Barchester Towers

Barchester Towers is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longmans in 1857. It is the second book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, preceded by The Warden and followed by Doctor Thorne. Among other things it satirises the antipathy in the Church of England between High Church and Evangelical adherents. Trollope began writing this book in 1855. He wrote constantly and made himself a writing-desk so he could continue writing while travelling by train. "Pray know that when a man begins writing a book he never gives over", he wrote in a letter during this period. "The evil with which he is beset is as inveterate as drinking - as exciting as gambling".

In his autobiography, Trollope observed "In the writing of Barchester Towers I took great delight. The bishop and Mrs. Proudie were very real to me, as were also the troubles of the archdeacon and the loves of Mr. Slope". When he submitted his finished work, his publisher, William Longman, initially turned it down, finding much of it to be full of "vulgarity and exaggeration". Recent critics offer a more sanguine opinion: "Barchester Towers is many readers' favourite Trollope", wrote The Guardian, which included it in its list of "1000 novels everyone must read".

The literary scholar John Sutherland observes that Trollope suspended work on the novel (having reached the end of Chapter VIII) between February 1855 and May 1856, turning instead to his posthumously published The New Zealander. During this time he changed his idea of writing a short novel (similar in length to The Warden) to a longer one, and that from this hiatus there arise a number of inconsistencies in the text. In the first chapter Trollope says that Bishop Grantley is dying in "the latter days of July" and that Proudie became bishop "just a month after his [Grantly's] demise". At the beginning of Chapter IX, Sutherland observes that Trollope has Proudie three months onto his term as Bishop - effectively late November. However at the beginning of Chapter XII Slope is writing a letter dated 20 August, and in Chapters XXXIII and XXXV it is made clear that Miss Thorne's fête champêtre takes place on the last day of September. In Chapter XLVIII Arabin proposes to Eleanor on "a beautiful afternoon in the beginning of October".

Sutherland points out that in the early chapters Trollope describes the Proudies as intending to spend as much time as possible in London, leaving the field clear for Slope to act on his own in Barchester with the action easily contained in a single-volume novel: in Chapter IV, Slope thinks to himself that, in the Proudies' anticipated absences in London, "he, therefore, he, Mr Slope, would in effect be bishop of Barchester". But when Trollope resumed the composition of Barchester Towers in May 1856, planning the eventual three-volume novel as a result of the unexpectedly increasing sales of The Warden in late 1855, he expanded the text by keeping the Proudies in Barchester and introducing a number of new characters who had not appeared in the earlier chapters - the Stanhopes, Mr Arabin, and the Thornes inter alia.

And although Sutherland notes that Trollope was "often indifferent to minor inconsistencies in his narratives", he regards these lapses as showing the point at which Trollope conceived the idea of the novel series which would eventually become the hugely successful Chronicles of Barsetshire. (Wikipedia.org)