Mr. Popular Sentiment

The Warden was the fourth novel by Anthony Trollope to be published and the first to catch the public eye. It was also to be the first of his enormously popular Barsetshire Chronicles, the tales set in an ancient cathedral close and occupied with the doings of the bishop, clergy, and their families.

The warden is the Reverend Septimus Harding, a sweet old boy who likes nothing better than to play his cello and chant the litany in the cathedral. In return for being nice to the twelve ancient bedesmen in Hiram’s Hospital, he receives the huge salary of eight hundred pounds a year, paid out of the funds accumulated by property development on the patches of land bequeathed by the original Mr. Hiram. By contrast, the decayed pensioners under his care receive a mere one shilling and fourpence a day. This gross inequality comes to the notice of John Bold, a thrusting young surgeon who is in love with Harding’s daughter, Eleanor, and she with him. Bold takes up the bedesmen’s cause, and enlists the support of his friend Tom Towers, the equally thrusting young lion of The Jupiter (Trollope’s version of The Thunderer, then and now the nickname of the London Times, at that period the dominant newspaper, with a circulation of fifty thousand).

A ferocious legal and media campaign follows. In the end, the distraught Eleanor persuades John Bold to call off the campaign, but not before Harding, stricken with belated shame, has decided to give up the wardenship and its whopping income, and go and live in relative poverty with his cello. Bold and Eleanor are married, and the story ends on a serene diminuendo.

But this account fails to convey the passion with which Trollope insists on the sweet and saintly character of the old Warden and the crass, brutish behavior of his assailants. From the start, the scales are loaded against the campaigners. Bold himself is an interfering busybody: “It would be well if one so young had a little more diffidence himself, and more trust in the honest purpose of others—if he could be brought to believe that old customs need not necessarily be evil, and that changes may possibly be dangerous.” When the bedesmen’s eyes light up at the prospect of getting a hundred pounds a year, they are denounced for their greed. The Jupiter is denounced, too, as a terrifying “pope who manages his own inquisition, who punishes unbelievers as no most skilful inquisitor of Spain ever dreamt of doing—one who can excommunicate thoroughly, fearfully, radically; put you beyond the pale of men’s charity; make you odious to your dearest friends, and turn you into a monster to be pointed at by the finger!” Seldom until the advent of the Leveson Inquiry can the irresponsible cruelty of the press have been so flayed.

The Warden is an affecting little novel, but it is also a decidedly odd one. In its barely two hundred pages, Trollope finds space for a prolonged parody of Thomas Carlyle, alias Dr. Pessimist Anticant, in his most tub-thumping manner. Odder still, he throws in a sketch of the same novel as Charles Dickens might have written it. In a shop window, John Bold sees the first installment of The Almshouse by Mr. Popular Sentiment. In Sentiment’s version, the Warden becomes an out-and-out villain living in luxury, while the paupers in his care are starving on sixpence-farthing a day. After reading the first installment, Bold tosses it aside, thinking that the book “at least had no direct appliance to Mr Harding, and that the absurdly strong colouring of the picture would disenable the work from doing either good or harm.” But Trollope tells us firmly, “He was wrong. The artist who paints for the million must use glaring colours, as no one knew better than Mr Sentiment when he described the inhabitants of his almshouse; and the radical reform which has now swept over such establishments has owed more to the twenty numbers of Mr Sentiment’s novel, than to all the true complaints which have escaped from the public for the last half-century.”

Here we have a completely new critique of popular sentimental fiction. No longer is the objection that the authors of such works are self-indulgent weepies. In that sense, as we have seen, The Warden is just as sentimental. The trouble now is not that these books are powerless to affect the injustices they are moaning about. On the contrary, the objection is that this new wave of sentimental twaddle is too effective: “Of all such reformers Mr Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects, and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do.” His secret is gross oversimplification: “Mr Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters.”

In his parody, Trollope reproduces some of the overwhelming firepower of Dickens at his hottest, for example in his description of the villainous Master of the Almshouse: “He was a man well stricken in years, but still strong to do evil: he was one who looked cruelly out of a hot, passionate, bloodshot eye; who had a huge red nose with a carbuncle, thick lips, and a great double, flabby chin, which swelled out into solid substance, like a turkey-cock’s comb, when sudden anger inspired him: he had a hot, furrowed, low brow, from which a few grizzled hairs were not yet rubbed off by the friction of his handkerchief: he wore a loose unstarched white handkerchief, black loose ill-made clothes, and huge loose shoes, adapted to many corns and various bunions: his husky voice told tales of much daily port wine, and his language was not so decorous as became a clergyman.”

This portrait of an imaginary character in an imaginary novel rather reminds me of the bravura portrait of the dying Mrs. Sinclair, the brothel-keeper in Clarissa. It is also a good deal livelier than Trollope’s descriptions of his actual characters in The Warden, which are all drawn judiciously, as always in Trollope’s novels, with a careful mixture of good and bad in them, but drawn pallidly, a little blandly, in watercolor rather than Dickens’s furious impasto. Might one perhaps have enjoyed The Almshouse, if it had ever been written, rather more intensely than The Warden?

I have quoted Trollope’s indictment of Dickens at some length not because it is unique but because it is so vivid and candid. Dickens’s other critics sing much the same tune. One’s first reaction, in fact, on reviewing his critical heritage, is to marvel that these critiques are so plentiful and so ferocious. As the essayist G. H. Lewes, George Eliot’s partner, one of the fairer of these critics but not the least harsh, put it, “There probably never was a writer of so vast a popularity whose genius was so little appreciated by the critics.” Dickens might have effortlessly conquered the popular market. By the guardians of high culture, he continued to be received with distaste and even loathing. In fact, it is the very ease which he came to dominate the market for popular fiction that awakened the direst suspicions of the intelligentsia (as it was not yet called).

Lewes had enjoyed many of Dickens’s earlier novels, such as Oliver Twist. And he had corresponded amicably with Dickens himself. But after Dickens’s death, he gave a more caustic assessment. His characters were like frogs whose brains had been removed for the purpose of scientific experiment. These brainless frogs would continue to hop and jump as before, but the hops and skips would be “always the same.” They lacked the complexity and unpredictability of real living creatures.

Lewes writes in summation: “Only the cultivated who are made fastidious by cultivation paused to consider the pervading commonness of the works, and remarked that they are wholly without glimpses of a nobler life; and that the writer presents an almost unique example of a mind of singular force in which, so to speak, sensations never passed into ideas. Dickens sees and feels, but the logic of feeling seems the only logic he can manage. Thought is strangely absent from his works.”

So: low, common, thoughtless, lacking in serious aspiration. This kind of assessment of Dickens was still alive seventy years later. The critique of Dickens as sentimental and vulgar, and therefore a bad influence on both literature and politics, lasted for decades, until the more generous assessments of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson more or less smothered it. Lewes was at least right in claiming that no popular English novelist ever got such a roasting from the critics as Mr. Popular Sentiment. That roasting was the beginning of a more defined cleavage between high culture and popular culture, a cleavage which widens over the early years of the twentieth century with lasting and fateful consequences. It is in fact a defining feature of modernism. Perhaps it is the defining feature.  

This essay is adapted from Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality (Bloomsbury, 2025). It was published in the Christ the King 2025 issue under the headline “Charles Dickens.”