A Clergyman's Daughter
Encyclopedia
A Clergyman's Daughter is a 1935 novel by English author George Orwell
. It tells the story of Dorothy Hare, the clergyman's daughter of the title, whose life is turned upside-down when she suffers an attack of amnesia
. It is Orwell's most formally experimental novel, featuring a chapter written entirely in dramatic form, but he was never satisfied with it and he left instructions that after his death it was not to be reprinted.
as his base for the next five years. Southwold is a small provincial town on the coast of East Anglia. The family was well established in the local community and he became acquainted with many local people. His sister Avril was running a tea shop in the town. Brenda Salkeld, a gym teacher at St Felix School
and the daughter of a clergyman was to remain a friend and regular correspondent about his work for many years, although she rejected his proposal of marriage.
Orwell was tutoring and writing at Southwold and he resumed his sporadic expeditions going undercover as a tramp in and around London. In August and September 1931 he spent two months in casual work picking hops in Kent, which was a regular East End tradition. During this time, he lived in a hopper hut
just like the other pickers. During the expedition he kept a journal in which "Ginger" and "Deafie" are described, and much of this journal found its way into A Clergyman's Daughter. At the beginning of 1932 he took a job teaching at a small private school in a manufacturing area at Hayes
, West London. This was owned by a manager in a gramophone factory and comprised only 20 boys, the sons of local tradesmen and shopkeepers. While at the school he became friendly with the local curate and became involved with the local church. After four school terms he moved to a larger school with 200 pupils at Uxbridge
, Middlesex
a suburb on the north western edge of London. However, after one term he was hospitalised with pneumonia and in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and never returned to teaching. He started writing A Clergyman's Daughter in mid-January 1934 and had finished by 3 October 1934. After sending the work to his agent Leonard Moore, he left Southwold to work part time in a Hampstead bookshop. After various last-minute alterations for fear of libel, Gollancz published A Clergyman's Daughter on 11 March 1935.
Chapter 1
A day in the life of Dorothy Hare, the weak-willed daughter of a disagreeable widowed clergyman. Her father is Rector of Knype Hill, a small provincial East Anglian town. She keeps house for him, fends off the trade creditors, visits parishioners and makes costumes for fund-raising events. All the time she practises self-mortification
in order to be true to her faith. In the evening she is invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, Knype Hill's most disreputable resident, a middle-aged bachelor and an unashamed lecher and atheist. He attempts to seduce Dorothy, as he has done before more than once. As she leaves he forces another embrace on her, and they are seen by Mrs Semprill, the village gossip and scandal-monger. Dorothy returns home to her conservatory late at night to work on the costumes.
Chapter 2
Dorothy is transposed to the Old Kent Road
with amnesia
. Eight days of her life are unaccounted for. She joins a group with Nobby and his 2 friends, who relieve her of her remaining half-crown and take her with them on a hop-picking
expedition in Kent. Meanwhile the rumour has arisen that she has eloped with Mr Warbuton, and the story makes the national press for a few weeks. After hard work in the hop fields she returns to London with her small earnings. As a single girl with no luggage she is refused admission at "respectable" hotels and ends up in a cheap hotel for "working-girls" (prostitutes). Her funds are constantly dwindling until she is forced to leave the hotel, to live on the streets, namely Trafalgar square
.
Chapter 3
Dorothy spends the night sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square
(in a chapter presented entirely as dramatic dialogue). She is arrested for vagrancy and ends up in a police cell for 12 hours for failure to pay the fine.
Chapter 4
Dorothy's father, has seemingly ignored her letters for help, while in actuallity, he had contacted his cousin Sir Thomas Hare in London, whose servant finds her at the police station
. She is given a job as a 'schoolmistress
' in a small '4th rate' private girls' "academy" run by the grasping Mrs Creevy. Her attempts to introduce more liberal and varied education clash with the expectations of the parents, as they had wanted solely handwriting and basic maths taught. The work which she had enjoyed becomes a drudgery. Meanwhile she endures Mrs Creevy's pettiness until Mrs Creevy turns her out without notice because she has found another teacher.
Chapter 5
Shortly after Dorothy steps out of the door of the school, Mr Warburton turns up in a taxi to say that Mrs Semprill has been charged with libel and she and her malicious gossip are discredited and largely ignored. He has therefore come to take her back to Knype Hill. While bringing her home, Warburton proposes marriage and Dorothy rejects him. She recognises but ignores his arguments that with her religious faith lost, her existence as a hard-working clergyman's daughter will be rendered meaningless and that marriage, while she is still young, is the only escape from a life of hardship, loneliness and poverty.
