The Warden: A Barsetshire Novel

By Anthony Trollope and Joannna Trollope

The Warden is the first of Anthony Trollope's six Barchester novels, and epitomizes the wit, charm and acute social observation that he brings to the series.

Septimus Harding is an unwordly, cello-playing clergyman, beloved by the pensioners of Barchester's almshouse, of which he is Warden. But when ecclesiastical and political skulduggery engulf him, he is pulled one way by the zealot John Bold, and the other way by his son-in-law, the sardonic and richly comic Archdeacon Grantly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848705821

Anthony Trollope

<p><b>Anthony Trollope</b> nació en Londres en 1815, hijo de un abogado en bancarrota y de Frances Trollope, que, tras fracasar montando un bazar en Cincinatti, escribió <i>Usos y costumbres de los americanos</i> (ALBA CLÁSICA núm. XLVIII), con la que inició una carrera literaria que le reportó fama y prosperidad económica. Anthony se educó en Harrow, Sunbury y Winchester, donde se sintió a disgusto entre los miembros de la aristocracia, y nunca llegó a la Universidad. En 1824 empezó a trabajar en el servicio de correos, donde permanecería hasta 1867. Tras siete años en Londres fue trasladado a Irlanda, y de ahí a nuevos destinos por el Reino Unido, Egipto y las Indias Occidentales.</p> <p>En 1847 publicó su primera novela, <i>The Macdermots of Ballycloran</i>, y en 1855 <i>El custodio</i>, la primera del ciclo ambientado en la mítica ciudad de Barchester (trasunto de Winchester) y en las intrigas políticas de su clero. Este ciclo lo consolidó como autor realista y le dio una gran popularidad. En 1864 inició con <i>Can You Forgive Her?</i> otro ciclo, el de las novelas de Palliser, en el que retrataría los entresijos de la vida política y matrimonial de los parlamentarios londinenses. En 1868 él mismo se presentó como candidato liberal a las elecciones, pero no fue elegido. Entre sus últimas obras cabe destacar <i>The Way We Live Now</i> (1875), una gran sátira del capitalismo. Murió en Londres en 1882.</p>

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Hiram’s Hospital

Chapter 2. The Barchester Reformer

Chapter 3. The Bishop of Barchester

Chapter 4. Hiram’s Bedesmen

Chapter 5. Dr Grantly Visits the Hospital

Chapter 6. The Warden’s Tea Party

Chapter 7. The Jupiter

Chapter 8. Plumstead Episcopi

Chapter 9. The Conference

Chapter 10. Tribulation

Chapter 11. Iphigenia

Chapter 12. Mr Bold’s Visit to Plumstead

Chapter 13. The Warden’s Decision

Chapter 14. Mount Olympus

Chapter 15. Tom Towers, Dr Anticant and Mr Sentiment

Chapter 16. A Long Day in London

Chapter 17. Sir Abraham Haphazard

Chapter 18. The Warden is Very Obstinate

Chapter 19. The Warden Resigns

Chapter 20. Farewell

Chapter 21. Conclusion

Notes to The Warden

General Introduction

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

General Adviser

Keith Carabine

Rutherford College

University of Kent at Canterbury

Introduction

The Warden, written in 1855 when he was forty, is Anthony Trollope’s fourth novel and, even though it sold slowly, was the first to give him some degree of success as a novelist. It opens the series of six Barsetshire novels. It was in the course of his work for the Post Office that Trollope visited Salisbury, and wandering around the precincts of the cathedral on a mid-summer evening was inspired by his surroundings. He writes in his autobiography: ‘I conceived the story of The Warden – from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon, was the central site.’ [1] Each novel is complete in itself but many of the characters and their stories emerge again throughout the series. Barchester Towers followed The Warden in 1857. Then came Dr Thorne in 1858, Framley Parsonage in 1860–1, The Small House at Allington in 1864 and The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1866–7. Trollope went on to write another thirty-eight novels, many with a political theme.

