This may be one reason why Barchester Towers is that rarest of achievements – a topical novel on a contentious subject which from the first seems to have aroused amusement and affection rather than controversy. That it has continued to do so is in large measure due to the way Trollope managed to universalize his clerical subject. We can read Barchester Towers, and profitably, as a novel about the early-Victorian Church, but behind the battles in the cathedral close and the bishop’s palace there hovers a larger and more archetypal theme. It surfaces in the twelfth chapter, ‘Slope versus Harding’, where Mr Slope so gratuitously insults the ex-warden in the name of necessary and inevitable change: ‘“It is not only in Barchester that a new man is carrying out new measures, and carting away the useless rubbish of past centuries. The same thing is going on throughout the country…New men, Mr Harding, are now needed”’ (p. 99). Here, transposed into a minor key, is the grand subject which Coleridge found in the novels of Sir Walter Scott: ‘the contest between the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration of permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason – in short, the mighty instincts of progression and free agency, on the other’.8 The difference is that whereas in Scott’s fiction these ‘mighty instincts’ are usually allowed a qualified victory, in Barchester Towers they are thwarted. The enduring appeal of Trollope’s novel is that it recognizes the forces making for change in contemporary society, but stages a comic reversal in which the reader’s ‘desire and…admiration of permanence’ is subtly satisfied.
III
Some light is thrown on this aspect of the novel by considering the three-volume structure of the original edition, reprinted here for the first time. It can be seen that the threat of innovation is strongest in Volume I, as is the sense of Barsetshire (in Hutton’s words) as ‘a great web of which London is the centre.’ All seems bustle and controversy, with the telegram to Downing Street, the newspaper debate about the new bishop, the arrival of the metropolitan Proudies, and the ‘War’ which breaks out in this clerical backwater when Mr Slope preaches his calculatedly offensive sermon. The high point is the broad comedy of Mrs Proudie’s reception in Chapters 10 and 11, where the opposing factions come together and the she-bishop suffers her first reverse: the careering sofa which carries away her lace train, exposing the real woman beneath, is appropriately set in motion by Bertie Stanhope and contains the recumbent signora, symbolizing the comic havoc which this pair are to cause in Barchester. But it is only a temporary reverse and the remainder of the volume shows Mr Slope tightening his grip on the diocese. In Volume II a counter-movement is set up. Chapter 1 reveals in Mr Arabin a man as scrupulous and unworldly as Mr Slope is unscrupulous and worldly, a comparison underlined by the difference between Arabin’s quiet sermon at St Ewold’s in Chapter 4 and Slope’s performance in the cathedral in the first volume. There is also a significant movement away from Barchester into its rural hinterland, first to the country vicarages of Plumstead and St Ewold’s, and then to Ullathorne in Chapter 3, where the ultra-conservative Thornes are introduced as seemingly comical survivors of a dying world. Much of the action in this volume takes place in the country, at Puddingdale and Plumstead, while in Barchester Slope starts to overreach himself and is defeated by Mrs Proudie in the battle of the bishop’s bedroom in Chapter 13. Volume III completes the reversal of the novel’s initial premise that undesirable change is inevitable. The first eight chapters all take place at Ullathorne, and through the comic–feudal of the Ullathorne Sports we are asked to re-examine the Thornes and what they stand for. No longer simply absurd anachronisms, they are seen to represent the still living values of old Barsetshire and its ways: true courtesy, generous hospitality, a quaint but genuine paternalism, Their fête champêtre, balancing the bishop’s reception in Volume I, sees the signora – to our delight – complete the discomfiture of the newcomers begun in the earlier scene. Finally it is at Ullathorne, now established as the heartland of Barsetshire, that the awkward and not-so-young lovers are brought together by Miss Thorne. Childless themselves, the Thornes preside over the re-establishment of clerical tradition in the marriage between Mr Harding’s daughter and a new High Church dean. One should hot perhaps expect too symmetrical a shape from Trollope, but the organization of the three volumes does serve to highlight the process of comic reversal in the novel, the resurrection of the traditional values and kindly ways which had earlier been threatened with being carried off on Mr Slope’s ‘rubbish cart’ of history.
