The Warden (4 page)

The conservative cleric, the reformer, and the newspaper editor all speak and think in the abstract public language of rights and principles, which cannot begin to deal with the complex individual case of Mr Harding. His language, on the other hand, is wordless and intuitive, the language of his beloved cello, which is soon silenced by his troubles and turns into the soundless mime which is ‘his constant consolation in conversational troubles' (p.
39
). Literature, which should be able to link the public and the private languages, is shown in the case of Dr Pessimist Anticant (Carlyle) and Mr Popular Sentiment (Dickens) to be merely a melodramatic form of journalism. Like the reformers and the conservatives, these writers can take only a single-minded and one-dimensional view of the issue. The majority of Trollope's critics have found these parodies a mistake and a blemish. My own view is that the parody of Carlyle, at least, scores some palpable hits at the expense of a writer who by the time of
Latter-Day Pamphlets
(1850) had shot his bolt and was starting to parody himself. But this, as Ruth apRoberts wisely remarks, is not the point: ‘Whether these parodies succeed or not – whether they are good as parodies and whether they are decorous – they are altogether functional. Trollope is defining, by negatives, what he himself would do.'
¹³
By deploring in his own trade the moral simplifications he attacks in Bold and the
Jupiter
, Trollope was writing an incidental manifesto for the kind of sympathetic, quiet-voiced realism which from
The Warden
onwards was to be the mark of his own work.

The Warden
, Henry James said, ‘is simply the history of an old man's conscience'.
¹⁴
What gives that history dramatic shape is Mr Harding's decision to go to London and see Sir Abraham Haphazard. The chapters describing his visit are the climax of the novel, and they enact a subtle reversal of its initial premise. From the London road in Chapter
1
Mr Harding's ‘Elysium' looks and is a vulnerable paradise, and virtue seems to lie in retreat from the public world. But the moment he decides to take the London road he regains, not a lost paradise, but something better, control of his public destiny. Indeed, his decision to resign means that paradise is lost, and before he leaves ‘the warden returned to his garden to make his last adieus to every tree, and shrub, and shady nook that he knew so well' (p.
116
). Mr Harding's trip to London can be seen as Trollope's ironic variation on the convention that brings the young heroes of Victorian fiction, the David Copperfields and Pips, to the metropolis to learn the ways of the world, for unlike them the warden is too old and too innocent to learn. There is a gentle comedy in his failure to read the signs of an unsavoury night-life in the London supper-house (p.
147
), and in the contrast between his domesticated ways and the seedy cigar divan. Even his resort to Westminster Abbey and his disappointment with it reveal how deeply he belongs to the rural ways of Barchester.

Yet Mr Harding does succeed in confronting the public world in shape of Sir Abraham Haphazard and impressing the lawyer with the intensity of his own view of the case. When he at last finds words to articulate his decision to resign, the release of inner feeling finds expression in a triumphant mime on the imaginary cello:

He was standing up, gallantly fronting Sir Abraham, and his right arm passed with bold and rapid sweeps before him, as though he were embracing some huge instrument, which allowed him to stand thus erect; and with the fingers of his left hand he stopped, with preternatural velocity, a multitude of strings, which ranged from the top of his collar to the bottom of the lappet of his coat. Sir Abraham listened and looked in wonder, (p.
155
)

The lawyer is silenced, as well he might be by such a spectacle. But Mr Harding has vindicated himself, and with his vindication comes a moment of what in another novelist we would call epiphany:

Mr Harding was sufficiently satisfied with the interview to feel a glow of comfort as he descended into the small old square of Lincoln's Inn. It was a calm, bright, beautiful night, and by the light of the moon, even the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, and the sombre row of chambers, which surround the quadrangle, looked well. (p.
155
)

This intimation of cathedral sublimities in the heart of legal London signifies the healing of Mr Harding's spirit, the restoration of harmony between private being and public role. And so it is that he can leave the lost paradise, not looking back over his shoulder, but purposefully, with a spring in his step: ‘There was a tear in Eleanor's eye as she passed through the big gateway and over the bridge; but Mr Harding walked with an elastic step, and entered his new abode with a pleasant face' (p.
181
).

