The chief attractions of The Warden are its length--it's that rarity among the Victorians, a short novel--and the relative complexity of its politics. Trollope has a couple of tirades about nineteenth-century reformers in here, directed at progressive newspapers (The Times, dubbed "The Thunderer"), Thomas Carlyle ("Dr. Pessimist Anticant"), and Charles Dickens ("Mr. Popular Sentiment"). Those are amusing to anyone "in the know" about the nineteenth century, but more broadly speaking, these attacks are signs that Trollope cared about the motivations and effects of high-minded political reforms on various lives. He hesitated, in other words, to embrace reform in any simplistic manner. That leaves him open to criticism that he supported the evils of politics-as-usual, but it also means he portrays politics in ways that feel refreshingly three-dimensional.
One drawback of this approach is that there aren't a lot of those "point-and-laugh" moments you get with traditional satire. It isn't, in other words, "fun." There's no exciting crusading here, and no easy right-and-wrong, so the emotional tenor of the novel is smooth and steady instead of compelling. The satire that's left often takes that eighteenth-century form of giving characters unrealistic but revealing names (see above)--the rash reformer's name is "Bold," for example. And while the characters are more complex than their names, they're still sketchily drawn. (The politics may have three dimensions, but the characters mostly have two.) There's little psychological exploration here, but the characters' thinness helps the novel remain slim.
In short, this one is probably for enthusiasts, or for people who have to squeeze in a quick nineteenth-century novel--I can imagine it working in a Victorian Fiction survey. Personally, I took it in poolside, which fit nicely with its untaxing nature.
