Lady Glencora is only one of dozens of unforgettable characters, who are every bit as boldly drawn as Dickens’s, and more plausible. Obadiah Slope is an oleaginous young clergyman who divides his energies between ingratiating himself with the powerful and laying down the moral law to everyone else. Mrs Proudie is a clerical wife consumed by ambition—and by disappointment with her husband. Nathaniel Hawthorne described Trollope’s world as “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of”.

The novel’s anti-hero, Augustus Melmotte, is one of the great portraits of the businessman as ogre—a “horrid, big, rich scoundrel”, “a bloated swindler” and “vile city ruffian” who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Robert Maxwell (and to living figures who had best not be named for legal reasons). Despite his foreign birth and mysterious past, Melmotte forces his way into British society by playing on the greed of bigwigs who despise him yet compete for his favours. He buys his way into the House of Commons; he floats a railway company that is ostensibly designed to build a line between Mexico and America but is really a paper scheme for selling shares. The Ponzi scam eventually collapses, exposing Britain’s great commercial empire for a greed-fuelled racket and its high society as a hypocritical sham.

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