Barchester Towers

Barchester Towers is set entirely within Trollope's invented cathedral city of Barchester and its surrounding county of Barsetshire, and much of its plot turns on a vacant post, the wardenship of Hiram's Hospital, which the gentle, elderly Mr Harding gave up in the previous novel of the series. When old Bishop Grantly dies, his son the archdeacon expects to inherit the see, only to watch a political shuffle in London hand it instead to the weak, easily led Bishop Proudie, who arrives trailing two far stronger personalities behind him: his domineering wife, Mrs Proudie, who runs the diocese as though it were her own household, and his chaplain, the oily, ambitious Obadiah Slope, who schemes over who gets the warden's post, wants Mrs Proudie's influence for himself, and wants the young widow Eleanor Bold most of all, for her money as much as anything else. Eleanor is also pursued, more honestly, by Mr Francis Arabin, a scholarly High Church clergyman brought in by the archdeacon partly to counter Slope's influence, and their courtship proceeds in fits and starts while the flirtatious, disabled Italian noblewoman Signora Madeline Neroni amuses herself testing every man in Barchester, Slope included. Slope overreaches, loses the backing of both the bishop and his wife, and leaves town defeated; Eleanor marries Arabin, and the deanship itself goes to Arabin at the close, an honour offered first to the gentle Mr Harding, who, true to himself, declines it.

Trollope narrates all of this with a warm, gossipy, faintly ironic authorial voice that steps forward often to comment on his own characters, and the comedy comes less from incident than from watching vain, ambitious, essentially small minded people jockey for status inside a cathedral close. It is a leisurely book by design, more interested in social comedy than plot mechanics, and a reader who enjoys Trollope's narrator talking directly to them will find it consistently funny; a reader wanting momentum may find the middle volume slow going.

Trollope later wrote in his autobiography that the bishop, Mrs Proudie, the archdeacon, and Slope had all become "very real" to him as he worked.