To Trollope-l
June 4, 1999
Re: The Warden and Barchester Towers: Introduction & Calendar
I don't know how many people on our list are aware that it was with Framley Parsonage that Trollope achieved his first thorough-going commercial success, and became a "name" to conjure with and a name which would sell novels. When he came to write the The Warden he had behind him two superlative novels, the second of which had sold very poorly, and the first of which had barely sold at all and been jeered at. They were not total flops: we can still dub what Trollope got through The Macdermots and The Kellys a "success d'estime" as they did bring his work to the attention of the good minds (he did get some high praise from a couple of reviewers). Trollope's name had appeared in the public papers of the period. He had then written two books which were dead in the water: La Vendée and The New Zealander, the latter did not get into print until the late 20th century. He had gone on to work hard on a travel book on Ireland, send a large manuscript to Murray only, after he demanded its return, to receive it back nine months later and to discover that it had not been read.
Undaunted, our man carried on. One of my favorite phrases by him in the early part of his An Autobiography is "I got used to it."
His next two books were The Warden and Barchester Towers. Though I think many people nowadays assume the first was a success, it was only in the French sense of "d'estime." It did not sell widely; the reviewers were at last respectful, even if they did not quite understand Trollope's use of an ironic dilemma where both of two choices are understandable and even morally and socially sound. Still here's what Trollope says of The Warden:
"The novel-reading world did not go mad about The Warden; but I soon felt that it had not failed as the others had failed. There were notices of it in the press, and I could discover that people around me knew that I had written a book. Mr Longman was complimentary, and after a while informed me that there would be profits to divide. At the end of 1855 I received a cheque for £9, 8s. 8d., which was the first money I had ever earned by literary work; -- that £20 which poor Mr Colburn had been made to pay [for La Vendéeafter Colburn published _The Kelly's_ and lost money] certainly never having been earned at all. At the end of 1856 I received another sum of £10,15s.1d. The pecuniary success was not great. Indeed, as regarded remuneration for the time, stone-breaking would have done better. A thousand copies were printed, of which, after a lapse of five or six years, about 300 had to be converted into another form, and sold as belonging to a cheap edition. In its original form The Warden never reached the essential honour of a second edition (Oxford An Autobiography, 1980 reprint ed Sadleir and Page, intro PDEdwards, p. 98).
In its original form. I am one of many people who see Barchester Towers as a kind of rewrite of The Warden in a more conventional format (3 volumes, several plots, various crises), done in high spirits, with Fielding partly in mind (as regards narrative technique and the comic fun). The high spirits are important: Trollope tells us 'In the writing of Barchester Towers I took great delight'. Barchester Towers was the book Trollope says was his first success: 'It was one of the novels which novel readers were called upon to read.' Trollope thought it could perhaps 'become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, and which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century' (p. 104). Here he was wrong: it has not only never fallen out of print, a library of editions exists, and it is today Trollope's best known book. It is the one you find in bookshops which carry English classic novels.
He had not been very respected by his publisher. The reader had actually said the novel would be acceptable if Trollope would turn it into a 2 volume book. Of this Trollope writes:
"I am at a loss to know how such a task could be performed. I could burn the MS., no doubt, and write another book on the same story; but how two words out of every six are to be withdrawn from a written novel, I cannot conceive"(p. 104)
Trollope rejected most of the minor strictures too. He had gotten an advance of £100 (the result of The Warden) and there were now 'moderate payments'. Also The Warden began to sell again, and Trollope computes his income from them as a pair. At the time of writing his An Autobiography (1875-76) he had received for the pair £727,11s.3d (p 109). However, even this did not lead to pecuniary success and selling power. Trollope tells us that this is more than he got for the next 3-4 books he wrote (The Three Clerks, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, Dr Thorne and The Bertrams).
Of this group Dr Thorne is often said to have been the most successful, but people who have studied the group argue The Bertrams sold as widely (it fetched Trollope the same sum) and point out the satire of bureaucracies in The Three Clerks made a great splash at the time -- as did Chaffanbrass who makes his first brilliant appearance in this novel. The Three Clerks is today called Dickensian and it was then seen as a book in competition with Dickens: Trollope tells us his villain, Undecimus Scott represents a far more insidious and wide-ranging danger to our society than poor Bill.
One result of all this is that there is no set pattern we can follow for any of Trollope's books before Framley Parsonage. They were issued as volumes; and in some cases even if you follow the original volume divisions, you discover that sometimes the first issue was one the publisher had tampered with: Castle Richmond was redivided to suit the publishers' convenience, so some modern editions which follow this text obscure where the climax of the 2nd & 3rd volumes really comes. As all three of my editions of Barchester Towers are not divided into the original three volume ordering, but based on a later two volume set (it was cheaper to print a book this way after it went through Mudie's cycle), I have myself simply to follow the two volume division.
Trollope described The Warden as '"hat pleasant task -- a novel in one volume" (p. 83). If you look at all his novellas, they come in well under 300 pages. Still I thought we wouldn't want to rush through. Thus I divided the book into mostly 4 chapters a week. Thus treating it lovingly.
Barchester Towers in my Oxford edition is a 2 volume work of 50 chapters. There I thought it would be a good idea to go a little faster so we wouldn't spend too much time on a single book. So I divided it into mostly 5-6 chapters a week. I will be using the paperback Oxford classics because they are good editions (good introductions, lots of notes) and don't weigh too much.
Here then is our calendar for the summer:
The Warden
We begin with The Warden on Sunday, June 13th:
July
Then we'll charge on straight into Barchester Towers
Vol I:
August
Vol II
September
One week break means we'll begin Dr Thorne in early October or autumn, a beautiful time of year here in Virginia.
Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody
There was some talk before I wrote the first "introductory" and calendar posting.
Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 09:36:45 +0100
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] Trollope reviews
I have just read a review of The Warden written by a youthful Wilkie Collins and printed in the socialist paper the Leader. Collins admires the characters of the Warden and Archdeacon and generally loves the book but dislikes the authorial intrusion and the ending.
Perhaps this is reprinted in a collection of Trollope reviews or mentioned by biographers and others know of it?
It seemed a thrilling find to me (my partner found it doggedly looking at Collins' work in the British Library.)
Angela
To which Joan Wall replied:
Hi Angela,
I have a book Anthony Trollope, the Critical Heritage edited by Donald Smalley that contains an "Unsigned notice from the Leader of 17 Feb 1855, pp. 164-5. It sounds very much like the review you're writing about. How did Paul find out it was by Collins?
This book was a big find for me sometime last year and I've enjoyed reading along from the contemporary reviews as we read the books.
