The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
The guard still focuses on Mr. Harding, a clergyman with great personal integrity who has income from the charity and far exceeds the amount allocated for the purposes of the foundation. After discovering this, young John Bald turns his reformist zeal to uncover what he sees as an abuse of privileges, despite falling in love with Mr. Harding's daughter, Eleanor. It was a very topical novel (the case of the abuse of church funds was a scandalous topic of modern debate), but like other great Victorian novelists, Trollope uses a specific case to investigate and highlight the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality.
