The Warden (Trollope, 1855)

Anthony Trollope. The Warden. Pub. 1855. Ed. David Skilton. Oxford: World’s Classics, 1994.

• Published in 1 volume by Longmans 1855 (83 metafictive about this)
  • all the discussion of the power of newspapers is underwritten by the repeal on the taxes on knowledge (also Altick 1957)
• Good for: discussion of power/ethical issues of newspapers; 58 periodical "we" seeping into novelistic narration; 193ff satire of Thomas Carlyle and Dickens;

Reading Notes

• 5-7 the kind of gradual, incremental accrual of worth underlying Hiram’s Hospital over the period from the 15th-19th centuries— uniformitarian? Charles Lyell
  • the account of Hiram’s vaguely recalls The Mill on the Floss (1860) scene with situating the aunt and uncle’s parlor in deep time
• 9 "Since his appointment to his precentorship, he has published, with all possible additions of vellum, typography, and gilding, a collection of our ancient church music"
  • this is allied with Harding being not "industrious" but not an "idler"
• 10 "men are beginning to say that these things must be looked into": kairos of the Hospital of St. Cross case in the period
• 15 First person pronoun used by 3rd person narrator, as Eliot sometimes does in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
• Trollope’s moral vision:

...I fear that he is too much imbued with the idea that he has a special mission for reforming. It would be well if one so young had a little more diffidence himself, and more trust in the honest purposes of others— if he could be brought to believe that old customs need not necessarily be evil, and that changes may possibly be dangerous; but no[.]

• 24 Bold does archival work in getting a copy of John Hiram’s original will, and asks Chadwick for paperwork about the Hospital property’s accounts
  • again on 89: all the paperwork in his case plus the discussion of the scandal in the Jupiter (the Times)
• 32 "I’m as ignorant as a child": Harding and the feminized old men topos, like John Jarndyce or a much more benign Skimpole in Bleak House (1853)
• 33 still I wish I lived in his moral universe
• 58 "We believe that Mr Horseman would relent"— narratorial I slipping into periodical We (see Brake 2001 for periodicals and authorship)
  • Warden is interesting because it’s so topical
• 69 Harding's misgivings
• 83 metafictive about publishing in one volume, a dialogue equivalent of "but why always Dorothea" in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
  • see Buurma 2013 for this on material form as limit to representation -- there's a similar moment in The Way We Live Now (Trollope, 1875) too
• 88ff "The Jupiter" (aka The Times, which Skilton notes was commonly called ‘The Thunderer’)
  • 91 newspaper distribution worrying Harding (his own charges carry around a copy they can’t read on 93)
  • 92 Grantly on the autocratic power of the newspaper, futility of Harding writing a letter to them
  • Lawyer Finney excited about the prospect of a years’ long court case, like Kenge in Bleak House (1853)
• 102-3 the interiors of the Grantlys’ at Plumstead Episcopi describing a middle class but distinctly clerical "heaviness": "the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour"
  • a nice sense of values, not unlike the mother’s family in The Mill on the Floss (1860). see Freedgood 2006— not Marxian commodity/object relations
  • narrator describes their dullness by putting himself into the diagetic world 104
• 105 love it— Grantly elaborately prepares his sermon-writing materials and then sits down to covertly read Rabelais
• 123 eloquent on Harding feeling stymied by grantly's rhetoric
• 139 "I narration" fearing for Eleanor "sacrificing" herself by speaking to Bold
• 148-9 the ethical difficulty of indicting the office when the innocent person holding it will suffer in Eleanor and Bold's confrontation
  • though it raises the question of Harding's naïveté
• 160 Grantly's elaborate library shelving system
• 170 Harding in a leader in the Jupiter
• 173 fine grained analysis of Eleanor’s feelings about her father’s decision to resign
• 179 The Jupiter’s office as a typographic Mount Olympus:

Who has not heard of Mt Olympus,— that high abode of all the powers of type, that favoured seat of the great goddess Pica, that wonderous habitation of gods and devils, from whence, with ceaseless hum of steam and never-ending flow of Castilian ink, issue forth eighty thousand nightly edicts for the governance of a subject nation?

• • 180ff satire of the rhetoric of infallibility about the newspaper (comparison to the Vatican makes it clearly satirical)
• 186 Towers’s books in one of the inns of court
• 188 pre-raphaelites
• 193-200 pamphlet by Dr. Pessimist Anticant (Thomas Carlyle) in part about Harding— a whole section in high Carlylean style
• 200 first numbers of the Almshouse by Mr Popular Sentiment (Dickens): "It’s a direct attack on the whole system....It’s very well done, you see. His first numbers always are."
• 204:

“The public is defrauded," said he [Towers], “whenever private considerations are allowed to have weight.” Quite true, thou greatest oracle of the middle of the nineteenth century, thou sententious proclaimer of the purity of the press— the public is defrauded when it is purposely misled. Poor public! how often it is misled! against what a world of fraud has it to contend!

• • ff too— Bold on "truth"
• 205ff Mr Popular Sentiment’s new number
  • "Ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true [206] sorrows, and monthly novels convince. when learned quartos fail to do so. If the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling numbers."
  • 206 "Mr. Sentiment is a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest."
  • 207 "What storm was ever written without a demon?" Self-satirizing (also mentioning the description of wealthy furnishings close to his own description of the Grantlys’, esp. the villain "...the clerical owner of this comfortable abode”
  • describing the plot almost resembles Barchester Towers
  • 208 "...the beauty of the sentiment, however, amply atoned for the imperfection of the language"
  • "the artist who paints for the million must use glaring colours... the radical reform which has now swept over such establishments has owed more to the twenty numbers of Mr. Sentiment’s novel, than to all the true complaints which have escaped from the public for the last kengehalf century.”
• 211 Harding stays at the Chapter Coffee House near St Paul’s, same as in Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853), Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)
• 215 Harding consults his Bradshaw worrying about Grantly arriving
• 230-1 compare Sir Abraham Haphazard to Dickens’s lawyers: more Vholes than Kenge, more Jaggers than Vholes— nice sizing him up as a powerful but dried up man
• 233 the sense here as in Bleak House of the law’s inadequacy to Harding’s human, ethical problem, just as the resolution of Jarndyce is inadequate to the damage it’s done to Richard
  • and again the quandary that Harding and Haphazard are both right from different points of view: "A man is never the best judge of his own position." "A man is the best judge of what he feels himself." (235)
• 250-2 Harding writes his resignation letter, and its included in the narrative as it is "characteristic of the man"
• 260 lawyers come up with an out for Harding: exchanging his wardenship with Quiverful’s living— in part because Quiverful won’t care about the press coverage (264): What does this sensitivity say about Harding?
• 267 sticking up for Grantly as not entirely bad (in the "We" rather than I voice)
• 268 class difference in the perception of Harding’s actions
• 271 the wards won’t get the money, anyway