The Way We Live Now

Sir Felix Carbury

Sir Felix drifts through London clubs and drawing-rooms with charm enough to be forgiven and no income to justify it, forever calculating what a good marriage might pay off. His pursuit of the Melmotte heiress is less romance than arithmetic, and his casual cruelty toward his sister and mother exposes how little he thinks of anyone who cannot fund him. He matters because his gambling, borrowing, and bluster drag the Carbury name into the very circles where Melmotte's money is being made and tested.

Augustus Melmotte

Melmotte arrives in London with a fortune made abroad, a wife who barely speaks English, and a talent for making money dear or cheap as he pleases; within a year a Royal Prince and the cream of duchesses are dining at his table. He is purse-proud, bullying, and magnificent, a man whose power redeems his vulgar face but never quite his reputation. He matters because every ambition in the novel—social, financial, marital—must pass through him, and no one, including his own daughter, can decide whether he is a genius or a fraud.

Marie Melmotte

Marie is small, plain, and overwhelmed by the position her father's wealth has thrust upon her, with no real mother and a papa who beats her when she disobeys. She pours her trust into Felix Carbury with a desperate, unguarded eagerness, insisting that her money is hers to give and that love should make anything possible. She matters because her rebellion against Melmotte turns the marriage market into a battlefield, and because her loneliness makes the novel's glittering world look suddenly cruel.

Hetta Carbury

Hetta moves through the novel as the one Carbury who sees clearly and loves honestly, patient with her mother's ambitions and ashamed of Felix's conduct. She is caught between Roger Carbury's steady, unpoetic devotion and Paul Montague's more troubled suit, and her refusal to be managed by anyone makes her both admirable and vulnerable. She matters because her choices test what love and duty can mean in a world where marriage is mostly a transaction, and because her loyalty to her family keeps costing her.

Paul Montague

Paul is a junior partner in Fisker, Montague, and Montague, sent to England to draw Melmotte into the Great Railway to Vera Cruz, and he carries the taint of that association wherever he goes. He is decent, a little weak, and genuinely in love with Hetta, but his entanglement with the formidable Mrs. Hurtle follows him like a debt he cannot discharge. He matters because his divided loyalties force the novel's central question—whether a man can be honest in business and in love at the same time—and because Roger Carbury's friendship with him curdles into rivalry.

Roger Carbury

Roger is the head of the Carbury family, a man of small means and stubborn integrity who lives on his own land among his own people and has never learned to dress his feelings in romance. He loves Hetta with an aching, unadorned longing, and when she cannot return it he sits alone on the bridge at Carbury telling himself there is nothing left in life. He matters because he is the novel's moral measure—generous to Paul, patient with the feckless Felix, and quietly heartbroken—and because his disappointment exposes how little goodness is rewarded in the world Trollope is describing.