It could be said, however, that these values and this outcome have never been seriously threatened in Barchester Towers. At several points in the novel Trollope interrupts the narrative to reassure us that all will be well, as for example in the notorious passage towards the end of Volume I when the ‘gentle-hearted reader’ is told to be under no apprehension about the heroine’s fate: ‘It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope’ (p. 126). Such comments are of a piece with reminders that we are only reading a novel, with its ‘ordained’ elements of ‘a male and female angel, and a male and a female devil’ (p. 237). The final Chapter opens with the cynical reflection that ‘The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums’ (p. 495). Henry James found these ‘little slaps at credulity’, as he called such interruptions of the realistic illusion, ‘suicidal’ and ‘pernicious.’9 A modern reader familiar with Nabokov and Borges is likely to take a more charitable view, seeing them as evidence of a critical and self-conscious attitude to the conventions of the genre. Barchester Towers is a novel which offers the reader reassurance in the face of change; it is also a novel which knows that it is offering such reassurance and invites the reader’s complicity in the illusion. Like many other novels by Trollope, and indeed by other Victorian novelists, Barchester Towers can be read on two levels. There is the conventional story of the battle for the beautiful widow’s hand and fortune, with the good and the bad angels and the appropriate award of sweetmeats and sugar-plums in the final chapter; and there is another story, a more stationary study of character and situation, which has subtler satisfactions to offer. Indeed, Trollope hints at this way of reading his novel in the passage where he reveals that Eleanor is not to marry either Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope:
And what can be the worth of that solicitude which a peep into the third volume can utterly dissipate? What the value of those literary charms that are absolutely destroyed by their enjoyment?…Nay, take the third volume if you please – learn from the last pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there be any interest in it to lose. (p. 127)
It follows that the more interesting characters are those who are least dependent on the conventions of romantic plot-making. Eleanor is almost entirely subservient to those conventions and Trollope confesses as much in the obviously ironical opening to the Chapter ‘Baby Worship’ (Volume I, Chapter 16), or in his statement (p. 281) that all would have been well between the lovers at Plumstead if Eleanor ‘had…but heard the whole truth from Mr Arabin. But then where would have been my novel?’ Arabin is scarcely more developed in his role of bashful lover (the account of his spiritual struggles and worldly awakening in Volume II, Chapter 1 is a good deal more interesting, as we shall see). Slope is an effective villain and a splendid catalyst for some of the novel’s funnier scenes, but, if the truth be told, he remains a somewhat two-dimensional character. Certainly, as a study of an evangelical clergyman he cannot stand comparison with George Eliot’s Amos Barton and Edgar Tryan in the contemporaneous Scenes of Clerical life (1858). In Mrs Proudie, however, in Bertie and Madeline Stanhope, and above all in Archdeacon Grantly, more complex issues are raised.
IV
Prominent among these issues is worldliness. Barchester Towers explores and exploits a central incongruity in its clerical subj
ect: the Church teaches the truths of eternity but has to exist in the world of time, preaches a heavenly kingdom but must survive in an earthly one. Much of the fun in the novel comes from our perception of this incongruity in the behaviour of the characters, as the two clerical factions scheme for power. But whereas another novelist might see only hypocrisy in the discrepancy between the clergy’s high destiny and their human fallibility and worldliness, Trollope is not so categorical. The description of the archdeacon at the start of the novel, for example, caught between love for his dying father and eagerness for the bishopric, achieves a fine balance of sympathy, comedy and judgement which is never lost in the subsequent presentation of the character; and like the surprising defence of clerical ambition at the end of the Chapter – surprising because it challenges the reader’s own double standards in expecting clergymen to be different from other men – it opens a tolerant perspective on the archdeacon’s worldliness. Linked as it may be on one side to the hypocrisies of the Victorian Church, on the other it serves as a rallying-point for certain of the decencies and courtesies which make for the worth of Barsetshire. The archdeacon is generous, hospitable and a gentleman; he can afford to be, as the novel makes plain, but nonetheless these are by no means insignificant attributes to Trollope, and they go to provide some at least of the standards by which the newcomers are judged.
