He always stops short of mere caricature, and key to the subtle bite of his famous irony is that, good or bad, his characters’ follies are often a discomfiting reflection of our own. He knows them from the inside out, from the weak, uncertain interior to the armored persona that has grown up for public use.” The only remedy for this particular species of disillusionment is fondness and humor, and no one can beat Trollope on that front. “He seems not to have invented them but to have found himself in their company,” wrote the critic John Bayley, adding that he “knows them as a wife was once said to know her husband, or a valet his master. And so Trollope enlists his readers in the tricky, ambiguous task of making moral sense of the scuffles of everyday life.Īlthough never celebrated for the beauty of his prose, Trollope has no rival as a creator of characters. We root for the low-church faction to fail because they’re self-serving and unkind while Mr.

Slope want to give it to a poor clergyman with 14 children, who obviously needs it more. Harding hopes to regain the wardenship, but Mrs. Harding to keep his position as warden, but it’s equally impossible not to see that the people who want to take it away from him have a point. The preceding novel in the series, The Warden, describes the scandal surrounding the decent old gentleman Septimus Harding, whose position running a charitable retirement home becomes the subject of a reform campaign. ( The Way We Live Now illustrates how he saw things at a later, less sanguine stage in his life.) Like Jane Austen, he understands human beings to be motivated by a balance of principle and self-interest and that too much of either is equally likely to lead to trouble.

The Trollope of Barchester Towers is about as worldly as a novelist can get without tipping over into outright cynicism.

The warden barchester towers