Anthony Trollope, the prolific Victorian novelist, remains highly popular today with most of his fifty plus novels still in print. His works have become the subject of TV dramatizations notably The Pallisers (1974), and The Barchester Chronicles (1982). It is the first two novels of The Barchester Chronicles, The Warden and Barchester Towers that are the subjects of today’s column.
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The Warden is set in the cathedral town of Barchester. The protagonist, the reverend Septimus Harding is a good, kind and simple man with a patronage job. Under the terms of a medieval will, the Warden at Hiram’s Hospital receives 450 pounds per year to look after twelve retired woolcarders. Now the needs of these elderly folk are well tended to but certainly the bulk of this stipend goes to maintain the household of Mr. Harding in a modest degree of comfort where he plays his cello and basks in the affections of his daughter.
No one has ever challenged this arrangement; it is simply the way things have always been done. But The Jupiter (i.e. London Times) is preparing the arrow that will penetrate this cozy medieval community with the emerging middle class morality of Victorian Britain.
“On what foundation, moral or divine, traditional or legal, is grounded the warden’s claim to the large income he receives for doing nothing?” the Jupiter thunders. Mr. Harding is conscience-struck. He wants no such reputation. He wants to quit. But Mr. Harding’s struggles with his conscience ripple through the clerical community. Factions form. Some think he is corrupt, some think he is arrogant and most think he will bring down the whole structure of subsidized clerical privilege.
If The Warden is an individual portrait in miniature, Barchester Towers is a broad social canvas of power struggles within the Church. Under the clerical robes is a world of ambition, greed, and vanity.
Anticipating the reaction to this, Trollope addresses the reader in his most epigrammatic fashion. “If we look to our clergymen to be more than men, we shall probably teach ourselves to think that they are less,” To shift metaphors, Barchester Towers is more like a chess game. The novel opens with the death of the old bishop.
His son, the archdeacon, Dr. Grantly, an eminently high churchman, is hoping for the preferment. Howeverr, the powers that be impose Dr. Proudie, a low churchman. If these terms are not familiar, think simply, lax and strict for high and low.
The king pieces, Grantly and Proudie, move their respective pawns, rooks and knights (not to say bishops) around the board, advancing here, encircling there, and attacking weak spots. Very little of this is spiritual. It is all about patronage appointments and preferments. Among the “knights” is a Mr. Slope and among the pawns is an aptly named Mr. Quiverful (he has 14 children).
Another subplot revolves around a remarkable family, the Stanhopes, the most heartless of which is a married and abandoned daughter calling herself Signora Madelaine Neroni. She is both outrageously beautiful and paralyzed. She is Jezebel coming to an English country town and adding lust to the sins of pride and ambition.
The ending? Victorian readers insisted on characters receiving just deserts. Trollope is happy to oblige.