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flobbinhood's review against another edition
4.0
This book was really interesting and full of absolute chaos. The characters are about as far from one-dimensional as I've ever seen. Also, the author has managed to create perhaps my least favorite (not necessarily most evil) character ever in Felix Carbury.
karenholmes's review against another edition
4.0
Trollope does it again, he grabs me while he starts a story and doesn't let me go until the end. I love how he treats women, not as damsels in distress but as people with their own agenda even if it's one a bit limited by the society views.
I've read three so far this year and I feel this one is the best. The interactions, the relationships and how everything turns out was such a delight to read.
Been reading it along with a bunch of people and it was great comenting and enjoying each character. That Felix is despicable is the only thing we all agree on but all the other characters are nuanced and have different ways to get understood.
I, for that matter, loved the American widow, Mrs Hustle and her tempestous temperament. I do wish her well in her new endeavours.
I've read three so far this year and I feel this one is the best. The interactions, the relationships and how everything turns out was such a delight to read.
Been reading it along with a bunch of people and it was great comenting and enjoying each character. That Felix is despicable is the only thing we all agree on but all the other characters are nuanced and have different ways to get understood.
I, for that matter, loved the American widow, Mrs Hustle and her tempestous temperament. I do wish her well in her new endeavours.
charan's review
challenging
funny
lighthearted
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
lakmus's review against another edition
Going to DNF this at ~100 pages in (or 150-ish, depending on edition), because I feel like I get it, and do not feel like reading another 600 pages on the topic of "People & Money". I might return to this at some point (maybe if i break a leg or something and must stay in bed for a month, cosplaying a sick Victorian), because the language is nice (moderately flowery with accessible grammar) and the plot seems to be going on at a good pace and with plenty of twists and whatnot, characters are done well.
sherwoodreads's review against another edition
I think it’s fairly well known by Trollope readers what he said about this book: he came back to England after a long trip (which included San Francisco) to discover how sordidly his fellow countrymen delved into shady financial shenanigans. Morality, he felt, went right out the window if the fortunes were high enough.
And so he set out to write a satire.
Trollope is one of those authors whose novels make absorbing reading, but who never quite attain greatness. His contemporaries scorned him, especially after his autobiography came out, in which he claimed that the ticket to success was getting your daily wordcount done. Well, obviously he was no artiste!
In the 20th century some critics have maintained that this is his greatest work, even his masterpiece—a word that gets thrown around a lot, like the word ‘classic.’ I’m not willing to define what is, or is not, a masterpiece, but I do think that this book serves as an excellent example of why I think Trollope at his best is eminently readable, but does not transcend that mysterious boundary into greatness.
I can look past the unexamined colonial superiority--that was the paradigm of the time. Ditto his profound ignorance of Chinese history and culture, and of dialects. Satire means a certain amount of distortion, behind which ignorance can hide behind.
Spoilers are going to be legion.
The book opens with Lady Carbury, a female writer, having penned a non-fiction book called Criminal Queens, setting out to beg, plead, and flatter the three primary critics in London literary circles into praising her book in order to boost sales. Each letter is tailored to its recipient, after which we get a disquisition about the editors in such a way that I suspect not only were specific periodicals or newspapers of Trollope’s time being lampooned, but maybe even specific editors.
There is a lot in this book about the hypocrisies and phonies and egos of the literary world. And the political world. And the financial world. And above all, the world of the beau monde. The book apparently was savaged by early reviewers. When I got to passages in which a couple of young ladies negotiate favors for introduction into high society circles couched in the crass language of business barter, I thought, Trollope is channeling Thackeray.
But Thackeray’s sometimes vulgar satire fit an earlier, less “refined” age. I suspect that the lampooning of high society on just about every level (including its comfortably unexamined anti-Semitism) did not sit well at all with the 1870s audiences who very much liked to read about doings among the noble ranks. This is no silver fork novel, though it partly engages the London season, exclusive clubs, Parliament, and duchesses.
Trollope does a splendid job here, especially with details like the grandson of an ancient marquis who cheats at cards, and whose peers have no idea what to do about it. They don't want to rock their comfortable boat, though all aware aware it is leaking like a sieve. (As one of them says toward the end of the book, when they try to rejuvenate their club, that they must simply find a fellow and ask him how much he's going to steal from them above and beyond his salary, so everyone knows what to expect.)
