The Warden (3 page)

Then in
The Times
of 1 September appeared a letter from one Alfred Cox, naming the clergyman in question as his relative, the Rev. John Pope Cox, and describing him as ‘so peculiarly mild, benevolent and amiable a person, that it seems impossible to conceive that through the whole of his life he could have ever found… anyone who could harbour an unkind thought about him' (p.
10
). Cox claimed that his relative had been neither ‘paralytic' nor avaricious, that he had accepted the living in good faith, expecting to regain his health and reside at St Ervan's; and he accused Osborne of using the columns of
The Times
‘to harrow the feelings of the widow and relatives of his brother clergyman, by dragging his name before the public, and holding up his memory to public reprobation' (p.
10
). After two more letters
from Osborne of a somewhat self-congratulatory kind, and another in support of him signed ‘Pro Bono Publico', the correspondence closed.

There are several features of this case which make it a likely source for
The Warden
: the testimony of Escott, the fact that Osborne was known to, and possibly disliked by, Trollope, and the very striking contrast between the reformer's public view of the abuse, and the private character and feelings of the clergyman and his family. That likelihood becomes a probability when we consider a fact which has never been pointed out before.
The Times
, Trollope's
Jupiter
, took up the St Ervan's case in a leading article. On 10 September 1853, the second leader magisterially endorsed Osborne's view of the Rev. Cox (‘a paralytic, or as good as one') and then turned the accusation against the Church, first mocking the bishops for their powerlessness to prevent the institution of a ‘paralytic' –

The Bishop is only performing a scene in the splendid melodrama of the Church of England, and has no more to do with the personal qualifications of the man before him than if he and the man were a couple of scene-shifters elevated for five minutes into mitred abbots on the floor of Drury Lane. (p.
6
)

– then questioning their utility (‘What need of such great men, such learned men, such well-paid men… Why twenty-six to do a purely mechanical act?'), and ending by pointing soberly to what
The Times
obviously saw as the real abuse, absenteeism:

The greatest scandals in the Church are those which are not only undeniable, but even confessed, not to say boasted. A man obtaining a living is instituted and inducted, read in, and then informs the Bishop that the house is too damp for him, or the church too spacious, or the parish too extensive; and he takes leave of his parish for ever; only drawing £500 a-year from it, and paying £100 to his curate… There is not an office under Government in which such conduct would be tolerated… (p.
6
)

Here, clearly, is the link between the reformer, the accused clergyman and the pronouncements of the
Jupiter
which figures so largely in
The Warden
. And although the Rev. Cox is unlike Mr Harding in that he did not live to read the accusation against
him, here is a similar contrast between the harsh and mocking publicity of the leading article and the private world of the individual (‘so peculiarly mild, benevolent and amiable a person') to which Alfred Cox's letter tried to draw attention. Furthermore, the leader in
The Times
makes it clear why Trollope, when he mentioned the correspondence to Escott, remembered it as a case of absenteeism.

If the long-running scandals of St Cross and Rochester provided the initial idea, then, and the visit to Salisbury (and the awakened recollection of Winchester) the setting, the trigger for the writing of the novel may well have been the St Ervan's case and the leading article on it. Certainly this would account for the particular intensity of Trollope's attack on the
Jupiter. The Times
had pronounced on clerical scandals before, of course, but in 1853 – the year Trollope was writing
The Warden
– it was more than usually wide-ranging and scathing in its criticism of the abuse of privilege in the Church: the reference in the St Ervan's leader to ‘the spendid melodrama of the Church of England' and the mockery of the bishops are fairly typical. On 21 and 27 June, and again on 10 August 1853,
Times
leaders mounted an attack on the Bishop of Salisbury, accusing him of misappropriating the revenues of his see by consistently taking an annual salary some £1,700 higher than that allowed by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and computing the excess payment over a fourteen-year period as £24,318. The paper was wholeheartedly in favour of the Charitable Trusts Act of 1853, which at long last gave the Charity Commissioners power to adapt old charities to modern uses (and which, incidentally, became law the day after judgement was given in the St Cross case), and was equally enthusiastic about the Marquis of Blandford's proposal in June of that year to introduce an Episcopal and Capitular Property Bill, to ensure a more equitable distribution of the Church's income. In a penetrating editorial,
The Times
described the Church of England as ‘the most paradoxical body in the world. It is, at the same time, the richest and the poorest; the most popular and the most exclusive', and to illustrate the point contrasted its appearance in a cathedral town with its virtual absence in the new manufacturing cities. The former is summoned up in
words that could describe Mr Harding's situation at the start of
The Warden
:

