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Barchester Towers is the second book in Trollope's well-loved "Barsetshire Trilogy," which follows the trials and tribulations of the inhabitants of an imagined cathedral town, Barchester. The controversial and unexpected appointment of the new bishop creates rivalries and intrigue.
nessreader: Oliphant's carlingford chronicles are an equivalent series to the barchester books; victorian sagas of social manouevering and parish politics. If you enjoy barsetshire, they are well worth trying. Perpetual is about high anglicanism vs lower church and like trollope spreads sympathy across opposed characters.… (more)
A delightful and funny novel which made me wonder how much one can put Trollope's social observations into a current state of affairs if it comes to schemes to gain power and influence. I love his insight into the human psyche, both of men and women. Parts reminded me of Woody Allen and how he depicts speechlessness and confusion in otherwise very articulate persons and how one’s own perception so much differs from that of others.
Reading in an illustrated, carefully edited small full cloth book with gilded edges and ribbon page marker was an extra delight. ( )
This is a more ambitious novel than The Warden, where that book's strengths are amplified in the genuinely enjoyable characterisation and narrative, but also the digressions abound and the set pieces expand to fill space seemingly not editorially constrained. Enjoyable overall however ( )
Ultimately a Victorian story of who will marry whom, but the opening 20% or so of the novel, in which the characters are named and outlined and the stage is set, is hilarious. Certainly, if you were interested, you could learn a lot about the ranked clerical positions of the Anglican church here, and many great words are used, e.g. congé, toxophilites, ha-ha, and, my favorite, hebdomadal. ( )
In the latter days of July in the year 185–, a most important question was for ten days hourly asked in the cathedral city of Barchester, and answered every hour in various ways – Who was to be the new Bishop?
Quotations
The outer world, though it constantly reviles us for our human infirmities and throws in our teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more than men, demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection. There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with the acerbity common to man; we triumph over each other with human frailty; we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no infallible head for a church on earth.
It was dreadful to be thus dissevered from his dryad, and sent howling back to a Barchester pandemonium just as the nectar and ambrosia were about to descend on the fields of asphodel.
Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so. It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.
Last words
The Author now leaves him in the hands of his readers; not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn.
Barchester Towers is the second book in Trollope's well-loved "Barsetshire Trilogy," which follows the trials and tribulations of the inhabitants of an imagined cathedral town, Barchester. The controversial and unexpected appointment of the new bishop creates rivalries and intrigue.
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blurb: Barchester Towers is Trollope’s most popular novel and one of the classics of English fiction. It is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire, which follow the intrigues of ambition and love in the cathedral town of Barchester. Trollope was of course interested in the church, that pillar of Victorian society - in its susceptibility to corruption, hypocrisy, and blinkered conservatism - but the Barsetshire novels are no more ‘ecclesiastical’ than his Palliser novels are political. It is the behavior of individuals within a power structure that interests him. In Barchester Towers Trollope continues the story of Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor, adding to his cast of characters that oily symbol of progress Mr. Slope, the hen pecked Dr. Proudie, and the amiable and breezy Stanhope family. The central questions of this moral comedy - Who will be warden? Who will be dean? Who will marry Eleanor? - are skillfully handled with that subtlety of ironic observation that has won Trollope such a wide and appreciative relationship.
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Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope - lyzard tutoring souloftherose
Wikipedia in English (1)
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