The Warden

THE WARDEN

ANTHONY TROLLOPE was born in London in 1815 and died in 1882. His father was a barrister who went bankrupt and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Happily established in a successful career in the Post Office (from which he retired in 1867), Trollope’s first novel was published in 1847. He went on to write over forty novels as well as short stories, and enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime. The idea for The Warden (1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was conceived while he wandered around Salisbury Cathedral one mid-summer evening. It was succeeded by other ‘Barsetshire’ novels employing the same characters including Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. These novels are Barchester Towers (1857), Doctor Thorne (1858), Framley Parsonage (1861), The Small House at Allington (1864) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). This series is regarded by many as Trollope’s masterpiece, in which he demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels – property. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising Can You Forgive Her? (1865), Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime Minister (1876) and The Duke’s Children (1880). The notable titles among his many other novels and books include He Knew He Was Right (1868–9), The Way We Live Now (1874–5), An Autobiography (1875–6) and Dr Wortle’s School (1881).

ROBIN GILMOUR was Reader in English at the University of Aberdeen. He was the author of The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981), The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction (1986) and The Victorian Age: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830–1890 (1993). He also edited Trollope’s Barchester Towers for Penguin Classics. He died in 1999.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

The Warden

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by ROBIN GILMOUR

BookishMall.com

BookishMall.com

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street. New York, New York 10014. USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd. 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd. 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017. India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196. South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL. England

www.penguin.com

First published 1855
Published in Penguin Books 1982
Reprinted in Penguin English Library 1984
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1986
Reprinted with a revised Further Reading and a new Chronology 2004
29

Introduction and Notes © Robin Gilmour, 1984, 2004
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–90810–6

Contents

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

FURTHER READING

CHRONOLOGY

THE WARDEN

NOTES

Introduction

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)

The Warden (1855), Trollope’s fourth novel and the first of the Barsetshire Chronicles, is in outline a simple tale: the story of an elderly clergyman, warden of an almshouse for old men, who resigns this Church sinecure when it becomes the centre of public controversy. Trollope’s account of the book’s origin in his Autobiography (1883) is almost as simple. He was working for the Post Office, and in 1851 had been sent to examine rural deliveries in the West of England:

In the course of this job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there on a mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral 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. (Chapter 5)

It is a famous passage, one that seems to breathe the air of clerical tranquillity which generations of readers have found in Barchester. Trollope goes on, however, to disclaim any previous knowledge of clerical and cathedral life:

I have often been asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a Close. I never lived in any cathedral city – except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon… was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness. (Chapter 5)

This statement is slightly misleading. No doubt Trollope did conceive Archdeacon Grantly and his other characters in his ‘moral consciousness’, but he forgot to mention that he had also lived for three years in a cathedral town: he had been a schoolboy at Winchester. At the end of his life he remembered more clearly, telling his friend E.