The first of Anthony Trollope's celebrated Chronicles of Barsetshire, The Warden is a remarkably modern novel disguised as a Victorian one.

At its centre is Septimus Harding, the gentle warden of an almshouse whose quiet life is thrown into crisis when questions are raised about whether the charitable foundation he oversees has become morally compromised. 

The reformers are not entirely right, the traditionalists are not entirely wrong, and Harding himself only really muses on whether he deserves the position he occupies. Trollope writes with extraordinary sympathy for people caught inside institutions that have outgrown the ideals on which they were founded. Though Kafka or Orwell examined bureaucracy through estrangement with magnificent eyes, Trollope understood its more ordinary tragedy: decent people trapped within systems that ask incompatible things of them.

Published in 1855, The Warden established the fictional county of Barsetshire, one of the great literary worlds of the nineteenth century. It remains one of the finest places to begin with Trollope—gentler than Dickens, less psychologically fevered than George Eliot, but unmatched in his understanding of institutions, compromise and everyday moral life.

2012 Vintage Classics paperback. Very good condition with light shelf wear.