Barchester Towers Read online

  ‘Beautiful woman,’ at last he burst forth; ‘beautiful woman, you cannot pretend to be ignorant that I adore you. Yes, Eleanor, yes, I love you. I love you with the truest affection which man can bear to woman. Next to my hopes of heaven are my hopes of possessing you. How sweet to walk to heaven with you by my side, with you for my guide, mutual guides. Say, Eleanor, dearest Eleanor, shall we walk that sweet path together?’

  ‘Ah! Eleanor,’ he continued, and it seemed to be his idea that as he had once found courage to pronounce her Christian name, he could not utter it often enough. ‘Ah! Eleanor, will it not be sweet, with the Lord’s assistance, to travel hand in hand through this mortal valley which his mercies will make pleasant to us, till hereafter we shall dwell together at the foot of his throne?’ And then a more tenderly pious glance than ever beamed from the lover’s eyes. ‘Ah! Eleanor–’

  ‘My name, Mr Slope, is Mrs Bold,’ said Eleanor…‘Sweetest angel, be not so cold,’ said he, and as he said it the champagne broke forth, and he contrived to pass his arm round her waist.

  The first thought of anyone introducing a book such as Barchester Towers is to envy the reader. The person so introduced is, one presumes, coming to this great novel for the first time. What a pleasure awaits! But I have a second thought. Before writing these words, I read the novel once again – it occupied me for a long aeroplane trip across the United States and many odd hours in a hotel room on the West Coast. It could have been for the fifth or sixth time. So far from envying the Trollope novice, I found myself feeling blessed. I was enjoying it even more than on earlier encounters. So, dear reader, as Trollope himself says a shade too often, if you have been here before, welcome back. Barchester Towers, not alone among Trollope’s works, is meant to be read at, say, ten-year intervals over a whole adult lifetime.

  J.K.G.

  Acknowledgements

  I should like to thank Mr J. Baldwin of Glasgow University Library for making available a first edition of Barchester Towers, and John Hall and Paul Schlicke for their help in matters of background.

  R.G.

  Introduction

  (New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit.)

  When Trollope died in 1882, the Spectator critic R. H. Hutton took the occasion of a recent reissue of Jane Austen’s novels to reflect on the differences between the rural society she had described at the start of the century and the same society as it appeared fifty years later in Trollope’s novels:

  The former is, above all things, mild and unobtrusive, not reflecting the greater world at all…while the latter is, above all things, possessed with the sense of the aggressiveness of the outer world, of the hurry which threatens the tranquillity even of such still pools in the rapid currents of life as Hiram’s Hospital at Barchester, of the rush of commercial activity, of the competitiveness of fashion, of the conflict for existence even in outlying farms and country parsonages. Miss Austen’s clergy are gentlemen of such leisurely habits of mind, that even the most energetic of them suggests a spacious and sequestered life. Mr Trollope’s clergy are the centres of all sorts of crowding interests, of ecclesiastical conflicts, of attacks of the press, of temptations from the great London world…Everybody in Mr Trollope is more or less under pressure, swayed hither and thither by opposite attractions, assailed on this side and on that by the strategy of rivals; everywhere someone’s room is more wanted than his company; everywhere time is short.1

  Hutton was one of Trollope’s most astute contemporary critics and this is a characteristically perceptive observation, although it may strike a modem reader as a rather surprising one. The idea that ‘time is short’ in Trollope’s world is at odds with that nostalgia for a lost haven of peace and stability which has been one sure source of his appeal in the twentieth century. As V. S. Pritchett wrote in 1946, he has become ‘one of the great air raid shelters’ and Barsetshire ‘one of the great Never-Never Lands of our time. It has been the normal country to which we all aspire.’2 And yet Hutton was surely right, both to set Trollope in the tradition of the novel of manners stemming from Jane Austen, and to perceive that the rural gentry he writes about are under challenge in a way that hers are not.