Trollope claimed that he was not familiar with the life of a cathedral close and had never met an archdeacon. ‘My archdeacon, who has been said to be life-like, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent’s fond affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness.’ [2] This is, however, slightly misleading as Trollope’s grandfathers were both parsons, he knew a family of clerics who were teachers at Harrow, he went to school in Winchester and was familiar with Exeter. Perhaps when he made these claims he was trying momentarily to obliterate unhappy memories of childhood. His father’s business as a barrister and subsequent efforts at farming failed, and Trollope endured miserable schooldays at Harrow and Winchester, an outcast because of his poverty. ‘Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart.’ [3] He was victimised by staff and pupils alike, and suffered many a flogging. The family was eventually supported by Trollope’s mother, Frances, who, late in life, turned to writing, and set her son the example of a habit he never lost when he started to write himself. That was to regard writing as a craft, which must be practised regularly, and treated like any other daily job. He allotted himself so many pages a week to write, starting at 5.30 in the morning before going to the office.

Trollope’s adult life was much happier than his childhood had been; he rose to be a surveyor for the Post Office and successfully introduced the pillar-box. His marriage was long and fulfilling, and he enjoyed a close relationship with his son Henry, to whom he entrusted the publication of his autobiography after his death in 1882. A trusting relationship with a child is central to The Warden. This novel introduces us to Barchester, where Mr Harding is warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse for the support of twelve old Barchester men. In his will John Hiram left property and land to fund the charity. This real estate has increased in value considerably, but while the warden’s income has also grown considerably, the small allowance of the old men has not. The young reformer, John Bold, seeks to amend this situation and brings it to the attention of the press, even though he hopes to marry the warden’s daughter, Eleanor. Mr Harding’s love and tenderness towards his favourite daughter, and her deep affection and loyalty to him, even in difficult times, provide an emotional centre for the novel.

Mr Harding loves music deeply and when under stress he plays an imaginary cello, for he finds it difficult to express his own troubles; but Eleanor is able to draw him out with her sympathy: ‘ . . . if there be such cause for sorrow, let us be sorrowful together; we are all in all to each other now’. (p. 76) Mr Harding’s hopes that his daughter will support him in his moral decision to resign the warden’s post, when he discovers that the spirit of Hiram’s will is not being strictly adhered to, his concern that her happiness will not be ruined and his ability to accept John Bold as a husband for her show the warden’s full humanity. Eleanor’s unhesitating acceptance of his decision, much to her own material disadvantage, and her constant wish to comfort her gentle father are typical of the lively and strong heroines that Trollope drew so well. In Trollope and Women, [4] Margaret Markwick sees Eleanor as a model of virgin decorum and points out that many of Trollope’s novels ‘contain at least one female figure who is presented to us as having the attributes of an Angel in the House’ (Markwick p. 26). But she is human too and cannot cease to love John Bold on principle, for she is deeply attracted to him. For Trollope, female sexual passion is consistent with virtue.

The structural framework of the novel comes from what Trollope called ‘two opposite evils’. ‘I thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe them, both in one and the same tale.’ [5] The first evil was possession by the Church of endowments, intended for charitable purposes, which had become easily earned incomes for certain clerics. The second evil was the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards these men who were often mild and well-meaning and could hardly be held to account for what the Church allowed them.

As Trollope was thinking about his novel two examples of the first evil were scandalising the nation and he mentions them in the second chapter of The Warden. At Rochester, the Reverend Robert Whiston, the headmaster of the Cathedral Grammar School, fell into a dispute with the dean and chapter over maintenance which they were obliged to pay for scholars and exhibitioners. The amount of this had not been increased significantly for centuries. Whiston published a pamphlet in 1849 accusing the clergy in other cathedrals of benefiting themselves from charitable trusts. The chapter dismissed him but he fought his case in the courts and was reinstated. Trollope was interested in the way Church dignitaries would fight without scruple to protect their own vast wealth.

Exact equivalences are impossible to establish but economists suggest that incomes have multiplied by a factor of 180 since the novel was written. Mr Harding is rich as warden, and not exactly poor when his income is reduced to £150 (about £27,000 in today’s money). The modern reader may well feel that Trollope is not sufficiently angered by the excessive wealth of the Church and some of its clergy, but it is worth noting that when Trollope did his accounts for 1861 he had an income of £734 from the Post Office and £3,038 from writing. [6] From this perspective it is not perhaps surprising that he does not regard the warden’s income as inordinate. Trollope is essentially conservative and his satire on the Church remains good-humoured. Dr Grantly in The Warden is said to be ‘a personal friend of the dignitaries of the Rochester Chapter’ (p. 8) and Dr Grantly will go to any lengths, all of them presented by Trollope as highly amusing, to prevent Mr Harding from sacrificing his income of £800 (which would be a very large sum today). He will also argue bluntly with his father-in-law.