R.G.

The Warden
was first published by Longman in 1855. The manuscript has not survived and, with the exception of the reprint of the novel in the eight-volume ‘Chronicles of Barsetshire' edition published by Chapman and Hall in 1878, there is no evidence that Trollope took an interest in the text of any edition of the novel after the first. The alterations and additions in the 1878 text are very slight, however, made perhaps while Trollope was reading proofs of this edition and, since they leave errors un-corrected and incorporate no new material of substance, cannot be considered to constitute a proper revision of the novel. The copy-text for this Penguin English Library edition has therefore been taken from the first edition.

The most notable of the changes made in the 1878 text is the increase in the
Jupiter's
circulation from forty and fifty thousand in the first edition to eighty thousand, with a corresponding
increase in readership (p. 60) to four hundred thousand. Four footnotes were added to Chapter 16, as follows: on p. 140 after ‘effect' at the end of the second paragraph, ‘How these pleasant things have been altered since this was written a quarter of a century ago!'; also on p. 140 after ‘a drug in the market' at the end of the third paragraph, ‘Again what a change!'; on p. 143 after ‘went in as a sightseer' at the top of the page, ‘Again what a change!'; and after ‘time was not unnecessarily lost in the chanting' on p. 144, ‘Again the changes which years have made should be noted.' The following two sentences were added to the end of the first paragraph of Chapter 16, p. 138:

It was mean all this, and he knew that it was mean; but, for the life of him, he could not help it. Had he met the archdeacon he certainly would have lacked the courage to explain the purpose which was carrying him up to London – to explain it in full.

Of minor changes, the most noteworthy comes at the end of Mr Harding's letter to the bishop in Chapter 19, when ‘Yours most sincerely' (p. 167) was altered to ‘Yours most affectionately'.

On the other hand, Trollope did not take the opportunity of this edition to correct the arithmetical error in the first chapter (see note 7), or to change ‘Lord Guildford' to ‘Lord Guilford', or to regularize the name of the lawyers ‘Cox and Cummins', who become ‘Cox and Cumming' halfway through the novel. I have let the first two errors stand, since to change them seems an unwarranted alteration of what Trollope actually wrote, but ‘Cumming' is such a likely printer's error for the original ‘Cummins' that it has been changed to ‘Cummins' throughout, thus removing an inconsistency in the text which has survived through every reprint.

In preparing the text for this edition, I have corrected obvious minor errors, regularized capitalization and italicized titles like the
Jupiter
and
Harding's Church Music
. In keeping with Penguin house-style, the point has been omitted after Mr, Mrs, Dr and St, and ‘some one' and ‘any one' have been closed up as single words, except where the sense requires their separation. Errors in punctuation have been corrected, and redundant commas
removed in a limited number of cases. Trollope's practice of using a comma with the dash, which is consistent in his later novels, is inconsistent in
The Warden
, and in regularizing punctuation I have opted for the modern form and removed the comma.

apRoberts, Ruth, ‘Trollope's Casuistry',
Novel
3 (1969), pp. 17–27. As illustrated especially by
The Warden
, Trollope's novels are case studies; his cases ‘constitute… the significant form of his novels.' This claim is elaborated in Roberts's subsequent book,
The Moral Trollope
(Athens, Ohio, 1971).

Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Anthony Trollope – A New Judgment', BBC broadcast of 1945 reprinted in
Collected Impressions
(New York, 1950), pp. 233–45. Bowen's imaginary interview with Trollope is a fascinating document of what she calls elsewhere ‘the Trollope “revival” in Britain, in 1940' (preface to
Dr Thorne
, 1959). Bowen has her Trollope say, ‘My Warden, for instance – old Mr. Harding, in the novel, was a personification of my own muddled wish to do right at any cost.' More generally, Trollope's realism is seen as a thwarted or sublimated pursuit of ideals. In this way, a character like Harding can embody a Trollopian poetics that somehow includes nostalgia, worldliness and hope. Bowen frames her case as at once a deepening and refutation of James's comment that Trollope's imagination had no light of its own.

