Mr Arabin’s discovery about himself points to what is most individual in Trollope’s vision. In an age of reform, the first two Barsetshire novels question the moral absolutism of the reforming temper; they speak up for the comic truth that accepting the human fallibility involved in our need for the ‘usual amount of comfort’ may save us from destructive illusions about ourselves and others. Topical as Barchester Towers is, this emphasis is at odds with the strenuous, angular morality of mid-Victorian culture. In The Mill on the Floss (1860) George Eliot speaks of ‘renunciation’ as ‘that sad patient loving strength which holds the clue of life’, with ‘the thorns…for ever pressing on its brow’ (Book VI, Chapter 14). That is the high Victorian note, but it is not Trollope’s. His is rather to be heard in Archdeacon Grantly’s outburst: ‘“And where on earth can a man have peace and rest if not in a deanery?”’ (p. 456). It is that unique blend of comedy, worldly wisdom and nostalgia for a less hurried past which constitutes the lasting charm of Barsetshire.
R.G.
A Note on the Text
The manuscript of Barchester Towers has not survived, and I have found no evidence that Trollope took an interest in the text of any edition after the first. The copy-text for this edition is therefore taken from the first edition in three volumes, published in 1857 by Longman. Subsequent reprints during Trollope’s lifetime were in single volume form.
In preparing the text, obvious errors have been corrected, capitalization regularized, and archaic spellings (trowsers’, ‘melodrame’, ‘travestie’) modernized. 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. The punctuation of the first edition is careless and has been corrected, and in a limited number of cases redundant commas have been removed. Trollope’s practice of using a comma with the dash, which is consistent in his later novels, is inconsistent in Barchester Towers, and in regularizing punctuation I have opted for the modern form and removed the comma.
Trollope’s correspondence about the novel with Longman, whose reader found certain passages in the manuscript ‘too warm’, is an interesting example of the prudish publishing standards of the 1850s, and can be found in Michael Sadleir’s Trollope: A Commentary (Constable, 1927), pp. 160–66.
A Note on the Church in ‘Barchester Towers’
Barsetshire is both an imaginary county in the south of England and a diocese, or administrative district, of the Church of England. The head of the diocese is the bishop, whose see (from Latin sedes, a seat) Barchester is, and where his throne (cathedra) stands in the cathedral. Since the Church of England is an established or state church, bishops are nominated by the Crown, which in effect means the government of the day, and are entitled – subject to a limitation as to number (see Volume I, Chapter 3, note 7) – to a seat in the House of Lords. The bishop in turn has power of patronage or preferment to appoint a clergyman to a cure (from cura, care) of souls in a parish, which is that clergyman’s living or benefice; he also has the power, in Barchester, to appoint a clergyman to be warden of the charitable home for old men, Hiram’s Hospital. Mr Slope is a ‘man without a cure’ (p. 45) because as the bishop’s chaplain, or private secretary, he is attached to no parish. The humblest of the parish clergy is the curate, who is the assistant to a parson and in Trollope’s day was often wretchedly paid. The parson has full charge of a parish and may be a vicar, traditionally the deputy of a clerical or lay proprietor and entitled to only a portion of the tithes, or a rector, enjoying full tithes and therefore wealthier and more prestigious. The archdeacon, who is nominated by the bishop, is a senior clergyman with a living of his own – in Dr Grantly’s case a wealthy rector with another living in his gift – who has jurisdiction over a part of the diocese, the archdeaconry, in which he is supposed to supervise the clergy and ecclesiastical property.
Next in power to the bishop is the dean, who is also a political nominee. As head of the cathedral chapter, resident in the close, the dean is responsible for the conduct of services in the cathedral and, with the chapter, for the maintenance of its fabric. This gives them considerable independence of the bishop, including the right (see Volume I, Chapter 7) to decide who shall and shall not preach in the cathedral. The Chapter is a semi-collegiate body of clergymen, most of them attached to the cathedral rather than to parishes, and originally devoted to ecclesiastical learning and to maintaining the standard of worship in the cathedral. It consists of canons and prebendaries; minor canons assist at the services but are not members of the chapter. A prebendary is a clergyman who enjoys a prebend, or stipend, historically attached to a particular stall or seat in the cathedral, in return for officiating at stated times, although these duties could be deputed to a vicar-choral; he could therefore be non-resident and combine his prebend with other livings, as does the notorious Dr Stanhope. The system was open to many abuses which were the subject of reforming legislation before the time Barchester Towers opens: the Pluralities Act of 1838 limited to two the number of livings a single clergyman could hold, and strengthened the bishop’s power to enforce residence; the Dean and Chapter Act of 1840 confiscated the revenue of all non-resident prebends and limited the number of resident canons in each cathedral. Life-interests were maintained, however, so Dr Stanhope is not an anachronism, although increasingly an anomaly in this age of ecclesiastical reform.
