clew's reviews: a book log

The Warden, Anthony Trollope

Every time I read this, I'm surprised that no-one in The Warden proposes to extend Hiram's bequest to more of the poor of Barchester.

The plot revolves around a medieval bequest, leaving land and the income from it to support twelve poor old men, two nice buildings for them, and one clergyman in charge. In the succeeding centuries the town has grown, and the land is now providing urban rents, not cow-pasturage. The increased profit has all been absorbed by the clerical position, which is now somewhere between very comfortable and a luxurious sinecure. (Henry George's motives become clear.) Several scandals of the kind were current in the day, sometimes involving startling wealth paid to a clergyman who didn't do any of the work of his cure. Trollope leaves those cases to novelists of sentiment and sensation; the Warden of this novel is a mild, absentminded but inarguably good man, and the meat of the story—as I see it—is how the habits of Church and society have made it easy for a good and generous man to profit hugely without thinking about who profits less; and how less good and absentminded men stand behind his virtue as behind a scrim and defend their less loving behavior (and greater profits) in the name of his virtue as well as the Church's honor.

Trollope is more inclined to honor money and rank and tradition; I think he means it when he writes that no-one can walk through various calm and elegant gardens and not think it fitting that bishops should be rich.

Trollope accordingly has most of the indigents in the hospital fire up with the hope that they'll get a 'hundred pounds a-year' as their share of the flourishing bequest. I don't really see that twelve virtuous indigents deserve it less than one virtuous precentor, but their cupidity is clearly thought both comical and ungrateful in their time.

(In the next novel, Parliament amends the bequest to build a second hospital for twelve indigent old women, who get slightly less per day than the men do; and provides for a matron for the women's side, who gets £70 a-year; this halves the Warden's income to more than £400 a-year, not counting the value of his lovely house. Parliament had read the sentimental and sensational novels, one assumes, but wasn't radical about it.)

Project Gutenberg text #619