A. Freeman that ‘Barchester was Winchester, where he was at school, and the notion of Hiram’s Hospital was taken from Saint Cross’.1

Speculating about the original of Barchester is a harmless pastime, and in the end it does not greatly matter whether the most famous cathedral town in English fiction is Salisbury or Winchester or, as Trollope suggests at the start of The Warden, an amalgam of these and others. What is of interest to the reader of Trollope is the link that undoubtedly exists between his first successful novel and his unhappy childhood. The Warden is one of the shortest and most topical of his books, but it had a longer genesis than any other. A year after visiting Salisbury he wrote the first chapter, then laid it aside, resumed it at the end of 1852, and finished the work, according to the Autobiography, ‘in the autumn of 1853’ (Chapter 5). But Trollope was notoriously inaccurate about dates and figures (there is a spectacular error in the first chapter of The Warden) and it is much more likely that the writing extended well into 1854, for the manuscript was sent to Longman, who had earlier agreed to look at it, in October 1854. A novel so long in the making was inevitaoly fed from many sources: the visit to Salisbury in 1851, the clerical scandals of the day and, as we shall see, the role of The Times in attacking them, but also the sufferings of Trollope’s childhood. If the story of Mr Harding is the first truly characteristic manifestation of Trollope’s genius, it is so partly because it enabled him to express a vision of the world which had deep roots in his own life and experience.

I

Trollope was born in 1815, the fourth son of a moody and impecunious Chancery barrister and of Frances Trollope, who was subsequently to save the family from financial ruin by her late-blooming career as a travel-writer and popular novelist. His father had expectations of inheriting an uncle’s family estate, on the strength of which he committed himself beyond his means to embark on a disastrous career as a gentleman-farmer. When the childless uncle married again and started producing heirs, the Trollope family was set on an inexorable downward path into genteel poverty. The story of Anthony’s hapless involvement in his father’s decline is poignantly told in the first chapter of his Autobiography. An increasingly neglected, dirty and penniless child, he was sent first to nearby Harrow School as a day boy, then to a private school at Sunbury, then (with a half-hearted idea that he should go on to New College, Oxford) to Winchester, where, his bills unpaid and his pocket-money stopped, he became a ‘Pariah’: ‘I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But, ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything?’ Worse was to come. With his mother in America trying to recoup the family fortunes, and his father sunk in gloom in a tumbledown farmhouse compiling – of all things – an ecclesiastical encyclopaedia, Trollope was sent back to Harrow as a day boy, forced to walk twelve miles a day on dirty lanes to and from the school. It was, he says, the worst period of his life:

I was a sizar [poor student] at a fashionable school, a condition never premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer’s boy, reeking from a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers – or much worse still, next to the sons of big tradesmen who had made their ten thousand a-year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me – those of masters as well as boys… I was never able to overcome… the absolute isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground or racket-court I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a coveting which was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my schooldays has clung to me all through life.

Writers, perhaps more than other people, are prone to exaggerate the sufferings of their childhood; that Trollope did not do so is evident from the testimony of Sir William Gregory, husband of Lady Gregory of Coole Park, who was a contemporary at Harrow and later a friend, and who wrote of Trollope in his autobiography that he was ‘without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met… He gave no sign of promise whatsoever, was always in the lowest part of the form, and was regarded by masters and by boys as an incorrigible dunce.’2

Ever since Edmund Wilson’s essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow (1941), critics have made much of Dickens’s passionate resentment of the months he spent in the blacking-factory as a child. One sometimes wonders, though, whether Trollope did not suffer more in absolute terms from his prolonged experience of lost caste, but since he wrote no Bildungsroman like David Copperfield or Great Expectations the influence of the experience can be sensed only indirectly in his fiction, as for example in the remarkable description of the sufferings of ‘poor gentry’ in Chapter 9 of The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). Certainly he responded to it very differently. If the blacking-factory and the debtors’ prison made Dickens a rebel and a social reformer, the humiliations of Harrow and Winchester made Trollope, in part of himself, a passionate conformist, hungry for social acceptance. The man who could write of his ‘exceeding longing’ to join in cricket and rackets, of the ‘Elysium’ of being able to make friends with his contemporaries on a basis of equality, was no disdainful aesthete, and the story of his life is – from one point of view – the story of someone who had lost caste in his youth making his way slowly back into the Elysium of gentlemen. Nothing illustrates this ambition better than the efforts that this ‘incorrigible dunce’ made to teach himself Latin in adult life, thereby redeeming the schoolboy’s failure to acquire the classical learning that was the hallmark of the gentleman. (There is something of the same impulse at work in the touchingly modest claim at the end of the Autobiography not ‘to any literary excellence’ but ‘to whatever merit should be accorded to me for persevering diligence in my profession’ in writing forty-seven novels.) Hence the gregarious, fox-hunting figure who emerges from contemporary recollections of Trollope: the conscientious civil servant and part-time author, frequenter of clubs and rider to hounds, with his high colour, loud laugh, boisterous spirits and gesticulating manner – almost as if he were trying to live up to his idea of the hearty English squire. Hence, too, the no-nonsense portrait of the artist in the Autobiography, where aspiring writers are advised to stick to their desks ‘as though they were lawyer’s clerks’ and the legendary Trollope routine was posthumously revealed: at the desk by 5.30 a.m., three hours writing at 250 words every quarter of an hour by the clock, ten pages a day – a rate, he reckoned, which would have enabled him to complete three three-volume novels a year, if the market could have stood it – then off to the Post Office for a day’s work.

‘One hates an author that’s all author,’ the aristocratic Byron wrote in Beppo, preferring those writers ‘Who think of something else besides the pen’.