Be glad that this book is 767 pages long; it's a great book, and you should savor the experience of reading it.
This is our favorite book by Anthony Trollope, one of the great Victorian novelists writing in the time of Dickens, Austen, Gaskell, and Thackeray.
At it's core, this book is about means versus ends; the way you get money matters more than the amount of money you get. The plot puts two very different characters in opposition in a way that is just as relevant today as it was when the book was written. One is a rich and very sleazy financier; the Victorian version of Madoff. The other is a young man who wants to work and create value; in this case, building a railroad in the American West, which was all the rage at the time.
The book is much more than this, of course, including romance, but The Way We Live Now refers to living in a time when wealth and appearances are all that matter, and substance and the means used to acquire wealth are ignored; as true today as in Trollope's time.
Other steamship operators were quick to invest in lower-risk alternatives. Cornelius Vanderbilt, flush with cash from his East Coast steamships, started a line that
