The Warden

‘It was so hard that the pleasant waters of his little stream should be disturbed and muddied …that his quiet paths should be made a battlefield: that the unobtrusive corner of the world which been allotted to him …made miserable and unsound’. Trollope’s witty, satirical story of a quiet cathedral town shaken by scandal – as the traditional values of Septimus Harding are attacked by zealous reformers and ruthless newspapers – is a drama of conscience that pits individual integrity against worldly ambition. In The Warden Anthony Trollope brought the fictional county of Barsetshire to life, peopled by a cast of brilliantly realised characters that have made him among the supreme chroniclers of the minutiae of Victorian England. It is the first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.