So why isn’t it great? I think that halfway through Trollope gradually began to alter what kind of book it was. The satire becomes more fitful, the sharp point more diffuse. Lady Carbury, our bad writer (who may or may not have initially been based on Trollope’s remarkable mother Frances Trollope, a famous writer who earned her living by the pen) gradually becomes less a satiric and more a pitiful figure as her beautiful-but-rotten son Sir Felix descends inexorably into infamy, until at last she submits to the will of one of her admirers, and is rewarded with marriage. Likewise the second half furnishes more palatable endings for the deserving secondary characters than one might find in a satire; Vanity Fair, for example, never errs on the side of mercy.
I actually have no problem with characters getting happy endings, or deserving endings. My problem is that Trollope waffles, always in the direction of convention. For example, he takes a good whack at anti-Semitism, and yet his Jewish characters are still singled out with opprobious adjectives such “greasy.” This word appears several times, and is especially egregious given that Trollope was writing at the height of the antimacassar period: everybody was greasy, dukes and watermen alike, from their well-oiled mustaches to their shiny hair leaning against those lace doilies protecting the backs of chairs.
But far more important than that, though Trollope demonstrates his skill at creating interesting, even complex characters, he is unable to resist forcing them firmly into well-grooved channels in order to prove his lifelong point, that heroines—good women—deserve happy endings only when they passively fall in love (once and only once) after the gentleman has hinted that he is in love with her.
At the beginning of what I believe was meant to be read as a comic side-story, in country girl Ruby Ruggles’ struggle for independence (which nearly ruins her) there occurs what I think sums up Trollope’s attitude toward women when he says about her: Poor Ruby Ruggles, who was left to be so much mistress of herself at the time of her life in which she most required the kindness of a controlling hand!
A controlling hand! Ruby at this time is 23, not 13.
It’s not just that Trollope is a proponent of the Victorian “angel in the home” attitude toward women. Which he is. Over and over in his books Trollope rides his particular hobby horse, affirming that women who have been in love more than once, unless they are genuine widows, are tainted—soiled goods—unworthy of a good man’s love. (This is not true, needless to say, of men.) Mrs. Hurtle, the American adventuress, we are to understand is unmarriagable by the insufferable hero Paul Montague because she either murdered or divorced her abusive drunk of a husband. Oh, and she traveled with Paul without benefit of chaperone. Taint! Taint!
It’s perfectly okay for Paul to promise to marry her, then dump her for nineteen year old (and oh so pure) Hetta Carbury. In fact, the whole Paul/Hetta/Roger/Mrs. Hurtle quadrangle is one of the longest and most irritatingly boring threads in the entire book full of otherwise delightful characters.
Hetta is frustratingly passive until near the end; her otherwise interesting, though stolid, cousin Roger becomes tiresome in his constantly reiterated statement that he will never fall in love with any other woman if Hetta won’t marry him (he’s near forty, she’s nineteen), and Paul and Mrs. Hurtle argue exhaustively in circles as she practices her feminine wiles to bring him back to her side, until the very end. I began to wonder as yet another long, long argument between these two commenced if Trollope in some wise was arguing with himself, testing out various theories before firmly wrenching the characters' emotional truths right back to his inescapable conviction.
Finally, after she does a series of good turns to a host of characters, Mrs. Hurtle gives up and returns to America. Where, I fervently hope, she found someone more interesting than Paul. It wouldn’t be hard.
Much more interesting are the other characters, like the comically useless clubmen (I wonder if the Beargarden was P.G. Wodehouse’s model for the Drones Club), but especially the mysterious financier Augustus Melmotte, whose financial schemes are at the center of the book. Of shady background, he is a perfect example of the Bernie Madoff/Koch Brothers amoral financial pirate. In those days, it was railroad schemes and gilt-edged stocks: how the supposed leaders of politics and society found reasons, however spurious, to kowtow to those with money (while busily slandering them behind their backs) is a scene that should read depressingly familiar to today’s citizen.
In the middle of Trollope's skillful demonstration of how great wealth distorts everything in its vicinity, Melmotte’s daughter Marie nearly walks away with the book. In someone else’s hands—someone not quite so obsessed with female “purity”—this might have been a terrific book, with Marie Melmotte as its center, as she goes from gutter rat to being courted by duke’s sons to embarking for a life on the wild west coast, having gained at bitter cost an impressive sense of how big business is conducted. But alas, Trollope shoves her to one side and keeps the focus firmly on conventional Hetta and her two honorable swains, their emotional lives carefully tailored to fit Trollope's pet theory.
Bringing to a close a book I thought readable and wonderful in places, but . . . . finally not one of the enduring greats.
And so he set out to write a satire.
Trollope is one of those authors whose novels make absorbing reading, but who never quite attain greatness. His contemporaries scorned him, especially after his autobiography came out, in which he claimed that the ticket to success was getting your daily wordcount done. Well, obviously he was no artiste!
