The warden of a charitable hospital in a cathedral town draws an income the reformers say is not his, and the only question in the book is what an honest man does when he finds out they may be right. Trollope wrote before breakfast, by his watch, at 250 words a quarter-hour; this short novel opened Barsetshire and is the gentlest anatomy of conscience in English — nobody is a villain, and it ends in the only way it can.