The contending clerical factions in the novel are fully explained in the Introduction and Notes to this edition.
Suggestions for Further Reading
BIOGRAPHY AND BACKGROUND
No fewer than four biographies of Trollope have appeared in recent years, by R. H. Super (1988), Richard Mullen (1990), N. John Hall (1991) and Victoria Glendinning (1992). Each has its virtues, but Richard Mullen’s Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World (Duckworth, 1990) has most of interest to offer on Trollope’s early life and career, devoting nearly half its 660 pages to the period up to the publication of Barchester Towers. N. John Hall has prepared The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford, Calif., 1983). Despite this extensive recent scholarly work, Michael Sadleir’s Trollope: A Commentary (Constable, 1927) is still worth consulting, and Trollope’s own Autobiography (1883; Penguin, 1993) remains an indispensable source.
The non-fictional expression of Trollope’s views on the Church of his day can be found in his Clergymen of the Church of England (1866; reprinted with an introduction by Ruth Roberts, Leicester University Press, 1974) and in The New Zealander, edited by N. John Hall (Clarendon Press, 1972). For the contemporary background of Barchester Towers, Part 1 of Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church (A & C Black, 1966) and Elisabeth Jay’s The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Clarendon Press, 1979) are both highly informative.
CRITICISM
Criticism of Trollope by his contemporaries is collected in Donald Smalley (ed.), Trollope: The Critical Heritage (Routledge, 1969) and analysed by David Skilton in his valuable book Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (Longman, 1972). Guidance to more recent criticism can be found in J. C. Olmsted and J. E. Welch, The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–75 (Garland, 1978). There is an author survey of Trollope by Arthur Pollard (Routledge, 1978). The most recent introduction to the genre in which Trollope worked is Robin Gilmour’s The Novel in the Victorian Age: A Modern Introduction (Arnold, 1986).
The following books have differing perspectives to offer on Barchester Towers:
Henry James, Partial Portraits (Macmillan, 1988)
Frank O’Connor, The Mirror in the Roadway (Knopf, 1956)
Robert Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (University of California Press, 1968)
U. C. Knoepflmacher, Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Period (University of California Press, 1968)
James Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Clarendon Press, 1977)
P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope: his Art and Scope (Harvester Press, 1978)
T. Bareham (ed.), The Barsetshire Novels: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1983)
Andrew Wright, Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art (Macmillan, 1983)
K. M. Newton, ‘Barchester Towers’ (Macmillan, 1987)
Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (Faber, 1988)
Jane Nardin, He Knew She was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Southern Illinois University Press, 1989)
CHRONICLES OF BARSETSHIRE
Trollope’s Barsetshire novels are as follows:
The Warden (1855)
Barchester Towers (1857)
Doctor Thorne (1858)
Framley Parsonage (1861)
The Small House at Allington (1864)
The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
All are available in Penguin Classics.
Chronology
1815 Battle of Waterloo
Lord George Gordon Byron, Hebrew Melodies
Anthony Trollope born 24 April at 16 Keppel Street, Blooms-bury, the fourth son of Thomas and Frances Trollope. Family moves shortly after to Harrow-on-the-Hill
1823 Attends Harrow as a day-boy (–1825)
1825 First public steam railway opened
Sir Walter Scott, The Betrothed and The Talisman
Sent as a boarder to a private school in Sunbury, Middlesex
1827 Greek War of Independence won in the battle of Navarino
Sent to school at Winchester College. His mother sets sail for the USA on 4 November with three of her children
1830 George IV dies; his brother ascends the throne as William IV
William Cobbett, Rural Rides
Removed from Winchester. Sent again to Harrow until 1834
1832 Controversial First Reform Act extends the right to vote to approximately one man in five
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Poor Law Act introduces workhouses to England
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii
Trollope family migrates to Bruges to escape creditors.
