Note: Please enjoy my piece for The Oxonian Review on Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris, which is available to read here.
The Warden is the first of the six novels that make up the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which were published between 1855 and 1867. Barsetshire is a fictional county seemingly in the West Country, and Barchester, the setting of The Warden, is its county town. Septimus Harding is the precentor of Barchester Cathedral and the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse. In 1434, one John Hiram, a woolstapler, left in his will his house and some surrounding lands for the support of twelve old wool-carders, and appointed that the almshouse should be built for them with a residence for a warden, who would be paid annually from the rents on the lands. In the intervening four hundred years, as wool-carding went out, wardens filled the twelve places with “worn-out gardeners, decrepit grave-diggers, or octogenarian sextons”. The value of the property has increased such that by Septimus’ time, the income paid to the warden is eight hundred a year. Talk is heard in Barchester to the effect that such an arrangement is unfair to the twelve bedesmen, who are the intended beneficiaries of the whole arrangement, even if Mr. Harding has increased their allowances by twopence to a daily one shilling and sixpence. A young surgeon, John Bold, keen on reform, starts a lawsuit against Mr. Harding, and this is despite the surety of considerable awkwardness, given that he is all but engaged to Mr. Harding’s daughter, Eleanor. Meanwhile the older daughter, Susan, is married to Archdeacon Grantly, a vociferous defender of the church against any lawsuit, criticism, or attempted curtailment of its wealth and worldly power. A newspaper called The Jupiter, always sensitive to ecclesiastical excesses, can be relied upon to comment on the case of Hiram’s Hospital, while Harding, ambivalent about his own position but exhorted by his son-in-law to defend it, consults with a distinguished London barrister, Sir Abraham Haphazard.
The Warden is rather short compared to later installments in the Barsetshire series. There are not all that many developments in the lawsuit nor in the public reaction to it for us to follow, nor do the dilemmas faced by both John Bold and Mr. Harding take too much time in the resolution. Much of the enjoyment to be had is in the character of Mr. Harding in his conferences with the almost caricature of Archdeacon Grantly. Mr. Harding is doubting, anxious, charitable, concerned for his own name and also for the comfort of his daughters. Dr. Grantly has “all the dignity of an ancient saint with the sleekness of a modern bishop,” and he sweats, gesticulates, and denounces the “impudent” and “pestilent” enemies of the church, sometimes running out of invective and muttering, ‘Good heavens’ in a manner that had been found very efficacious in clerical meetings of the diocese.” The twelve old bedesmen, told by an attorney they have the prospect of one hundred pounds a year, depending on the success of the lawsuit, have signed a petition stating their claims, and while the Archdeacon thinks they need rebuking, Mr. Harding wants as little scandal and conflict as possible:
‘Quiet,’ said the Archdeacon, still speaking with his brazen trumpet; ‘do you wish to be ruined in quiet?’
‘Why, if I am to be ruined, certainly.’
John Bold is usually bold in his political advocacy, but now compromised as the agent of reform because of his entanglement with Eleanor. He has “so worried three consecutive mayors, that it became somewhat difficult to find a fourth,” but now it occurs to him in doubtful solitude that the bedesmen are already well cared for under the present arrangement, and he has to “quieten the suggestion within his breast” with a sturdy, solemn maxim: “Fiat justitia ruat cœlum” (Let justice be done though the heavens fall). His older sister Mary, close friend of Eleanor, begs him to give up the case for her sake, and his incoherent, love-sickened answer is a rare case of Trollope exaggerating an effect in his dialogue: “Eleanor, that is, Miss Harding, if she thinks fit—that is, if her father—or rather, if she—or, indeed, he—if they find it necessary—But there is no necessity now to talk about Eleanor Harding.” You can hear him find at least temporary calm in the final declaration. When Eleanor has him call on her to ask him to spare her father the scandal, sensible Mary and the sensible reader know it “quite natural that he should relent.” The chapter featuring this meeting is titled “Iphigenia”, in reference to the sacrifice Eleanor would be making for her father if she were to lose her potential husband to protect him. Bold, mocked as the “Barchester Brutus” by his author, does not fulfill his classical destiny, and neither does Eleanor: the two end the chapter engaged. As Trollope has it in a triumphantly good last line, “the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice.” He uses the mock epic in Chapters VI, “The Warden’s Tea Party”, and XIV, “Mount Olympus”, giving various mythic and heroic conceits to musicians, whist-players, and a journalist, but his satirical purposes are different with “Iphigenia”. It is not Eleanor’s role or behaviors, but her understanding of herself as self-sacrificing that is ridiculed.
Amusing as they may be, Trollope’s fanciful satires don’t sit very comfortably in the novel he is trying to write. The music in “The Warden’s Tea Party”, played by Eleanor and “another nymph” at the piano, with “tall Apollo” on the flute, heralds a shift to the present tense (“And now the crash begins”), in which Trollope stays for the whist-playing, which is really unrelated, as the archdeacon and his adversaries ignore the music to concentrate better on the cards. Suddenly the party is over, having been lost to its own satirical presentation, and the conversation that Mary and Eleanor ought to have had (about John Bold’s absence) lost too, to be reduced to later summary as “something had passed between them”. The story has been paused and then resumed. One wants to the author to skillfully thread the storyline with its attendant drama through the dense stuff of the party with all its irrelevant color and detail.
So it is with the two parodies in Chapter XV, of Thomas Carlyle and Charles Dickens, a polemical pamphlet called Modern Charity by “Dr. Anticant”, and the first number of a novel called the Almshouse by “Mr. Popular Sentiment”. The former is stirring stuff of this sort:
Oh, my civilized friends!—great Britons that never will be slaves, men advanced to infinite state of freedom and knowledge of good and evil—tell me, will you, what becoming monument will you erect to an high-educated clergyman of the Church of England?
The latter, perhaps not quite parody as Trollope does not provide an excerpt, is a description of the fictional work the Almshouse thus far, a topical roman a clef with a clergyman representing Mr. Harding who “looked cruelly out of a hot, passionate, bloodshot eye; who had a huge red nose with a carbuncle, thick lips, and a great double, flabby chin, which swelled out into solid substance”. If such advanced corruption even exists in Trollope’s fictional world, it will not display itself with so hideous a face, as he is not so crude an artist and moralist as Dickens. Curiously, that double chin goes on to look like a “turkey cock’s comb”, which will recall the reader to Dr. Grantly’s preparation for his severe words to the bedesmen: “As the indomitable cock preparing for the combat sharpens his spurs, shakes his feathers, and erects his comb, so did the archdeacon arrange his weapons for the coming war, without misgiving and without fear.”
In treating Carlyle and Dickens this way, Trollope was jostling for position, and once The Warden had been a modest success and the very successful Barsetshire Chronicles were underway, with work on Barchester Towers beginning soon thereafter, there was less need for such distractions from his own novelistic aims. The Warden is more curiosity than masterpiece, with a slightness corresponding to its smaller reputation, but both John Bold’s and Mr. Harding’s dilemmas make for good intrigue, and Dr. Grantly is an excellent comic creation. That coxcomb’s affectations are exposed as such when the reader learns that he too has a taste for satire, a break from all work of the committed churchman. He was alone in his study, the door closed, with inkstand, pen, and paper arrayed for the composition of his next sermon, but then “threw himself into his easy chair, took from a secret drawer beneath his table a volume of Rabelais, and began to amuse himself with the witty mischief of Panurge.”