This article analyzes The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, a serial novel pub-lished between 1874 and 1875 in England. From the perspective of semiotics of passions, The Way We Live Now functions as a satire that criticized the changing social values in England by the end of the century. The subplots of three secondary characters are taken as the symbols of clashing social models, and the result of this clash is taken as the author's proposal to keep traditional social values in times of unstoppable changes.