Glendinning, Victoria,
Trollope
(London, 1992). Glendinning's readable biography offers an excellent introduction to the novelist's life.

Goldberg, M. A., ‘Trollope's
The Warden
: A Comment on the “Age of Equipoise” ',
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
17 (March 1963), pp. 381–90. Goldberg describes Trollope's use of satiric techniques derived from eighteenth-century mock-epic poems, like Pope's ‘Rape of the Lock'; he then argues that the novelist's attacks are softened by his desire for ‘quietude and decorum'. This is a noteworthy early effort to come to terms with the stylistic and ideological evasiveness of
The Warden
.

Hawkins, Sherman, ‘Mr. Harding's Church Music', ELH 29 (June 1962). Hawkins argues that
The Warden's
subject is the
‘Church, and the paradoxes and problems which arise when an impulse of the spirit must be translated into a corporation with a bank account.' Moreover, ‘the antithesis of Bold and Grantly is resolved in the warden' himself; this synthesis is achieved largely through ‘the pervasive imagery of music.' Since
The Warden
does include much literal music, Hawkins's argument seems grounded in the realistic as well as symbolic texture of the novel.

Hennedy, Hugh,
Unity in Barsetshire
(The Hague, 1971). Chapter 2 maintains that
The Warden
is a novel of vocation, ‘a prose “Lycidas” '. Hennedy is serious about this somewhat startling claim; he notes Trollope's fondness for Milton's pastoral elegy, traces the novel's interest in sheep and pastors, and emphasizes a pervasive concern with living up to one's calling. (He sees the theme of vocation as a key to Chapter 15, the satiric flight that so offended Henry James.)

James, Henry, ‘Anthony Trollope', first published in
Century Magazine
(1883); republished in
Partial Portraits
(1888) and in
Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers
(Library of America, 1984), pp. 1330–54. This account of Trollope's career includes several deeply appreciative pages on
The Warden
, which James describes as ‘the history of an old man's conscience'. There is particular praise for the contrasting portraits of Harding and Archbishop Grantly. However, James decries the evocation of Carlyle and Dickens in Chapter 15; it reminds us that Trollope had ‘no gift' for ‘certain forms of satire'.

Kincaid, James,
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(Oxford, 1977). In Kincaid's view, far from being a novel of compromise,
The Warden
seeks to establish ‘a positive and enduring moral centre… by running the reforming rascals out of town.'

Kucich, John,
The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction
(Ithaca, New York, 1994). This is a book about ‘Victorian England's fascination with lying' and how this fascination illuminates ‘attitudes towards social distinctions'. The first chapter, on Trollope, makes a few suggestive comments about Harding, whose humility is identified with a specifically middle-class form of honesty; Kucich's general survey is not
only suggestive for
The Warden
in particular but a good introduction to recent Trollope studies.

Lyons, Paul, ‘The Morality of Irony and Unreliable Narrative in Trollope's
The Warden
and
Barchester Towers', South Atlantic Quarterly
54 (1989), pp. 41–54. Lyons explores ‘the possibility of an unreliable omniscient narrator, a combination that seems special to Trollope.' He uses his analysis of novelistic point-of-view to demonstrate how Trollope's ‘pleasantness' can produce not only ‘the habit of mercy' but also effects of terror (largely, it would seem, terror about one's own base motives).

McDermott, Jim, ‘New Womanly Man: Feminized Heroism and the Politics of Compromise in
The Warden'. Victorians Institute Journal
27 (1999), pp. 71–90. In the ‘strangely unique' world of
The Warden
, Harding embodies a special kind of androgyny that allows him to transcend opposites, indeed, to ‘manufacture their disappearance'.

Maid, Barry, ‘Trollope, Idealists, Reality, and Play',
Victorians Institute Journal
12 (1984), pp. 9–21. Maid analyses the behaviour of
The Warden
'
s
disputants as a form of play, in the sense defined by Johann Huizinga (
Homo Ludens
, 1955).