Joan
From: "Paul Lewis" To forward to the Trollope list
The work attributing anonymous pieces in The Leader to Collins was done by
an American professor Kirk H Beetz (Victorian Periodicals Review XV No.1
Spring 1982 pp 20-29. Beetz used Collins's letters, then unpublished, to
attribute 51 pieces definitely to Collins and a similar number probably to
him. They appeared between 1851 and 1856. Sadly Beetz did not fulfil his
plans to publish Collins's collected items from The Leader. My role has been
checking Beetz and copying the pieces for my own use.
The evidence for Collins's authorship of the review of The Warden is a
letter from Collins to Edward Pigott, then the owner and editor of The
Leader. On 3 February 1855 Collins wrote
Those reviews appeared in The Leader on 24 February 1855 p187-188 (Wolfert)
and 17 February 1855 p164-165 (The Warden) respectively.
Unfortunately this important letter was not included in the recently
published The Letters of Wilkie Collins, Baker and Clarke, Macmillan 1999.
Sadly The Leader is a very rare publication and few people have seen it or
read Collins's pieces. Most were reviews of books, art, or plays, but he did
write on a few other things. The Wilkie Collins Society plans to republish
two of the items in the forthcoming issue of its Newsletter. More may
follow.
Paul Lewis
mailto:paul@paullewis.co.uk web www.paullewis.co.uk I replied to all:
Re: The Unsigned Notice in the Leader on The Warden
In response to Angela, Paul, and Joan,
The review printed as anonymous in Donald Smalley's Trollope:
The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul & New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), pp. 36-38, is dated 17 February 1855.
It is the one identified by Prof Kirk H Beetz as by Wilkie Collins.
What fascinates me most is the complete lack of any
identification of the Leader as a socialist paper. Here in
the USA where there is no socialist party or any effective
organisation of socialists of any kind this is understandable.
However, one of the publishers is English, and in the interests
of historical accuracy as well as understanding why the
reviewer takes the positions he does, one might think
the real context or framing of this piece would be brought up.
Not so. I should say I have talked to people about this
Smalley production and it has been more than hinted that
it has errors, does not pick the best of criticism by any
means, and shows ignorance in some areas (this last
comment comes from Skilton's book on reviewers and
Trollope, Trollope and His Contemporaries). Of course
no book is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and
Smalley had only so many pages allowed him.
Still were one to know that the paper was socialist, it would
become clear where some of the writer's -- Collins's --
criticisms of The Warden are coming from. Throughout
the piece Collins testifies to the highest respect for the
author of The Warden. That Trollope starts with a real and
important subject as opposed to most novels ('in these
days ... people sit down to compose fictions, having nothing
in the world to write about'), that Trollope fully reveals that
the way the charity is administered is an egregious abuse
of what was intended, that the man who exposes the abuse
is the 'accepted lover of the good Warden's youngest
daughter', and that the Warden himself is a well-meaning
good man who has assumed he is fulfilling the terms of
the bequest by 'bestowing the most watchful kindness and
attention on the fixed number of destitute men whom the
rules of charity place under his charge' -- are all strongly
commended by the reviewer as a superb subject for a novel.
What is assumed is a novel reaches so many people.
Collins admires the 'delicacy and truth to nature' with which
the Warden is drawn', the 'feeble old Bishop, his truculent
and intensely clerical son', and 'the old men who live
on the mismanaged funds'.
What does the reviewer object to? 'The defective part of the
book is the conclusion, which seems to us careless and
unsatisfactory'. Alas, Collins does not make explict what
he refers to here, but I suspect it is that the resolution
does not come out clearly for or against how the charity
has been perverted from its original intentions to support
the ecclesiastical establishment. This complaint is made
explicit in the Eclectic Review: "A moral is wanting.
To say nothing of the fact -- in itself significant -- that
the views of the author on the subject of ecclesiastical
revenue are not apparent, there is no fitting end attained
by all which is done' (The Critical Heritage, ed. D
Smalley, March 1855, nx. ix, 359-361, p. 39). What
we see here is the Victorian educated reader read the
novel as political fable. In Collins's case he looks for
a political comment.
But Trollope's ultimate interests are elsewhere: in human
nature, in realism, in paradigms of Trollope's own
autobiography as seen in other of his novels (e.g.,
An Old Man's Love).
Another thing of interest are the three further complaints:
Collins argues that Trollope 'speaks far too much in his
own person in the course of the narrative'. It would
seem an aesthetic standard is asserted here, but if
we look at the example presented to explain what
Collins means it seems it is also a matter of an upper
class bias. Somehow it is higher art not to talk directly
to an audience as a clown does in an pantomime.
Great comedians, Collins says, never address their
audiences directly. This is music hall stuff.
Collins also objects to the 'want of thorough earnestness
in the treatment of the subject'. Trollope distances himself
too much; he mocks Eleanor's conflicts between love
and duty when he should enter into them fully. James
R. Kincaid's argument that Trollope was a subversive
writer is vindicated here. Again Collins refers for his
standard to an upper class standard: he alludes to
Horace, the kind of text gentleman studied.
I take this to be part of the objection to Trollope's
mockery of Dickens and Carlyle. This kind of "farce"
is a mistake, says Collins: "Trollope is far too clever
a man, and has far too discriminating an eye for
character to descend successfully to such low
literary work as that". Note the use of the word "low".
Again it's class bias; there is something vulgar,
too practical and not removed enough from the realms
of art in Mr Trollope. In its place in the review it is
also clear that to Collins such farce disturbs the
social and political criticism which the Leader
wants to assume is Trollope's central purpose.
The scene the reviewer quotes is the one by
Grantley in which he threatens the old men with
losing everything if they seek this improvement.
They should be grateful for what they have. This
is just the argument used today in many a debate:
don't go for an improvement in health care because
you might end up with something worse, or lose
the little you have. It is a brilliant resonating
emblem. Nonetheless, politics is not the final
shaping element in The Warden or Trollope's
art.
I hope Angela's partner, Paul Lewis, or Prof Beetz
make it more widely known that this review, familiar
to all those who own the Critical Heritage is
by Collins. It would go far to explain it and also
how The Warden was originally read and
partly intended. For I have no doubt that Trollope
meant this novel to be read partly and strongly
as a political statement as he meant his first & early
works: two Irish books, The New Zealander and
La Vendée
Cheers to all, Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 21:05:06 Allow me to add that there are a number of unsigned pieces from
the Leader on Trollope's novels. The closest in time and
voice to that on The Warden are on Barchester Towers (date
23 May 1857) and The Three Clerks (date 19 December 1857).
These two read as if written by the same man who wrote the review
of The Warden. Dr Thorne (29 May 1858) and The
Bertrams
(25 April 1859) were also written about in the Leader and
enough is given of the first of these to suggest it is again
the same man who is writing.
