The Way We Live Now: Quickie Follow-Up

I thought of a few quick things I want to think about further someday, maybe when I review my notes for The Way We Live Now:

• The times when people mention "the way we live now." It is amusing and thematic and something Trollope seems to like to do when he has one of these weird conversational titles: he definitely asks the reader point-blank "can you forgive her?" in Can You Forgive Her? What does "the way we live now" mean to Trollope? The changes in the way we live can be described as entirely negative--loose morals of all kinds!--but they also include religious tolerance and some degree of freedom for women which Trollope may tentatively endorse? But we always talk about how Trollope seems very sensitive to women's issues even though he was a big antifeminist. So who knows. Related to this question are all the foreign characters: the brash Americans and vulgar Europeans & Jews who invade London and change everything. But the native Londoners are pretty awful to begin with: is it the influence of the invaders? Or are the invaders infusing something that could maybe maybe be useful to these fops and fuddy-duddies? Also the "we," like the "you" in Can You Forgive Her? implicates the audience in an interesting way. Topicality!
• The times in general when Trollope makes his little comments. Including when he's like, "We don't have time for this now" or "I will only show you some of this letter" or "I will paraphrase this for you, it is boring." I'm so interested in these little tropes about the spatial/temporal limits of the novel, or the "physical" evidence that is or is not admissible within the narrative.
• The weird wrapping-up of the narrative at the end. Time gets really weird at the end, because he tries to wrap up each character's arc ("Marie Melmotte's Fate") in its own chapter, but the characters' lives and fates are so wrapped up in each other that he has to say stuff like "Well, and you remember that that was three weeks ago, but then this was another two months after what happened three chapters ago" and you wonder why he didn't just go chronologically, as he has been doing more or less for the rest of the book. But I guess you do want to know what happens to people. I must admit that this wrapping-up stuff, while satisfying in its way, also goes on forever and ever in these long, long novels and I tend to get bored and fall asleep on the couch, just like Sir Felix Carbury would do.
• The Salt Lake City-Vera Cruz railway! Does anyone in the novel actually think it's a good idea? Does Trollope think it's a good idea? I think he knows it's a stupid idea--at one point Melmotte is like, "Well, the NYC-SF railway prospered because people wanted to go from San Francisco to New York; does anyone want to go from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz?" If Trollope thinks it's a stupid idea, it's a really inspired choice: something that you can imagine stupid Victorians getting excited about, and therefore that you can imagine Trollope getting excited about, so there's this element of uncertainty where you're like "maybe someone in this novel thinks this will work out"--but something that would never never never work. Also, was it based on a real plan? A real swindle? I should find out.