The Way We Live Now in London & Paris

My orals reading progress--and thus my blogging--slowed down a lot over the past week, when I left the low-traveling-pressure environment of my mom's cozy apartment in Florence for the high-traveling-pressure-environment of a couple of hostels in London & a traveling companion eager to get the most out of the city. It's kind of ironic that I got a lot more Victorian-novel reading done in Florence than I did in the city where most of these novels are set--you'd think I would have been inspired to read about carriages in Hyde Park while actually lying around in Hyde Park myself, etc. etc.--and it's also ironic that my traveling companion was also a Victorianist--a more eminent and serious Victorianist than myself, even--as you would have thought we'd encourage each other to do some reading. But it was kind of rainy, so lying around in parks was hard, and there were a lot of scones to eat and museums to visit, including the Cult of Beauty exhibit at the V&A and the Freud Museum, which I'd never been to before. We also saw a production of The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre, so now I can think about Russian literature a little, too--and I guess the themes of The Cherry Orchard, which explores the changes in the social and financial relationships between classes after the freeing of the serfs, as an aristocratic family loses control of their ancestral estate, are pretty similar to The Way We Live Now, even if The Cherry Orchard was written thirty years later. The Russians were always a little belated, as the characters in Chekhov would be the first to admit.

So I'm about two-thirds of the way through The Way We Live Now, and here's what I've been thinking so far:

• Have I read this before? I saw the miniseries a few years ago, and then sometime in 2007 I started reading the novel, but since I know at least the rudiments of the plot from the miniseries, it's hard to remember how far I got. I distinctly remember sitting on a city bus in Baltimore reading about how John Crumb was covered in flour, and I also remember reading the account of the dinner Roger Carbury holds for the bishop and the Catholic priest, but beyond that it's anyone's guess. So, since my goal for at least the first month or two of my orals reading is to read texts I've never read before, it was kind of frustrating reading The Way We Live Now this time: how much of this was I rereading? Everything seemed so familiar--had I actually read the whole novel? By the time I got about halfway through, I realized I didn't know exactly what was going to happen next, or even how all the characters were going to end up, so I think I've caught up with myself. Still, unnerving.
• Is this something Laura blogged about? I think that when Laura read the novel she wrote a post about the differences between the novel and the miniseries. I should look it up! One difference she noticed was that in the novel Paul Montague never seems to think the railway will actually be built--he seems much more morally ambiguous, and therefore more implicated in Melmotte's speculations. That seemed like a smart change: it might have been hard to cinematically portray Paul's complicated feelings about his money & the business & so on, whereas Trollope can kind of explain it to us in such a way that we sympathize with Paul & his difficulties. I think Laura also had something to say about Mrs Hurtle, which I can't remember and would like to look up. Or maybe I had a thought about Mrs Hurtle when I started reading the book? I seem to remember thinking Mrs Hurtle was less violent in the novel than she was in the miniseries--less of a threatening Wild West Annie Oakley type--but that doesn't actually seem to be the case. I personally sympathized with the letter she wrote in which she threatens to horsewhip Paul--"and believe me, I know how to choose such a weapon!"--not because I have ever wanted to horsewhip my Paul (I have not!) but because I  have definitely wanted to write e-mails like that to people, and have been prevented from sending them only by great feats of blessed self-restraint.
• How is this different from Vanity Fair? This is not a rhetorical question. It's very, very different--and yet it's in the tradition of Vanity Fair: a satirical, cynical novel meant to give us a kind of panoramic view of English society, with characters who are often supposed to be unsympathetic but with whom we kind of sympathize anyway, and plenty of authorial commentary. I guess I'd like to think about whether the "good" characters in TWWLN are more or less sympathetic and more or less realistic than the "good" characters in VF, and what the relationship might be between how realistic and how sympathetic they are. I also want to think about Trollope's use of point of view: sometimes we get free indirect discourse, sometimes moral commentary from an omniscient narrator. I think Thackeray does this, too, and probably it's just a classic Victorian narrative move: the true omniscient narrator can slip from consciousness to consciousness, and into a Godlike moral judgment of those consciousnesses, as swimmingly as a little Victorian fish. But since I haven't read much Thackeray, Dickens, or Trollope, I might not understand this mode as well as I should!