The Warden

Lore & Background

The story is set in the fictional county of Barsetshire and concerns Mr Septimus Harding, the meek, widowed and elderly warden of Hiram's Hospital and precentor of Barchester Cathedral. When a zealous young reformer, John Bold, launches a campaign to expose the disparity in the charity's income between the bedesmen and the warden, Harding ultimately resigns his office in good conscience. The novel ends with Harding becoming Rector of St Cuthbert's, a small parish near the Cathedral Close.

In Their Own Story

The corridor stank of old ash and something sweeter, something that clung to the back of the throat like a bad memory. You had been walking for what felt like hours, the torchlight swallowing the walls one by one, each step crunching over a floor littered with the bones of those who came before. Then the air changed. A pressure. A silence that was not silence but held breath.

The Warden stood at the end of the passage, and it did not move. It did not need to. Its presence filled the space the way a blade fills the space between your ribs—inevitable, total. You could see the faint glow of something ancient in its chest, a light that had no source you could name. Around its feet, the stone was cracked in a radial pattern, as though the ground had tried to push it out and failed.

You raised your weapon. Your hands were steady. They had to be.

The Warden's eyes opened. And the corridor was no longer a corridor. It was a throat.

Reader's Guide

The source article does not provide a guide.

Did You Know?

• The Warden was adapted as a BBC television mini-series in 1951, which was broadcast live and apparently never recorded.
• The BBC adapted The Warden and its sequel, Barchester Towers, into the miniseries The Barchester Chronicles in 1982.
• George Orwell, in a 1944 review, called the novel 'probably the most successful' of Trollope's 'clerical series' and 'one of his best works.'