Cheers to all, Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2000 09:37:20 +0100 Thank you Ellen for responding so thoroughly. There are many
points about the Leader and the review of the Warden that are
interesting. It was an anti-establishment paper which criticised
the Church (and reminds me of the paper in the Warden itself).
What struck me about Collins' tone was the sheer confidence of
the 20 something who had after all very few novels under his
belt. Its interesting that his very first novel, Iolani, which
he couldn't get published, also addressed the reader directly.
I was initially thinking how presumptious it was of him to write
in this tone about a more established author, but when I checked
I could see that they were both pretty much on a par as would-be
successful novelists. I suppose Trollope didn't need to earn
money writing reviews at that time, as Collins did, because he
was in the civil service.
Paul will be going to the Library today to check out the other
unsigned pieces you identify but he is not confident they will
prove to be by Collins. Apparently, he had a falling out with
the Leader over religious views and may not have been writing at
that later date.
Thanks for giving this so much thought.
Angela
Meanwhile people had begun to talk about church politics in the Barsetshire series:
Re: [trollope-l] Pre-ramble to Barchester Series
Jill Singer had responded to something Gene Stratton wrote:
The discussion about the contemporary problems facing the Church and the
difference between High/Low Church are enlightening. I wonder if
someone would be kind enough to wax even more basic and provide the
basic "hierarchy" of Church officials. Being Jewish, I have always been
fairly vague about who ranks above whom in the novels.
Jill Singer
So Gene replied:
Jill: Please don't take the following as gospel (no pun intended) but this
is my understanding of the hierarchy under the Anglican Communion:
The head of the Church of England is the King or Queen. However, the
sovereign is now but a figurehead and Parliament reigns supreme and, within
political tolerances, can make or change whatever church rules it wishes.
This was one of the concerns of many Victorian Tories who were only lukewarm
at best about the church being "established" by law, for they feared
"half-atheist" members of parliament might be able to appoint the bishops
and completely change the complexion of the church.
The two highest clerics are the Archbishops of Canterbury and of York, with
Canterbury having somewhat more powers than York. England is divided into
so many bishopric sees subordinate to one or the other of these two
archbishops. L. G. Pine, The Story of Titles, 1969, [note the possibility
of Pine being outdated now] states that "The Archbishop of York is Primate
of England and Canterbury Primate of all England, behind which distinction
is a long history of unseemly bickering." I guess the number of bishops has
changed over the years, and someone else might have today's division between
Canterbury and York. Pine has the total number of Lord Bishops in the
Established Church as 43.
Archbishops are termed Right Reverend and Most Honourable, and they are
addressed as Your Grace. Interestingly in regard to our discussion of
Archbishops, according to Pine there is still a Protestant Archbishop fo
Armagh and he is Primate for all Ireland.
Bishops rank next in the hierarchy and are responsible for their respective
sees. Pine says that most bishops are termed Doctor, even though few of
them have such degrees, earned or honourary.
Deans appear to be next in rank and are addressed as Very Reverend. The
dean is the head of a cathedral, or perhaps more properly a cathedral
chapter, which means all the clerics assigned to a given cathedral, each of
whom is generally known as a canon, in addition to his other title(s). Or a
cathedral may be headed by a provost. Pine says that in the modern church
of England there are 14 provosts and 29 deans (interestingly totaling 43,
the number of bishops with sees, and I believe there is a cathedral in every
see). Barchester Cathedral has a dean.
Archdeacons are the administrative heads of the sees, and might be termed
the diocese's business head. They are termed Venerable Sir, and called Mr.
Archdeacon in speech.
The head of a given church may be a rector or a vicar or parson, and he (or
she in current times) is frequently said to hold the "living." The living
is a feudal power whereby someone has the frequently hereditary right to
appoint a clergyman to a vacant church. Sometimes this power is vested in
an important local landowner, and sometimes in a bishop or dean, or other.
The rector need not assume charge of his church in person, but may appoint a
curate to handle day-to-day or year-to-year or decade-to-decade affairs.
One of the abuses attacked in Victorian times was the favoritism shown to
some influential clerics who could be appointed rectors to one or several
churches at, say, 800 pounds a year each, and then be absent, say, in Paris,
for many years, paying a curate perhaps 80 or 100 pounds a year to handle
all sermons and other church matters. This was known as pluralism. The
Rev. Dr. Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers was an absentee vicar living
many years in Italy.
The above is a quick and dirty sketch, but it may suffice for some to put
the titles in the Barchester stories in proper perspective. I'm sure some
others can improve on this and perhaps correct parts. I'm also sure that it
would be tremendously difficult to explain the entire Anglican Church
hierarchy in any kind of outline form, for there are too many exceptions.
Think of it as the U.S. Internal Revenue Code; every time some politician
wants to do a constituent a favor, new exceptions are made to the Code, and
in the Church of England this has been going on for over 400 years. Case in
point: Probate is (or perhaps was, for I may be somewhat behind times)
handled by the local diocese. Probates crossing diocesan lines are handled
by the Probate Court of Canterbury (PCC) or Probate Court of York (PCY).
However, if you are trying to locate an old will, you have to know that
exceptions were always being made so that some probates are/were handled by
clerical authorities known as Peculiers (note the spelling).
Another example which may show how difficult it is to make straight, short,
simple definitions comes up when we try to decide if a given church is under
a vicar or rector. In the Anglican Church a rector is the head of a church
"where the tithes are not impropriate" (from Chambers English Dictionary).
A vicar is the parson of a parish church who receives only the smaller
tithes or a salary. I don't pretend to know the distinctions, but only know
that some fine distinctions exist. Archdeacon Grantly was the rector of
Plumstead Episcopi. Dr. Stanhope was the vicar of Crabtree Canonicorum.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the Church of England could tell us
if some of these distinctions have dissolved over the years.
There are numerous other titles in the Church, such as a prebendary, a
resident clergyman who enjoys a share in the revenues of a cathedral or
collegiate church; and a precentor, who is the choir leader (such as Mr.
Harding). Note that Mr. Harding was a both precentor and a warden of an
almshouse.
This may tide you over until better information is available.
Gene Stratton Gene wrote again:
Subject: [trollope-l] Pre-ramble to Barchester Series
I don't think the following is a spoiler, but some people might be more
fastidious than I about such matters, and so I want to give them a chance
now to press the delete key. Essentially the following discusses some
Church of England background to the first two Barsetshire novels.
List members know or will soon find out that the Reverend Mr. Septimus
Harding is the protagonist of The Warden, and in fact -is- the Warden.
David Skilton in his Introduction to the OUP World's Classics series of The
Warden says that Mr. Harding had held his position "since before the days
when such things as the disportionate size of a warden's income were
considered abuses." This is both possible and likely, but I think it could
give an erroneous impression.
