“I woke up one morning about six months ago and felt a strong urge to read some Trollope (Anthony, that is, rather than Joanna). I'm not quite sure what brought on this urge, since I'd managed to live more than four decades on this earth without giving him much thought. I'd managed to make it through English Literature at Oxford without paying him any attention, although given that I got my degree without bothering to read Middlemarch while a friend of mine triumphed in the same subject without ever turning his critical eye to Hamlet, that's not saying much.

I had an incentive. Trollope is said to have modeled his most famous creation—the town of Barchester—on my home town of Salisbury, England; so I had a foothold on the cliff-face of his imagination. But, although I'd read a good amount of Tripe in my time and had imitated in my own writing his contemporary Codswallop, Trollope was, literally, a closed book to me.

The Way We Live Now, considered Trollope's masterpiece, felt too daunting a read—a typical Victorian triple-decker of a novel. So I started with his novella, The Warden, and have just completed the second in the series, Barchester Towers. The Warden tells the gentlest of tales about a Mr. Harding, who's the warden of an old-person's home called Hiram's Hospital. It turns out that the job pays much more than the work required, and when the rather self-righteous John Bold finds out, he feels it's not right and alerts the press. There's a deal of ecclesiastical brouhaha before all is resolved: John Bold is tamed, not least by marrying the younger of Mr. Harding's daughters, and Mr. Harding's decency and modesty are confirmed. The novel is leisurely and extremely even-tempered; even the religious controversies that were roiling England at the time (the 1840s and 50s) are handled with a certain reactionary amusement. Only when Trollope turns his attention to politicians and the press—in the form of the Jupiter, his satirical take on the London Times—does his prose gain some Dickensian teeth (although Trollope only uses his molars, whereas Dickens will employ his incisors when he needs to).

Barchester Towers is more of the same, except longer. The characters of the ingratiating and ambitious Obadiah Slope; Mrs. Proudie, the battle-axe wife of the henpecked Bishop of Barchester; and Signora Neroni, the beautiful but affected elder daughter of the feckless Stanhope family, add some texture to the novel. But the remaining characters are virtuous and punctilious (even those satirized are generally looked on with benignity by the genial narrator), and the plot—basically about who will get what position in the local church—is uneventful. As in The Warden, Trollope is amiably discursive, addressing the reader at frequent intervals to tell him or her what's happening and not to worry because everyone will get what they deserve. He curtails or willfully avoids the big scenes that Dickens would have spent fifty pages describing, and even anticipates the reader's frustration by lamenting that Mr. Longman, his publisher, hadn't given him another volume so he could satisfy the reader's desire for a rousing conclusion. As it is, the novel still feels attenuated.

None of this is exactly annoying, but it's all a little sleepy—rather as we may say Salisbury is in comparison with London, Dickens' great stage. I think Trollope knows this; at one point, one of his characters returns home to read the final installment of Little Dorrit: a nice variation of the inability topos. To his credit, Trollope does remind you that what happened in the Anglican Church during this period mattered, not merely doctrinally but also because so many middle-class professions depended on preferment within its hierarchy. It's also interesting to read a Victorian novelist whose temperament is conservative and whose politics are Tory, as opposed to the Whiggish and nonconformist Eliot, or the thundering reformer Dickens himself.

That said, I think my yen for reading Trollope has been satisfied for a few more years.