The title of the first chapter of Barchester Towers is not exactly a hook, at least for the contemporary reader: “Who will be the new Bishop?”
The novel that follows is similarly archaic, suffused with lingo (prebendary, curate, warden, etc.) unique to the particularities of the Church of England in the mid-19th century. After all, Barchester, the seat of the diocese of Barset, was meant to be a cathedral town, and as our overly jocular narrator observes, “…the manhood of Barchester consisted mainly of parsons.”
Victorianist Elizabeth Bridgham argues in Spaces of the Sacred and Profane that the Roman Catholic origins and gothic design features of cathedrals made them seem “distant from, and opposed to, modernity.” The cathedral’s centrality to the medieval town and ethos had withered away. “By the nineteenth century,” writes Nigel Yates, scholar of ecclesiastical history, “cathedrals had become bastions of entrenched conservatism,” and accusations of material gluttony and spiritual impoverishment were rife. The desire to address such inequities was the impetus for an Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Commissions, appointed by the prime minister, which led to a series of acts that made appointments more transparent and, as Bridgham puts it, “salaries and expenditures commensurate with cathedral labor.”
Trollope wrote as a trade, rather than to express political or religious views…and he wrote a lot.
These reforms reverberate throughout Barchester Towers, in the form of Mr. Harding’s divestment of his position of warden (which took place in Barchester Towers’ predecessor, The Warden) and the constant squabbling about who will be the new warden, the new dean, and, of course, the new archbishop.
There was another movement for reform in the Church of England at the time, however. The Oxford Movement, named after the college it emanated from, meant, as Rosemary Hill observes in God’s Architect, to “reform the Church from within, to reinvigorate it.” A rallying cry came in the form of John Keble’s 1833 sermon “National Apostasy,” which pitched against a diminishment of Irish churches. Shortly following were the first Tracts for the Times, anonymous epistles which defended, according to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “an orthodox version of the Anglican faith against the insidious inroads of liberalism, Dissent, secularism, agnosticism, and the interference of the state.” The primary author of the Tracts, John Henry Newman, would become one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, and its adherents would become known as Tractarians or Newmanites.
Where Trollope’s own allegiance falls is difficult to ascertain.
If the Protestant movement had been about — to put it simplistically — seizing the word of God from priests and putting it into the hands of the people (via the new technology of the printing press), these Tractarians “sought always to convey the spirit behind the literal word,” as Elisabeth Jay puts it. Such a notion was anathema to the established power base of the Church of England. Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith in 1845 ended, as Yates puts it, “the Oxford Movement’s political effectiveness.”
These are the battle lines Trollope means to mock in his line “…there was hardly room for Proudieism in Barchester as long as Grantlyism was predominant.” As Jill Durey writes in Trollope and the Church of England Mr. Harding would have been considered a member of the traditional “high and dry” clergy, who would have been “synonymous with indolence and fondness for the comforts of life.” The Proudies and Mr. Slope are the reformists attempting to clean up what they see as waste and excess. Forming an alliance against them, via Dr. Grantly, is Mr. Arabin of Lazarus College, Oxford (a fictional version of Newman’s own Oriel College). In his youth, Arabin had followed Newman and “took up cudgels on the side of the Tractarians,” only to nearly succumb to papistry himself, his Anglican nature saved in a vaguely described encounter with a seaside parson.
Where Trollope’s own allegiance falls is difficult to ascertain. Mr. Slope and Mrs. Proudie are presented as grasping and above their own stations, hence they are the villains. (Although, to a contemporary reader, their motivations appear far less noxious, especially those of Mrs. Proudie.) There is nothing in their Evangelical beliefs which Trollope inveighs against. The author would later write in his non-fiction The Clergymen of the Church of England (1866), “Had we not High Church and Low Church among our ordinary bishops…we should miss much that we feel to be ornamental to the Establishment and useful to ourselves.”
Ideology is secondary. Personality reigns, across both Barset and London.
Trollope wrote as a trade, rather than to express political or religious views — and he wrote a lot. His oeuvre of 47 novels contains within it a macrography (“huge writing,” a favored term of Harlan Ellison’s) made of two loosely interlocking series, the Chronicles of Barsetshire and the Palliser novels. While the six novels comprising the Chronicles take place within the titular diocese, and the six which comprise Palliser take place primarily in London, they take place within the same fictional Britain and overlap in terms of composition.
The penultimate Barsetshire novel, The Small House at Allington, was published in 1864, the year before the first of the Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her? The two series share characters as well. Lady Glencora Palliser appears in Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, as well as Can You Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn, among other novels in the series which bears her surname. If the Barset novels are set amidst the doings of the clergy of a cathedral town, the Palliser novels are set amidst Parliamentary struggles. At the time, national politics were invariably tied to those of the Church of England. We are reminded in the opening paragraphs of Barchester Towers that the prime minster appoints each new archbishop.
Adam Gopnik writes, “Nothing in the little world of Barchester’s clerics really counts for much; everything in it is high drama. The Trollope of the political novels is a master of the anti-epic … everything ends up being about matters of personality, temperament, and chance.” I disagree with Gopnik in that Barset seems hardly minor: careers and marriages are made and demolished. London, in the form of the prime minister or Tom Towers of the Jupiter (supposedly a stand-in for the London Times), and Oxford, in the form of the master of Lazarus, both take an interest in the doings of Barchester’s clerics. Gopnik’s central point still stands: in Trollope, ideology is secondary. Personality reigns, across both Barset and London.
This is why Trollope’s novels have aged well: they are about personalities in conflict, not about the ideologies behind said conflict.
And there are plenty of personalities in Trollope. When the author uses the phrase “our friend” to refer to one of his characters, it comes off as less of a convention and more of an affectionate title. He seems to enjoy the company of even Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope, his supposed heavies. In his Autobiography, Trollope wrote of his characters, “There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned.” In this, the author seems not to have been boasting excessively; his characters lodge in the mind.
This is why Trollope’s novels have aged well: they are about personalities in conflict, not about the ideologies behind said conflict. Early in Phineas Finn, a novel very obviously about politics, the authorial voice disposes of political talk as “nonsense.” As the novel progresses, the ideological lines his characters toe often appear unclear, but their motivations for doing battle against one another are perfectly delineated. In the middle novel of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, Framley Parsonage, Trollope wrote, “I have endeavored to portray [clergymen] as they bear on our social life rather than to describe the mode and working of their professional careers…” Were he to have done otherwise, “I should have either have laden my fiction with sermons or I should have degraded my sermons into fiction.”
In that case, John Henry Newman’s autobiographical novel Loss and Gain (1848) is the exact opposite of Barchester Towers. Written three years after Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, it features theological discussion conducted in minutiae by characters who are merely mouthpieces. Newman’s novel is a sermon, and as such, it is no longer read except for historical context or as a curiosity.
Barchester Towers, on the other hand, shifts from a light comic satire of church politics to a high comedy of marital proposals. The question “Who will be the new Bishop?” becomes “Who will be Mrs. Bold’s new husband?” (Although, of course, Trollope interjects himself early on to tell us who it will not be, thus allowing only one real answer). The High Church/Low Church battle is never truly resolved, despite Slope’s exit. The Bishop himself will remain, “till the new-fangled manners of the age have discovered him to be superannuated, and bestowed upon him a pension.” Yet Dr. Grantly is pleased enough to have his sphere of influence unchecked, with a minimum of meddling from Mrs. Proudie (at least until The Last Chronicle of Barset). There is, after the dust clears, room for both Proudieism and Grantlyism in Barchester.
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