There seems to be a popular misconception that at the time The Warden was
written (1855), the public was just beginning to become aware of financial
abuses by the Church of England, when actually the public had been long
aware of them.
I'm reading Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols., 1966 & 1970,
Oxford Univ. Press, which C. P. Snow in his biography Trollope calls
"essential reading for the Barchester novels." This may be somewhat
exaggerated, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have some familiarity with the
Anglican Church of Trollope's times when reading these novels.
Let me give a thumbnail sketch of the background of the Victorian religious
situation (with profound apologies to those who are already well aware of
it). Henry VIII (died 1547) split from the Catholic Church when the Pope
would not allow him to divorce his first wife so he could marry the second
of his six wives. Much beheading and burning at stakes followed, and the
Church of England was born. It was still essentially Catholic, but no
longer Roman, and now had the King (or Queen) of England (Defender of the
Faith) as the head instead of the Pope.
Catholics remained strong even into the late 17th century, when James II was
ousted in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 by his own daughter and her Dutch
husband, who jointly ruled as William and Mary. During the Reformation in
Europe, England, too, saw the rise of many "dissenting" Protestant churches,
later followed by Quakers and Methodists. But the Church of England was the
official church, established by law, which required, among other things,
that everyone pay tithings to it even though they attended some other
church. All wills, even for dissenters, had to be probated through the
Church of England. This Church of England, or Anglican Church, also had a
number of other privileges in law that other churches lacked, such as its
bishops' being automatically members of the House of Lords. Non-Anglican
church members at various times and to varying degrees suffered various
forms of persecution, although the general trend was to allow them more
freedom. Eventually dissenting religionists were allowed to be Members of
Parliament, but still no Catholic or Jew could be.
The following comes from Chadwick, who in his books points out that the
Whigs were eager for Catholic emancipation as early as 1829. And this is
the real point of my ramblings, that it was around 1830 that popular feeling
became enraged against the abuses of the Church of England, some 25 years
prior to the writing of The Warden. Chadwick also observes that this was
not the first time that the Church had come under attack.
This was also the time of the 1st Reform Bill, when the electorate was
enlarged and various political, as well as Church, abuses began to be
corrected. The 1st Reform Bill was finally passed and enacted into law in
1832, but earlier it had suffered several defeats. When reform was defeated
in the House of Lords in 1831, with the aid of the votes of the Bishops,
popular enmity against the clergy raged hot. There were mobs in the
streets, and the recent Tory Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington (once
England's hero following his 1815 victory over Napoleon at Waterloo) was
villified, with rioters even throwing stones through the windows of his
London residence, Apsley House.
One popular method of non-violently attacking the Church was by displaying
placards showing the fantastic incomes of various high-ranking Church
leaders. But signs of real revolution were in the air, feared alike by the
clergy, the Whigs themselves, and the level-headed Tory politician Robert
Peel, who around this time thought that the monarchy could not last more
than another six years in England.
And, horror of horrors for the later Trollope (who was only around 16 years
old at this time), there was even a strong movement "to end parsons who
hunted."
I mention this to show that long before Trollope wrote The Warden
(triggered as it probably was by some specific Church abuses of the time
that he conceived the idea) the Church was not only unpopular with many
people, but Church and political leaders had been under much stronger attack
than I had believed before I started reading Chadwick. By the time of the
Barchester novels, this enmity against the Church was entering its second
generation.
And this was still just the beginning. Darwin's publication of The Origin
of Species in 1859 began a new kind of intellectual challenge to the Church
of England, but that's another story. The amazing thing seems to be how on
earth was it able to continue as the State Religion even into our own times?
(N.B. This is all reportorial and is not intended to be offensive to
members of any faith.)
And now for a question: I know that England has two Archbishops, those
respectively of Canterbury (the premier Archbishop) and of York. But
Chadwick (1:31) refers to three (!) Archbishops voting in the House of Lords
in 1832. Who was the third? Did the Anglican Church in Ireland (called the
Church of Ireland) have at that time its own Archbishop?
Now don't you wish you had pressed that delete key? ;-)
Gene Stratton
To which Michael O'Neile replied:
Gene,
I much appreciated your background on the evolution of the Church of
England. Would the third Archbishop have been Westminster?
A question for you (two-parts) - how did the High/Low church split occur?
which is the basis of "The Warden"?
Michael
He was answered by Virginia Preston:
Either Ireland or Wales I think. The Irish Church was disestablished in
1869 and the Welsh Church in 1919, at which point they lost their episcopal
representation in the Lords - I don't know which of them had an
archbishop there. Michael suggested it might be Westminster, but actually
there isn't an Anglican Archbishop of Westminster - it's a Roman Catholic
post, currently held by Cardinal Hume (and of course not in existence at
the time we are discussing, as the Catholic hierarchy had not been
restored then).
Virginia Gene Stratton:
Hi, Michael. Thanks for your message. Let me answer the first part now and
perhaps attempt the second later. Unfortunately the answer will not be
satisfactory. The third archbishop must have been the Anglican Church of
Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. So far, so good. But although I'd read this
before, the significance must have passed over me until I rechecked it: On
pp. 53-54 Chadwick points out that the Church of Ireland, a distinct
minority in Ireland, received tithing from all the Irish, although often the
rectors "maintained the common and courteous habit of not troubling the
[local] Catholic priest for his tithe"!!! More to the point, this church
seemed a bit top-heavy with 4 archbishops (!!!) and 18 bishops. We seem to
have a surfeit of archbishops. Could it be that only the Archbishop of
Dublin was in the House of Lords? I just don't know.
For an interim quick-and-dirty attempt at answering your
2nd question, I'd say that High Church essentially leaned toward Roman
Catholic rites and was non-evangelical, and Low Church was both evangelical
and more bare-bones Protestant. I believe the High-Low Church division
enters more into Barchester Towers than The Warden, for after the death of
Bishop Grantly, the contest both to become the new bishop and to dominate
the diocese following the new bishop's election is between the Archdeacon
Grantly high-church group and the Proudie/Slope low-church group. However,
this explanation may be simplistic, and if I find it is, I'll address your
2nd question again. In real life during Trollope's time, we see some
high-church Anglican dignataries eventually converting over to Roman
Catholicism, with Newman and Manning becoming cardinals in that church.
Gene Stratton I replied to Gene, Michael and Virginia:
Re: Pre-ramble to Barchester Series
Like Gene, I am going to tell some details of the book in the
following; all of these come from the opening 3 chapters
of the book. However, if you do not want to read about
these chapters as yet, do not read on.
