5 Reasons Why You Should Read "The Warden"?

Anthony Trollope is one of those names that serious readers know, but which many have never read. His books are classics—receiving that black and orange Penguins Classics treatment and so forth—but for many readers they smack of a certain Victorian stiffness that can make them unappealing at first glance (Not for all readers, of course) despite the fact that the man literally died because he laughed too hard. Yet here we are reading The Warden on the show. Why did we choose it? Here’s Sean Johnson, an avowed Trollopite (Trollope-head?), to explain.

---

The face of a man who died of the giggles

---

5. The Warden is “important.” Complex narrative voice, realism, and tight plotting: to read Trollope is to watch the novel (as a form) passing (gracefully) out of its awkward teenage years.

4. It’s short. If you’re already behind on your yearly reading goals, The Warden is a quick but substantive novel to catch you up. (This also makes it an ideal gateway to the more–ahem–prolific Victorians.)

3. It’s a tale as old as sin. The novel wrestles with the perennial problem of human corruption hindering the mission of noble institutions, and the tendency of journalistic media to dehumanize perfectly human crises.

2. It’s old. The Warden is more than one hundred years old and people still talk about it. If this were your only metric for selecting a book, you would rarely read a stinker.

1. Oscar Wilde notoriously quipped that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” I can’t be sure which of the lines in the emotional climax to Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop pushed Wilde over the edge, but for me it has to be “So shall we know the angels in their majesty, after death.” The scene has been referred to elsewhere as “the apotheosis of sentimentality.” In his (and my) best moments, Dickens can rend my heart and fill it with the milk of human kindness, but Wilde’s jibe touches his equal and opposite ability to turn me into an unwilling misanthrope. It is in those latter moments I need Anthony Trollope most.

   Trollope is the anti-Dickens, and not by accident. Superficially, he thought little of the serialization method Dickens lived on and instead brought out The Warden all at once in a single volume. More fundamentally, he criticized Dickens’ tendency to flatten moral and emotional complexities for the sake of commercial appeal. The Warden’s “Mr. Popular-Sentiment” is a (very) thinly-veiled sendup of Dickens, who tends to divide the world into snow-white righteousness and utter evil—the glowing goodness of Mr. Brownlow or the durable darkness of Fagin and Bill Sikes, with very little gray in between.

   
   Consummately even-handed, Trollope happily praises Dickens’ major achievement: his minor characters. “They walk and talk like men and women, and live among our friends a rattling, lively life.” His triumph is in taking his rival’s well-drawn minor characters and populating an entire story with them. So doing, he anticipates G. K. Chesterton’s argument that in the modern age not only the vices run wild but the virtues also. “Isolated from each other,” they wander errantly and “do more terrible damage.” The true-to-life characters of Trollope’s Barchester and Barsetshire enact the danger of isolated virtue in a way Dickens’ heroes and heroines cannot. Both men share an abiding concern for England and the English soul, but where Dickens judges their health by the number of souls who possess all the virtues or none, Trollope offers the more provoking picture of what evils a decent man can inflict upon his neighbor if he pursues truth, or pity, or justice, or humility apart from its fellows.

   
   Why Trollope, why The Warden? Because he writes a novel fantastic enough to take me out of my life, but real enough to make me a better man when I return. Trollope has me grinning at every turn, but as the everyday tragedies unfold for characters like the Warden Harding, I never have to stifle a laugh.

   ---