The Warden (2 page)

‘One hates an author that's
all author
,' the aristocratic Byron wrote in
Beppo
, preferring those writers ‘Who think of something else besides the pen'. It was part of Trollope's complex relationship to the gentlemanly code that he should have played down the element of inspiration and creative genius in his work, spoken of his gift as though it were on a par with any other trade a man might ply to earn money. His misfortune was to be taken at face value. The Samuel Smilesian note on which the
Autobiography
ends, with its careful balance-sheet of literary earnings, obscured the suffering outsider of the first chapter and was used to confirm the view of Trollope which had gained ground in his own lifetime: that he was a conventional writer, an unspectacular recorder of the everyday, in Carlyle's harsh words ‘irredeemably imbedded in commonplace, and grown fat upon it'.
³
Or as Henry James put it, more sympathetically: ‘His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.'
⁴
Yet if we look at Trollope's life and work from the perspective of the
Autobiography's
opening pages, two quite unusual features are thrown into relief. One, which may at first seem obvious enough, is that the young ‘Pariah' of Harrow and Winchester was an outsider, looking on at the world of his more secure contemporaries with, as he says, ‘an exceeding longing'. The hunger for social acceptance which can be sensed in Trollope's life had an aesthetic corollary in his novelistic fascination with the rituals of the English middle-class and gentry life from which he had
once been excluded. The English are said to have a genius for institutions, and in Trollope they have a novelist who is the supreme recorder of that genius. The Church, the Civil Service, Parliament, the Law, the rural gentry – Trollope was the first novelist to map the subtle interrelations of these various institutions in Victorian England. It has been, and still is, far too easy to underestimate the sheer knowledge of human nature in its social and institutional bearings which went to the creation of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels, and perhaps it took a writer with something of an outsider's fascination to conceive them in the first place.

The other unusual feature in Trollope's case may seem the very opposite of this: it is his feeling for, and invariably sympathetic portrayal of, the lonely individual, the character caught in a moment of isolation and introspection, like Mr Harding in the chapter ‘A Long Day in London'. Nearly all Trollope's unhappy characters are portrayed with a wonderfully precise sympathy, even – or especially – the exiles and misfits, those who for whatever reason have stepped beyond the accepted boundaries of their caste or social group. One thinks of the Rev. Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate accused of stealing a cheque in
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, or the melancholy, obsessed Trevelyan in He
Knew He Was Right
(1869), or the swindler Melmotte in
The Way We Live Now
(1875), denounced as a scoundrel for much of the novel but, after his downfall, the object of Trollope's increasingly compassionate scrutiny. In other words, one cannot read far in Trollope's work without encountering what David Skilton has called ‘a central paradox': ‘that of all novels they are the most “social”, in the sense of depending on the interaction of sets of persons, and of creating a supremely convincing illusion of a functioning fictional community; and yet that an examination of any of the novels will show how very significant a proportion of the book concerns the situation of a single character, alone…'
⁵
Just as contemporaries found in Trollope the man a sensitive nature and feeling heart beneath the bluff, gregarious manner, so the reader of his novels soon becomes accustomed to moving
from the comic outer action of the densely realized community to the inner action of the solitary individual.

The significance of
The Warden
in Trollope's career is that it was the first of his novels to bring these twin impulses fully into play. Here one can see the beginning of his inquiry into the Church as an institution, and in Archdeacon Grantly the first stirrings of the comedy that lies in the contrast between the worldly man and the unworldly calling, both to be much more fully developed in
Barchester Towers
(1857). Also evident is Trollope's preoccupation with the influence of London and metropolitan opinion on provincial life. But at the heart of the novel is a private drama of conscience and an act of resignation. The co-presence of these two perspectives, the interaction and indeed collision between them, gives
The Warden
a resonance out of proportion to its modest scale. For of course the relation between private and public life, and more particularly the threat to the individual posed by the growth of public opinion and the advent of a centralized modern democracy, are among the chief concerns of Victorian literature. When Mr Harding wonders how he can ever tell the truths of ‘his inmost heart' (p.
60
) to the readers of the
Jupiter
, Trollope is touching on an issue which animates works so different from
The Warden
as Arnold's poem ‘The Buried Life' or Tennyson's
In Memoriam
, with its troubled vision of ‘private sorrow's barren song' drowned in the march of science and democracy (lyric xxi). Moreover, by dramatizing the issue in terms of an individual caught in the limelight of newspaper publicity Trollope was giving it an original and highly topical treatment. It is to this question of the novel's topicality I want now to turn.

In his
Autobiography
Trollope tells how he had been struck by ‘two opposite evils':

The first evil 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. There had been more than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable purposes. The second evil 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
)

Two of these scandals are mentioned in the second chapter of
The Warden
: St Cross Hospital in Winchester and ‘the struggles of Mr Whiston, at Rochester' (p.
7
). Of the two, the St Cross case is closer to the situation in the novel.

