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that of Montague, the close friend of Roger. The meeting of Montague and Mrs Hurtle with Roger on the sands at Lowestoft is improbable but well engineered. It is Trollope’s easy but studied matter-of-factness, as well as his willing submersion in the conventions of Victorian fiction – if events can be formed into plot patterns why should they not be formed into very elaborate plot patterns? – that prevents readers from finding these connections discouragingly improbable. Realism is a highly artificial mode and calls, asmuch as any melodrama of squire and maiden, for readerly cooperation. Are we troubled by the coincidence that John Crumb was at hand in a London backstreet at the very moment when Sir Felix decided to take Ruby by force? Or that Roger should, in due course, be at hand to discuss the fracas with John Crumb?
    When a publisher asked for changes in the plot of
John Caldigate
Trollope politely told him he had never found himself able ‘to effect changes in the plot of a story. Small as the links are, one little thing hinges on another to such an extent that any change sets the whole narrative wrong’. 13 To make a unity of a story that involved a study not only of Melmotte and his circle but of Mr Broune and Mr Alf, of Mrs Hurtle, of the barren and snobbish Longestaffes, of the Beargarden set, including the pleasant Nidderdale – a more complicated young man than he at first appears (witness his disinterested kindness to Marie Melmotte after her father’s death) – is no small feat of management. And that is to mention only a small number of characters; others are provided at need, like the contrasted lawyers Squercum and Bideawhile, and Lady Monogram and Father Barham, and various politicians and angry fathers. This, as Michael Sadleir remarked, was ‘the work of no ordinary mind’. 14
    In a private note to his son, who was trying his hand at a novel, Trollope tells him he ‘has not yet quite got into the way of writing for lengths. One cannot do all these mechanical tricks at once.’ 15 Trollope does them all at once – mechanical tricks calling for the fashioning of hinges, and the whole complicated structure casts some of the ethical shadows I have referred to.
    Roger Carbury is quite a large hinge. Despairing lover of Hetta, head of the Carbury family (which either venerates or despises and exploits him), landlord of the Ruggles and the Crumbs, close friend of Montague, his successful rival in love, he is indeed central to the plot mechanism. And of course, as I have already remarked, he is a kind of ethical norm, a gentleman according to the minimal definition given in
The Prime Minister
, ‘a man who would not for worlds tell a lie’ (Chapter 30 ). 16 Herepresents the way ‘we’ lived before we started living as we do now, in a time when a family might, like him, modestly thrive because they had ‘been true to their acres and their acres true to them through the perils of civil wars, Reformation, Commonwealth, and Revolution’ (p.44). Roger Carbury remains true in this way. Yet here, as we have seen, the shadow is present, the ambiguity into which Trollope was so beneficially led by the mere fact of using story to illuminate a moral or satirical theme. For his notions of justice and fairness don’t fit when it is right that they shouldn’t, but also when they should, by being adapted to a world that cannot help but change.
    For
The Way We Live Now
, though it is undoubtedly about decadence, is also about change, and change is often identified with decadence. During Trollope’s own lifetime England changed enormously, grew wonderfully more wealthy yet, despite huge deals in the market, was already almost imperceptibly in decline. It was a world increasingly more congenial to the speculator than to the gentleman, whose morality expressed itself more easily in an older form of society, with clear ideas about proper stations