Trollope’s next attempt at satirising the most malignant social tendencies of the time exposed the idolatry of the golden calf, and in its conception owed something to the pregnant remarks of one of the most influential among his contemporaries. During the season of 1875, Trollope’s hitherto slight acquaintance with Delane of _The Times_ matured into intimacy. At this time the great editor was much impressed by the growth of extravagance and the increase of reckless speculation in the overgrown and mischievously mixed conglomerate of London society. The subject was one on which he and Trollope thought exactly alike. With equal disgust and indignation both observed the acceptance of mere wealth as a passport to the company of men and women who were social leaders by right of birth. In their many talks about these subjects originated both Trollope’s _The Way We Live Now_ and a certain _Times_ article presently to be mentioned. On resettling in London after his colonial expeditions, Trollope had established himself in Montagu Square. The first piece of work he did here was the novel in whose most prominent figure, Melmotte, a grotesque and nauseating monstrosity, he personified the commercial corruptions of the time with all their brutalising effects upon character, as in private, so in public life.
Grouped round, and more or less associated with the over-coloured financier, Melmotte, were many smaller personages representing or suggesting other vicious propensities of the period. The bloated and ferocious plutocrat has a vulgar but otherwise unobjectionable daughter whom, when she dares any details to cross his will or stand in the way of his villainies, he cuts into pieces--in plain English, horsewhips within an inch of her life. There are other young ladies as unattractive as Marie Melmotte, but less inoffensive. These are the girls who expend their energies and innocence in intrigues to get husbands, not for love, but for the enjoyment of greater freedom and more pocket-money. Melmotte himself carries about him a certain suggestion of Baron Albert Grant in the past, and of Whitaker Wright in the days that were then yet to come. The deterioration of Club life is shown by the blackguard interior of the Beargarden, where stripling debauchees, who sponge on their polite paupers of mothers, and venal and pretentious newspaper hacks eat, drink, and rampage at unholy hours.