Trollope's The Warden

I’ve been reading aloud to Sarah again, and today we finished a novel, my first Trollope novel (that’s Anthony), called The Warden; his first successful novel, and the first in the Barchester series. It’s a very tightly controlled novel, which treats of a number of themes and one central moral dilemma. The central character, Septimus Harding, Warden of Barchester hospital, finds his living under a cloud when it’s revealed that what was originally a small bequest from the will of John Hiram in the fifteenth century, which covered both the pay of the Warden and the expenses of a dozen retired wool-carders, has since become a tidy sum for the Wardenship, but not for the dozen retirees (no longer wool-carders in the nineteenth century). In other words, through either the carelessness or the manipulation of the Church of England, which has overseen the bequest through the centuries, the Wardenship has become a pleasant sinecure, and the working class carders and their successors have had their portion kept to the barest minimum.

Around this dilemma, Trollope invents and has great fun with some archetypal characters: the kindly, doddering bishop; the zealous reformer; the conservative and self-important archdeacon; the man of the press as judge, jury and executioner; and in the middle of it, the kindly and scrupulous Warden himself. In general, quite satisfying fare, but both Sarah and I had qualms about the way it ended, especially for the dozen indigents on whose behalf the zealous reformer (John Bold) and the man of the press (Tom Towers) took up the cudgels. Clearly these were worn-out, illiterate working-class worthies, but Trollope treats them more as grotesques than as fully human characters, and seems rather to mock their ‘illusions’ regarding the bequest out of which they seem to have been genuinely cheated. In the end the Warden resigns his tainted position, and the Church, avoiding controversy, appoints no successor. The twelve good men and true gradually die off and are no longer replaced as they had been in the past, and the whole place falls into desuetude. The kindly bishop is thus shown, though not explicitly by Trollope, to be kindly only to his friend the warden, but not at all to the deserving poor of the hospital. Their abandonment is a disgrace undealt with, though no doubt this sort of thing really happened. Trollope is really much more concerned with his middle-class protagonists; doctors, lawyers, ecclesiasts, newspapermen and the like. There are only two prominent women in the novel, both daughters of the Warden. Eleanor, the more or less simpering maiden and dutiful daughter, and Mrs Grantley the haughtily respectable wife of the archdeacon. And to be fair, even Eleanor is rendered bearable by Trollope’s mild but unrelenting satire.

Still, there’s always this silly hope that the writer’s critique will bite deeper, biting right to the heart of his age and class. In the end, it’s what Trollope presents but doesn’t himself fully notice that attracts our utmost attention, I feel. Most notably, the nineteenth century class system, and the failure to recognise even the potential for equality for all. The undemocratic nature of the age, if you will.