As the same leader said, ‘no system can be really effective which has not the power of continual adjustment, according to the change of circumstances’. This, I would suggest, is the essential context in which The Warden should be read. The particular clerical scandals which inspired Trollope’s initial conception are only aspects of a larger problem which is not mentioned in the novel, although it informs the presentation of character and setting at many points. The Warden paints its picture of the charming ways of the provincial and country clergy in the shadow of the knowledge that these ways are ceasing to be relevant to the needs of Victorian England. It is this knowledge which gives the novel its slight air of elegy, of special pleading for a losing cause. Trollope could not defend clerical privilege, and Archdeacon Grantly is there as a comic reminder of the impossibility of doing so. But he could and did attack reformers, in John Bold, Tom Towers, and in the writings of Dr Pessimist Anticant and Mr Popular Sentiment. No doubt the anti-reformism of The Warden is partly a defence of privilege and the old ways by the back door, but there is more to it than that. Trollope’s originality lay in perceiving the moral imperialism of the reforming temper and its tendency to lose a sense of the complexities of the individual case – and therefore of the supreme value of individual integrity and conscience – in the simplifying pursuit of an abstract justice. It is a perception which clearly owed a good deal to his reflection upon these topical matters discussed in The Times.

III

The fate of the private life in an extrovert age of great public achievement, I have suggested, is one of the principal concerns of Victorian literature, and in few works of the period can the sense of the private life seem quite so embattled as it is in the early chapters of The Warden. Our first sight of Hiram’s Hospital in its idyllic situation on the riverbank is from the bridge on the London road – appropriately, for it is from London that copies of the Jupiter will come to threaten Mr Harding’s ‘retreat’ (p. 5), and it is to London that he will go in the second half of the novel to see Sir Abraham Haphazard. The ‘slight iron screen’ which separates the rest of the hospital from ‘the Elysium of Mr Harding’s dwelling’ (p. 5) is a deftly symbolic touch, suggesting at once the paradise within and its fragility, the slightness of the defence it will be able to put up against challenge from without. The developing symbolic resonance of the warden’s garden hardly needs stressing, as we see it first from the London road, then through John Bold’s eyes at the start of Chapter 3, then metaphorically in Mr Harding’s thoughts as he envisages the disruption of his peace in terms of the destruction of his retreat:

It was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied by rough hands; that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield; that the unobtrusive corner of the world which had been allotted to him, as though by Providence, should be invaded and desecrated, and all within it made miserable and unsound, (p. 45)

– a fear that is actualized at the end of the novel when we learn that ‘The warden’s garden is a wretched wilderness, the drive and paths are covered with weeds, the flowerbeds are bare, and the unshorn lawn is now a mass of long damp grass and unwholesome moss’ (p. 183). The ruined garden is charged with a sense of irreparable loss, although we should not for that reason assume that Mr Harding’s story is entirely one of loss. It is in fact a moral victory, although not an easy or a painless one.

Mr Harding stands out from the other characters in the novel by virtue of his refusal to behave as if there were a divorce between his public role and his private life. The best defence of his sinecure is not that he is entitled to it by law – which he may or may not be – but that he performs the duties of warden well and from the heart, providing the old men in his care with something that no salary can buy, ‘that treasure so inestimable in declining years, a true and kind friend to listen to their sorrows, watch over their sickness, and administer comfort as regards this world, and the world to cornel’ (p. 28). For Archdeacon Grantly and Tom Towers this is inadmissible evidence. The Jupiter can only see the matter remotely and statistically – ‘Does he ever ask himself, when he stretches wide his clerical palm to receive the pay of some dozen of the working clergy, for what service he is so remunerated?’ (p. 59) – the archdeacon only in terms of the institution. He can provide the best legal advice money can buy, but he can ‘give no comfort to Mr Harding’s doubts’, who ‘was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so’ (p. 24) – a distinction which in its quiet firmness encapsulates the inner drama of the novel. And as his name suggests, the reformer John Bold is merely naïve and blundering in imagining that he can hope to maintain a distinction between the individual and the office, when dealing with a man like Mr Harding.

Trollope skilfully avoids adjudicating between conservatives and reformers by shifting the terms of the debate and in effect putting them both in the same camp. ‘The ostensible issues matter very little,’ James Kincaid observes, ‘… because the morality advocated is aesthetic and intuitive rather than argumentative and rationalistic.’10 The reader is invited to see the similarities between Archdeacon Grantly and Tom Towers in the descriptions of their respective rooms at Plumstead and in the Temple, where the hoarding of luxury and comfort reveals a hidden hedonism in both men. ‘Every appliance that could make study pleasant and give ease to the over-toiled brain was there’ (p. 104) at Plumstead, while a parallel sentence describes Towers’s room: ‘Every addition that science and art have lately made to the luxuries of modern life was to be found there’ (p.