Abstract
Time is not on Mr Septimus Harding’s side in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855). When his income as warden of Hiram’s Hospital is questioned by his prospective son-in-law Dr John Bold, and while his reputation is being undermined by articles in The Jupiter, Mr Harding’s peace of mind becomes so disturbed that he finds it almost impossible to think through the problems he is only now being presented with, and can never seem to find the time needed to come to his own opinion on the scandal. Indeed, time, which previously had seemed so generous, so full, quickly dissipates before his eyes, and he discovers himself living in what Walter Benjamin has memorably called the ‘homogeneous, empty time’ of modernity.1 He is hemmed in on all sides as he finds justice in both the actions of Bold and the defence offered by Dr Grantly, archdeacon and Harding’s son-in-law, who speaks in tones of certainty of the moral rectitude of the Church. Trollope communicates to the reader the confusion and turmoil of Harding’s mind through free indirect speech; Harding’s thoughts are composed mostly of questions he simply cannot manage to answer:
What right had [Bold] to say that John Hiram’s will was not fairly carried out? But then the question would arise within his heart — Was that will fairly acted on? Did John Hiram mean that the warden of his hospital should receive considerably more out of the legacy than all the twelve old men together…? Could it be possible that…? What if it should be proved…?2
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 263.
Anthony Trollope, The Warden, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), p. 34.
Although The Warden is now receiving some well-deserved attention as an examination of Victorianism liberalism. See Bo Earle, ‘Policing and Performing Liberal Individuality in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 61 (1) (2006), 1–31;
Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 66–124.
Walter Kendrick, The Novel-Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 93–4.
Sherman Hawkins, ‘Mr Harding’s Church Music’, ELH, 29 (1962), p. 204.
Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part One: 1829–1859 (London: SCM Press, 1987), p. 513.
Matthew Arnold, ‘On the Modern Element in Literature’, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 1, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 32.
James Baldwin Brown, ‘The Revolution of the Last Quarter of a Century’, in First Principles of Ecclesiastical Truth (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1871), p. 279.
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84–258.
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 12–18.
David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2000), p. 81.
Richard S. Westfall, ‘The Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: A New World View’, in The Concept of Nature, ed. John Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 63–93.
Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Nature and the Ecological Crisis (London: Doubleday, 2002), p. 111.
William Paley, Natural Theology, ed. Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 7–8.
Ibid., p. 15. For an acute analysis of Bold’s lack of interest in the medical profession in which he has trained, see Timothy Ziegenhagen, ‘Trollope’s Professional Gentlemen: Medical Training and Medical Practice in Doctor Thorne and The Warden’, Studies in the Novel, 38 (2) (2006), 154–71.
Quoted in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 116.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 54.
W.L. Burn, ‘Anthony Trollope’s Politics’, Nineteenth Century and After, 143 (1948), 165.
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Killeen, J. (2013). Emptying Time in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden. In: Ferguson, T. (eds) Victorian Time. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007988_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007988_3
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