The fictional English county in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers is Barsetshire.
Barsetshire is the central setting of Trollope’s six-novel Chronicles of Barsetshire, which began with The Warden in 1855 and concluded with The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867. Barchester Towers, published in 1857, is the second novel in the sequence. Its cathedral city, Barchester, gives the novel its title and serves as the centre of the county’s ecclesiastical and social life.
Trollope built Barsetshire from recognisable southwestern English influences rather than copying one real county exactly. He reportedly acknowledged Somerset as an important source, while Barchester was largely inspired by Winchester. The county’s fictional geography allows Trollope to examine church politics, class, patronage, marriage and local rivalries within a compact community.
Readers sometimes confuse Barsetshire with Wessex, Thomas Hardy’s fictional region, or with Loamshire, another invented county in Victorian fiction. Barsetshire also appears in later novels by writers such as Angela Thirkell, but its original creator and defining series are Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire.