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Title: Barchester Towers
ISBN: 0451518160
Author:
Anthony Trollope
Publicate Date: 1983-09-06
Publish: 1983-09-06
List Price: $3.50
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest Used Price: $1.28
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1: An overlooked gem
Anthony Trollope, like Miniver Cheevy, was born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Nineteenth century England produced some of the greatest novelists the world has ever known--Dickens, Austin, the Bronte sisters, Hardy, etc. In this company Trollope has been somewhat lost and that is unfortunate. His books are interesting and filled with humor, pathos and the stuff of life. They are also literate (Trollope was especially versed in the Greeks and Shakespeare), full of good humor and provide lessons for life. It is clear from the limited number of reviews on Amazon.com that Trollope is not widely read. It is equally clear from the mostly positive results that he is a good writer who should get more attention.
Barchester Towers is the second of the six books in the Barsetshire series. The books run in historical sequence but can be read independently. The first in the series, The Warden, tells of Mr. Harding and his younger daughter, Eleanor. Rev. Harding is forced to resign as the warden (a kind of manager/minister) of a hospital for elderly men because the salary is too high. He is exposed by John Bold, a reformer, and a local newspaper. But Harding is a good man and he accepts the situation gracefully; his daughter, in fact, marries Bold who then dies but leaves his widow well off financially and with a baby boy.
Barchester Towers picks up the story at that point and switches the focus to another group of largely religious individuals. It should be noted that the novel is not about religion as much as it is about power. On the other hand it would be a good idea to know something about the Church of England, such as what the various religious titles represent (archdeacon, dean, vicar, prebendary, etc.), as well as the attitude of the two political parties (Whigs and Tories) toward religion.
At the start of the novel the bishop of Barchester dies and a new bishop, Dr.Proudie, is appointed in his place. Proudie is a short, indecisive man who is dominated by his wife. He picks Obadiah Slope as his second in command. Slope is reminiscent of Dickens' sly, scheming Uriah Heep. His objective is to be the de facto bishop, a position that Mrs. Proudie aspires to in her own way as well. Set against this trio are the local Barchester clergy led by Archdeacon Grantly. The recently deceased bishop was the archdeacon's father and the son hoped to succeed to the office. The ambitious Grantly takes an instant dislike to the officious Mr. Slope and their rivalry is one of the main focuses of the book
A number of other characters and sub-plots suffuse the novel. The Stanhope family--mother, father, two daughters and son, soon arrive on the scene. This group includes Madeline, a beautiful but physically impaired young woman who toys with men's affections and Bertie, a shiftless but essentially decent young man. Also joining the cast is the Rev. Mr. Arabin, brought in by the archdeacon to help combat Mr. Slope. The other major plot is the efforts of three men to secure the hand of the widow Eleanor Bold. Slope is one schemer who is primarily intent on securing her money. Bertie Stanhope, the irresponsible prodigal son in the Stanhope family is also encouraged to marry her for her fortune. Finally there is Mr. Arabin, a decent man, but inexperienced in matters of love. Early in the book (page 112) Trollope enters the story to reassure the reader that "It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope." This tactic, engaged in by other British writers (Fielding for example) can be irritating, but Trollope does it in a good humored way.
The central power struggle involves who shall be appointed to the Warder position which has now been restructured. The archdeacon pulls for Mr. Harding to be reappointed, while Mrs. Proudie pumps for the Rev. Mr. Quiverful who has a wife and 14 children to look after and needs the income the job will provide. Mr. Slope slides between the two contenders, depending on how he sees his advantage. When another position opens up, that of Dean, the stakes get even higher.
The novel reaches a climax at a party given by an elderly matron, Miss Thorne. Eleanor's two ill suited suitors make their pitch, Trollope's caution to the reader comes true, and the novel proceeds to a happy ending for almost everyone.
A final comment. I read a news report recently that president-elect Obama will stop reading novels and spend more time in the gym because of what he sees as the increased demands on his new job. That is, in my view, a big mistake. Novels give us insights into how to live our own lives and we are all better off for reading them. For example in Barchester Towers there is a scene between Archdeacon Grantly and Mr. Williams in which Mr. Williams has received a letter from Mr. Slope for his daughter. Both men object to Slope both as an individual and especially as a suitor for Eleanor. The archdeacon gets very angry and says that Eleanor has disgraced him and that if she marries Slope he will not have anything further to do with her. Mr. Williams, on the other hand, while equally distressed at the prospects of his daughter marrying Slope, says that he will accept that choice and continue his relationship with her. Here we have a clear difference in character. The archdeacon will only have friendship with people who agree with his views--much as George Bush's comment after 9/11, "you are with us or you are against us." But we can't live in a world like that. We have to live as Mr. Williams suggests, by accepting that other people can have different views from our own. So lets hope Obama spends less time on the treadmill and more time on Trollope!
