Pleasence as Septimus Harding
As my wife and I were driving down to Tennessee, New Orleans, and then back to Maryland over the holidays, we listened with rapt attention to two Victorian novels, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit.
I was struck by how both authors grapple with some of the same political issues that we face today. Trollope was a conservative and Dickens a progressive, but they don’t fit neatly into the boxes we have assigned for conservatives and progressives. Or to put it slightly differently, they complicate the issues in enlightening ways, perhaps because good novels aren’t propaganda. As a result, both novels could open up fruitful dialogue between today’s warring factions. I’ll write about Trollope today and Dickens later in the week.
Trollope has Dickens-like progressives in mind when he directs his satiric barbs against John Bold, a man of property who wants to root out corruption. Bold’s target becomes Hiram’s Hospital, an establishment that takes care of twelve old men that have fallen on hard times. It so happens that the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, a kindly old rector named Septimus Harding, is also the father of the woman that Bold loves.
Harding receives 800 pounds a year—a substantial sum—for administering what today we would call a senior center. Each of the men receives one shilling four pence a day, along with an extra twopence a day that Harding (against the advice of others in the church) voluntarily gives up from his own salary. The income gap in the past was not so great—at times the warden made hardly anything at all—but in recent years the value of the land has soared, making it possible for the warden to receive a very comfortable salary.
Bold is convinced that the man who set up the hospital’s endowment in 1434 never meant such a disproportionate percentage of the funds to go to the church administrator and begins a lawsuit. The Jupiter, a crusading newspaper, takes up the cause and links this case with other instances of church greed. Harding, who cares much more for his pensioners than he does about the money, is horrified to see his name dragged through the mud.
Meanwhile several of the pensioners, who have been saved from a wretched old age by the hospital, start thinking of themselves as entitled to 100 pounds a year. Indeed, they seem to be perfect exemplars of Mitt Romney’s 47%, men who want others to lavish “gifts” upon them. Trollope depicts their ringleader Abel Handy as particularly repellant. Here’s an interchange Handy has with Bunce, the one pensioner who argues that the current arrangements are more than fair. Bunce first:
“Did any of us ever do anything worth half the money? Was it to make gentlemen of us we were brought in here, when all the world turned against us, and we couldn’t longer earn our daily bread? A’n’t you all as rich in your ways as he in his?”—and the orator pointed to the side on which the warden lived. “A’n’t you getting all you hoped for, ay, and more than you hoped for? Wouldn’t each of you have given the dearest limb of his body to secure that which now makes you so unthankful?”
“We wants what John Hiram left us,” said Handy. “We wants what’s ourn by law; it don’t matter what we expected. What’s ourn by law should be ourn, and by goles we’ll have it.”
Though he obviously dislikes Handy, who at times sounds like a union organizer, Trollope is even harder on Bold, and his criticism is conservative thinking at its most eloquent. He acknowledges that Bold has some justification for targeting church greed but believes that reformers, in their zeal, risk doing more harm than good:
[Bold’s] passion is the reform of all abuses; state abuses, church abuses, corporation abuses (he has got himself elected a town councillor of Barchester, and has so worried three consecutive mayors, that it became somewhat difficult to find a fourth), abuses in medical practice, and general abuses in the world at large. Bold is thoroughly sincere in his patriotic endeavors to mend mankind, and there is something to be admired in the energy with which he devotes himself to remedying evil and stopping injustice; but I fear that he is too much imbued with the idea that he has a special mission for reforming. It would be well if one so young had a little more diffidence himself, and more trust in the honest purposes of others,—if he could be brought to believe that old customs need not necessarily be evil, and that changes may possibly be dangerous; but no, Bold has all the ardor and all the self-assurance of a Danton, and hurls his anathemas against time-honored practices with the violence of a French Jacobin.
