The Warden

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

The Warden is the first of six novels about the town of Barsetshire. Naturally, I read the second novel, Barcester Towers, first. No one should ever accuse me of being smart. BT was a few years ago but I remember liking it quite a bit, some biting satire and standout characters. Trollope is like a more personable Dickens with less eventful, if more realistic plots. He seems gregarious and friendly as a narrator than his more famous countryman.

The Warden details the controversy surrounding the right of the church to bestow 800 pounds to the warden of an old folks' home when the will it draws that right from explicitly states that money is to go to the old folks at Hiram's Hospital. The church is basically ripping the poor, infirm workers off and has been for years. Who's stuck in the middle but Septimus Harding (cool name) a kindly, meek, and benevolent man of the cloth. The problems start when an equally well meaning laymen, John Bold, decides to take up the cause of the poor guys. Things are complicated by three facts: 1) Bold is in love with Harding's daughter Eleanor and she loves him 2) The archbishop is a big blustery fellow by the name of Grantly who is vehemently against Bold and also married to Harding's other daughter 3) Septimus Harding has a conscience that won't let him overlook ripping off old guys.

The novel follows Harding's struggle with the lawsuit, his ideas about fairness to the inhabitants of Hiram's hospital and his loyalty to the church. He is devastated when a few editorials appear in the all powerful Jupiter newspaper blasting the warden for his greed. The editorials are really the last straw, they deeply affect Harding and he decides to head to London to confer with the church's lawyer, an action of betrayal to the archbishop. After the lawyer can't even begin to explain why the warden gets the 800 pounds a year Harding makes up his mind to retire from the position. And that's pretty much the whole book. Eleanor and Bold get married, the end. What we've got here is really the introduction to Barchester Towers, a much more nuanced and complicated tale. The nice thing about The Warden is that we get a look inside the mind of a very good man. Once the issue of fairness is brought up to Harding, Trollope shows the wheels moving in the old man's mind. The thought process that leads him to resign from the wardenship and take a ton less money is the center of the tale.

Rating 5/10: I liked The Warden, but it should have just been tacked onto Barchester Towers.

The Dreams in the Witch House

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

One of the shortest of the classics, you can find Witch House here. We meet poor Walter Gilman after he's already made a fatal mistake. A math major in college, he becomes obsessed with the tales of a witch who was executed 300 years ago in his town. This witch, Keziah Mason, bragged to the court that she had discovered a fourth dimension. Gilman decided, or was drawn, to move into Keziah's former garret room which was still extant.

The small room is plagued by rats and has two small enclosures that have long been inaccessible. Lovecraft guides us between Gilman's distressing days and his mindblowingly abstract and horrible dreams. Within the dreams Gilman alternates between seeing horrible apparitions of an old crone, a small human-like rat named Brown Jenkins, and a giant Black Man and some really trippy scenes where he is transcending time and space surrounded by space and odd shaped entities.

I don't want to give away the story save to say Gilman is pulled farther and farther into the insanity of the dreams until they cross over into his awake life. I do want to comment on the dreams. Lovecraft's dreamworld reads more like an analyzation of an LSD trip from the 60s. The division between the real and the dream world becomes smaller and smaller until they finally merge. Some creepy, mindbending stuff.

Rating 7/10: A lot packed into a short story. Need to get through more Lovecraft stories in this series before giving it a final rating.