Barchester Towers was written by Anthony Trollope and was published in 1857. Trollope (1815-1882) was one of the most successful and prolific of all Victorian authors. Barchester Towers is the second (and best) of Trollope’s “Chronicles of Barsetshire.”

Barchester Towers is about the scheming of two rival groups of clergymen in the English cathedral town of Barchester: one, led by Archdeacon Grantly, and one, led by Bishop Dr. Proudie, his formidable wife Mrs. Proudie, and the bishop’s chaplain, Mr. Slope. Archdeacon Grantly is High Church, a followers of the old ways of the Anglican Church, while Dr. Proudie et al. are Low Church, favoring reform. After Mr. Slope preaches a sermon calling for the reformation of aspects of services, the war is on between Grantly and Proudie/Slope—a struggle which Grantly eventually wins.

In the meantime the position of warden of Hiram’s Hospital becomes open, and two men are considered for it: the Reverend Septimus Harding, who formerly held the post but resigned, and Mr. Quiverful, who is poor, with fourteen children to support, and is willing to perform new duties in the role of Warden, duties the Reverend Harding is hesitant to perform. Eventually Mr. Quiverful is given the position, with the blessings of Reverend Harding.

While this is going on the Stanhope family, who have spent years in Italy, return to Barchester. Dr. Stanhope’s eldest daughter, the disabled Signora Madeline Neroni, immediately quarrels with Mrs. Proudie and begins, in a leisurely way, to captivate and capture, spider- like, all the men of the district. “All the men” includes Mr. Slope, who becomes her pawn, and the Reverend Arabin, Dr. Grantly’s friend and the new parson of St. Ewold’s in Barsetshire. Reverend Arabin (who is High Church) and Mr. Slope also contend for the hand of Eleanor Bold, Reverend Harding’s widowed daughter—a hand Reverend Arabin eventually wins, thanks in part to Signora Neroni’s machinations.

The preceding summary doesn’t really do justice to Barchester Towers, which skillfully interweaves a number of plot lines and story arcs to accompany its satire. Barchester Towers, once described as not having enough plot, has more than enough of it, so that the novel almost feels short despite its length.

Barchester Towers is indeed a satire—of English society, of the “Young England” idealized feudalism movement, of the High Church-versus-Low Church struggle—but it is such a genial one that the modern reader can be forgiven for not seeing the satire. Trollope is so good at giving his characters three dimensions, of emphasizing that even the best of his characters has flaws and even the worst of his characters deserves charity and compassion, that modern readers may well see Barchester Towers purely as a mimetic, realistic novel, along the lines of Middlemarch. Certainly Trollope’s contemporaries admired him as a realist, with Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) claiming that Trollope’s novels were “just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”¹

But satire Barchester Towers is, and some of the best satire of the century short of Jane Austen (see Emma, Pride and Prejudice). (Some prefer to put the novel into the comic category, but it seems clear to me that it is more accurately called a satire.) Henry James called Trollope “safe” and criticized him on the grounds that “he never played with a subject, never juggled with the sympathies or the credulity of his reader, was never in the least paradoxical or mystifying”² — which is a peculiarly wrongheaded critical position to assume. As James Kincaid points out, Barchester Towers “quietly [subverted] many of the major tenets of traditional comedy,”³ from its distrust of the young and admiration for the aged to its contempt for social groups en masse to the way in which the novel’s “moral approval is directly proportionate to the decrease of power”⁴ of characters.

One of Barchester Towers’ (admittedly minor) flaws is that the satire is predominant for roughly the first two hundred pages. Trollope is so busy shotgunblasting satire in every direction that his characters, real though they are, do not engage the readers’ emotions. But if the modern reader sticks with Trollope and continues reading, to reach the Quiverful sections, that reader will find his or her sympathies suddenly engaged. Barchester Towers makes an almost abrupt change, from satire to drama, leaving the reader—not gasping, exactly—but suddenly hooked and flying across the pages, wanting to know what happens next.

Some readers find Trollope’s authorial choices interfere with the reading experience, specifically, Trollope’s decision to make his narrator intrusive and omniscient, a clear example of the influence of Thackeray (Vanity Fair) (and before him Henry Fielding) on Trollope. Trollope’s deployment of the narrator, and the narrator’s tendency to reveal the endings of story arcs long before the text reaches them, can be off-putting to the reader, as it certainly was to Trollope’s contemporaries. But Trollope uses his intrusive narrator voice more during the satire section of Barchester Towers than during the dramatic section, so that the intrusive narrator gradually becomes less distracting as the novel progresses.

