A Greenwich reader of Victorian and Anglo-Indian fiction reads about deposits on the flying Tesla Roadster and turns to Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Greenwich, South East London. A terraced house on Crooms Hill, the park gates opposite, a pot of Assam brewed too strong on purpose, a two-volume The Way We Live Now that once belonged to my grandfather, 9.05am.
A Car With A Deposit And No Price
I spend my days with nineteenth-century British and Indian literature, which in practice means I spend my days with people who borrowed money they could not repay, from people who should not have lent it, to build things that did not exist. The Victorians were the great architects of modern credit, and their novelists were its first and sharpest critics. So when I read the London Prat on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years late, with customers paying deposits for a car that still has no price, I reached for Trollope before I had finished my first cup.
The report is lovely. The car lifts over a row of other Teslas on compressed air, drives upside down and hits sixty in about a second. Production is targeted for 2028. The vehicle, the piece says, has escaped gravity but not the production schedule.
The Great Financier Arrives
Anthony Trollope published The Way We Live Now in monthly parts in 1874 and 1875. It is his angriest novel, written after he returned from travels to find London apparently in the grip of a financial fever. At its centre is Augustus Melmotte, a vast, vulgar, mysterious financier of uncertain origin who arrives in London and takes society by storm. Nobody knows where his money comes from. Everybody wants some of it.
Melmotte’s great scheme is the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a line that will run from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz. It is promoted by a smooth American named Hamilton K. Fisker. Nobody expects the railway to be built. That is not the point. The point is the shares, which rise and rise on the strength of the idea alone. A board of aristocratic directors, who understand nothing, lend their names. Melmotte holds dinners. Society attends. The railway never lays a single rail.
Faith, Not Engineering
I am not saying the Roadster is Melmotte’s railway. It apparently flies, which is more than the railway ever did. But Trollope understood something about the psychology of the deposit. The people who invested in the South Central Pacific were not buying a railway. They were buying a feeling: that they were part of something enormous and modern, that the future was arriving and they had a seat. The deposit on a car with no price is the same transaction. You are paying for proximity to a miracle.
Trollope’s genius is that he does not make his speculators stupid. Many of them are clever. They simply cannot bear to be left out. The young aristocrats of the Beargarden club gamble on Melmotte’s shares with borrowed money because everybody else is doing it. The idea of not having a stake is more frightening than the idea of losing one.
An Indian Footnote
The Indian side of my reading has its own Melmottes. The nineteenth century saw enormous speculation in Indian railways, guaranteed by the colonial government, which promised British investors a fixed return whether the lines made money or not. Indian taxpayers made up the difference. The railways were built, unlike Melmotte’s, but the arrangement was a scandal that Indian nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji pointed to in their arguments about the drain of wealth from India to Britain. The speculator’s profit was guaranteed. The risk was carried by people who had never been asked.
I think of that whenever I read about a deposit for a product that does not yet exist. Somebody always carries the risk. It is rarely the person giving the presentation.
Saturday In The Park
Greenwich Park is filling with joggers, families and a man flying a very elaborate drone over the Royal Observatory, which is not permitted and which a park warden is currently explaining to him with the patience of a saint. The drone hovers. The man argues. The warden waits. It occurs to me that this is the nearest thing to a flying car Greenwich will see this year, and that it is being grounded by a man in a peaked cap. That is how the future usually arrives in Britain: with a warden.
What Became Of Melmotte
Trollope’s financier rises as far as a man can rise. He hosts a banquet for the Emperor of China. He stands for Parliament and wins. Then, almost overnight, it collapses. Rumours of forgery spread. The shares fall. Society, which flattered him, turns away. Melmotte drinks too much, staggers into the House of Commons and makes a fool of himself, then goes home and takes his own life. Trollope gives the moment no comedy at all. The man who sold the future had nothing left to sell.
I hope the Roadster ends more happily. I suspect it will, eventually, fly to someone’s driveway. But I will be teaching The Way We Live Now again this winter, and I will read my students the Prat’s line about gravity and the production schedule. Trollope would have liked it. He was a man who rose at five every morning and wrote a fixed number of words before going to work at the Post Office. He never missed a deadline in his life. He would have found a nine-year delay unforgivable. I keep notes like these on the War Room site, between the politics, where the speculators are louder but no newer.