It was part of Trollope’s complex relationship to the gentlemanly code that he should have played down the element of inspiration and creative genius in his work, spoken of his gift as though it were on a par with any other trade a man might ply to earn money. His misfortune was to be taken at face value. The Samuel Smilesian note on which the Autobiography ends, with its careful balance-sheet of literary earnings, obscured the suffering outsider of the first chapter and was used to confirm the view of Trollope which had gained ground in his own lifetime: that he was a conventional writer, an unspectacular recorder of the everyday, in Carlyle’s harsh words ‘irredeemably imbedded in commonplace, and grown fat upon it’.3 Or as Henry James put it, more sympathetically: ‘His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.’4 Yet if we look at Trollope’s life and work from the perspective of the Autobiography’s opening pages, two quite unusual features are thrown into relief. One, which may at first seem obvious enough, is that the young ‘Pariah’ of Harrow and Winchester was an outsider, looking on at the world of his more secure contemporaries with, as he says, ‘an exceeding longing’. The hunger for social acceptance which can be sensed in Trollope’s life had an aesthetic corollary in his novelistic fascination with the rituals of the English middle-class and gentry life from which he had once been excluded. The English are said to have a genius for institutions, and in Trollope they have a novelist who is the supreme recorder of that genius. The Church, the Civil Service, Parliament, the Law, the rural gentry – Trollope was the first novelist to map the subtle interrelations of these various institutions in Victorian England. It has been, and still is, far too easy to underestimate the sheer knowledge of human nature in its social and institutional bearings which went to the creation of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels, and perhaps it took a writer with something of an outsider’s fascination to conceive them in the first place.

The other unusual feature in Trollope’s case may seem the very opposite of this: it is his feeling for, and invariably sympathetic portrayal of, the lonely individual, the character caught in a moment of isolation and introspection, like Mr Harding in the chapter ‘A Long Day in London’. Nearly all Trollope’s unhappy characters are portrayed with a wonderfully precise sympathy, even – or especially – the exiles and misfits, those who for whatever reason have stepped beyond the accepted boundaries of their caste or social group. One thinks of the Rev. Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate accused of stealing a cheque in The Last Chronicle of Barset, or the melancholy, obsessed Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right (1869), or the swindler Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1875), denounced as a scoundrel for much of the novel but, after his downfall, the object of Trollope’s increasingly compassionate scrutiny. In other words, one cannot read far in Trollope’s work without encountering what David Skilton has called ‘a central paradox’: ‘that of all novels they are the most “social”, in the sense of depending on the interaction of sets of persons, and of creating a supremely convincing illusion of a functioning fictional community; and yet that an examination of any of the novels will show how very significant a proportion of the book concerns the situation of a single character, alone…’5 Just as contemporaries found in Trollope the man a sensitive nature and feeling heart beneath the bluff, gregarious manner, so the reader of his novels soon becomes accustomed to moving from the comic outer action of the densely realized community to the inner action of the solitary individual.

The significance of The Warden in Trollope’s career is that it was the first of his novels to bring these twin impulses fully into play. Here one can see the beginning of his inquiry into the Church as an institution, and in Archdeacon Grantly the first stirrings of the comedy that lies in the contrast between the worldly man and the unworldly calling, both to be much more fully developed in Barchester Towers (1857). Also evident is Trollope’s preoccupation with the influence of London and metropolitan opinion on provincial life. But at the heart of the novel is a private drama of conscience and an act of resignation. The co-presence of these two perspectives, the interaction and indeed collision between them, gives The Warden a resonance out of proportion to its modest scale. For of course the relation between private and public life, and more particularly the threat to the individual posed by the growth of public opinion and the advent of a centralized modern democracy, are among the chief concerns of Victorian literature. When Mr Harding wonders how he can ever tell the truths of ‘his inmost heart’ (p. 60) to the readers of the Jupiter, Trollope is touching on an issue which animates works so different from The Warden as Arnold’s poem ‘The Buried Life’ or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, with its troubled vision of ‘private sorrow’s barren song’ drowned in the march of science and democracy (lyric xxi). Moreover, by dramatizing the issue in terms of an individual caught in the limelight of newspaper publicity Trollope was giving it an original and highly topical treatment. It is to this question of the novel’s topicality I want now to turn.

II

In his Autobiography Trollope tells how he had been struck by ‘two opposite evils’:

The first evil was the possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered to be the chief sinners in the matter. (Chapter 5)

Two of these scandals are mentioned in the second chapter of The Warden: St Cross Hospital in Winchester and ‘the struggles of Mr Whiston, at Rochester’ (p. 7). Of the two, the St Cross case is closer to the situation in the novel.

Like Hiram’s Hospital, St Cross was an almshouse for the elderly poor founded in the twelfth century by one Henry de Blois; its Master, or Warden, was Francis North (1773–1861), nephew of George III’s Prime Minister, who became Earl of Guilford in 1827. In the fine old pre-reform traditions of clerical nepotism, North had been appointed to the Mastership by his father, the Bishop of Winchester, in 1808, and he held it in plurality with the Rectory of Old Alresford and a rich parish in Southampton, which brought him a combined annual income of nearly £3,500. He drew another £1,000 a year from a prebendal stall in Winchester Cathedral, and some £2,000 to £3,000 a year from St Cross. Despite his wealth and pluralism, however, the Earl of Guilford seems to have been reasonably responsible in his management of the Hospital.