The offence of Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope is not so much their Low Church theology as their bad manners, in first spurning the courtesy of the archdeacon and Mr Harding when they make their visit to the palace in the fifth chapter, and then abusing the hospitality of the dean and Chapter with a sermon which deliberately insults cherished cathedral practices. Mr Harding, who is the touchstone of true courtesy in the novel, puts the matter in what is for Trollope the essential perspective: ‘“It can hardly be the duty of a young man rudely to assail the religious convictions of his elders in the church. Courtesy should have kept him silent, even if neither charity nor modesty could do so.”’ And when Eleanor remarks that ‘the commands of his heavenly Master’ might have a higher priority for Mr Slope, Mr Harding replies:
‘Believe me, my child, that Christian ministers are never called on by God’s word to insult the convictions, or even the prejudices of their brethren; and that religion is at any rate not less susceptible of urbane and courteous conduct among men, than any other study which men may take up.’ (p. 60)
This is admittedly a rather limited view of religion; it smacks a little of what the Tractarian Hurrell Fraude called the ‘gentleman heresy’, the tendency of the Anglican Church to value urbanity more than holiness. But there is no evidence that Trollope saw it as a limitation, at least at this stage in his career. In so far as he has a religious position in Barchester Towers, it could be summed up in the words of an urbane clergyman of the previous generation, Sydney Smith: ‘The longer we live, the more we are convinced of the justice of the old saying, that an ounce of mother wit is worth a pound of clergy; that discretion, gentle manners, common sense, and good nature, are, in men of high ecclesiastical station, of far greater importance than the greatest skill in discriminating between sublapsarian and supralapsarian doctrines.’10
The Proudie party’s offence against ‘discretion, gentle manners…and good nature’ is made worse by their offence against the usual hierarchy: Mrs Proudie has usurped her husband’s episcopal throne. The Grantly faction can cope with discourtesy but petticoat government hits them where they are weakest. As many critics have pointed out, the ostensibly male-dominated clerical world of Barchester is in fact ruled by women. Mrs Proudie runs the bishop, as Charlotte Stanhope does her father, Mrs Quiverful her husband, Miss Thorne her brother, and even, in a suitably discreet way, Mrs Grantly the archdeacon. In this world of inverted authority the imposing archdeacon is comically powerless, while Mr Slope, ‘powerful only over the female breast’ (p. 49), is in his element. He is a dangerous figure in petticoat-governed Barchester because he is untouched by the fear and incomprehension of women which afflict the archdeacon and Mr Arabin. Their groundless suspicions of Eleanor, which breathe some dramatic life into the otherwise rather tedious romantic plot, serve to indicate how little they understand her. Mr Slope, on the other hand, seems to be privy to the sources of female power at the palace; his influence with Mrs Proudie clearly has a sexual element, although in the tactful manner of the Victorian novelist this is never stated, only implied in her obsessive jealousy of the signora.
