Barchester Towers

"It starts with the big question: the bishop has died, who’s going to get the job? And Archdeacon Grantly—who appears in many of the novels—is affronted to find out that they’ve brought in Bishop Proudie. He has an amazing wife, Mrs. Proudie, who tries to take over everything. It’s got one of my favourite sleazy characters, the Reverend Obadiah Slope (played by Alan Rickman when it was broadcast). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Barchester Towers has also got one of my favourite, favourite scenes in Trollope, which is when Miss Thorne gives a party. There are two marquees, one for the tenants of the estate, the farmers and below, and one for the gentry. But what about the people who don’t fit so neatly into those categories? Trollope is very interested in them. There’s a woman called Mrs. Lookaloft who, because her daughters have learned the pianoforte and she has named her farmhouse Rosebank, muscles into the gentry’s tent. And it causes consternation. The scene is so funny. The tenants, the people below the ha-ha (which is a big ditch, that’s one word I learned from Trollope) are furious because she’s no better than them and they’ve all been mocking her about her daughters learning the pianoforte and her pretension in renaming her house. But then, suddenly, she’s with the gentry. She’s pushed her way in. And the gentry are appalled that this woman is invading their space. No one knows what to do about this breach. They’re wonderful characters and they are genuine slices of life. They really are classy soap operas. You get sucked in so quickly and easily. I was looking through them again yesterday, in preparation for talking to you. I thought, ‘I’ll just remind myself quickly of Lord whatever-his-name-is’—because it can be hard to remember—and I just found myself reading them again. They are really fun. Once you read one, it’s hard not to read all of them. Well, maybe not all. There are 47 and I’ve probably read about 35. Trollope wrote to a stopwatch and compared being a writer to being a cobbler. A lot of people made fun of him for that, and I just thought, ‘You are my hero! It’s a job and how great that you’re totally unpretentious about it.’ I admire Trollope’s interest in money and I also admire the way that he wrote 250 words every 15 minutes. He famously finished one novel and started the next one immediately. He’s so un-precious about himself, which is something I’ve really taken from him as a writer. For most of his life Trollope worked fulltime at the Post Office. For a long time, he didn’t make money from his books. He would get up early to write, and then go and do his job. He wrote on trains, he wrote when he was travelling. He just fitted it into his life. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh I need to be alone. I need my separate space. ‘Servants! Look after me because the Muse has descended from Olympus!’ He was just very practical. I think what he’s writing is a comedy of manners. But he’s also writing about the way the world is. He’s very alert to the changes in society, the Industrial Revolution and the declining power of the landed aristocracy, of which he was the poor cousin. He had to work. He’s the perfect person to be narrating these scenes. It is a real tapestry of Britain in the 19th century, but with a lot of things to say about our times as well. You learn a lot about life, really, and our lives, through reading someone like Trollope."

"Trollope was called in his time the lesser Thackeray, and Thackeray was his god. But I think most people today would probably see him as the greater Thackeray. He took from Thackeray the idea that you could connect your novels into a kind of megafiction. You could have characters moving on from one novel to the next. The Barchester series is six novels long, and Victorian novels are not small things. Barchester Towers is one of my favourites in that six-part sequence. The thing to remember about Trollope is that he was very innovative. He was a civil servant, and the first novelist to realise that institutions like the Civil Service or universities or hospitals or churches were worlds, and within these worlds you could create microcosms of fictional lives. Barchester Towers is really about the Victorian church as an institution, rather like the Civil Service, that you could have a career in. It begins, famously, with a bishop dying. A telegram is sent. (Trollope worked in the post office himself; he invented the pillar box and was also instrumental in the introduction of telegraphy.) The telegram is sent to Downing Street for the appointment of the new bishop, and they don’t know if it will be a modernist or a traditionalist. That is a Trollopian theme which runs right the way through the series. Exactly. The Victorians didn’t know whether they believed in progress or tradition. In fact, they believed in both. It depended on the time of their life."