In the 20th century some critics have maintained that this is his greatest work, even his masterpiece—a word that gets thrown around a lot, like the word ‘classic.’ I’m not willing to define what is, or is not, a masterpiece, but I do think that this book serves as an excellent example of why I think Trollope at his best is eminently readable, but does not transcend that mysterious boundary into greatness.
I can look past the unexamined colonial superiority--that was the paradigm of the time. Ditto his profound ignorance of Chinese history and culture, and of dialects. Satire means a certain amount of distortion, behind which ignorance can hide behind.
Spoilers are going to be legion.
The book opens with Lady Carbury, a female writer, having penned a non-fiction book called Criminal Queens, setting out to beg, plead, and flatter the three primary critics in London literary circles into praising her book in order to boost sales. Each letter is tailored to its recipient, after which we get a disquisition about the editors in such a way that I suspect not only were specific periodicals or newspapers of Trollope’s time being lampooned, but maybe even specific editors.
There is a lot in this book about the hypocrisies and phonies and egos of the literary world. And the political world. And the financial world. And above all, the world of the beau monde. The book apparently was savaged by early reviewers. When I got to passages in which a couple of young ladies negotiate favors for introduction into high society circles couched in the crass language of business barter, I thought, Trollope is channeling Thackeray.
But Thackeray’s sometimes vulgar satire fit an earlier, less “refined” age. I suspect that the lampooning of high society on just about every level (including its comfortably unexamined anti-Semitism) did not sit well at all with the 1870s audiences who very much liked to read about doings among the noble ranks. This is no silver fork novel, though it partly engages the London season, exclusive clubs, Parliament, and duchesses.
Trollope does a splendid job here, especially with details like the grandson of an ancient marquis who cheats at cards, and whose peers have no idea what to do about it. They don't want to rock their comfortable boat, though all aware aware it is leaking like a sieve. (As one of them says toward the end of the book, when they try to rejuvenate their club, that they must simply find a fellow and ask him how much he's going to steal from them above and beyond his salary, so everyone knows what to expect.)
So why isn’t it great? I think that halfway through Trollope gradually began to alter what kind of book it was. The satire becomes more fitful, the sharp point more diffuse. Lady Carbury, our bad writer (who may or may not have initially been based on Trollope’s remarkable mother Frances Trollope, a famous writer who earned her living by the pen) gradually becomes less a satiric and more a pitiful figure as her beautiful-but-rotten son Sir Felix descends inexorably into infamy, until at last she submits to the will of one of her admirers, and is rewarded with marriage. Likewise the second half furnishes more palatable endings for the deserving secondary characters than one might find in a satire; Vanity Fair, for example, never errs on the side of mercy.
I actually have no problem with characters getting happy endings, or deserving endings. My problem is that Trollope waffles, always in the direction of convention. For example, he takes a good whack at anti-Semitism, and yet his Jewish characters are still singled out with opprobious adjectives such “greasy.” This word appears several times, and is especially egregious given that Trollope was writing at the height of the antimacassar period: everybody was greasy, dukes and watermen alike, from their well-oiled mustaches to their shiny hair leaning against those lace doilies protecting the backs of chairs.
But far more important than that, though Trollope demonstrates his skill at creating interesting, even complex characters, he is unable to resist forcing them firmly into well-grooved channels in order to prove his lifelong point, that heroines—good women—deserve happy endings only when they passively fall in love (once and only once) after the gentleman has hinted that he is in love with her.
At the beginning of what I believe was meant to be read as a comic side-story, in country girl Ruby Ruggles’ struggle for independence (which nearly ruins her) there occurs what I think sums up Trollope’s attitude toward women when he says about her: Poor Ruby Ruggles, who was left to be so much mistress of herself at the time of her life in which she most required the kindness of a controlling hand!
A controlling hand! Ruby at this time is 23, not 13.
It’s not just that Trollope is a proponent of the Victorian “angel in the home” attitude toward women. Which he is. Over and over in his books Trollope rides his particular hobby horse, affirming that women who have been in love more than once, unless they are genuine widows, are tainted—soiled goods—unworthy of a good man’s love. (This is not true, needless to say, of men.) Mrs. Hurtle, the American adventuress, we are to understand is unmarriagable by the insufferable hero Paul Montague because she either murdered or divorced her abusive drunk of a husband. Oh, and she traveled with Paul without benefit of chaperone. Taint! Taint!
It’s perfectly okay for Paul to promise to marry her, then dump her for nineteen year old (and oh so pure) Hetta Carbury. In fact, the whole Paul/Hetta/Roger/Mrs. Hurtle quadrangle is one of the longest and most irritatingly boring threads in the entire book full of otherwise delightful characters.