‘God, that feeds the young ravens, will take care of me also,’ said Mr Harding, with a smile, as though afraid of giving offence by making his reference to scripture too solemn.

‘Pish!’ said the archdeacon, turning away rapidly. ‘If the ravens persisted in refusing the food prepared for them, they wouldn’t be fed.’ [p. 136]

The other case mentioned by Trollope is that of St Cross, the hospital at Winchester, where the Reverend Francis North, Earl of Guilford, was master, an appointment conferred on him by his father, the bishop. The Earl of Guilford was a wealthy man anyway, and he received a substantial income, greater than the amount used for the charitable work of the hospital. He was also a pluralist, holding two other parish livings and a canonry at Winchester. A reforming retired clergyman brought the case to the attention of the newspapers and the ensuing publicity dazed the old earl, who had carried out his duties fairly conscientiously without questioning his right to the income. The parallels with the case of Hiram’s Hospital are apparent. Mr Harding is also a man of integrity, shocked to discover he may be in the wrong.

The second evil of press intervention in such matters is fully dealt with in the novel, where Trollope satirises The Times in the guise of the Jupiter. The Times praised The Warden, and Barchester Towers, but criticised the author for bringing in personalities. But Trollope denies this in his autobiography. ‘If Tom Towers was at all like any gentleman then connected with The Times, my moral consciousness must again have been very powerful’ (p. 86). The Times had relentlessly attacked absenteeism, ecclesiastical privilege and the misappropriation of Church incomes. There was particular concern for the poverty, now extreme, in many of the fast growing industrial towns. Against this poverty the wealth of the Church appeared in a bad light. Clergymen of conscience were, however, concerned by the way The Times lashed out indiscriminately. Trollope himself was angered by the ability of the press to cause such distress, and by its irresponsible use of power. Much of Trollope’s criticism of the Jupiter foreshadowed modern anxieties about the licence of the press.

The name of Tom Towers is significant. Trollope liked to play with the connotations of names; for example, his lawyers are called Haphazard, which suggests that the law is a random affair, and Finney, which suggests that it is a fishy one. The poor clergyman with many children is called ‘Quiverful’. He is to play a significant part in Barchester Towers and the reader is kept aware of his name. Henry James believed that the reader is made ‘unhappy by the primitive character of this satiric note’. [7] Some of Trollope’s names work successfully, however, because they are credible ordinary names, as well as having symbolic overtones. Tom Towers falls into this category. When Trollope named his editor perhaps he was thinking of Tom Tower at Christchurch College in Oxford and suggesting that the Press had supplanted the Church and the University in its towering influence. The offices of the Jupiter are situated in ‘a small secluded, dreary spot’, but from there the nation can be controlled. ‘This little court is the Vatican of England’ (p. 101).

Trollope thought he had failed in his aim of satirising both of these evils in the novel. ‘Any writer in advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of an advocate, – or his writing will be ineffective. He should take up one side and cling to that, and then he may be powerful.’ [8] Contrary to Trollope’s own opinion, however, the combination of the two issues does succeed for they are skilfully wound together. Mr Harding’s shame at being pilloried by the Jupiter is crucial to his realisation that his position as warden is ethically untenable. He tells Sir Abraham Hap-hazard, ‘I cannot boast of my conscience, when it required the violence of a public newspaper to awaken it; but, now that it is awake, I must obey it’ (p. 132). In fact the novel’s chief interest lies in the moral awakening of this already good man and our own consequent understanding of how difficult it is to perceive objectively the rightness or wrongness of our own situations. It occurs to few people to question the basis of their inherited wealth or their incomes. Mr Harding’s great strength lies in the fact that he starts to take action as soon as he decides he is in the wrong. In Romanticism and Trollope, L. J. Swingle says that in dramatising such a situation Trollope is ‘confirming a proposition familiar to nineteenth-century intellectuals that ultimately human beings must make decisions for themselves’ (Swingle, p. 156). Mr Harding is aware of the difficulties of making right choices and it is ironic that the Church, far from providing a standard for behaviour, is offering advice which he must reject.

