The title of the first chapter of 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 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 , to “reform the Church from within, to reinvigorate it.” A rallying cry came in the form of ’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 , “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, , 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.
