Mediation, Authority, and Critical Reading in The Warden

Abstract

In New Zealander, the book-length critique of Victorian England that Anthony Trollope wrote in the mid-1850s, Trollope bemoans the fact that the newspaper press, especially the Times, has so much influence on society. But, his mind, the readers of the paper are more at fault for this dangerous consolidation of power than the Times itself. Trollope likens that most influential of newspapers a Leviathan that tyrannizes English society with the threat of its opinions (37). Yet, Trollope says, we have a tyrant ruling us... we have none blame for our thralldom but ourselves (42). Trollope goes on suggest that this subjection a newspaper comes from the fact that the English people consume the articles of the Times with no critical discernment. The readers, he says, the work of brainless idle men, whom the trouble of thinking for would be a pain too great for endurance (45). This line of thinking, in many ways, elaborates on the themes that Trollope had dealt with in his portrayal of the press in Warden (1855), the novel he wrote before starting New Zealander. In this essay, I examine Warden as a novel that aims make its audience into the kinds of critical readers that New Zealander finds be so lacking in England. Critics such as Bo Earle and Elaine Hadley have recently turned Warden examine the ways in which Septimus Harding's reaction the press represents Trollope's notions of ideal liberal citizenship. (1) Yet these accounts have done little in the way of addressing how Trollope deals with the press itself. Trollope, I argue, attempts educate his readers in that book be skeptical of the writing of authorities like the Times, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle (who are represented in Warden by the Jupiter, Mr. Popular Sentiment, and Dr. Pessimist Anticant respectively); he wants his readers understand that these figures are fallible despite the air of infallibility that they cultivate. More importantly, though, Trollope wants his audience be aware of the ways in which these sources do not offer immediate access their subject but are conditioned by various mediations. Trollope shows that the very air of authority that these texts project is an effect of medium and convention. Moreover, Trollope's desire scrutinize the effects of mediation also manifests as a self-consciousness about the ways in which his own novel works. At several points in Warden, Trollope calls his audience's attention the ways in which the genre of his text, the material realities of the book, the marketplace, authorial labor, or his narrator shape his portrayal of the narrative. For instance, in the last chapter of Warden, Trollope confesses that he is writing a conclusion mainly because he feels the pressure of generic expectations. Were it not for the custom of the thing, Trollope writes, he would not bother to collect the scattered threads of our little story but would rather leave it the imagination of all concerned conceive how affairs at Barchester arranged themselves (278). Such moments in the novel, I argue, no matter how flippant they may seem, aim reinforce the sense that readers need have critical awareness of all the factors that are shaping the texts that they read. If he can teach his readers that the works they encounter do not offer immediate access the truth or reality but rather versions of these things that are shaped by generic conventions and material contingencies, Trollope believes that he can help educate the public be more critical readers and more discerning thinkers than they are. Trollope's Media Awareness and His Realism In what sense is Trollope conscious of the mediations that shape his and other texts? (2) For my purposes, mediation refers both the workings of technical media--such as print--and more abstract entities like genre. I am here following John Guillory, who has recently argued that scholars of traditional art such as literature must take equally seriously both the mediation of literature by technologies such as print. …