ABSTRACT
In its well-known discussion of The Way We Live Now (1875), the novel Anthony Trollope was composing even as he was also “formulating his views on the art of writing fiction” (Sutherland 473), the last chapter of An Autobiography (1883) both classifies the novel as a satire on “the commercial profligacy of the age” and calls attention to its “exaggerated” features (ch. 20). Perhaps aiming to redress a perceived imbalance in its tone, Trollope professes, on the one hand, some liberal faith in “progress,” in that “comfort has been increased,” “health has been improved, and education extended” (ch. 20); these comments, as N. John Hall notes, sound the same note of faith in amelioration that Bishop Yeld articulates in the novel itself (Hall 387; ch. 55). On the other hand, as James Kincaid first established, An Autobiography also makes some very pointed observations about “dishonesty magnificent in its proportions” as an actual feature of contemporary life (Kincaid 127). “Can a world, retrograding from day to day in honesty, be considered to be in a state of progress?” (ch. 20), Trollope asks, making the familiar, here tacit claim that one best measures “progress” by gauging the moral and ethical character of the nation.
