122). The archdeacon has his Rabelais in a ‘secret drawer’ (p. 69), Towers his Pre-Raphaelite painting. In contrast to Mr Harding’s Elysium, which is easily entered through the ‘slight iron screen’, these rooms are well-defended snuggeries, confidently excluding the outside world. The lofty isolation implied in Towers’s name is reinforced by the fact that the painting in his room is of a nun (clearly based on Charles Collins’s Convent Thoughts: see Chapter 14, note 20), suggesting that the editor of the Jupiter is himself something of a hedonistic monk, insulated from the complexity of the human world. It is significant that he never visits Barchester to inspect the abuse he so easily denounces.

Grantly and Towers also balance each other in being pillars of what the novel presents as the old established and new secular religions. The heavily ironic portrayal of the newspaper editor as a pagan deity may seem rather overdone to a modern reader, but it reflects Trollope’s fear (in which he was not alone) of the unprecedented nature of the authority which The Times enjoyed in the early-Victorian period. ‘No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed,’ Emerson wrote in English Traits (1856). ‘What you read in the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society.’ Trollope put the daily circulation of The Times at 40,000 (p. 60), but even that figure does not reveal the extent to which it dominated the newspaper market. In 1854 its daily sale was recorded as 51,200, in comparison with 2,800 for the Morning Chronicle and 3,712 for the Herald: there was almost no competition, or as Trollope put it elsewhere, ‘The Times with us is the Press.’11 This situation gave a dangerous amount of power to a single individual because of the rise of public opinion as a political force and the novelty, as John Stuart Mill saw it in On Liberty (1859), of the fact that ‘the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers.’12 In these conditions the powerful newspaper editor became a god, hidden, unaccountable, and therefore to Trollope pernicious.

The conservative cleric, the reformer, and the newspaper editor all speak and think in the abstract public language of rights and principles, which cannot begin to deal with the complex individual case of Mr Harding. His language, on the other hand, is wordless and intuitive, the language of his beloved cello, which is soon silenced by his troubles and turns into the soundless mime which is ‘his constant consolation in conversational troubles’ (p. 39). Literature, which should be able to link the public and the private languages, is shown in the case of Dr Pessimist Anticant (Carlyle) and Mr Popular Sentiment (Dickens) to be merely a melodramatic form of journalism. Like the reformers and the conservatives, these writers can take only a single-minded and one-dimensional view of the issue. The majority of Trollope’s critics have found these parodies a mistake and a blemish. My own view is that the parody of Carlyle, at least, scores some palpable hits at the expense of a writer who by the time of Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) had shot his bolt and was starting to parody himself. But this, as Ruth apRoberts wisely remarks, is not the point: ‘Whether these parodies succeed or not – whether they are good as parodies and whether they are decorous – they are altogether functional. Trollope is defining, by negatives, what he himself would do.’13 By deploring in his own trade the moral simplifications he attacks in Bold and the Jupiter, Trollope was writing an incidental manifesto for the kind of sympathetic, quiet-voiced realism which from The Warden onwards was to be the mark of his own work.

IV

The Warden, Henry James said, ‘is simply the history of an old man’s conscience’.14 What gives that history dramatic shape is Mr Harding’s decision to go to London and see Sir Abraham Haphazard. The chapters describing his visit are the climax of the novel, and they enact a subtle reversal of its initial premise. From the London road in Chapter 1 Mr Harding’s ‘Elysium’ looks and is a vulnerable paradise, and virtue seems to lie in retreat from the public world. But the moment he decides to take the London road he regains, not a lost paradise, but something better, control of his public destiny. Indeed, his decision to resign means that paradise is lost, and before he leaves ‘the warden returned to his garden to make his last adieus to every tree, and shrub, and shady nook that he knew so well’ (p. 116). Mr Harding’s trip to London can be seen as Trollope’s ironic variation on the convention that brings the young heroes of Victorian fiction, the David Copperfields and Pips, to the metropolis to learn the ways of the world, for unlike them the warden is too old and too innocent to learn. There is a gentle comedy in his failure to read the signs of an unsavoury night-life in the London supper-house (p. 147), and in the contrast between his domesticated ways and the seedy cigar divan. Even his resort to Westminster Abbey and his disappointment with it reveal how deeply he belongs to the rural ways of Barchester.

Yet Mr Harding does succeed in confronting the public world in shape of Sir Abraham Haphazard and impressing the lawyer with the intensity of his own view of the case. When he at last finds words to articulate his decision to resign, the release of inner feeling finds expression in a triumphant mime on the imaginary cello:

He was standing up, gallantly fronting Sir Abraham, and his right arm passed with bold and rapid sweeps before him, as though he were embracing some huge instrument, which allowed him to stand thus erect; and with the fingers of his left hand he stopped, with preternatural velocity, a multitude of strings, which ranged from the top of his collar to the bottom of the lappet of his coat.