  The challenge comes in part from the power of London and of metropolitan opinion, brought suddenly closer by the technological and social innovations of the first half of the nineteenth century. The electric telegraph, the railway, the increased power of the press – these make their mark in the very first Chapter of Barchester Towers. As Hutton went on to say, ‘the society which in Miss Austen’s tales seems to be wholly local, though it may have a few fine connections with the local capital, is in Mr Trollope’s a great web of which London is the centre, and some kind of London life for the most part the motive-power’ (p. 511 ). But the challenge is deeper than this; it comes from the spirit of reform which had been sweeping across all areas of English life since the 1820s, and had begun to threaten the institution which more than any other held the whole network of gentry society together: the Church of England. Barchester Towers is not set in a Never-Never Land; on the contrary, it captures unforgettably a particular phase, a significant turning-point in the history of a great national institution, and treats it with a combination of humour, sympathy, irony and nostalgia which has made this local subject into a universal comic drama of change.

  I

  The situation of the provincial Anglican clergy in the middle of the nineteenth century was a splendid and original subject, as Trollope must have realized when he first broached it in The Warden (1855). Before this he had tried his hand at two novels of Irish life. The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848), and a third work, La Vendée (1850), in what was for him the uncongenial genre of historical romance. The Irish books have a decided interest, but in none of these three early novels does one feel that Trollope had found his true métier. It was only when he returned to England from Ireland in 1851. and started to survey the south-western counties for the Post Office, that the idea of Barsetshire came to him, as he records in his Autobiography: ‘In the course of this job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there on a mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of The Warden – from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon, was the central site’ (Chapter 5). In The Warden Trollope found not only a highly topical subject – the use, or abuse, of charitable funds by clergymen for whom they were not originally intended – but an approach to it that was uniquely his own. He had been struck, he says in the Autobiography, by ‘two opposite evils’:

  The first…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…The second…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)

  The originality of Trollope’s treatment lay in taking neither the reforming nor the conservative view of the abuse, but in concentrating on the reactions of the man who benefits from it. Suppose the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital to be a good man who has never considered the justice or injustice of his preferment, and suppose him to be confronted by the activities of a local reformer and the accusations of the powerful Jupiter newspaper, how would he behave? The answer is the story of Mr Harding and his struggle to do right in a situation which he has just learned to see may possibly be wrong. It is little more than ‘the history of an old man’s conscience’, as Henry James called it,3 and yet the resulting novel is the first truly characteristic expression of Trollope’s genius.

  In The Warden the challenge to the quiet ways of the provincial clergy comes from without, from the London office of the Jupiter and what Trollope saw as the tyrannical powe
r of the modern newspaper. In Barchester Towers, which he wrote from 1855 to 1856 and published in 1857, the challenge comes from within the Church as well. Here again he had struck an original seam. There had of course been many religious novels before this, novels dealing with the problems of doubt, like James Anthony Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith (1849), and novels attacking or defending this or that party within the Church. His novelist mother, Fanny Trollope, had written one of the most partisan of these in her anti-Evangelical The Vicar of Wrexhill (1837). But Trollope was the first novelist to perceive the great comic subject that lay in the predicament of the Church of England, considered as an institution, at this point in its history. The ‘subject is so fresh’, the reviewer in The Times remarked, ‘and the representation so vivid, that the contracted limits of the story are forgotten, and we are left to wonder that more has not long ago been made of such promising materials.’4

