Trollope famously tailored his novels for publication as serials, priding himself ‘on completing [his] work exactly within the proposed dimensions’ (Trollope 1999a: 119). Although the system of serialisation had become antiquated by the time he came to write The Way We Live Now, Trollope still clung to the constraints he had set himself, dividing the novel into twenty parts, with each chapter being equally long (see Sutherland 1982). Trollope's reluctance to adapt to the demands of a changing market seems, at first, a sign of his unwillingness to adopt a new economic paradigm, the theory of marginalism, which posited that an object's value is determined by market forces rather than its inherent qualities. As the preceding pages have suggested, this shift in economic thinking intensified Trollope's conceptualisation of a subjectivity in which free will has turned to stone. In the bleak story-world of The Way We Live Now, his characters’ minds are presented as having become devoid of moral qualities under the influence of consumerism. Ayala's Angel, however, puts a more positive spin on the workings of neo-classical economics. Reading these two novels alongside one another offers an interesting contrast: in both, a financier plays an important role, even though he and his thoughts remain, to a considerable extent, in the margins. A former Governor of the Bank of England and now the director of Travers and Treason in all but name, Sir Thomas Tringle in Ayala's Angel is as powerful as Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now: he ‘could affect the rate of money throughout Europe, and emissaries from national treasuries would listen to his words’ (Trollope 1989b: 226). Their personalities are substantially different, however. Melmotte is a conniving swindler, whereas Tringle is a respectable banker. This contrast suggests that The Way We Live Now and Ayala's Angel respond to the machinations of marginalist economics in opposite ways. Ayala's Angel suggests that there is potential for joy and pleasure in this brave new world, even if there is no room for morality.