It is here that the signora has a crucial part to play in the novel. Ostensibly the weakest and most vulnerable of women, her resort to the sofa almost a parody of retiring Victorian womanhood, Madeline Stanhope proves to be the most powerful of all the powerful women in the novel. Her combination of sexuality and wit is lethal, and as with the archdeacon’s worldliness, a certain ambiguity in the reader’s response to her conduct seems inevitable. She is heartless, cynical and unprincipled, but then, as the narrator rather plaintively asks, ‘Is it not a pity that people who are bright and clever should so often be exceedingly improper? and that those who are never improper should so often be dull and heavy?’ (p. 308). It must be a very dull reader of Barchester Towers who cannot forgive much to the character who causes such splendid havoc at Mrs Proudie’s reception, or outstares the Countess De Courcy at Ullathorne. Besides, if the signora is unconventional in her vices, her virtues are unconventional too. She is refreshingly indifferent to rank, and the effect of her impropriety is nearly always to bring out the truth hidden beneath the reticent social surface – the naked appetites of lust and ambition in Slope, the secret hunger for the good things of life in Arabin. It is easy to forget, also, how much the havoc she brings serves the cause of old Barsetshire. In terms of the Saxon-Norman antithesis which Trollope took from Scott’s Ivanhoe and made into a comic mythology of change at the Ullathorne Sports, it is the immobile signora who is the true Saxon champion in the social lists, unhorsing the rude Norman invader De Courcy:
The countess, who since her countess-ship commenced had been accustomed to see all eyes, not royal, ducal, or marquesal, fall before her own, paused as she went on, raised her eyebrows, and stared even harder than before. But she had now to do with one who cared little for countesses. It was, one may say, impossible for mortal man or woman to abash Madeline Neroni. She opened her large, bright, lustrous eyes wider and wider, till she seemed to be all eyes…The Countess De Courcy, In spite of her thirty centuries and De Courcy Castle and the fact that Lord De Courcy was grand master of the ponies to the Prince of Wales, had not a chance with her. At first the little circlet of gold wavered in the countess’s hand, then the hand shook, then the circlet fell, the countess’s head tossed itself into the air, and the countess’s feet shambled out to the lawn. (p. 353)
When Lady De Courcy then joins Mrs Proudie on the lawn the political alignment of ‘Norman’ invaders is plain, and the ‘Saxon’ triumph complete, for the time being at least.
The same is true of Bertie Stanhope’s effect in the novel. He brings to Barchester a spirit of well-bred anarchy which is delightfully subversive of the prickly dignities of the new order. When he asks the bishop, ‘“Is there much to do here, at Barchester?’” (p. 83), or promises on his knees to ‘“fly to the looms of the fairies”’ (p. 85) to repair Mrs Proudie’s ruined dress, the blend of urbanity and bohemianism (the soft glossy beard, the sky-blue suit) is devastatingly comic Again, as with the signora, one can overlook as one laughs the extent to which Bertie’s conduct in this scene is a victory, in its own way, for the social panache and freedom from convention of the old high and dry party. The new Low Church order is unlikely to allow such eccentricity to flourish, and the High Churchmen are too entrenched in their political position to see the wisdom in Bertie’s suggestion that they might ‘“take a lesson from Germany”’ (p. 90). Fifteen years later a similar point will be made more soberly in George Eliot’s Middlemarch by another bohemian outsider, Will Ladislaw, when he reveals that Mr Casaubon’s ignorance of German schola
rship has rendered his ‘Key to All Mythologies’ redundant. But this prophetic note is lost in the general outrage at Bertie’s impertinence: ‘There was no answering this. Dignified clergymen of sixty years of age could not condescend to discuss such a matter with a young man with such clothes and such a beard’ (p. 90).
It is scenes and characters like these which make Barchester Towers the great comic novel it is – that, and the author’s bias towards the comfort that lies in recurrence, as opposed to the tragic stress on the finality of loss and the need for stoicism in the face of it. ‘How seldom does such grief endure!’, Trollope observes of Eleanor’s widowhood, ‘how blessed is the goodness which forbids it to do so!’ (p. 14). Grief passes, stoicism is unnatural, men and women must not make excessive demands on their limited capacities for renunciation and self-denial. ‘Not being favourites with the tragic muse’ (p. 271), Trollope teaches the truths of a comic accommodation to the world as it is. The character who more than any other has to learn these truths is Mr Arabin. He is not otherwise a particularly interesting creation, but the account of his spiritual and emotional crisis in the first Chapter of Volume II is one of the finest things in the novel. A man who had aspired in early manhood to a stoical apostleship, he now finds himself at the age of forty sighing for the worldly comforts he had once so easily spurned:
Not for wealth, in its vulgar sense, had he ever sighed; not for the enjoyment of rich things, had he ever longed; but for the allotted share of worldly bliss, which a wife, and children, and happy home could give him, for that usual amount of comfort which he had ventured to reject as unnecessary for him, he did now feel that he would have been wiser to have searched, (p. 177)
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