Like Hiram's Hospital, St Cross was an almshouse for the elderly poor founded in the twelfth century by one Henry de Blois; its Master, or Warden, was Francis North (1773–1861), nephew of George III's Prime Minister, who became Earl of Guilford in 1827. In the fine old pre-reform traditions of clerical nepotism, North had been appointed to the Mastership by his father, the Bishop of Winchester, in 1808, and he held it in plurality with the Rectory of Old Alresford and a rich parish in Southampton, which brought him a combined annual income of nearly £3,500. He drew another £1,000 a year from a prebendal stall in Winchester Cathedral, and some £2,000 to £3,000 a year from St Cross. Despite his wealth and pluralism, however, the Earl of Guilford seems to have been reasonably responsible in his management of the Hospital. On becoming Master he increased the salaries of the steward and chaplain; he saw to it that the old men were well fed and housed, paid their doctor's bills, and like Mr Harding added to their allowance. All this cost him about £1,000 a year. What made St Cross a scandal in the 1840s was not so much the Master's conduct of the Hospital, which by the standards of the day was hardly outrageous, as his conduct of the properties belonging to the Hospital, which he was leasing on fines (i.e. granting long leases at low rents in exchange for a capital sum, or fine) and pocketing the proceeds. Thousands of pounds which should have gone to expand the charitable work of the Hospital were being misappropriated by its clerical Master. The abuse was taken up by the newspapers, a resolution was passed in Parliament, and the St Cross case was referred to the Court of Chancery in 1849. Nearly four years later the Master of the Rolls found against the Earl of Guilford. He was prevented from taking future fines and made to repay those taken since
1849, the Master's salary was reduced to £250 and his clerical duties re-established, and the mangement of the Hospital was transferred to a board of trustees.
⁶

There are several features of the St Cross case which may have struck Trollope and influenced the conception of
The Warden
: the Winchester setting with its reminder that he, like Lord Guilford, had suffered humiliation there; the advanced age of the Master and the relative conscientiousness with which he had looked after the old men in his charge; the activities of a reformer (in this case a retired clergyman) and the newspapers in bringing the abuse to light; and most suggestive of all perhaps, the dramatic potential in the figure of a clergyman grown old in the comfortable and corrupt ways of the eighteenth-century Church, blinking in the sudden light of reform and publicity. The case of the Rev. Robert Whiston at Rochester is less immediately relevant to the action of
The Warden
. Whiston was the energetic and successful Headmaster of the Cathedral Grammar School, who had fallen foul of the dean and chapter by his efforts to persuade them to increase the value of the allowances which, by cathedral statute, they were required to pay for the maintenance of four Exhibitioners at university and twenty cathedral scholars, and which had been little changed for centuries. In 1849 he published a pamphlet on
Cathedral Trusts and Their Fulfilment
, which not only set out his complaint against the Rochester Chapter but pointed the finger at other cathedrals where the clergy had enriched themselves at the expense of the charities they were bound by statute to maintain. The Chapter promptly dismissed him, but Whiston bravely took his case to law, where after the usual slow progress through the courts he won a rather grudging verdict in his favour and was reinstated.

It has been suggested that Whiston was a John Bold, but this can only be true in so far as he brought into the open the mismanagement of cathedral revenues. Trollope's point about Bold is that he sets out to reform an institution in which he has no personal stake, and of whose true workings he is largely ignorant.
The same cannot be said of Whiston: he had a direct, professional interest in improving the maintenance provided for his pupils, and his campaign on their behalf was entirely honourable, albeit intemperately conducted at times. There is, however, one aspect of his case that may have struck Trollope: Whiston's faith in, and resort to, public opinion and the power of the press. After winning his case in 1852 he sent a letter of thanks to the various newspapers that had supported him, including
The Times
, in which he wrote: ‘Without the support of the Press, in forming, guiding and reflecting the irresistible supremacy of public opinion, I might have indeed appealed in vain for even that measure of justice which I have at last obtained.'
⁷
It is just such a faith in ‘the irresistible supremacy of public opinion', when applied to an ancient institution like the Church, that
The Warden
sets out to question.

If only because they were widely discussed in the newspapers and are mentioned several times in the text, the St Cross and Whiston scandals must be considered the chief topicalities in the background of this highly topical novel. But there is another less well-known issue that may have counted for just as much in the genesis of
The Warden
, because it offers a particularly clear link between a scandal involving an elderly clergyman, an impetuous reformer, and
The Times
newspaper. According to T. H. S. Escott, Trollope's friend and first biographer, the novelist told him that the first two Barsetshire novels ‘grew out of
The Times
correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare he was responsible.'
⁸
This correspondence has been tracked down by Carol H. Ganzel,
⁹
and the issue at stake turns out to be not absenteeism but simony, the buying and selling of Church livings (although, as we shall see, there
are reasons why Trollope should have recalled it as a dispute about absenteeism). The reformer was a Dorset clergyman, Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who like the fictional Bold was something of a busybody, taking up one ‘abuse' after another, and a favoured correspondent with the editor of
The Times
, who published his letters and sometimes took up the issues they raised in leading articles. Moreover, he was known to Trollope, who had earlier written an article for the
Examiner
criticizing the views on Ireland which Osborne had expressed in a previous series of letters to
The Times
. In 1853 Osborne was concerned with a loophole in the Simony Law. At that time it was legal for the patron, or owner, of a clerical living to sell it to a clergyman only in prospect: he could sell the next presentation to the living, but not a vacant living. If the incumbent died before the living had been sold, another clergyman had to be instituted. There was therefore a temptation for a greedy patron to institute an old or dying man, on the likelihood of whose early death the next presentation could be sold profitably. In
The Times
of 28 July 1853 Osborne cited the case of a very ill man who had recently been presented to the living of St Ervan's in Cornwall; he was said to be paralytic, and at his induction had to be helped down the aisle and fortified with wine, yet even so was unable to read through the Thirty-nine Articles. He never resided and shortly thereafter died. In a further letter published on 20 August, Osborne accused this clergyman of selling his infirmity for the brief enjoyment of an increased stipend.