In ‘The Modern English Archbishop’, an essay in the volume, Clergymen of the Church of England, Trollope summarises his view of the English national character: ‘We hate an evil, and we hate a change. Hating the evil most, we make the change, but we make it as small as possible’ (Trollope, p. 8). Trollope himself displays this sensibility in the novel. He is concerned by the corruption in the Church and he satirises with humorous delight Archdeacon Grantly’s love of power and wealth: ‘he believed confidently in Oxford, in the bench of bishops, in Sir Abraham Haphazard, and in himself’ (p. 56). His home, Plumstead Episcopi, is furnished with the most expensive objects that money can buy: ‘The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand, and the bread-basket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons’ (p. 59). Trollope greatly admired Jane Austen, and perhaps Dr Grantly was named after Dr Grant in Mansfield Park, an epicurean clergyman who died after eating several very good dinners.

But Trollope, as we have seen, is by nature conservative; he is far more severe on the press than he is on the Church. Interestingly enough it is the old religious institutions to which he is deeply attached and The Warden is a novel about clergymen without any discussion of theology in it. Nor does it raise the questions of faith and religious doubt, which so much preoccupied the Victorians. Many readers of Trollope have found this a strength rather than a weakness and have enjoyed seeing the Church presented in its social and economic aspects like any other national institution. What appealed to Trollope was a traditional way of life, supported by ancient buildings, music and ritual. In one of the author’s many direct addresses to the reader, whom he treats as his friend who must share his feelings, Trollope waxes lyrical about cathedral closes. One feels that he has a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he builds up the rhetoric, but essentially he means what he says.

Who would not feel charity for a prebendary, when walking the quiet length of that long aisle at Winchester, looking at those decent houses, that trim grassplat, and feeling, as one must, the solemn, orderly comfort of the spot! Who could be hard upon a dean while wandering around the sweet close of Hereford, and owning that in that precinct, tone and colour, design and form, solemn tower and storied window, are all in unison, and all perfect! Who could lie basking in the cloisters of Salisbury, and gaze on Jewel’s library and that unequalled spire, without feeling that bishops should sometimes be rich! [p. 34)]

It is possible to share this love of the past and still hope that change, however necessary, will not destroy what is valuable about it. The modern reader, however, may not share Trollope’s imperatives (‘feeling as one must’) and may resist his persuasive reflections. Then the inordinate wealth of the clergy becomes a moral disgrace which the reader does wish Trollope to address more seriously. The fact that he does not becomes for many readers a serious limitation in Trollope’s fiction. But readers who enjoy his fiction are carried away from this position under the spell of the novel. It is also possible to see the author himself as being ironically in the position of his warden and unable to realise the full extent of the abuses he is trying to highlight. For all that he wishes to expose evils, Trollope is firmly on the side of tradition.

Trollope’s portrait of the Bishop of Barchester is not satiric in the manner of that of his son, Archdeacon Grantly. The bishop is drawn as a gentle elderly man not wanting confrontation with his son or anyone else. He is a kind friend to Mr Harding, wishing to assist him personally after his resignation as warden. ‘His first proposition to Mr Harding was, that they should live together at the palace. He . . . wanted another resident chaplain’ (pp. 146–7). Mr Harding of course refuses, because this preferment would also be against his conscientious wish to be independent. The reactions of the bishop show how deeply ingrained in the Church is the habit of nepotism, or at least of looking after their own. Trollope is not harshly critical, but the point is made. Yet we still feel drawn to the kindliness of this way of life and regret that it may all be wiped away.

Moreover, the old bedesmen, the pensioners living in the hospital, who should be the object of the reform, are not necessarily going to benefit from any changes, although they are promised that their income will be dramatically increased as a result. The author asks without irony, ‘How can their lot be improved? all their wants are supplied; every comfort is administered; they have warm houses, good clothes, plentiful diet, and rest after a life of labour; and above all, that treasure so inestimable in declining years, a true and kind friend’ (p. 26).