**************************************
I too enjoyed Gene's historical account; what's more he brings
to the fore the background to the book a modern reader won't
assume. Many people reading this book see it as a sweet
story about an apparently mild man who demonstrates
an unusual moral courage. So far, so good. In the background
they feel a pastoral at work and much nostalgia; what they
don't know is that Trollope is also writing a political novel
about a hot issue of his day. One may see in the psychological
give-and-take of the political events of the book a subtle
parable about the way politics works, but it's not just allegorical.
It is grounded in the real world of 1852.
When we open the book we discover a story about a church official
who does almost nothing; who is, in comparison with the rest
of society at the time, leading a supine, comfortable life, and
gets an enormous income. At the sametime, very early on,
we learn the people whom the founder of the wardenship meant to
have the money are only receiving what is a pittance when
the founder meant them to have some sort of independence from
their income, even if a very modest one. The story begins when someone
begins publicly to protest this egregiously unbalanced distribution
of income. In the Trollope Society edition of the novel, Chadwick
points out that Trollope did have a specific real incident in mind
that had become something of a cause célèbre in the press. When
we get started we will have the details before us.
Still even without these, if we know the background as we
begin to read, we could liken The Warden to a cherry bomb thrown
at a barricade on one side of which are those who are angry
at the use of their money (tithes are taxes). This anger leads
to protests against the lack of real religious spirit in the upper
clergy; their use of curates to do the ministerial work; the
way they are chosen based on who they know, how much
money they can pay or who they are. The average person
in England worked a long workweek for very little. On the
other side of the barricade are those who would of course
stand firm on behalf of their lifestyle and privileges, their
caste. Michael Sadleir argues The Warden is a book
about caste-arrogance as much as anything. (Castes
include lawyers like Sir Abraham Haphazard.) Characteristically
Trollope does not call our attention to
a profligate: rather he shows us an ordinary man who has
been lucky; he has been offered this income, place, and
has to the best of his small ability, done what he could
for his men -- without of course taking away from himself
the life offered him by the place. Who would refuse this?
Most of us leap at offers we are given -- and sometimes
all the while knowing just how corrupt and unfairly the
positions are allotted out and the incomes (I think of
the modern American university system.) So on the
other side of the barricade there is this one man. As
we are told almost upon meeting him, he has even gotten
into debt and been bailed out by his son-in-law
(Archbishop Grantly) because he loves music and
wants to publish learned works on it. We may conclude
that if the Warden had not lucked into his income, he
might not have fared very well in this world.
The 'crisis of conscience' of the book is thus not a
private matter at all. Nor one which is not still relevant
to us and our attitudes towards work and money today.
And the more we know about the hot political background
the more we'll get out of the book. I didn't know about
the riots Gene mentioned nor the larger history of
the 1830s with respect to the church.
Ellen Moody
Someone asked for some distinction between high and low
church and how these terms came about:
Virginia Preston wrote:
High Church as a term starts being used in the 17th century, I think, to
describe people like the Arminians who wanted to go on being as Catholic as
possible, preserving many of the pre-Reformation traditions, stressing
the sacraments (I believe that officially the CofE only has 2, as opposed
to the RC 7, but High Churchmen will often promote practices like
auricular confession) and the authority of bishops. After the Restoration
of Charles II they were quite strong, then I think they declined a bit and
came into their own again in the 19th century - the Oxford Movement is
extremely High Church, with Keble and others writing Tracts (the
first one was published in 1833) in defence of Catholic doctrines. Newman
eventually published one (1841) which tried to prove that the 39 Articles
are compatible with Catholic theology and was very unpopular with the
Evangelicals.
I don't know when people started using the term 'Low Church' but it means
those who emphasise preaching, the centrality of the Bible and the
importance of the Reformation. At the end of the 18th century and
early 19th, there was an Evangelical revival which was also connected to
the anti-slavery movement and things of that kind - the Earl of
Shaftesbury was an Evangelical. They then got tied up fighting the High
Church/Anglo-Catholics.
Then there is the Broad Church, which attempts to avoid the fights
between both these movements. Bishops weren't actually very keen on the
Oxford Movement, and I think a lot of them belonged to the Broad Church
- they didn't like Biblical literalism either, preferring to emphasise
the national comprehensiveness of the Church of England, and prepared to
consider the results of contemporary scientific and historical study.
Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol 1870-93) was a Broad Churchman and so
was Charles Kingsley.
Archibald Tait, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1868 was one of
those who protested against Newman's Tract. He was personally low
church, but like the 'Broad Church' believed in the comprehensiveness of
the Church of England and vetoed prosecutions for ritualism.
Virginia Then Tyler Tichelaar added:
Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: 96TICHELAAR@wmich.edu
I have consulted Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens
Knew about the question between High and Low Church. He breaks down the
difference as primarily being that the High Church tended to go in more for
ceremony and ritual, while the Low Church preached the desperately sinful
nature of man and they abhorred ceremony and ritual. Part of the separation
is due to the ceremeony in the High Church which was bordering upon
Catholocism. If I am remembering my history rightly, eventually this problem
even caused the High Church groups to have splits, and people like John Henry
Newman, a member of the Oxford movement, who advocated the Anglican church
becoming almost completely Catholic eventually left the Anglican Church and
converted to Catholicism, as did John Henry Manning. This desire for a
return to Catholicism was also a desire for medieval reform, growing out of
the popular Victorian medievalism. Pool says that in 1874 was passed the
Public Worship Act which tried to find a middle common ground between the two
factions. As a result, many Anglican churchmen actually went to jail for
introducing "allegedly" Catholic practices into their worship. Pool also
mentions the Proudies as part of the Low Church establishment, while
Archdeacon Grantly was of the old-fashioned High Church group, which would
have disliked the Proudie's low Church feelings, and the newer, more Catholic
faction inside the High Church.
Tyler Tichelaar
From: "Jill D. Singer" The informative background posts about the problems besetting the Church
of England prior to and at the time of Trollope's work have been
wonderfully informative. Another interesting commentary is the
Introduction to the Trollope Society's publication of AT's Clergymen of
England, written by Westminster Dean Emeritus Michael Mayne, who
dedicated the Poets' Corner memorial to AT in 1993. He notes that when
Trollope's essays appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, a few months before
Trollope started on The Last Chronicle of Barset, the Church of
England was being rocked by German Biblical Criticism, something we now
take very much for granted but that must have seemed terrifying in the
1860's. He also discusses the feud between the Church and Bishop
Colenso of Natal.
Dean Mayne describes AT as drawn to the following "defining marks of
Anglicanism: tolerance within a broad spectrum of belief and
interpretation; a high regard for the individual conscience; moderation
in face of extremism; a recognition that sometimes the truth may lie in
both extremes rather than somewhere in between." In the first essay in
the book, "The Modern English Archbishop," Trollope himself observes,
"We hate an evil, and we hate a change. Hating the evil most, we make
the change, but we make it as small as possible." It will be
interesting to see how these views are reflected in The Warden and the
other five novels.
