The Cathedral was published by Macmillan in 1922, and it is the first and finest of Walpole’s Polchester novels — a series set in a fictional cathedral city modeled on Truro, where Walpole grew up as the son of a bishop. The novel follows the fall of Archdeacon Brandon, a man who has ruled Polchester for decades through the combined force of his personality, his piety, and his absolute conviction that he is doing God’s work.
Brandon’s authority is unchallenged until the arrival of Canon Ronder — a fat, shrewd, affable man who understands power as Brandon does not: not as a natural attribute of the righteous but as a game to be played. Ronder never directly opposes Brandon; he simply makes himself useful to everyone, cultivates alliances, and waits for Brandon to destroy himself — which, driven by pride and the inability to imagine opposition, Brandon does.
The novel is a study in institutional power: how it is acquired, maintained, and lost within a closed community where everyone knows everyone and every action is observed. The cathedral close is a perfect setting for this story — a world of apparent harmony and absolute civility beneath which rivalries, resentments, and ambitions operate with ferocious intensity. Walpole, raised in exactly this world, understands its dynamics with the precision of an insider.
Collecting The Cathedral
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1922): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$25