Hitherto Barchester had escaped the taint of any extreme rigour of church doctrine. The clergymen of the city and neighbourhood, though very well inclined to promote High Church principles, privileges, and prerogatives, had never committed themselves to tendencies which are somewhat too loosely called Puseyite practices.
One of the most impressive things about Trollope is that he is actually able to create compelling dramatic conflict out of the interactions of his character in this novel as they struggle over an issue as abstruse as ecclesiastical ideology. The “Puseyite” practices referred to in the above description of the natural state of Barchester references the difference between liturgical practices within the various denominations of Protestantism. The Puseyites favored an adherence to certain aspects of church instruction which aligned closer to those defined by Catholicism.
“It is not only in Barchester that a new man is carrying out new measures and casting away the useless rubbish of past centuries. The same thing is going on throughout the country. Work is now required from every man who receives wages, and they who have to superintend the doing of work, and the paying of wages, are bound to see that this rule is carried out. New men, Mr. Harding, are now needed and are now forthcoming in the church, as well as in other professions.”
The conflict shaping up to make Barchester a center of debate for the first time is not just centered upon liturgical practice. The collision between church traditions and change is but an element of the overall theme reflection the view of the Victorians as living in an age of evolution. Traditions were giving way to new ideas within every aspect of society and in this passage is situated the semantic difficulty making this epochal change so unstable: the view of those desiring change that traditions of the past can be equated with trash to be discarded in the heap.
And now it is to be feared that every well-bred reader of these pages will lay down the book with disgust, feeling that, after all, the heroine is unworthy of sympathy. She is a hoyden, one will say. At any rate she is not a lady, another will exclaim. I have suspected her all through, a third will declare; she has no idea of the dignity of a matron, or of the peculiar propriety which her position demands.
Trollope would later move away from technique as it began to fall out of favor, but in this novel he shows himself to be a traditionalist through being fully committed to a tradition going strong him at the time. For the most part, his narrator is limited in his authority, acting as a mere storyteller with more than occasional glimpses into the working mind of characters as he so chooses. Adhering to a certain style of narration that is almost obsolete in modern fiction, however, he indulges in the practice of addressing or acknowledging the reader directly.
I never could endure to shake hands with Mr. Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.
In rare instances, Trollope even writes in a manner in which he allows his narrator to co-exist in the real world. Readers of contemporary fiction would never expect to find the use of first person awareness in a novel otherwise persistently presented in the third-person, but Trollope was hardly unique in the occasional blurring. The technique is related to an underlying ideology of composition in which the narrator is assumed to be literally telling a story. That is to say the narrator is literally a storyteller; an unnamed personage writing from experience who has nevertheless adopted the distance of a third-person narrator. This ideology of storytelling creates an assumption of reality that subtly encourages the reader to infer that the story actually happened even though it is not in any other manner presented as non-fiction. Such an approach is part of the history of the evolution of the novel and one its lingering connections to its origins when novelists actually did specifically try to create the illusion that they were reading a true account.
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?
The opening line sets the stage for the machinations of everything that is to come. The death of the bishop has come after a long, lingering period of illness and it precisely that passage of time between when it became obvious that he was not long for this world and when he actually was no longer of this world that has allowed the world external to Barchester to wield unexpectedly profound influence upon the cloistered village, bringing old traditions into conflict with new ideas for the first time a long while.