In The Warden Trollope offers his own views of revolution. As we have seen, the cruel reforming passion of the press, with its often dubious motives, disturbs him, and so too does the over-zealous nature of reformers. Trollope introduces John Bold as the initiator of the campaign against the warden’s remuneration, a ‘strong reformer’ whose passion is the reform of all abuses. John Bold is a surgeon by profession. In Trollope’s time the occupation of surgeon would have suggested more drastic ‘kill or cure’ methods than now, and Bold’s wish for social surgery knows no moderation. He wishes to ‘mend mankind’ by radical surgery. He is not connected with the Church, but from the outside he attempts to put its house in order, and he is seen to be intervening in ecclesiastical matters without sufficient consideration for the outcome of his actions, although as Mr Harding recognises, he is a good man and one to whom Eleanor can be entrusted. Trollope presents Bold as well-intentioned but arrogantly self-confident, as his name indicates. ‘Bold is thoroughly sincere in his patriotic endeavours to mend mankind’ but he ‘has all the ardour and all the self-assurance of a Danton, and hurls his anathemas against time-honoured practices with the violence of a French Jacobin’ (p. 11). The references to the French Revolution show the strength of Trollope’s feeling on the subject, but Bold is not of course a Danton and the excessive nature of the comparison is self-defeating. In The Victorian Debate, Raymond Chapman points out that in the middle of the nineteenth century the shadow of the French Revolution continued to loom over the cautious middle classes. Without the John Bolds, ‘the violence of a French Jacobin might well have been felt in this country’ (Chapman, p. 185).

Bold is of the prosperous middle class and rich enough to risk losing money in the case. When he decides to pull out, Tom Towers tells him it will cost him a good deal, for there are lawyers’ fees to be met.

‘A few hundreds,’ said Bold – ‘perhaps three hundred; I can’t help that, and am prepared for it.’

‘That’s philosophical. It’s quite refreshing to hear a man talking of his hundreds in so purely indifferent a manner.’[p. 108]

This would be at least £40,000 in today’s money, but he does not have to consider every step as a less privileged person might have had to do. The earnest young man is assisted by a publicity machine, and aided and abetted by unreliable gossip: ‘the value of the property had gradually increased from year to year and century to century, and was now presumed by those who knew anything about it, to bring in a very nice income; and by some who knew nothing about it, to have increased to an almost fabulous extent’ (pp. 4–5). The bedesmen are led by one radical, Abel Handy, who, ironically had been put into the almshouse by Mr Harding in opposition to a candidate of Dr Grantly’s, who of course would have caused no trouble. The rest are ordinary folk, stirred up as their self-interest is appealed to, and they are browbeaten by the lawyer, Finney, the cynical tool of those able to pay him. Only Bunce is strong enough to retain his integrity and refuse to sign the petition, but he has no power to match the lawyer’s.

The idyllic scene of the old men sitting around in Mr Harding’s garden, listening to his cello (p. 17), is not to be repeated when change has taken place. Indeed, by the end of the novel, the hospital has fared badly: ‘ . . . six have died, with no kind friend to solace their last moments . . . Nor were those who remained better off than those who died. Dissensions rose among them, and contests for pre-eminence.’ The hospital became ‘the miserable relic of what had once been so good and so comfortable’ (p. 156). Trollope’s conservative view is that reform does not necessarily benefit those it is aimed at as the historical process, and the fictional process, work themselves out. In The Warden reform is seen as a matter of destroying privilege rather than of improving the lot of the underprivileged, and Trollope cleverly induces his own mixed feelings about reform in the reader. He makes us see that no political move is straightforward. These conflicting sympathies of the author give the novel an ambiguity and a subtlety that it would have lacked had its theme been single. The inclusion of the press makes us sympathise with Mr Harding, who is not a greedy prelate. Trollope does not offer a solution to the two evils but he does imply that a slower process of more thoughtful reform would avoid some of the pitfalls of revolution.

Because he is opposed to regarding political matters as simple, Trollope mocks Charles Dickens, in the character of Mr Popular Sentiment, a novelist who has jumped on the bandwagon of reform. He believed that Dickens’s characters, and the issues he presents in his novels, are too unmixed morally. He also satirises Thomas Carlyle, in the name of Dr Pessimist Anticant, a reforming social critic, who, according to Trollope, has failed to recognise ‘that in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly’ (p. 108). Henry James objected to Trollope’s heavy-handed satire of these two authors, which he also considered inaccurate. ‘Dr Anticant is a parody of Carlyle, and Mr Sentiment is an exposure of Dickens; and both these little jeux d’esprit are as infelicitious as

Reviews for The Warden

[a.j.lumaren · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The second, third and fourth books in this series rank among my all times favourites. However, I find the Warden and Lilian Dale, as characters, unappealing, therefore I did not enjoy the first, fifth and sixth books so much. However, throughout all the books, Trollope's mastery of the English language is almost unparalleled and he provides a fascinating insight into Victorian England.