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2: The Fog of Love; The Fog of War
In Barchester Towers you have the feeling of being in a command center during a war; everyone is in uniform; archdeacons are common, and bishops, far from rare. It is an exceedingly rare perspective of the Church of England's clerical politics, and Trollope brings it to life with Giotto-like realism. Trollope's writing is tension-filled and the protagonists' and antagonists' characters are depicted in black and white, just as their clerical garments would suggest. Barchester Towers, is a love story from start to finish, and if the reader finds the sequence of compound misunderstandings which form the basis of the plot's tension to be incredible in the extreme, Trollope would defend it as the "fog of war," which creates confusion on any battlefield.
The detail with which Trollope portrays his characters is crystal clear, yet economical: "He knows how to say a soft word in the proper place; he knows how to adapt his flattery to the ears of his hearers; he knows the wiles of the serpent, and he uses them." "Why she had chosen Paulo Neroni, a man of no birth and no property, a mere captain in the pope's guard, one who had come up to Milan either simply as an adventurer or else as a spy, a man of harsh temper and oily manners, mean in figure, swarthy in face, and so false in words as to be hourly detected, need not now be told." But it is to Mr. Slope that Trollope devotes particular attention: "If it should turn out to be really the fact that Mrs. Bold had twelve hundred a year at her own disposal, Mr. Slope would rather look upon it as a duty which he owed his religion to make himself the master of the wife and the money; as a duty too, in which some amount of self-sacrifice would be necessary." And of Mr. Harding: "He had that nice appreciation of the feelings of others which belongs of right exclusively to women." And you have to love Trollope's baptism of his characters with names which serve as labels: Farmer Subsoil, Rev. Quiverful, Dr. Fillgrave, Mrs. Lookaloft, Miss Thorne, Mr. Plomacy.
Trollope's craft is apparent throughout: "Olivia Proudie, however, was a girl of spirit; she had the blood of two peers in her veins, and, better still, she had another lover on her books; so Mr. Slope sighed in vain; and the pair soon found it convenient to establish a mutual bond of inveterate hatred." And in describing the henpecked Bishop, "If ever he thought of freedom, he did so as men think of the millennium, as of a good time which may be coming, but which nobody expects to come in their day." And our protagonist: "Mrs. Bold would have given the world not to blush, but her blood was not at her own command."
Trollope's 1857 British usage takes some acclimation, as with his liberal use of compound negatives: "...not unnecessary...quite impossible that he should now deny his love...he could not but know...he was not the last person to hear of it...her state, nevertheless, was not to be pitied...I doubt very much he won't lose his gown." Trollope's liberal sprinkling of Latin and French phrases, as with "nil admirari" and "couleur de rose," are evidence of Trollope's trust in the reader's cultural qualifications. Comic relief is less liberally sprinkled, but it is welcome when it breaks the tension, as when Mrs. Lookaloft crashes the area of Miss Thorne's lawn party reserved for the "quality," which she so ardently strove to emulate.
A significant part of Trollope's craft is also comprised of befriending the reader and confiding in us regularly: "Will anyone blame my heroine for this?" Or "You, O reader, and I, should be angry with Eleanor..." Or "The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! Their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards."
Barchester Towers is a masterpiece of fantasy. Trollope here rivals Austen, some forty years his senior, as a creator of misunderstood and pitiably human characters whose stars we ardently pray will cross. Unlike Austen, however, Trollope gives us the basest and vilest of antagonists, whose downfall we demand. And you, O reader, shall not be disappointed.
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3: "The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums."
(4.5 stars) Anthony Trollope does, indeed, fill the ending of this delightful social satire with all the "sweetmeats" any reader could desire. Between the introduction and conclusion are so many moments of wry humor, genuine thoughtfulness, and satisfying come-uppances that the extra sweetness at the end is actually a bonus. In this second of the Chronicles of Barsetshire, published in 1857, Trollope continues the story of Mr. Septimus Harding, the gentle and unambitious clergyman who, in The Warden (1855), resigned his appointment as warden of Hiram's Hospital for the poor and became the vicar of a small church, living frugally above a chemist's shop. His daughter Eleanor, who married reformer John Bolt at the end of The Warden, is now a widow with a small son--and considerable inheritance.
