Barchester Towers

I finished Barchester Towers, the second book of the Barchester Chronicles, last week.

It was immediately obvious to me that Trollope had much more fun writing this book than any of the previous four novels – or at least he was in a more playful mood. I think this may have been because this novel’s predecessor, The Warden, was his first popular success – in fact, his first novel to receive any notice at all. It was also the first one to earn any money, and this was always of great importance to Trollope, as it is to most of us.

I won’t recount the plot, or extol the wonderful variety of characters. Mrs. Proudie, Signora Vesey Neroni (mother of the last of the Neros), Archdeacon Grantly, Bertie Stanhope – these marvelous characters have been adequately praised by wiser readers and better readers than me. It was pure pleasure to spend time with them again. I’ll just note how well Trollope captures the complexity of his characters – not a one, not even Mrs. Proudie, is a simple black-and-white study or a crude caricature of one idea.

I will note two things that struck me during this reading. One, I regret to say, is Trollope’s crude and unthinking anti-Semitism. Very sad and very bad, but there it is. The second thing that struck me is how much the novel reminded me of modern sitcoms -- in two ways. One is that a great mainstay of modern sitcoms is the situation where people are talking about different things, but without realizing it. The second likeness is Trollope’s continual intrusion into the story with authorial reassurances or information, much the way sitcoms like Modern Family and The Office “break the fourth wall” by having characters address the audience directly. In The Office this was originally explained by the entirely ridiculous idea that some sort of documentary is being made – although no documentary maker in the world could capture the confidences characters make, and the pretense of there being some sort of documentary filming seems to have been abandoned quite early. Modern Family never made an effort to explain why the characters address the audience directly every so often. But it works, and it’s very funny.

Trollope is more ponderous and more Victorian than contemporary sitcom writers, of course, but the convention still works. For example, “But let the gentle-hearted reader by under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope.” Or, he complains about the constraints of novel-writing: “And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels, so as to fit them all exactly into 439 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgeling my brains to find them?”

The 1982 BBC series is terrific - particularly Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly and Alan Rickman as Rev. Slope. In fact, I see them quite clearly now when I read the novel.