In this way, a character like Harding can embody a Trollopian poetics that somehow includes nostalgia, worldliness and hope. Bowen frames her case as at once a deepening and refutation of James’s comment that Trollope’s imagination had no light of its own.

Glendinning, Victoria, Trollope (London, 1992). Glendinning’s readable biography offers an excellent introduction to the novelist’s life.

Goldberg, M. A., ‘Trollope’s The Warden: A Comment on the “Age of Equipoise” ’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (March 1963), pp. 381–90. Goldberg describes Trollope’s use of satiric techniques derived from eighteenth-century mock-epic poems, like Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock’; he then argues that the novelist’s attacks are softened by his desire for ‘quietude and decorum’. This is a noteworthy early effort to come to terms with the stylistic and ideological evasiveness of The Warden.

Hawkins, Sherman, ‘Mr. Harding’s Church Music’, ELH 29 (June 1962). Hawkins argues that The Warden’s subject is the ‘Church, and the paradoxes and problems which arise when an impulse of the spirit must be translated into a corporation with a bank account.’ Moreover, ‘the antithesis of Bold and Grantly is resolved in the warden’ himself; this synthesis is achieved largely through ‘the pervasive imagery of music.’ Since The Warden does include much literal music, Hawkins’s argument seems grounded in the realistic as well as symbolic texture of the novel.

Hennedy, Hugh, Unity in Barsetshire (The Hague, 1971). Chapter 2 maintains that The Warden is a novel of vocation, ‘a prose “Lycidas” ’. Hennedy is serious about this somewhat startling claim; he notes Trollope’s fondness for Milton’s pastoral elegy, traces the novel’s interest in sheep and pastors, and emphasizes a pervasive concern with living up to one’s calling. (He sees the theme of vocation as a key to Chapter 15, the satiric flight that so offended Henry James.)

James, Henry, ‘Anthony Trollope’, first published in Century Magazine (1883); republished in Partial Portraits (1888) and in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (Library of America, 1984), pp. 1330–54. This account of Trollope’s career includes several deeply appreciative pages on The Warden, which James describes as ‘the history of an old man’s conscience’. There is particular praise for the contrasting portraits of Harding and Archbishop Grantly. However, James decries the evocation of Carlyle and Dickens in Chapter 15; it reminds us that Trollope had ‘no gift’ for ‘certain forms of satire’.

Kincaid, James, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford, 1977). In Kincaid’s view, far from being a novel of compromise, The Warden seeks to establish ‘a positive and enduring moral centre… by running the reforming rascals out of town.’

Kucich, John, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, New York, 1994). This is a book about ‘Victorian England’s fascination with lying’ and how this fascination illuminates ‘attitudes towards social distinctions’. The first chapter, on Trollope, makes a few suggestive comments about Harding, whose humility is identified with a specifically middle-class form of honesty; Kucich’s general survey is not only suggestive for The Warden in particular but a good introduction to recent Trollope studies.

Lyons, Paul, ‘The Morality of Irony and Unreliable Narrative in Trollope’s The Warden and Barchester Towers’, South Atlantic Quarterly 54 (1989), pp. 41–54. Lyons explores ‘the possibility of an unreliable omniscient narrator, a combination that seems special to Trollope.’ He uses his analysis of novelistic point-of-view to demonstrate how Trollope’s ‘pleasantness’ can produce not only ‘the habit of mercy’ but also effects of terror (largely, it would seem, terror about one’s own base motives).

McDermott, Jim, ‘New Womanly Man: Feminized Heroism and the Politics of Compromise in The Warden’. Victorians Institute Journal 27 (1999), pp. 71–90. In the ‘strangely unique’ world of The Warden, Harding embodies a special kind of androgyny that allows him to transcend opposites, indeed, to ‘manufacture their disappearance’.

Maid, Barry, ‘Trollope, Idealists, Reality, and Play’, Victorians Institute Journal 12 (1984), pp. 9–21. Maid analyses the behaviour of The Warden’s disputants as a form of play, in the sense defined by Johann Huizinga (Homo Ludens, 1955).

Moody, Ellen, Trollope on the Net (London, 1999). Chapter 4, on Trollope’s thirteen ‘novels in one volume’, situates The Warden in a group of novellas that, Moody argues, aim at goals and effects quite different from those associated with the longer novels. Among the typical qualities of the shorter books are certain kinds of polemic, satire, romance and pathos. There is an illuminating analogy between The Warden, Trollope’s first novella, and An Old Man’s Love, his last; Moody makes a good argument for preferring the latter.

Murfin, Ross, ‘The Gap in Trollope’s Fiction: The Warden as Example’, Studies in the Novel 14 (Spring 1982), pp. 17–30.