The discussion about the contemporary problems facing the Church and the
difference between High/Low Church are enlightening. I wonder if
someone would be kind enough to wax even more basic and provide the
basic "hierarchy" of Church officials. Being Jewish, I have always been
fairly vague about who ranks above whom in the novels.
Jill Singer I wrote about the class perspective:
To Trollope-l
Re: Little Versus Big Endians; or, High v Low Churchism
I am not sure I have spelt "Endians" correctly; it represents
my phonetic memory of a hilarious scene in Jonathan Swift's
Gullivers Travels where we find in the Lilliputian government
an inexplicably venomous controversy raging over whether
one should open one's morning egg from the big or little
end first. Swift is mocking all sorts of human political behavior
as it appears on the surface as absurd, mad, inexplicable.
This particular scene generalises (among others) the still
felt opposition between a 'high' and 'low' approach to the
way one should worship one's God in churches of the
Christian denomination.
As others have said, the terms ultimately descend from the
17th century, and probably the English Civil War (or, as the more
fashionable phrase has it, the War of the Three Kingdoms). There
were really scenes before the war where people in a given church
hierarchy in a local area physically fought over where to put the
Communion table: in the middle of the room showing the
equality of all partakers, or up by or beyond a barriers showing
the important intermediary role the clergyman was to take
in any communion service. Laud, Charles's surrogate, was
determined to reconfigure an elitist hierarchical and physically
rich surface texturing to what went on in churches. Those
who have studied the 39 articles argue that the Elizabethan
understanding of these was not Catholic (or sacramentalising)
in its scope or tendency, but Protestant, Reformist.
A silly thing? No, because for many people how others behave
and what they wear is terribly important; the intangible set of
values they live by is embodied in the silliest of ribbons, foolish
gold statues, and other symbolic representations of respect
for something done by a specific powerful or influential group.
In the case of high versus low we have a charged _class_ and
political conflict which manifests itself in religious symbolism
and behavior. In the Trollope household, the children were
brought up to look at those who worshipped in the more
equalising, anti-rich-luxury way as not gentlemen, not ladies,
vulgar types, in short, low. We can saw this strong class
bias in Rachel Ray; it will come out sharply in Barchester
Towers though there is it shaped by the contemporary
manifestation of this class and political clash: the Oxford
movement, the mid-19th century manifestation of an attempt
to return to sacramentalism and strong hierarchy, versus
the evangelical movement, an outgrowth of Methodism in
the 18th century which was at the time clearly a movement
which grew out of the people. The American form of
congregationialism where the people in the church get
to elect their minister, and can throw him out will serve
to stand for the politics here. Such groups have in their
earlier history apparently decided they will not be led by
people elsewhere who have been able to pick the minister on the
grounds of who he is, who he knows, what money he has,
or the people he is connected to. I believe (not sure) that
American Jews also run the synagogue on a more or
less Congregationalist basis (the rabbi must be chosen
by his congregation too).
It will be said it's not just a matter of class and political
stance. I agree but would put it that to these stances
of class and political behaviors other kinds of behaviors
adhere. The drive for respectability which is at its
strongest in the lower middle class family who seek
to differentiate themselves from the unrespectable working
class family do so by advocating a pious exterior. They
will not get drunk in public, certainly not on Sundays.
They will not have sexual liaisons outside marriage,
and certainly not openly. A strict attitude towards
outward behavior is not necesary among the very
rich if they want respectability. Their money does it
for them. They needn't prove they are among the
election and virtuous by outward behavior. Further,
they have access to private places that are comfortable
and can sometimes control the press. The continual
connection beween low church and repressive behaviors
in public is thus one natural to the lower middle class
and becomes part of what is meant by low church.
Trollope calls much of this kind of thing hypocritical,
a way of manipulating and controlling others, and
embodies it in Barchester Tower by the sycophantic
hypocrite Slope and his aggressively domineering
mistress, Mrs Proudie.
A deeper matter which also underlies Trollope's Barset
and later books too concerns the nature of religious
belief. Gene has reminded us of the publication of what
I think was the most important book of the 19th century
in 1859: Darwin's Origin of Species (somewhat misnamed
since he is talking about how speciation works). That
Trollope read some Darwinian books is demonstrated
by some of Mullen's comments on his religion and we can
find Darwinian metaphors in some of the novel (e.g.,
He Knew He Was Right, The Bertrams). How
much did one believe in the mythic or Christian
narratives; how deeply or in what kind of fashion
(allegorically or literally?) The Victorians
were maybe more alive to this than us. Their resort
to seances is one odd manifestation of their new
doubts.
The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century in Europe
had been an attempt to return to a
religiously-driven culture; the claim was the Roman
Church was anything but Christian, religious; it
was corrupt, whorish, secular, maybe harboured
libertines and atheists. But sometimes 'high' church
movements have the same underlying motive. To
want to sacramentalise reality is to assert there
is some other order in nature beyond the natural
and want to manifest it by what I'll call baroque
means. So the Counter-Reformation is born as
is the Oxford Movement. A number of the Pre-
Raphaelite painters stubbornly allegorised their
pictures as filled with deeply religious symbolism
and certainly they drove back into painting a
deeply spiritual sense of meaning as pictured
in the ordinary thing. The loving detail in which
the Pre-Raphaelites bothered to depict reality
shows they think it matters. We are not just
squirrels, here for the day and squashed tomorrow.
By-the-bye my Finch family is gone. The other
morning my husband I woke to find the nest
had fallen to the ground. Originally I had thought
it would never last. It seems I forgot my original
sense of the fragility of the effort and strength
and indifference of the natural forces and beings
surrounding this nest; I had become hubristic
and the book on Darwin's finches made me almost assume
I would see clutch after the clutch of eggs. Recently
too the father bird was often feeding the mother;
they seemed to have been bonded by their first
success. Still it fell; maybe a crow attacked it --
or a high wind shook the awning. The mower I hire
has flattened what was on the ground. I never saw the mother
bird again. The father has reappeared several
times on the slats and flown away immediately.
Are we like the birds? Well the sacramentalist
doesn't want to think so.
So it matters whether we eat our eggs from the big
or little end not because the outward behavior
matters but because it signals some very large
and important issues. Swift did know that, but he
couldn't resist.
