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Anthony Trollope's THE WARDEN raises ethical questions that it refuses to resolve, except insofar as the characters' personal journeys are concerned. All the characters are good men; the opposite to Thackeray's novel without a hero, this is a novel without an antagonist.

The central problem is John Hiram's will, written in Henry VI's time to support twelve old wool-carders. Times change, property increases in value, money inflates, and the twelve old men are left with a shilling and fourpence a day while the warden receives eight hundred pounds a year in return for light duties. Local activist John Bold notes this discrepancy and brings it to public attention, and as a result the warden Septimus Harding is vilified in the public press - even though he is a kindly, unworldly old man who is liked by his twelve charges and does a great deal of good for them. Add to this John Bold's love for Harding's daughter Eleanor and the interference of Eleanor's brother-in-law Archdeacon Grantly, who's always keen for a fight to support the church's powers, and there's a crisis between family and friends.

John Bold's actions drive the plot and he is a young man who intends to do right and win the love of a lady he admires - Bold has all the requisite traits of the hero or wouldbe hero, and his actions that upset Harding's life are done from good motives. Septimus Harding is a kind and gentle man, the protagonist and something reasonably close to a saint. The narrator assures the reader that Archdeacon Grantly is a man of benevolent intent who does his work to the best of his ability, even though his actions in the novel show his weaker points. The pensioners of Hiram's Hospital may be misguided but are poor old men. Tom Towers of the Jupiter is a self-serving newspaper editor, but he's hardly an antagonist.

Harding is gentle, kind, wise, soft-spoken, and a hero if there is a hero. Harding's response to trouble is also inactivity: he does not wish to fight in the first place, and when he is convinced that the interpretation of Hiram's will has been unjust in his favour, he only wants to resign his position. The result is net loss to all concerned, including the twelve old men who lost a kind caretaker. Harding is a good man who does more good than any other character in the story, but he is perhaps not enough.

This is Trollope's main quote on the reasons behind the choices he made in this novel, from his Autobiography. It's worth quoting again:

It was open to me to have described a bloated parson, with a red nose and all other iniquities, openly neglecting every duty required from him, and living riotously on funds purloined from the poor,—defying as he did do so the moderate remonstrances of a virtuous press. Or I might have painted a man as good, as sweet, and as mild as my warden, who should also have been a hard-working, ill-paid minister of God's word, and might have subjected him to the rancorous venom of some daily Jupiter, who, without a leg to stand on, without any true case, might have been induced, by personal spite, to tear to rags the poor clergyman with poisonous, anonymous, and ferocious leading articles. But neither of these programmes recommended itself to my honesty. Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed.

Trollope refuses to create strawpeople to make a point. He chose to write a novel where all the characters have valid, sympathetic reasons for their actions (with the possible exception of the media). Which brings up an obvious point about any discussion of ethics: there's a basic assumption here about what good ethics are. Is a good morality a morality that detatches itself, perceives both sides of a question, and does not conform to social or economic standards but instead personal moral and aesthetic principles? The answer to that is already, not necessarily. Humans who detach themselves too much from moral questions - for example, most people think poorly of abstract debaters who argue the Holocaust-denial side simply because they enjoy arguing - can lose sight of important matters, missing proverbial forests for trees. For looking at both sides of a question, I think that should always be done but in some cases it has already been done and needs no more doing - such as the Holocaust-denial example again. For social and economic standards, the gap of above a century-and-a-half since the novel's publication date speaks for itself. Characters who rely on an inner compass rather than the prevailing trends of their local time and space show independent choice, which can earn readers' respect even when sweeping social change has occurred in the intervening years.

Trollope's morality in THE WARDEN can be discussed from a dualistic perspective - which is also a choice I've made, to phrase ethical questions as if they had to be A versus B on a one-dimensional continuum. THE WARDEN examines stability versus change; age versus youth; private versus public morality; action versus inaction; and spiritual against physical. Underyling all this is the church itself.( Read more... )