Notch up another win for the Human Writing Machine.

The customers of London’s oldest bookshop Hatchards have eschewed the erotic appeal of EL James and the thrill-a-minute conspiracies of Dan Brown to choose Anthony Trollope’s gentle satire of the Church of England, The Warden, as their favourite novel of the past 200 years.

An initial list of about 100 titles was drawn up by Hatchards in what a spokesperson described as “an unsurprisingly lengthy meeting or two”. This longlist, drawn from books published in the 218 years since the shop opened on Piccadilly, London, was then whittled down to a shortlist of six.

Ranging from Muriel Spark’s tale of an eccentric school teacher The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, first published in 1961, to Christopher Isherwood’s take on 1930s German society, Goodbye to Berlin, the shortlist was arrived at by combining a public vote and a tally of copies sold in the shop.

Also in the running were PD James’ Adam Dalgliesh mystery Original Sin, the first novel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence, A Question of Upbringing, and Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March, a look at the Austro-Hungarian empire through three generations of one family.

But, after Hatchards displayed the lineup in its store to keep votes coming, it was the oldest novel on the shortlist, Trollope’s 1855 title The Warden, which emerged triumphant on Thursday evening, with the bookseller – now part of the Waterstones group – again using a mix of public votes and sales to determine the winner. Hundreds of customers voted, according to Hatchards, and The Warden was the “standout” favourite.

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