CREDIT BBC and PBS with good timing. Masterpiece Theater's recent miniseries The Way We Live Now, based on an 1875 Anthony Trollope novel, has had many viewers fast-forwarding to more recent examples of greed, deception, and betrayal.

The story's "great Mexican railway venture" walks and talks like Enron's creative accounting schemes. Trollope's dark-force character, Augustus Melmotte, today might be a collapsed dotcom adventurer or a rogue or Ponzi schemer (if he or she could muster the bravado and intrigue of a Melmotte). And there's that new-old equation—money+politics=power. During his campaign for Parliament, Melmotte tells the electors of Westminster, "You need a man who understands the way we live now. . . . public confidence is the essence in these things." "These things" being empty promises of quick, work-free wealth.

But greed and betrayed trust weren't exactly 19th-century inventions. They appear to be intrinsic to the human condition. Such is the conventional wisdom on human nature, anyway—today and in 1875. But that was also, in no small coincidence, the year in which Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was published. To explain the connection between two dissimilar books, it may help connect some painterly dots.

At that time in European art circles, what would later be called Impressionism was beginning to flower. Recently I saw the Impressionist Still Life show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. In the exhibit's first room there's a painting titled "Still Life" (1867) by Camille Pissarro. On a table are a loaf of bread, some fruit, a bowl. Five rooms later, I just had to walk back to see that painting again.

I don't know how this painting was received by critics of the day (I should have rented the headset), but it struck me as radical and visionary, even within the context of the as-yet-unformed Impressionist movement. In contrast to the smooth surfaces and finely rendered lines of most of his contemporaries' work, Pissarro had laid down rough planes of pigment that suggest a different and shifting "reality" beneath the surface appearance—a reality more mental and spiritual than physical, more thought than thing.

At the time Pissarro painted that picture, Mary Baker Eddy was a woman alone on a search for a deeper reality of health and of life's purpose. She knew betrayal by experience. First, in an unfaithful husband who deserted her. Later in her career, members of her new movement and her only son betrayed her for reasons involving ambition, power, and money.

Trollope reacted to the excesses he witnessed and in protest produced a work of lasting art. Mary Baker Eddy, changed through her own trials and moved by what she witnessed of humanity's suffering, produced a new science of spirituality. Its art would be in its practice. But for this viewer, something quite specific to The Way We Live Now also links the work of Anthony Trollope and Mary Baker Eddy.

The fictional character of Melmotte, masterfully played by David Suchet (best known as Agatha Christie's cerebral detective Hercule Poirot) is the focal point of The Way We Live Now—he sums up the greed that shocked Trollope. But the supporting role of Melmotte's daughter, Marie, actually may be more pivotal. She connects past with future. Played with comic and tragic spirit by Shirley Henderson, Marie suffers emotional and physical abuse at her father's hand. She also endures the moral abuse of having her name used to shelter his ill-gained wealth.

In early episodes, Marie is fragile, so desperate for that she can't see through the sham of a man who wants her only for her father's apparent wealth. But instead of being crushed by personal disappointments and swirling events, she becomes gradually stronger as her father's house of cards falls around the family and a crowd of ruined investors.

Toward the end, in a line that sounds like a prescient anthem for women's rights advocates, Marie says, "We women must take our fates in our own hands." Perhaps the more powerful 1875 connection is between the fictional Marie and the Mary who wrote in her first edition of Science and Health, "The time for thinkers has come; and the time for revolutions, ecclesiastic and social, must come."