  As in The Warden the issue is reform, although it is treated in a less intense and specific way. The background to Barchester Towers, largely implicit in Trollope’s handling of the battle between the Grantly and Proudie factions, is the troubled state of the Established Church in a period of rapid and what now seems to us inevitable reform. Since Parliament could legislate on ecclesiastical matters, each reforming measure which gave more power and recognition to non-Anglican groups, such as the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the 1832 Reform Act, seemed to conservative High Churchmen to threaten the Anglican character of the state and, beyond that, the very independence of the Church itself. By what right (the Archdeacon Grantlys of the time asked) could an increasingly non-Anglican Parliament, composed of English and Irish Catholics, as well as Dissenters and atheistic radicals, presume to legislate for the Established Church in England and Ireland? This, the prospect of ‘National Apostasy’ on which John Keble preached his famous Oxford sermon in 1833, when he attacked the government’s plan to suppress ten Irish bishoprics, was the real origin of the Oxford Movement, and it inspired that search for ultimate spiritual authority which, pursued through the study of the early Church Fathers and debated in the Tracts for the Times (hence the name Tractarian), was to lead Newman and many of his followers into the Church of Rome. At the same time the spirit of reform was at work within the Church, in the various enactments of the Ecclesiastical Commission set up by Sir Robert Peel in 1835 (see Volume I, Chapter 1, note 10), and in the willingness of liberal Churchmen to cooperate with the spirit of the age. Threatened from without and divided within, the mid-century Church of England might well seem to an embattled High Churchman like Dr Grantly to be at war with itself and the world.

  High Church Barchester has learned to live, however reluctantly, with this era of ecclesiastical reform. What precipitates the crisis in the novel is the arrival of a Low Church bishop with his Evangelical wife and chaplain. In this Trollope was being highly topical. Although there are some features of the outgoing ministry in Chapter 1 which suggest Lord Derby’s short-lived Tory administration of February to December 1852, it seems clear that the new Whig ministry in the novel was suggested by that of Lord Palmerston, which came to power in February 1855. Palmerston was not a devout man himself, but his son-in-law was Lord Shaftesbury, head of the Evangelical party in the country, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was John Bird Sumner, a man of Evangelical sympathies. The evangelicals were never triumphant,’ Professor Owen Chadwick observes in his study of the Victorian Church, ‘But there was an epoch when they were powerful; the epoch after 1855.’5Barchester Towers belongs to the start of this epoch. The almost ten years of Palmerston’s rule saw an exceptionally high number of bishoprics and deaneries fall vacant – in all he had the nomination of nineteen English and Irish sees, and thirteen English deaneries – and most of them, at the suggestion of Lord Shaftesbury, went to Low Church and Evangelical clergymen. Dr Proudie is a man whose political hour has come.

  The historical irony in this situation is that the Evangelicals achieved ecclesiastical power when the period of their greatest spiritual vigour had already passed. It was in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when ‘serious’ religion shaped individuals of the calibre of Gladstone, Macaulay, Newman and George Eliot, that Evangelicalism had achieved its great spiritual and social triumphs, such as the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. By the middle of the century they were numerically powerful – one contemporary writer reckoned that of the 18,000 clergy in the Church of England, roughly 3,300 could be called Evangelical, against 1,000 Tractarians6 – but the spiritual initiative had long since passed to the Oxford Movement. The Palmerston bishops were distinguished neither for great learning nor great piety, and Trollope’s portrait of the Proudies would seem to bear out the truth of Professor Chadwick’s conclusion that ‘those ten years of Palmerston continued to raise the authority and lower the prestige of the evangelical party’ (p. 469).