The man whose lot is cast in some one of its pleasant places, and whose curiosity does not betray him beyond the walls of his paradise, may go through life with a very delightful and dreamy idea of the Establishment. Its princely bishops, its magnificent cathedrals, its hospitable canons and zealous archdeacons, its comfortable incumbents, its parochial system, its village churches and devout congregations, all make up a whole which it wants but little poetry to convert into a very respectable anticipation of the heavenly Jerusalem. (22 June 1853, p.
4
)

But the situation in a swollen manufacturing town was very different, where the population had grown out of all proportion to the religious provision: ‘What avails it to the myriads that spring up, self-sown, as it were, over these spiritual wastes, that there are cathedrals, bishops, prebendaries, and some thousands of learned, otiose, and well-beneficed clergy?'

This is the most perceptive of all
The Times's
comments on the Church in 1853, and whether Trollope read it or not he can hardly have been unaware of the problem to which it drew attention. The real and inescapable challenge which the Established Church faced in the middle of the nineteenth century was the need to adapt to the new social conditions of an industrialized society. As the same leader said, ‘no system can be really effective which has not the power of continual adjustment, according to the change of circumstances'. This, I would suggest, is the essential context in which
The Warden
should be read. The particular clerical scandals which inspired Trollope's initial conception are only aspects of a larger problem which is not mentioned in the novel, although it informs the presentation of character and setting at many points.
The Warden
paints its picture of the charming ways of the provincial and country clergy in the shadow of the knowledge that these ways are ceasing to be relevant to the needs of Victorian England. It is this knowledge which gives the novel its slight air of elegy, of special pleading for a losing cause. Trollope could not defend clerical privilege, and Archdeacon Grantly is there as a comic reminder of the impossibility of doing so. But he could and did attack reformers, in John Bold, Tom Towers, and in the writings
of Dr Pessimist Anticant and Mr Popular Sentiment. No doubt the anti-reformism of
The Warden
is partly a defence of privilege and the old ways by the back door, but there is more to it than that. Trollope's originality lay in perceiving the moral imperialism of the reforming temper and its tendency to lose a sense of the complexities of the individual case – and therefore of the supreme value of individual integrity and conscience – in the simplifying pursuit of an abstract justice. It is a perception which clearly owed a good deal to his reflection upon these topical matters discussed in
The Times
.

The fate of the private life in an extrovert age of great public achievement, I have suggested, is one of the principal concerns of Victorian literature, and in few works of the period can the sense of the private life seem quite so embattled as it is in the early chapters of
The Warden
. Our first sight of Hiram's Hospital in its idyllic situation on the riverbank is from the bridge on the London road – appropriately, for it is from London that copies of the
Jupiter
will come to threaten Mr Harding's ‘retreat' (p.
5
), and it is to London that he will go in the second half of the novel to see Sir Abraham Haphazard. The ‘slight iron screen' which separates the rest of the hospital from ‘the Elysium of Mr Harding's dwelling' (p.
5
) is a deftly symbolic touch, suggesting at once the paradise within and its fragility, the slightness of the defence it will be able to put up against challenge from without. The developing symbolic resonance of the warden's garden hardly needs stressing, as we see it first from the London road, then through John Bold's eyes at the start of Chapter
3
, then metaphorically in Mr Harding's thoughts as he envisages the disruption of his peace in terms of the destruction of his retreat:

It was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied by rough hands; that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield; that the unobtrusive corner of the world which had been allotted to him, as though by Providence, should be invaded and desecrated, and all within it made miserable and unsound, (p.
45
)

– a fear that is actualized at the end of the novel when we learn that ‘The warden's garden is a wretched wilderness, the drive
and paths are covered with weeds, the flowerbeds are bare, and the unshorn lawn is now a mass of long damp grass and unwholesome moss' (p.
183
). The ruined garden is charged with a sense of irreparable loss, although we should not for that reason assume that Mr Harding's story is entirely one of loss. It is in fact a moral victory, although not an easy or a painless one.

