The Way We Live Now, fuelled by indignation, began as a satire. Trollope, who had been living in Australia for 18 months, had returned to London in 1872, to find a society (as he saw it) mired in corruption. He was appalled, he wrote later, by "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places… so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable."

This is one of the best of Trollope's novels. It is set in the late Nineteenth Century (1870s) when things are changing and people, some at least, live differently than in earlier times. The really new thing is the appearance of a modern financier, Mr. Melmotte. He uses leverage, watered stock and ponzi-like schemes to build a huge house of financial cards.

This is Trollope's magnum opus, according to many. The Guardian included it in a list of the 100 best novels in English.