The Warden (1855) is Anthony Trollope's parodic slenderization of Charles Dickens's baggy monsters. Besides caricaturing Dickens as Mr. Popular Sentiment (144-50; ch. 15), Trollope tries to "tone down" his rival's customary hyperbole "lest his excesses obscure the real problems his fiction oversimplified." The Warden strives for a "comprehensive reconsideration of Dickens as a realist and social critic." Trollope repudiates the "use of Juvenalian satire to promote a radical politics and encourage reform" (Meckier 27-8). (1) Three years after publishing his breakthrough novel, Trollope impugned Dickensian realism again. The attack in The Three Clerks is surprisingly direct--a rivalry not so hidden. Nevertheless, the revaluator withholds the full force of his displeasure for most of the novel--until chapter forty-four. Then deceptively playful anti-Dickens allusions become a screed. Trollope's Three Clerks--he considered his sixth novel his "best" yet (Autobiography 96; ch. 6)--follows the careers of Henry Norman, Alaric Tudor, and Charles (Charlie) Tudor, an affectionate caricature of the novelist himself. Henry and Alaric are employed in a branch of the Civil Service called "the Weights and Measures." (2) Trollope refers to Dickens in the novel's second paragraph: so "well-conducted" is the Weights and Measures that "it is exactly antipodistic of the Circumlocution Office" (ch. 1).