  Although Trollope is more interested in the political than the theological aspect of his subject (as one would expect of a novelist who was later to write the Palliser sequence), the party labels do involve theological positions which would have been familiar to contemporary readers, so some brief outline of the issues at stake may be helpful here. Bishop Proudie and his wife are both ‘Low Church’, but there is a distinction to be made between them. The bishop is Low Church in the older Whig and latitudinarian sense of being broadminded or ‘liberal’ on doctrinal matters, his wife in the newer and sterner Evangelical sense. He is portrayed as an opportunist without clear ecclesiastical principles who has proved politically serviceable for that reason: ‘He bore with the idolatry of Rome, tolerated even the infidelity of Socinianism, and was hand in glove with the Presbyterian Synods of Scotland and Ulster’ (p. 17). She holds to the Evangelical doctrines of the supreme authority of Scripture (reinforced by her wagging forefinger) and the importance of Sunday, or ‘Sabbath’, observance – another topical issue because of Evangelical-led campaigns in 1855 and 1856 to limit Sunday trading and stop military bands in the London parks. Her approval of Mr Slope’s cathedral sermon reveals other Evangelical attitudes: the importance attached to private judgement in religious matters and the corresponding distrust of church music and decoration, those ‘outward ceremonies’ which, Mr Slope tells the congregation, ‘had become all but barbarous at a time when inward conviction was everything’ (p. 45). Conversely, it is through their attachment to these same ‘outward ceremonies’ that the clergy of Barchester reveal their High Church sympathies, for the central doctrine of the High Church party was a belief in the corporate authority of the Church and the redemptive power of the sacraments, in contrast to the individualizing emphasis of Evangelicalism on private judgement, personal conversion and justification by faith. This party has its different shades also. When Trollope writes that ‘the clergymen of the diocese of Barchester are all of the high and dry church’ (p. 44), he means that they are the heirs of the old easy-going, gentlemanly, unenthusiastic, undogmatic Anglicanism of the eighteenth century, which still survives in the unregenerate figure of Dr Vesey Stanhope. Archdeacon Grantly has one foot in the ‘high and dry’ camp, but his vigorous defence of Church privilege and his awareness of the ecclesiastical battles being fought in Oxford and London make him a recognizably contemporary figure, as is the Rev. Francis Arabin: the account of his spiritual struggles after Newman’s departure for Rome (Book II, Chapter 1) is a representative Tractarian case-history.

  II

  The modern reader encountering the intensity with which these Victorian religious conflicts were fought must often feel like asking the question Mrs Grantly puts to her husband: ‘“My dear archdeacon…what is the use of always fighting?“’ (p. 450). Barchester Towers has two different answers to offer. One is the quietism of Mr Harding, declining the deanship: ‘“I may wish that I had your spirit and energy and power of combating; but I have not Every day that is added to my life increases my wish for peace and rest.”’ To which the archdeacon makes the immortal reply: ‘“And where on earth can a ma
n have peace and rest if not in a deanery?”’ (p. 456). The other is Mr Arabin’s defence of party conflict to Eleanor:

  ‘I never saw anything like you clergymen,’ said Eleanor; ‘you are always thinking of fighting each other.’

  ‘Either that,’ said he, ‘or else supporting each other. The pity is that we cannot do the one without the other. But are we not here to fight? Is not ours a church militant? What is all our work but fighting, and hard fighting, if it be well done?’ (p. 183)

  If the deeper current of the novel runs with Mr Harding’s ‘wish for peace and rest’, then its comedy exploits the possibilities inherent in the idea of clergymen ‘fighting.’ When Mr Arabin asks, ‘“But are we not here to fight?”’, he is voicing one of the main imperatives of Victorian culture, and Trollope, by staging the fight in a cathedral town, is throwing into a comic light one of that culture’s central metaphors: the battle, in particular the civil war. Thus Thomas Hughes could write in 1891 of Dr Arnold’s influence on his generation at Rugby School: ‘I think this was our most marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were training for a big fight – were in fact already engaged in it – a fight that would last all our lives…’7 One thinks of Dr Arnold’s son Matthew, and the ‘ignorant armies’ clashing by night at the end of ‘Dover Beach’; or of the ‘last, dim, weird battle of the west’ in Tennyson’s Passing of Arthur; or of Browning’s ‘Prospice’: ‘I was ever a fighter, so – one fight more,/The best and the last!’ And then one turns to Chapter 6 of Trollope’s novel (‘War’) and finds that ‘internecine war’ has broken out because of a sermon preached in an English cathedral. The issues at stake may be serious, but the comic inflation prevents us taking them seriously. When the ‘wars of Arabin and Slope’ are compared mock-heroically to the ‘angers of Agamemnon and Achilles’, the inevitable effect is to make them seem like the battle of the frogs and the mice (pp. 116–17).