Restructuring with Anthony Trollope: Managing Change in Chronicle Provincial Fiction

Abstract

This article examines the series of novels by Anthony Trollope, known as the Barsetshire Chronicles, in relation to the idea of living through infrastructural transition. It contends that the novels, set in and around the fictional cathedral city of Barchester, stage a macro-level experience of living through infrastructural transition for implied readers. While the narrator’s asides convey a sense of privileged early access to the informational flows of the modern state, characters are depicted as disconnected from the wide sweep of transition and, in effect, replaceable over the diachronic span of the narrative sequence. The article draws a parallel between the innovative forms of the serial provincial novel and Trollope’s work for the Post Office — the foundational infrastructure of the fantasy of liberal government of a state of freedom in which individuals can encounter and gain knowledge of distant others to ensure the steady flow of capital and information. The article suggests an overlooked aspect of the Barchester novels is the backdrop of a profound transition of civic infrastructures and ethics of care from the local pastoral and temporal workings of the Established Church of England to the workings of the centralized utilitarian liberal state via the 1834 Poor Law and the work of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The Barchester novels in this sense dramatize the ‘death of the parish’ as a meaningful unit of local autonomy.