Mr Harding stands out from the other characters in the novel by virtue of his refusal to behave as if there were a divorce between his public role and his private life. The best defence of his sinecure is not that he is entitled to it by law – which he may or may not be – but that he performs the duties of warden well and from the heart, providing the old men in his care with something that no salary can buy, ‘that treasure so inestimable in declining years, a true and kind friend to listen to their sorrows, watch over their sickness, and administer comfort as regards this world, and the world to cornel' (p.
28
). For Archdeacon Grantly and Tom Towers this is inadmissible evidence. The
Jupiter
can only see the matter remotely and statistically – ‘Does he ever ask himself, when he stretches wide his clerical palm to receive the pay of some dozen of the working clergy, for what service he is so remunerated?' (p.
59
) – the archdeacon only in terms of the institution. He can provide the best legal advice money can buy, but he can ‘give no comfort to Mr Harding's doubts', who ‘was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so' (p.
24
) – a distinction which in its quiet firmness encapsulates the inner drama of the novel. And as his name suggests, the reformer John Bold is merely naïve and blundering in imagining that he can hope to maintain a distinction between the individual and the office, when dealing with a man like Mr Harding.

Trollope skilfully avoids adjudicating between conservatives and reformers by shifting the terms of the debate and in effect putting them both in the same camp. ‘The ostensible issues matter very little,' James Kincaid observes, ‘… because the morality advocated is aesthetic and intuitive rather than argumentative and rationalistic.'
¹⁰
The reader is invited to see the similarities between Archdeacon Grantly and Tom Towers
in the descriptions of their respective rooms at Plumstead and in the Temple, where the hoarding of luxury and comfort reveals a hidden hedonism in both men. ‘Every appliance that could make study pleasant and give ease to the over-toiled brain was there' (p.
104
) at Plumstead, while a parallel sentence describes Towers's room: ‘Every addition that science and art have lately made to the luxuries of modern life was to be found there' (p.
122
). The archdeacon has his Rabelais in a ‘secret drawer' (p.
69
), Towers his Pre-Raphaelite painting. In contrast to Mr Harding's Elysium, which is easily entered through the ‘slight iron screen', these rooms are well-defended snuggeries, confidently excluding the outside world. The lofty isolation implied in Towers's name is reinforced by the fact that the painting in his room is of a nun (clearly based on Charles Collins's
Convent Thoughts
: see Chapter
14
, note 20), suggesting that the editor of the
Jupiter
is himself something of a hedonistic monk, insulated from the complexity of the human world. It is significant that he never visits Barchester to inspect the abuse he so easily denounces.

Grantly and Towers also balance each other in being pillars of what the novel presents as the old established and new secular religions. The heavily ironic portrayal of the newspaper editor as a pagan deity may seem rather overdone to a modern reader, but it reflects Trollope's fear (in which he was not alone) of the unprecedented nature of the authority which
The Times
enjoyed in the early-Victorian period. ‘No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed,' Emerson wrote in
English Traits
(1856). ‘What you read in the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society.' Trollope put the daily circulation of
The Times
at 40,000 (p.
60
), but even that figure does not reveal the extent to which it dominated the newspaper market. In 1854 its daily sale was recorded as 51,200, in comparison with 2,800 for the
Morning Chronicle
and 3,712 for the
Herald
: there was almost no competition, or as Trollope put it elsewhere, ‘The Times with us is the Press.'
¹¹
This situation
gave a dangerous amount of power to a single individual because of the rise of public opinion as a political force and the novelty, as John Stuart Mill saw it in
On Liberty
(1859), of the fact that ‘the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers.'
¹²
In these conditions the powerful newspaper editor became a god, hidden, unaccountable, and therefore to Trollope pernicious.