Ellen Moody
June 9, 1999
To Trollope-L
Re: High Angican Versus Roman Catholic
I'd like also to agree with Virginia that we should remember that although
today there's a tendency to blend High Anglicans with Catholics,
especially among people who are neither High Anglican or Catholic
(joke alert), in 17th century England these two sects (regarded as sects
not as groups of actualy human beings) were regarded as distinct
species: Roman Catholics were demonized; Irish Catholics regarded
as primitive superstitious barbarians, and both thought to be
a kind of 'fifth column' in England working for the Pope. The history
of the religious wars in Europe, the vying for power between Italian
aristocrats, Germany princes and a plethora of royal types gave
this idea some reality though as regards real people it was mostly
lurid legend.
The history of Catholics in England is complicated, but speaking
generally in the 19th century in England the average Anglican and
Dissenter did not accept Catholics as members of a socially
acceptable 'grown-up' and desirably placid religion. Wordsworth
voted against the Catholic Emancipation Act (I give him as an
example of someone people look upon as enlightened). Trollope would
immediately point out to us that his highest High Church people
(Arabin and the young man Patience Oriel marries -- his name escapes
me) married, had children, were not beings apart. We should keep
this in mind as we read Phineas's story. He is a fringe person by
virtue of his religion too (though I wouldn't lean too heavily on that).
Then there's where the Catholic person resides. I wonder how many
people know that Trollope has an essay on the Irish Anglican Church
where he presents an argument for disestablishment. In _The Kellys
and O'Kellys_ he does not lose any opportunities to satirise a
self-satisfied bigoted Anglican clergyman who lives off his income
and has but four people coming to his church. When Trollope presents
Catholics in England, they are proselytisers, people who are irritating
and not a little silly (Father Barham in _The Way We Live Now_).
However, plant the Father in Ireland and you have loving detailed
portraits of attractive men. Trollope's first loving deeply humane
intelligent charitable (&c&c) male hero is Father John in _The Macdemots_.
While, there is a strong probability that in some of these portraits he
was remembering specific Catholic priest whom he describes in
Father Giles whom he became cordial friends with; nonetheless,
it's interesting how Trollope changes attitudes towards
Catholicism depending on where he is imagining it.
Until the 20th century Catholics were regarded by people in England as
a political party, and after all religious attitudes shade into the
political (and nowadays ethnic and racial).
Cheers to All, Reply-to: trollope-l@onelist.com From: Virginia Preston On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Gene Stratton wrote a long and informative post on
the various ranks of clergy in the Church of England, and said
The distinctions no longer exist because tithes are no longer. But
incumbents are still known as vicars or rectors in accordance with the
parish's history, though a curate now is likely to be an assistant to
the vicar/rector, learning how to run a parish and under supervision.
This is how the differences started (I have left out lots of details):
Parishes were originally formed (c.8th century) because local landowners
wanted their manor to have its own church. They'd endow it out of their
land (providing the glebe, the priest's farmland), build it, and get the
right to appoint the priest (though they had to be inducted by the
bishop). Once appointed, they were hard to get rid of. As well as
cultivating the glebe (which was still an important source of income to
Jane Austen's father) they received one-tenth of all produce of the land
& of beasts (made compulsory in the tenth century). There are still
parishes where a lay person appoints the rector, having inherited that
right from the original endower.
The tithe becomes distinguished as the great tithe (from crops such as
wheat) and the lesser tithe (of things like vegetable crops and eggs).
Rectors get the whole lot, so are usually found in parishes where a lay
person owns the right to appoint someone, but can't take the church's
income. But some of the original endowers' descendants gave away 'their'
parishes to monasteries (or even dioceses) as a source of income. The
monastery takes the great tithe and appoints a vicar (=receiver of the
lesser tithe only) or takes great and lesser and appoints a perpetual
curate (=receiver of no tithes, just a fixed & low income, but with job
security), or nobody at all. Any of these people might appoint a curate
to do the work, paying what they like. When the monasteries were
dissolved the parishes passed to dioceses or the state, who did the same.
Mr Crawley is a perpetual curate - they can't get rid of him, but he has
no money; his friend Mark of Framley Parsonage is a rector, much better
off - but his patron often acts as though she has bought him. Trollope
could see how unfair this system was - but he was very reluctant to
condemn it altogether. Perhaps partly he thought that a system which
operated on 'interest', rewarding one person and ignoring another, was
one of the ways the Church of England maintained the numbers of
'true gentlemen' taking orders.
In response to Ellen's very interesting comments linking High and Low
Church to class, I certainly agree that Trollope sees the difference
between 'High' and 'Low' as being related class. However, it's also
possible to see similarities between the Oxford Movement and John
Wesley's Methodists a century earlier, who started as a small group of
young men at Oxford University (attempting to regulate their lives
according to strict standards of religious discipline, taking communion
weekly and ordering their lives in deliberate contrast to the
indifference they saw around them in the university) and become a broad
movement, by no means confined to any one class but very popular with
some groups of 'the masses'.
It's interesting that some of the devices intended to make services
accessible to an illiterate laity (e.g. colour, music) should become
so important to highly educated gentlemen.
Virginia From: RansomT@aol.com (Teresa Ransom):
Talking of High and Low church, am I right in thinking that the Dissenters
were a faction of the Low church end of the system. Tom Trollope writes in
his autobiography that when the family visited his grandfather, the Revd
William Milton at Heckfield, 'there were two or three Dissenters and their
families, generally considered by their neighbours much as so many Chinese
settled among them might have been - as unaccountably strange and as
objectionable.'
Congratulations Ellen. It will be good to meet some of the list members at
the AGM. I hope to be there.
Teresa Ransom
Virginia responded to Teresa:
Yes, and I believe one of the marks of High Church Tories in around Queen
Anne's period was their resentment at the way in which some Dissenters
and Roman Catholics were 'occasional conformists' - attending the Church
of England every few months - to make themselves eligible for public
office. They thought this was very wrong and did their best to stamp it
out. One should perhaps remember, while realising that 'High Church' is
quite close to Roman Catholicism theologically and to some extent
liturgically, RCs were still feared and distrusted by them as by everyone
else.
Virginia And then Gene Stratton wrote again:
A footnote in the 1908 book mentioned that "This charity is still
distributed under the above terms."
Later Ginger and I went to Taunton, Somershire, and visited St. Mary's,
which is known for its extremely tall perpendicular steeple. I was pleased
to see that the tablet in memorial to Thomas Trowbridge was still there.
However, I was not able to find anyone in the church who knew anything about
the tablet. On my return to the U.S. I wrote to the rector of St. Mary's to
ask if the Trowbridge Charity was still being distributed as it apparently
was in 1908. A prebendary of the church wrote me the following reply:
"I can't tell you much more about the Trowbridge Charity. The value of
money invested with the Charity Commission has been eroded by inflation.
Evidently it has not been possible to reinvest in any satisfactory
securities to keep pace with the fall in the value of money. Doubtless
innumerable individuals and corporations have been made the poor, here and
in the States and elsewhere.
