Hidden Fraud in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now

Hidden Fraud in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now

Hamilton K. Fisker supplies “the impetus for rolling Augustus Melmotte onwards into almost unprecedented commercial greatness” (Trollope 1.324). While his character occupies very little narrative space, Fisker functions as the catalyst which sets the novel’s financial ventures in motion; Melmotte rolls because Fisker has pushed. Not only does Fisker bring the Great South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway (or at least the prospectus) to England, but he also delimits the board members’ role in the venture. He places Melmotte, the novel’s “great financier,” in charge and repels Paul Montague’s desire to involve himself as an active director in the railroad’s daily operations (1.217). Fisker rejects Paul’s attempt to oversee the Mexican Railroad’s actualization by arguing that building railway lines does not concern an investor such as Paul:

But Fisker got the better of him and put him down. “Fortune! what fortune had either of us? A few beggarly thousands of dollars not worth talking of, and barely sufficient to enable a man to look at an enterprise. And now where are you? look here, sir; — there’s more to be got out of the smashing up of such an affair as this, if it should smash up, than could be made by years of hard work out of such fortunes as yours and mine in the regular way of trade.”

Paul Montague certainly did not love Mr Fisker personally, nor did he relish his commercial doctrines; but he allowed himself to be carried away by them. (1.85)

If Fisker’s momentum rolls Melmotte, it carries away Paul, and the force of Fisker’s rhetoric subjugates Paul to his “commercial doctrines”: Fisker “put him down.” Fisker gets the “better” of Paul by making speech subservient to lucrative economic principles. He does not want Paul to enforce honest practices in the railroad’s financial transactions. Fisker’s first commercial doctrine, then, declares that we should consider small investors “not worth talking of.” Since small, individual investments financed the majority of English railway ventures in Victorian England (Robb 36), Fisker essentially declares that the Mexican Railway’s investors should not receive any narrative attention. Even though Paul does not love Fisker or respect him personally, Fisker’s dominant narrative carries him away. Similarly, even though The Way We Live Now cynically satirizes fraudulent business practices, Trollope takes Fisker’s declaration that a few thousand dollars are “not worth talking of” to heart.