Hetta is frustratingly passive until near the end; her otherwise interesting, though stolid, cousin Roger becomes tiresome in his constantly reiterated statement that he will never fall in love with any other woman if Hetta won’t marry him (he’s near forty, she’s nineteen), and Paul and Mrs. Hurtle argue exhaustively in circles as she practices her feminine wiles to bring him back to her side, until the very end. I began to wonder as yet another long, long argument between these two commenced if Trollope in some wise was arguing with himself, testing out various theories before firmly wrenching the characters' emotional truths right back to his inescapable conviction.
Finally, after she does a series of good turns to a host of characters, Mrs. Hurtle gives up and returns to America. Where, I fervently hope, she found someone more interesting than Paul. It wouldn’t be hard.
Much more interesting are the other characters, like the comically useless clubmen (I wonder if the Beargarden was P.G. Wodehouse’s model for the Drones Club), but especially the mysterious financier Augustus Melmotte, whose financial schemes are at the center of the book. Of shady background, he is a perfect example of the Bernie Madoff/Koch Brothers amoral financial pirate. In those days, it was railroad schemes and gilt-edged stocks: how the supposed leaders of politics and society found reasons, however spurious, to kowtow to those with money (while busily slandering them behind their backs) is a scene that should read depressingly familiar to today’s citizen.
In the middle of Trollope's skillful demonstration of how great wealth distorts everything in its vicinity, Melmotte’s daughter Marie nearly walks away with the book. In someone else’s hands—someone not quite so obsessed with female “purity”—this might have been a terrific book, with Marie Melmotte as its center, as she goes from gutter rat to being courted by duke’s sons to embarking for a life on the wild west coast, having gained at bitter cost an impressive sense of how big business is conducted. But alas, Trollope shoves her to one side and keeps the focus firmly on conventional Hetta and her two honorable swains, their emotional lives carefully tailored to fit Trollope's pet theory.
Bringing to a close a book I thought readable and wonderful in places, but . . . . finally not one of the enduring greats.
tomleetang's review against another edition
4.0
This novel is the death of romance, not just in the sense of pure, unwavering love, but also in the sense of what it generally entails, from brilliant fortunes to dazzling aristocratic alliances to daring elopements. All of it is shown to be illusion, illusion that must give way to pragmatism as the foundations of happiness.
That makes this novel sound terribly depressing, but its deep cynicism is alleviated by sharp, amusing satire, which takes aim at literary critics as well as financiers; at the snobbish wealthy and the simple poor; at indolent men and conniving women.
Unlike Dickens, Trollope shows even the villains of the story have their bright points, the heroes their faults. There is no pure goodness here, but also no pitch black villain. The attitude perhaps holds more in common with Thackeray in point of thought, but without as cruel a cynicism - though it is fairly cynical.
Having said that, Trollope lacks the virtuosic brilliance of Dickens, the sensitive intellect of Eliot or the compassion of Gaskel. It's easy to see why he's been somewhat overshadowed as a Victorian author. But for all Trollope's circumlocution and rather uninspired vocabulary, he is still a great storyteller, one who combines realism with a cutting humour, which he uses to frame debates about the emancipation of women, about bigotry and - above all - about the illusory nature of money.
That makes this novel sound terribly depressing, but its deep cynicism is alleviated by sharp, amusing satire, which takes aim at literary critics as well as financiers; at the snobbish wealthy and the simple poor; at indolent men and conniving women.
Unlike Dickens, Trollope shows even the villains of the story have their bright points, the heroes their faults. There is no pure goodness here, but also no pitch black villain. The attitude perhaps holds more in common with Thackeray in point of thought, but without as cruel a cynicism - though it is fairly cynical.
Having said that, Trollope lacks the virtuosic brilliance of Dickens, the sensitive intellect of Eliot or the compassion of Gaskel. It's easy to see why he's been somewhat overshadowed as a Victorian author. But for all Trollope's circumlocution and rather uninspired vocabulary, he is still a great storyteller, one who combines realism with a cutting humour, which he uses to frame debates about the emancipation of women, about bigotry and - above all - about the illusory nature of money.
ebkara's review against another edition
4.0
Audio book read superbly by Timothy West. Incredible resonances with current political corruption. Money, power, status, political power and financial dealings with a cast of wonderful characters the revolting Sir Felix Carberry his stupid indulgent mother, the hard hearted Mr Melmotte and his daughter only courted because of her wealth, rye glorious Ruby Ruggles. Just fabulous story telling
ljm57's review against another edition
3.0
A long read but a beautifully written piece of fiction with a cast of less than perfect characters all chasing fortune in 1870's London.