"The answer to your question therefore is, that to the best of my knowledge
Charity money such as the one you mention is not bringing in appreciably
more income now than [when I first arrived here]. One wishes that it did,
but it doesn't.
"I suppose that one might mention too that in our welfare state old people
are in fact far more buttressed against poverty than they used to be;
pensions are general - and we find it hard to realise that this has only
come in the present century. To that extent we are not really dependent on
ancient charities; to relieve people in distress they would provide but a
minute contribution in modern times." To the above I should add that on a still later visit to Taunton, I gathered
in talks with church officials that properties such as the Trowbridge
Charity had most likely been commingled with others into one overall
charity, so that it would be impossible to trace the path today of Mr.
Thomas Trowbridge's original donation.
Gene Stratton
gwlit@worldnet.att.net
Now he wrote about Barchester Chronicles: The Film Adaptation
This does not give away plot, but still may be a spoiler for the
punctilious.
Barchester Chronicles is not a title by Trollope, but the name given by BBC
to its miniseries of the combined The Warden and Barchester Towers in
7 episodes of about 50 minutes each. Most of us are aware of the general
superiority of a book over its graphic representation, so there should be no
need to give reasons why (though of course anyone is free to disagree).
But there are sometimes advantages of a movie or TV show in specific
elements. The most outstanding, I think, in this miniseries is the singing
by an English boy's choir. of Lincoln Cathedral. You can't get that in a
book, although you could play a recording as you read (which might not be a
bad idea). The singing is inspirational and mood setting. In typical
British TV form, the music in Barchester Chronicles is derivative, a word
used as a pejorative when hurled at some composers, such as Andrew Lloyd
Weber, but quite appropriate for background music in TV productions (case in
point: the TV production of John Mortimer's Summer's Lease, for which the
composer beautifully interwove aspects of Gregorian chants with modern
Italian popular music).
It's also true that visual representations of settings can act as the
picture worth a thousand words. In Barchester Chronicles there is some
lovely scenery, including external Anglican cathedral shots.
But to be worthwhile, a TV miniseries must adhere close to the original
book, have good direction, and boast of a superior cast. Barchester
Chronicles has all these, and a thumbnail sketch of the cast might be
worthwhile. Needless to say, the below is somewhat subjective, as is the
above.
The Rev. Mr. Harding is protrayed by Donald Pleasance. Yes, the villain in
some James Bond movies and elsewhere. But Pleasance rises to the occasion
here showing his repertory training, and is the perfect Mr. Harding.
Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly is played by Nigel Hawthorne, my candidate as
the greatest living English-language actor. His versatility is
awe-inspiring. Compare and contrast, for example, his Grantly with his
Georgie in Mapp and Lucia. Molto grazioso. For a complete different
portrayal, see him as the top British civil servant in Yes, Minister, and
then again in the movie playing the title role as The Madness of King
George (American title; in England it's The Madness of George III).
Hawthorne alone is worth the price of admission to whatever he appears in.
There are some interesting pairings in BC, such as for the Barchester Towers
part, the role of the wife of Bishop Proudie is played maginficently by
Geraldine MacEwen. She and Hawthorne play in Barchester antithetically to
each other, although in Mapp and Lucia, MacEwen as Lucia had a cozier
relationship with her Georgie. Au reservoir.
Another pairing is Susan Pleasance as Susan, the Archdeacon's loving wife
who knows how to use sweetness as a weapon to control the savage beast. In
the miniseries, as in real life, she is the daughter of Donald Pleasance.
Mr. Harding's other daughter, Eleanor, is played by Susan Maw. I've never
seen her in anything else, and I would consider her the main miscasting in
this role.
John Bold is played by David Gwillam. He did a competent, but not
outstanding, job. I've only seen him once later, in a not-center role in
the British TV miniseries A Very Peculiar Practice.
Bold's sister, Mary, was played, again competently, by Barbara Flynn. We've
seen her before. She was in one of the Inspector Morse mysteries (The
Silent World of Nichols Quinn, I believe). And she played Dee Tate in the
miniseries Chandler & Company. Not especially glamorous looking, I
thought she was at her sexiest in A Very Peculiar Practice (see above)
playing the part of a Lesbian.
Bishop Proudie in Barchester Towers was portrayed by Clive Swift,
who has many acting credits, but Americans will recognize him best as the
husband to Mrs. Boo-KAY in Keeping Up Appearances. He was at his best in
Barchester.
Mr. Slope was played by Alan Rickman, who has gone on to bigger roles since,
such as, I think, one of the Robin Hood movies. He also played Colonel
Brandon in the Sense and Sensibility miniseries. Suffice it to say that
it would difficult to imagine anyone doing a better job as Slope. May he
live forever.
Madame Neroni was played by Susan Hampshire, who needs no introduction as
one of the best and best-known British actresses.
Other character parts were played by some of my favorite actors, such as
Cyril Luckner (Bishop Grantly), John Ringham (Lawyer Finney), Peter Blythe
(Bertie Stanhope), and Michael Aldridge (Sir Abraham Haphazard). I didn't
recognize any of the 12 bedesmen.
All told, a splendid production. I believe it is still available as
commerical video tapes.
One thing (e pluribus unum) I don't know is who or rather which played the
cathedral. I don't believe it was Salisbury, Norwich, York, or Canterbury,
although it might have been a composite. Perhaps some kind soul can
enlighten me on this. Many thanks.
Gene Stratton
To: "Angela"
Subject: Collins on Trollope
Date: Mon, May 29, 2000, 10:42 am
"...Is anybody at work on Wolfert's Roost? or The
Warden? - both of which I think of tackling this week."
47 Hereford Road, Acton, London W3 9JW United Kingdom
tel 020 8993 2361 - fax 020 8992 1753 - mob 07836 217311
Ellen Moody
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: [trollope-l] Further Unsigned Leaders in the Critical Heritage
Ellen Moody
Reply-To: trollope-l@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] The Unsigned Notice in the Leader on The
Warden
gwlit@worldnet.att.net
vpreston@icbh.ac.uk
(drawing breath for a discussion of what high and low mean in the Church
of England)
gwlit@worldnet.att.net
vpreston@icbh.ac.uk
Subject: [trollope-l] High and Low Church
Overland Park KS
jds@hoveywilliams.com
Ellen
Subject: Re: [trollope-l] Rectors & vicars; High & Low Church
"Another example which may show how difficult it is to make straight, short,
simple definitions comes up when we try to decide if a given church is under
a vicar or rector ...."
vpreston@icbh.ac.uk
vpreston@icbh.ac.
"Thank you for your letter. I have met several members of your family in
the past, engaged on similar pursuits.
gwlit@worldnet.att.net
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