Barchester Towers was published in 1857 by Longman and is the second novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire, the six-novel sequence that established Trollope as one of the major Victorian novelists. The old Bishop of Barchester has died, and the question of his replacement convulses the cathedral close. The appointment goes not to Archdeacon Grantly, the old bishop’s son and the High Church candidate, but to Dr. Proudie, a mild, ineffectual man who arrives in Barchester with two formidable allies: his wife, the domineering Mrs. Proudie, and his chaplain, the Reverend Obadiah Slope, whose evangelical fervor and social ambition make him the novel’s great antagonist.
Trollope’s genius in Barchester Towers is to take a subject that sounds deadly dull — ecclesiastical appointments, clerical rivalries, the internal politics of a cathedral chapter — and make it as absorbing as any thriller. The stakes are not life and death but power and status, which in the enclosed world of Barchester amount to the same thing. Mrs. Proudie, who controls her husband absolutely and intends to control the diocese, is one of Victorian fiction’s immortal creations: a woman of iron will and no charm, whose tyranny is the more effective for being exercised through the forms of wifely submission.
Slope and Signora Neroni
Mr. Slope is Trollope’s finest villain — not because he is evil but because he is plausible. He is intelligent, energetic, genuinely devout in his Low Church way, and motivated by a mixture of ambition and conviction that Trollope renders with characteristic fairness. Slope wants power, certainly, but he also wants to reform what he sees as a complacent, self-serving ecclesiastical establishment. That his methods are oily, his manner repulsive, and his judgment of people catastrophically poor does not make him merely contemptible.
Slope’s downfall comes through Signora Madeline Neroni, a beautiful, crippled Italian (actually the daughter of a Barchester clergyman) who manipulates men with the expertise of a professional. Slope falls for her, which destroys his reputation; his simultaneous pursuit of Eleanor Bold, the young widow who is the novel’s romantic heroine, fails equally. Trollope famously breaks the fourth wall to assure the reader that Eleanor will not marry Slope — a narrative intervention that has been debated ever since.
Trollope’s Method
Trollope wrote Barchester Towers according to his famous regimen: 250 words every fifteen minutes, beginning at 5:30 AM, before leaving for his job at the Post Office. The novel shows no signs of this mechanical production — it is fluent, inventive, and structurally assured. Trollope’s narrative voice, which addresses the reader directly and comments on the characters with an irony that is affectionate rather than savage, is one of the great pleasures of Victorian fiction. He does not judge his characters so much as understand them, and his understanding extends even to the people he dislikes.
Collecting Barchester Towers
First edition (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, London, 1857): Three volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, three volumes, fine: $8,000–$20,000
- Very good: $3,000–$8,000
- Later single-volume editions (1860s): $200–$500
- Association copies: Significant premium
Three-decker first editions of Trollope are scarce in any condition — the format was fragile, libraries rebound their copies, and surviving sets with all three volumes in matching condition are rare.