A third flaw in the novel, and perhaps the most serious one as far as modern readers are concerned, is Trollope’s assumption that all readers will be as familiar with the inner doings of the Anglican Church and religion as his contemporary readers were. (This is slightly unfair, as obviously Trollope was writing for his contemporaries rather than for posterity.) “Personal chaplain,” prebendaries, deaconries—these are all details which the modern reader, in all likelihood, is unacquainted with. Trollope’s creation of Barsetshire is detailed and living—Barsetshire is as alive in its way as Austen’s Highbury (see Emma)— but the amount of detail can be off- putting for modern readers, who will need to have an encyclopedia (or a good set of annotations) on hand to comprehend the intricacies of the Anglican Church. Barsetshire is wonderfully vivid, but slightly alien as well, and this alienness can pose a barrier to modern readers.

These flaws are minor in comparison to the successes of the novel. Barchester Towers is the second of the six “Barsetshire Chronicles” series, but the reader does not need to have read the preceding novel, The Warden, to enjoy Barchester Towers; Trollope does such a splendid job of creating his world that the reader is barely ever reminded that Trollope is revisiting Barchester rather than creating it anew. Barchester Towers, though not a bestseller, was met with great critical acclaim on publication—understandably.

Barchester Towers has a multitude of virtues. Although a satire, its humor and indeed its general tenor are gentle, and although it is realist enough for any modern reader Trollope handles the realism gently, without the fury of a Dickens, much less the coarseness of a Naturalist. Trollope’s characters are mocked—note, for example, the comically inflated rhetoric that he uses to describe Mrs. Proudie or the conflicts between the clerics—but always with affection. Indeed, Trollope even describes the characters’ flaws in a compassionate way:

All his good characters have faults, but all his bad characters have their good points. Most of the time when a writer does this with his characters, he is excusing bad characters for doing, thinking, or being bad; he is excusing the badness. With Trollope, the impression is more that of a man trying to bring out the best in sinful people, without moral confusion. A good writer, I have heard it said, is one that can show you how to love the unlovable. Trollope has this gift—has it perhaps in greater quantities than any other author I’ve read. Even Mr. Slope is worthy of charity.

This particular book, even more so than The Warden, is a wonderful book about just that—charity, the Christian love of the unlovable. This kind of love is the kind of love which Christ said would be the hallmark of the true Church (John 13:35). This book, about divisive church politics in a town full of clergymen, records the triumph of charity over differences of opinion, doctrine, and temperament—as well as documenting the dangers that arise from a lack of charity.⁵

Interestingly, Barchester Towers is a satire which ultimately has a conservative bent. Satirists and ironists are generally opposed to those in power—traditionally calling for liberal politics. But Barchester Towers, with its High Church leanings (Archbishop Grantly is notably the good guy in the Grantly-Proudie/Slope fight, and Slope is emphatically the bad guy), its traditional views of women (some might say misogynistic views, at least those voiced by the narrator), and its prudish sexual politics, is certainly a conservative work. But Trollope is too skilled a writer to let his politics guide his work, rather than flavor it; Trollope is interested in portraying the futility of human strivings, in carefully deploying irony, and in being a realist of the modern day, unlike Dickens and Thackeray. In fact, Barchester Towers, with its concerns about the role of religion, the Anglican Church, and the Catholic Church in modern England, is actually a “Condition of England” novel. During the 1840s English philosophers and legislators were forced to deal with the byproducts of the 18th century’s economic growth. These problems, which included gross urban overpopulation, insufficient housing, bad sanitation, and high levels of unemployment, were described by the writer Thomas Carlyle as “the Condition of England.” Writers from Benjamin Disraeli to Mrs. Gaskell wrote novels, variously called “Condition of England novels,” “industrial fiction,” and “social problem novels,” which examined the changes in the social classes and social structure and the current state of England. Barchester Towers focuses on the changes which modernity was forcing on the Anglican Church.

Barchester Towers is a gentle satire that rewards readers with constant quiet good humor and vividly-drawn characters. Its plot is complicated but is nicely resolved. It well deserves the designation “classic.”

Print: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008.

For Further Research

James R. Kincaid. “Barchester Towers and the Nature of Conservative Comedy.” ELH v37n4 (Dec. 1970).

Catherine E. Moore. “Barchester Towers.” Masterplots Fourth Edition (Dec. 2010).

John Sutherland. “Introduction.” Barchester Towers (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).

Annalise K. Walker. “On Trollope’s Barchester Series.” http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/trollope/walker1.html.

¹ Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, North American Review CCLXXIV (September 1879): 204.

² Henry James, Partial Portraits (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 104.

³ James R. Kincaid, “Barchester Towers and the Nature of Conservative Comedy.” ELH v37n4 (Dec. 1970): 595-596

⁴ Kincaid, "Barchester Towers," 596.

⁵ alas, I attributed this quote to the the wrong author--I don't know who said this originally, although it wasn't me