Sir Abraham listened and looked in wonder, (p. 155)

The lawyer is silenced, as well he might be by such a spectacle. But Mr Harding has vindicated himself, and with his vindication comes a moment of what in another novelist we would call epiphany:

Mr Harding was sufficiently satisfied with the interview to feel a glow of comfort as he descended into the small old square of Lincoln’s Inn. It was a calm, bright, beautiful night, and by the light of the moon, even the chapel of Lincoln’s Inn, and the sombre row of chambers, which surround the quadrangle, looked well. (p. 155)

This intimation of cathedral sublimities in the heart of legal London signifies the healing of Mr Harding’s spirit, the restoration of harmony between private being and public role. And so it is that he can leave the lost paradise, not looking back over his shoulder, but purposefully, with a spring in his step: ‘There was a tear in Eleanor’s eye as she passed through the big gateway and over the bridge; but Mr Harding walked with an elastic step, and entered his new abode with a pleasant face’ (p. 181).

R.G.

A Note on the Text

The Warden was first published by Longman in 1855. The manuscript has not survived and, with the exception of the reprint of the novel in the eight-volume ‘Chronicles of Barsetshire’ edition published by Chapman and Hall in 1878, there is no evidence that Trollope took an interest in the text of any edition of the novel after the first. The alterations and additions in the 1878 text are very slight, however, made perhaps while Trollope was reading proofs of this edition and, since they leave errors un-corrected and incorporate no new material of substance, cannot be considered to constitute a proper revision of the novel. The copy-text for this Penguin English Library edition has therefore been taken from the first edition.

The most notable of the changes made in the 1878 text is the increase in the Jupiter’s circulation from forty and fifty thousand in the first edition to eighty thousand, with a corresponding increase in readership (p. 60) to four hundred thousand. Four footnotes were added to Chapter 16, as follows: on p. 140 after ‘effect’ at the end of the second paragraph, ‘How these pleasant things have been altered since this was written a quarter of a century ago!’; also on p. 140 after ‘a drug in the market’ at the end of the third paragraph, ‘Again what a change!’; on p. 143 after ‘went in as a sightseer’ at the top of the page, ‘Again what a change!’; and after ‘time was not unnecessarily lost in the chanting’ on p. 144, ‘Again the changes which years have made should be noted.’ The following two sentences were added to the end of the first paragraph of Chapter 16, p. 138:

It was mean all this, and he knew that it was mean; but, for the life of him, he could not help it. Had he met the archdeacon he certainly would have lacked the courage to explain the purpose which was carrying him up to London – to explain it in full.

Of minor changes, the most noteworthy comes at the end of Mr Harding’s letter to the bishop in Chapter 19, when ‘Yours most sincerely’ (p. 167) was altered to ‘Yours most affectionately’.

On the other hand, Trollope did not take the opportunity of this edition to correct the arithmetical error in the first chapter (see note 7), or to change ‘Lord Guildford’ to ‘Lord Guilford’, or to regularize the name of the lawyers ‘Cox and Cummins’, who become ‘Cox and Cumming’ halfway through the novel. I have let the first two errors stand, since to change them seems an unwarranted alteration of what Trollope actually wrote, but ‘Cumming’ is such a likely printer’s error for the original ‘Cummins’ that it has been changed to ‘Cummins’ throughout, thus removing an inconsistency in the text which has survived through every reprint.

In preparing the text for this edition, I have corrected obvious minor errors, regularized capitalization and italicized titles like the Jupiter and Harding’s Church Music. In keeping with Penguin house-style, the point has been omitted after Mr, Mrs, Dr and St, and ‘some one’ and ‘any one’ have been closed up as single words, except where the sense requires their separation. Errors in punctuation have been corrected, and redundant commas removed in a limited number of cases. Trollope’s practice of using a comma with the dash, which is consistent in his later novels, is inconsistent in The Warden, and in regularizing punctuation I have opted for the modern form and removed the comma.

Further Reading

apRoberts, Ruth, ‘Trollope’s Casuistry’, Novel 3 (1969), pp. 17–27. As illustrated especially by The Warden, Trollope’s novels are case studies; his cases ‘constitute… the significant form of his novels.’ This claim is elaborated in Roberts’s subsequent book, The Moral Trollope (Athens, Ohio, 1971).

Bowen, Elizabeth, ‘Anthony Trollope – A New Judgment’, BBC broadcast of 1945 reprinted in Collected Impressions (New York, 1950), pp. 233–45. Bowen’s imaginary interview with Trollope is a fascinating document of what she calls elsewhere ‘the Trollope “revival” in Britain, in 1940’ (preface to Dr Thorne, 1959). Bowen has her Trollope say, ‘My Warden, for instance – old Mr. Harding, in the novel, was a personification of my own muddled wish to do right at any cost.’ More generally, Trollope’s realism is seen as a thwarted or sublimated pursuit of ideals.