Ecclesiastical controversies, many of them linked to the desire for power within the small world of the church hierarchy, still exist in Barchester, and the arrival of Mr. Slope, as chaplain to Bishop Proudie, signals fireworks. Slope, one of Trollope's most unforgettable characters, is one of the slimiest, most sycophantic, and manipulative clergyman ever to appear in English literature, and before long, he is controlling the bishop, clashing with the bishop's wife (who regards herself as co-bishop), using the unfilled wardenship of the hospital as a bargaining tool with Mr. Harding and Eleanor, alienating and even outfoxing Archdeacon Grantly, and seeking a wife with a large fortune.
Far more complex than The Warden, the novel has more fully developed characters acting from more realistic motivations. Victorian England, as we see it here, is a multileveled society which does not allow for much upward mobility, and the entrenched clergy regards itself as second only to the aristocracy. The human foibles, the back-biting, the selfishness, and the one-upsmanship which Trollope includes in his depiction of all levels of society are particularly ironic in the case of the godly churchmen, and the honest and straightforward Mr. Harding is a counterweight to them throughout the novel.
Several courtships and marriages are presented so unromantically here that it is difficult even to imagine the concept of sexuality, but the novel is witty and clever, and Trollope shows his continued development as a satirist. Not a writer of "sensation," like Wilkie Collins, or of social criticism, like Dickens, Trollope has his own quiet style, and his wry observations about his world may resonate with the present reader more than either of those other giants. n Mary Whipple
The Warden
Doctor Thorne (Barsetshire Novels)
Framley Parsonage
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4: Barchester Towers: The second in the delightful Barsetshire Novels by a Great Victorian Novelist brings hours of pleasure !
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) has earned his place in the pantheon of great English Victorian authors. His greatest novels are those in the
Barsetshire series dealing with the clergy and the Palliser novels concerned with politics focusing on the Palliser family.
The first novel in the Barsetshire series "The Warden"introduces us to the Rev. Septimus Harding and his charming daughters Eleanor and Susan. Harding gives up his supervision of Hiram's Hospital for elderly men as that novel concludes. His daughter Eleanor weds John Bolt the newspaperman who had criticized Harding for earning too much in a sincecure; his other daughter Susan is wed to Dr. Grantley the son of the Bishop of Barsetshire. "The Warden" introduces the characters in "Barchester Towers" which is a longer and more complicated novel.
In this novel the new Bishop has been chosen by the British government following the death of old Dr. Granley. He is Bishop Proudie the henpecked husband of one of literature's greatest shrews Mrs. Produie. The uxorious bishop must obey his dominant wife or face the consequences!
As the novel opens Dr. Grantley the scion of old Dr. Grantley is upset that he is not chosen to succeed his father as bishop. He is a member of the high church party in opposition to the evangelical wing of the Anglican church favored by the Proudies. It is time for clerical warfare to begin!
The oily chaplain to the new bishop is the Rev. Obadiah Slope who seeks advancement in the church but fights with Mrs. Proudie over who will have the wardenship of Hiram Hospital. He favors the restoration of Mr. Harding but Mrs Proudie wins out when the Rev. Quiverful, his wife and 14 children win the prize of the wardenship.
A love story is told as widow Eleanor Bold is courted by the odious Rev. Slope; Bertie Stanhope an impecunious and fatuous sculptor and the intellectual clergyman the Rev. Francis Arabin. Arabin is a favorite of the Grantley faction in the church feud with the Proudies.
The widow Neroni is Madeline, the daughter of the Rev. Stanhope, who is crippled but a bewitching temptress for all the men in the story. We also meet the Thornes who are an older brother and sister living in the country near St. Ewolds wherin is located Mr. Arabin's parish. They are hilarious!
The novel ends with the social, religious and romantic worlds in a state of calm salubrity. The novel was a bestseller in 1854 and is the bestselling and most humorous of all the Barsetshire novels. Anthony Trollope wrote about good men and women in a realistic, easy to read style which is enchanting 150 years after first being written.
I have read Barchester Towers several times and still enjoy this enchanting classic from the hand of a literary master.
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5: This edition is an adaptation
This edition is an adaptation, a fact that is *not* mentioned in the item record *at all*. I ordered it, and when if FINALLY came (6 months after I ordered it), I had to return it because I prefer the real edition of a book, not some dumbed-down "retold" version to go with the TV version of the story.
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