"What is there that money will not do?"
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A question like this lands with the weary elegance of someone who has watched polite society sell its soul and still insist on good manners. Trollope’s “What is there that money will not do?” is phrased as an open inquiry, but it’s really an indictment disguised as curiosity: the rhetorical shrug of a novelist who understands that Victorian respectability often ran on cash more reliably than it did on conscience.
The genius is in the grammar. “Will not do” doesn’t mean “cannot” do. Trollope isn’t claiming money is omnipotent; he’s pointing at the way people choose to let it operate. The line exposes a cultural permission slip: when money enters the room, moral boundaries start to look like mere preferences. This is how bribery gets renamed “influence,” how marriage becomes “security,” how philanthropy launders reputations, how class mobility is celebrated only after it’s been paid for.
In Trollope’s world, institutions aren’t toppled by revolution; they’re quietly negotiated. His novels are full of characters who don’t twirl mustaches, they balance ledgers - of affection, ambition, duty, and desire. The question’s bite comes from its assumption that the audience already knows the answer and doesn’t want to say it out loud. It’s not asking whether money can do anything; it’s asking what, if anything, we still refuse to let it buy.
That’s why it remains modern: not as a cynical slogan, but as a diagnostic tool for a society that keeps discovering, with mild surprise, that its values have a price tag.
The genius is in the grammar. “Will not do” doesn’t mean “cannot” do. Trollope isn’t claiming money is omnipotent; he’s pointing at the way people choose to let it operate. The line exposes a cultural permission slip: when money enters the room, moral boundaries start to look like mere preferences. This is how bribery gets renamed “influence,” how marriage becomes “security,” how philanthropy launders reputations, how class mobility is celebrated only after it’s been paid for.
In Trollope’s world, institutions aren’t toppled by revolution; they’re quietly negotiated. His novels are full of characters who don’t twirl mustaches, they balance ledgers - of affection, ambition, duty, and desire. The question’s bite comes from its assumption that the audience already knows the answer and doesn’t want to say it out loud. It’s not asking whether money can do anything; it’s asking what, if anything, we still refuse to let it buy.
That’s why it remains modern: not as a cynical slogan, but as a diagnostic tool for a society that keeps discovering, with mild surprise, that its values have a price tag.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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