Slow and steady on the straight and narrow: The struggling clergymen in Anthony Trollope's 'Barsetshire Chronicles'

This study explores the function of five fictional clergymen in Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles, a six-novel series based upon the ecclesiastical world of the rural region of Barsetshire. Research encompassed analysis of primary sources such as Trollope's personal observations about religion and the Church of England, his letters and autobiography, as well as secondary sources, including biographies of Trollope, literary articles concerning Trollope's life and writings, and studies of the history of the Anglican Church during Queen Victoria's reign. As Trollope's somewhat equivocal characters struggle and question their traditions, their system of ethics, and even their faith, they simultaneously support and contradict their author's statements concerning progress and tradition. Several literary scholars note this consistent yet often exasperating element of Trollope's style. He portrays every one of his major clergy characters as a complicated composition of virtue and vice. In the same way, he undermines his assertions that champion reform with equally significant yet contradictory statements calling for respect for the status quo.;I argue that Trollope presents wavering characters and ambiguous situations deliberately, in an attempt to interpret the perplexing social, political, economic, and moral transformations confronting earnest Victorians. Trollope's paradoxical characterization of his clergymen sensitively integrates the gradual change needed to adapt to modernizing nineteenth-century Great Britain, with existing, still meaningful Church traditions.