MEDIATION, AUTHORITY, AND CRITICAL READING IN "THE WARDEN"

To write honestly and responsibly about a matter as delicate and important as clerical reform requires the novelist to wade into irresolvable ambiguity. [...]Trollope's selfreflexive gestures can be seen as an extension of this sense of responsibility, for they demonstrate to the reader that even if Trollope's depictions of the scandal attempt to be more evenhanded than Mr. Sentiment's or Towers's they still are neither infallible nor unmediated. Part of the authorial process for Trollope in this early novel is to imagine how Dickens and Carlyle would treat the subject and then develop an approach that he finds more satisfying. [...]this nod to Dickens and Carlyle displays Trollope not only as an author with grand aspirations but, perhaps first and foremost, as a critical reader.