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The Warden (Wordsworth Classics)
by: Anthony Trollope |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 741 EAN: 9781853260872 Edition: New Ed ISBN: 1853260878 Label: Wordsworth Editions Ltd Manufacturer: Wordsworth Editions Ltd Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 264 Publication Date: 1994-12 Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd Studio: Wordsworth Editions Ltd
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  - A prescient Victorian novelAnthony Trollope's novel _The Warden_, though one-hundred and fifty years old this year, is just as readable and just a politically relevent today as it was in Victorian England. Mr. Trolllope offers a wonderful perspective on the fallout that occurs in highly polarized political settings - in this case Victorian England. Septimus Harding is a middle-aged Anglican cleric who earns 800 pounds a year looking after and caring for the residents of an almshouse. His patients are elderly and disabled peasants; the almshouse the result of the will of one John Hiram, four-hundred years dead, who declared that his land in Barsetshire, the couny where the novel is set, should be rented out and the revenue used to fund a hospital for ailing tradesmen, and that each tradesman should receive a small allowance. Four hundred years later, the value, and the rents on the land have increased four fold, and along with the increase in revenue, the salaries of the warden, who looks after the patients, and the steward, who cares for the buildings, have increased, but the allowances for the patients have not. Mr. Harding has a young friend, Mr. Bold, a man so bent on reform that he would reform his own household, given the chance, even if nothing were wrong with it. Mr. Bold gets his hands on old Hiram's will,a dn here the action begins. Mr. Bold and his attorney come to the conclusion that the Barchester cathedral, the executer of Hiram's will, has not been following the will properly, by not increasing the allowances of the patients of the hospital, and over-inflating the salaries of the warden and the steward. He brings a law-suit against the warden and the steward. But there are other problems brewing in Barchester. Dr. Grantly, the archdeacon of the church and Mr. HArdings son in law, is a staunch defender of the rights of sthe Church of England to conduct business as it sees fit, and therefore stands in direct opposition to the reforms of Mr. Bold. Mr. Bold is in love with Mr.Harding's unmarried daughter, Eleanor, and this brings him trouble when he files a lawsuit against her father. And Mr. Harding is beginning to doubt whether or not he deserves his salary, which is worrying to both Mr. Bold, because with out Mr. Harding he has no case against the church, and Dr. Grantly, who sees Mr. Harding's questioning of the validiity of his salary as threatening to the church. Spetimus Harding is a truly honest, valiant man in the middle of a war of ideology. Add that to Trollope's scathing reviews of the press (and a writer he calls Mr. Popular Sentiment, a satirization of Charles Dickens) and you have a tale that is just as relevent in America in 2005 as it was in England in 1855. Rating: - You're In For A TreatThis is the first in Trollope's Barchester series, and it is a must read. It's a nineteenth century Bonfire of the Vanities, in which almost any course of action other than that which the leading characters select would lead to an amicable solution. Chapter by chapter, Reverend Harding's guilt over his lucrative clerical sinecure builds, like a tightly wound spring. And ironically, Rev. Harding and Mr. Bold, his adversary, and future son-in-law, are not actually opposed on the merits of the case, yet events sweep them toward confrontation. The misunderstandings and missed opportunities are of epic proportions, and the tension builds throughout the story to its bitter and hopeless conclusion. In the end, hardly anyone escapes unscathed, and the reader is thoroughly exhausted. Rating: - No doom and gloom in this Victorian novel. Although its principal character, Mr Harding, the Warden of Barchester, suffers abject misery and extreme anxiety during most of this novel, the reader of "The Warden" will enjoy one of the happiest, richest and warmest experiences to be gained from the whole of English Literature. Untypically short, yet three years in the making, "The Warden" has a simple structure that Trollope utlized again and again. Take a moral dilemma of some sort, one that provides endless pros and cons to be argued, one that possibly takes many hundreds of pages to resolve, explore its social, political and financial implications, and show how it touches the lives of characters not too unlike ourselves. The dilemma here concerns the income of Septimus Harding, the Warden of Barchester. Under the terms of a will, dated 1434, twelve superannuated woolcarders were to be accommodated in an almshouse, receiving one shilling and fourpence per day. A residence was to be provided for a warden who was to receive the income from the remainder of the testator's property. Now, more than 400 years later, there seems to be an imbalance in these depositions. The almshouse inmates continue to receive only one shilling and fourpence, while the warden, living on the proceeds of some valuable properties, receives eight hundred pounds annually and the use of the warden's house. The dilemma faces a young Barchester surgeon, John Bold. If he allows the imbalance to continue, the wishes of the original benefactor, he believes, are being nullified. If he succeeds in having the warden's comfortable living discontinued, he will lose forever the possibility of making the warden's daughter his wife. And so the issue is taken up, argued and publicized. As Anthony Trollope reveals in his autobiography, this tiny novel was successful enough (it earned him twenty pounds) to lead him to consider writing more of the same, and he soon began "Barchester Towers". English actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne, brilliant as Archdeacon Grantly in a memorable TV adaptation of this novel, revisits Trollope's Barchester to provide a robust, opulent, complete and unabridged reading that no Trollope enthusiast should miss hearing. Rating: - "No good is unalloyed..."Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855) raises interesting ethical questions concerning questions of right and wrong, and ideas of fairness. The novel is grounded in conflicting interpretations of how funds earmarked for the poor from a wealthy man's four hundred year old will should be spent. The novel focuses on Reverend Septimus Harding, the good natured Warden of Hiram Hospital, who is at the center of the controversy. The plot of Trollope's novel chronicles Mr. Harding's internal struggles with public accusations of malfeasance. As Warden of Hiram's Hospital, Mr. Harding has been charged with overseeing the welfare and spiritual well-being of twelve aged bedesmen-poor elderly men supported by John Hiram's trust. In performing his duties towards the bedesmen, Mr. Harding's efforts are universally regarded as beyond reproach; nevertheless, questions arise as to whether the amount of money Mr. Harding receives as Warden, eight hundred pounds annually, contradicts the original intention of John Hiram's 1434 will to help the poor. John Hiram, a wealthy magnate of the Barchester wool industry, had stipulated in his 1434 will that an almshouse be created to take care of twelve aged men who had worked as cardsmen in the wool trade. The will directed that funding for the almshouse come from rent from Hiram's lands to be overseen by the Anglican Church. From 1434 to the mid-nineteenth-century-the present of the novel-the amount of money raised for the rent of these lands has increased considerably. When the novel begins, most of this extra money has been given to the Warden himself. Trollope's The Warden raises this basic question: how should the extra proceeds from the rent be distributed? Throughout the novel various interests-the popular press, the church, and legal authorities-weigh in on this question, each with its own unique point of view and stake in the matter. This novel offers no easy answers and instead dwells on the ambiguity of moral issues. In chapter 15, the narrator (and by extension Trollope) hints at this perspective: "in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly." The Warden is definitely worthwhile read. It is not as funny as Barchester Towers, which made me laugh out loud, but it is as sophisticated and subtle. This would be an interesting novel to complement a college course on ethical issues. Rating:  - Unfulfilled expectationsThis book was difficult to read as it contains references to the religious life of the Anglican church in Victorian Ebgland, events and politics quite unfamiliar to the American reader. The main plot about the Rev. Harding is interesting and engaging. But while the story in itself is worthwhile Trollope presents too many rabbit trails. |
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