Anthony returns to London to take up a junior clerkship in the General Post Office
1835 Halley’s Comet appears. ‘Railway mania’ in Britain
Robert Browning, Paracelsus
His father dies in Bruges
1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Penny Post introduced
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (–1841)
Dangerously ill in May and June
1841 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Appointed Postal Surveyor’s Clerk for Central District of Ireland. Moves to Banagher, King’s County (now Co. Offaly)
1843 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. I)
Begins to write his first novel. The Macdermots of Ballycloran
1844 Daniel O’Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, imprisoned for conspiracy; later released
William Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Marries Rose Heseltine in June. Transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary
1846 Famine rages in Ireland. Repeal of the Corn Laws
Dickens, Dombey and Son (–1848)
First son, Henry Merivale, born in March
1847 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
A second son, Frederic James Anthony, born in September
The Macdermots of Ballycloran
1848 Revolution in France; re-establishment of the Republic. The ‘Cabbage Patch Rebellion’ in Tipperary fails
Trollopes move to Mallow, Co. Cork
The Kellys and the O’Kellys
1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
La Vendée. Writes The Noble Jilt, a play and the source of his later novel Can You Forgive Her?
1851 The Great Exhibition
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Sent to survey and reorganize postal system in southwest England and Wales (–1852)
1852 First pillar box in the British Isles introduced in St Helier, Jersey, on Trollope’s recommendation
1853 Thackeray, The Newcomes (–1855)
Moves to Belfast to take post as Acting Surveyor for the Post Office
1854 Britain becomes involved in the Crimean War (–1856)
Appointed Surveyor of the Northern District of Ireland
1855 David Livingstone discovers Victoria Falls, Zambia (Zimbabwe)
Dickens, Little Dorrit (–1857)
Moves to Donnybrook, Co. Dublin
The Warden. Writes The New Zealander (published 1972)
1857 Indian Mutiny (–1858)
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays
Barchester Towers
1858 Irish Republican Brotherhood founded in Dublin
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
Travels to Egypt, England and the West Indies on postal business
Doctor Thorne
1859 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Leaves Ireland to settle in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, after being appointed Surveyor of the Eastern District of England
The Bertrams and The West Indies and the Spanish Main
1860 Dickens, Great Expectations (–1861)
Framley Parsonage (–1861, his first serialized fiction) and Castle Richmond
1861 American Civil War (–1865)
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. Mrs Beeton, Book of Household Management
Travels to USA to research a travel book
Orley Farm (–1862)
1862 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Last Poems
Elected to the Garrick Club
The Small House at Allington (–1864) and North America
1863 His mother dies in Florence
Rachel Ray
1864 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (–1866)
Elected to the Athenaeum Club
Can You Forgive Her? (–1865)
1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Fortnightly Review founded by Trollope (among others)
Miss Mackenzie, The Belton Estate (–1866)
1866 Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical
The Claverings (–1867), Nina Balatka (–1867) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (–1867)
1867 Second Reform Act extends the franchise further, enlarging the electorate to almost two million
Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Song of Italy
Resigns from the GPO and assumes editorship of St Paul’s Magazine
Phineas Finn (–1869)
1868 Last public execution in London
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Visits the USA on a postal mission; returns to England to stand unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Beverley, Yorkshire
He Knew He Was Right (–1869)
1869 Suez Canal opened
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Lorna Doone
The Vicar of Bullhampton (–1870)
1870 Married Women’s Property Act passed
Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Resigns editorship of St Paul’s Magazine
Ralph the Heir (–1871), Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, and a translation of The Commentaries of Caesar
1871 Eliot, Middlemarch (–1872)
Gives up house at Waltham Cross and sails to Australia with Rose to visit his son Frederic
The Eustace Diamonds (–1873)
1872 Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes (–1873)
Travels in Australia and New Zealand and returns to England via the USA
The Golden Lion of Granpere
1873 Mill, Autobiography
Settles in Montagu Square, London
Lady Anna (–1874), Phineas Redux (–1874); Australia and New Zealand and Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life
1874 The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris
Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
The Way We Live Now (–1875)
1875 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon
Begins writing An Autobiography on his return. The Prime Minister (–1876)
1876 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
Finishes writing An Autobiography. The American Senator (–1877)
1877 Henry James, The American
Visits South Africa
Is He Popenjoy? (–1878)
1878 Hardy, The Return of the Native
Sails to Iceland
John Caldigate (–1879), The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye (–1879) and South Africa
1879 George Meredith, The Egoist
Cousin Henry The Duke’s Children (–1880) and Thackeray
1880 Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)
Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex
Dr Wortle’s School and The Life of Cicero
1881 In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (–1882)
Ayah’s Angel, The Fixed Period (–1882) and Marion Fay (–1882)
1882 Phoenix Park murders in Dublin
Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December
Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough’s Family (–1883) and The Landleaguers (–1883, unfinished)
1883 An Autobiography is published under the supervision of Trollope’s son Henry
1884 An Old Man’s Love
1923 The Noble Jilt
1927 London Tradesmen (reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1880)
1972 The New Zealander
Contents
VOLUME I
1 Who will be the New Bishop?
2 Hiram’s Hospital According to Act of Parliament