  Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Way We Live Now, is a biting critique of the corruption of late Victorian morals. One of its central characters, the shallow Lady Carbury, at one point voices her conviction that the praiseworthy deeds of the powerful escape the normal categories of morality. Commenting on the character of the novel’s dominant figure, the grand swindler Melmotte, she says to her journalist friend Mr. Booker: