Despite appearances, The Warden is all about ‘noncompromises’ and ‘nonresolutions’. ‘The middle ground is a mirage, a matter of style that is developed to fill the gaps, the wardens’ seats.’ This argument expands into a consideration of the Barsetshire novels as a series with its own gaps, its own problematic hiatuses.

Overton, Bill, The Unofficial Trollope (Sussex, 1982). Overton provides an unusually full account of possible real-life models for the controversy described in The Warden. (He cites successively ‘the Whiston matter’ in Rochester, the scandal of St Cross in Winchester, the reform of Dulwich College, the mismanagement of a Charterhouse hospital – also covered by Dickens’s Household Words – Sidney Goldolphin Osborne’s letters on Irish relief, the work-in-process of the Ecclesiastical Commission and the Census of 1851.) Overton also emphasizes the unusual literariness of The Warden among Trollope’s novels, while arguing for the book’s largely covert ambition.

Pickering, Samuel, ‘Trollope’s Poetics and Authorial Intrusion in The Warden and Barchester Towers’, Journal of Narrative Technique 3 (1973), pp. 131–40. Pickering argues that Trollope’s poetics has its roots in Anglican latitudinarianism, particularly the tradition of sermonizing while telling a fictional tale established by Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts of the 1790s. The authorial intrusions of The Warden illustrate how to combine a sermon and an invented narrative – the synthesis that More’s Tracts helped to establish.

Sadleir, Michael, Trollope: A Commentary (New York, 1947). This is a basic work for readers of Trollope. With respect to The Warden, Sadleir provides the original publishing report from Longmans, by J. Cauvin (of which he provides a percipient analysis); he also quotes at length E. A. Freeman’s 1882 account of a conversation with Trollope about the models for Barchester and Hiram’s Hospital.

Saldívar, Ramón, ‘Trollope’s The Warden and the Fiction of Realism’, Studies in the Novel 3 (1981), pp. 166–83. Saldívar responds to Henry James’s contention that Trollope was a naive realist, mirroring in his novels what he saw around him. On the contrary, Trollope is said to emphasize rhetorical over referential aspects of narrative.

Smalley, Donald, Trollope: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1969). Smalley reprints five contemporary notices of The Warden, all anonymous. (The Atheneum notice is now known to be by Geraldine Jewsbury.) E. S. Dallas’s unsigned notice in The Times of Barchester Towers is also reprinted by Smalley. Dallas criticizes The Warden for its satire of The Times; indeed, somewhat bizarrely, he compares Trollope to G. W. M. Reynolds, author of The Mysteries of London and other lurid serials.

Stevenson, Lionel, ‘Dickens and the Origin of The Warden’, The Trollopian 2 (September 1947), pp. 83–9. Stevenson links Trollope’s satire on Dickens in The Warden to an essay in Household Words (probably by Henry Morley, rather than by Dickens himself).

Sutherland, John, ‘Trollope, The Times, and The Warden’ in Barbar Garlick and Margaret Harris, eds., Victorian Journalism: Exotic and Domestic (Queensland, Australia, 1998), pp. 62–74. This is a suggestive essay on the genesis of The Warden, quarrelling with Trollope’s own comments in his Autobiography (said to offer the civil servant’s ‘classic Whitehall sidestep’) and following through on the implications of his alternate account, given to T. H. S. Escott, which emphasizes the shaping influence of a reform campaign in The Times.

—, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London, 1976).