The novel goes on to show the damage done by Bold’s reforms. Harding, shocked by the attacks from The Jupiter but agreeing that perhaps he does receive too much, resigns his post for a much smaller living elsewhere. Once he leaves, the hospital falls apart, and Trollope relishes showing us the consequences. What progressives have sown, so shall they reap:
[O]ther tidings soon made their way into the old men’s rooms. It was first notified to them that the income abandoned by Mr. Harding would not come to them; and these accounts were confirmed by attorney Finney. They were then informed that Mr. Harding’s place would be at once filled by another. That the new warden could not be a kinder man they all knew; that he would be a less friendly one most suspected; and then came the bitter information that, from the moment of Mr. Harding’s departure, the twopence a day, his own peculiar gift, must of necessity be withdrawn.
And this was to be the end of all their mighty struggle,—of their fight for their rights,—of their petition, and their debates, and their hopes! They were to change the best of masters for a possible bad one, and to lose twopence a day each man! No; unfortunate as this was, it was not the worst, or nearly the worst, as will just now be seen.
“The worst” proves to be the loss of Mr. Harding’s spiritual presence:
It is now some years since Mr Harding left it, and the warden’s house is still tenantless. Old Bell has died, and Billy Gazy; the one-eyed Spriggs has drunk himself to death, and three others of the twelve have been gathered into the churchyard mould. Six have gone, and the six vacancies remain unfilled! Yes, six have died, with no kind friend to solace their last moments, with no wealthy neighbor to administer comforts and ease the stings of death. Mr Harding, indeed, did not desert them; from him they had such consolation as a dying man may receive from his Christian pastor; but it was the occasional kindness of a stranger which ministered to them, and not the constant presence of a master, a neighbor, and a friend.
Nor were those who remained better off than those who died. Dissensions rose among them, and contests for pre-eminence; and then they began to understand that soon one among them would be the last,—some one wretched being would be alone there in that now comfortless hospital,—the miserable relic of what had once been so good and so comfortable.
The building of the hospital itself has not been allowed to go to ruins. Mr Chadwick, who still holds his stewardship, and pays the accruing rents into an account opened at a bank for the purpose, sees to that; but the whole place has become disordered and ugly. The warden’s garden is a wretched wilderness, the drive and paths are covered with weeds, the flower-beds are bare, and the unshorn lawn is now a mass of long damp grass and unwholesome moss. The beauty of the place is gone; its attractions have withered. Alas! a very few years since it was the prettiest spot in Barchester, and now it is a disgrace to the city.
I hear in this development a critique of liberals in general. By moving so quickly to dismantle various institutions in the name of progress, they risk damaging the deep wisdom that lies within tradition. To cite one instance where I was guilty of such myopia, when I was among those in the 1960s waving the flag of sexual revolution, labeling marriage as a “bourgeois convention,” and excoriating the hypocrisy of patriarchal households, I didn’t fully acknowledge the virtues of “the traditional family.” A more gradual cultural evolution might have wrought less damage and incurred less of a backlash. That backlash has been behind the rise of the Christian right.
I’m not going to concede the entire argument here. Tradition could have kept African American suppressed for another hundred years, along with women and members of the GLBT community. There will always be a tension between conservatives and progressives. That tension can even be good, with each perspective checking the worst tendencies of the other. Trollope reminds us that sometimes change needs to happen at a slower pace than progressives would like.
One reason I like Barack Obama so much, and why he has such a fan in the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan of The Dish, is that he recognizes this. (Sullivan sees Obama as a true conservative and regards many of today’s so-called conservatives as dangerous radicals.) While many of Obama’s incremental steps have disappointed his progressive followers, they may have made a deeper impact because they were incremental.
Think again of the novel. If Bold had worked quietly with his future father-in-law, then together they could have redirected his salary and achieved something close to what Bold wanted. Instead he chooses confrontation and creates chaos.
We learn in the sequel that a better situation ultimately emerges. After several years during which Hiram Hospital decays, a new warden is appointed and paid 450 rather than 800 pounds. The extra money is used to set up a second establishment for 12 female pensioners.
By that time, however, Bold has died as Trollope rather callously kills him off between The Warden and its sequel Barchester Tower. This change could have occurred while he was still alive, and he would have undergone less humiliation and felt the satisfaction of a vision validated.