The story ends with Dorothy back in her old routine, with the exception that having lost her faith she no longer indulges in self-mortification.
In the case of the private school system in England of Orwell's era, he includes a two-page critique
(irrelevant to the plotline) of how capitalistic interests have rendered the school system useless and absurd. The description of the commercial imperative is illustrated by the overt attention Mrs. Creevy pays to the "good payers'" children, while completely disrespecting and marginalizing the "bad payers'" children. Mrs. Creevy is even seen to manage a better cut of meat for the children of "good payers", while saving the fattier pieces for the "medium payers" and damning the "bad payers" children to eat brown bag lunches in the school room, apart from the rest of the students.
, which most critics have accepted as written under the influence of James Joyce
, and specifically the celebrated 'Nighttown' scenes at the end of Ulysses
. In a letter to Brenda Salkeld, Orwell himself disowned it as 'tripe', "except for chap 3, part 1, which I am pleased with..." and prevented it being reprinted during his lifetime. In a letter to Henry Miller
a week after the book's publication in the US (August 1936) Orwell described the book as "bollox", though he added that he'd made some useful experiments with it.
In a letter to George Woodcock
on 28 September 1946, Orwell noted that there were two or three books he was ashamed of and called A Clergyman's Daughter an even worse one than Keep the Aspidistra Flying
and said "it was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money".
The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh however, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared it as having affinities with George Gissing
, a writer Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens
and Gissing: "Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated. The stages of Dorothy's plight - the coming to herself in the London street, the sense of being cut off from friends and the familiar, the destitution and the cold - enact [-] the nightmare in which one may be dropped out of respectable life, no matter how debt-laden and forlorn, into the unthinkable pit of the beggar's hunger and the hopelessly declassed."
It was first translated into Russian by Kenneth MacInnes and Vera Domiteeva (1994) and released by Azbooka Publishers (2004) and Astel (2011).
There was no French version of A Clergyman's Daughter until 2007, when Silvain Chupin's translation was published by Éditions du Rocher.
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
. It tells the story of Dorothy Hare, the clergyman's daughter of the title, whose life is turned upside-down when she suffers an attack of amnesia
Amnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
. It is Orwell's most formally experimental novel, featuring a chapter written entirely in dramatic form, but he was never satisfied with it and he left instructions that after his death it was not to be reprinted.
Background
After Orwell returned from Paris in December 1929, he used his parents' house in SouthwoldSouthwold
Southwold is a town on the North Sea coast, in the Waveney district of the English county of Suffolk. It is located on the North Sea coast at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is around south of Lowestoft and north-east...
as his base for the next five years. Southwold is a small provincial town on the coast of East Anglia. The family was well established in the local community and he became acquainted with many local people. His sister Avril was running a tea shop in the town. Brenda Salkeld, a gym teacher at St Felix School
Reydon
Reydon is a village and civil parish, north-west from Southwold and south east of Wangford in Waveney District and the ceremonial county of Suffolk in England. It has a population of 2,567....
and the daughter of a clergyman was to remain a friend and regular correspondent about his work for many years, although she rejected his proposal of marriage.
Orwell was tutoring and writing at Southwold and he resumed his sporadic expeditions going undercover as a tramp in and around London. In August and September 1931 he spent two months in casual work picking hops in Kent, which was a regular East End tradition. During this time, he lived in a hopper hut
Hopper hut
A hopper hut was a form of temporary accommodation provided for hop-pickers on English farms in the 19th and 20th centuries.-Background:thumb|Hopper huts at Grange Farm, TonbridgeBefore the days of mechanised farming, hop picking was a labour-intensive process, requiring a vastly greater number of...
just like the other pickers. During the expedition he kept a journal in which "Ginger" and "Deafie" are described, and much of this journal found its way into A Clergyman's Daughter. At the beginning of 1932 he took a job teaching at a small private school in a manufacturing area at Hayes
Hayes, Hillingdon
Hayes is a town in the London Borough of Hillingdon, West London. It is a suburban development situated west of Charing Cross. Hayes was developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries as an industrial locality to which residential districts were later added in order to house factory workers...
, West London. This was owned by a manager in a gramophone factory and comprised only 20 boys, the sons of local tradesmen and shopkeepers. While at the school he became friendly with the local curate and became involved with the local church. After four school terms he moved to a larger school with 200 pupils at Uxbridge
Uxbridge
Uxbridge is a large town located in north west London, England and is the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Hillingdon. It forms part of the ceremonial county of Greater London. It is located west-northwest of Charing Cross and is one of the major metropolitan centres...
, Middlesex
Middlesex
Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...
a suburb on the north western edge of London. However, after one term he was hospitalised with pneumonia and in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and never returned to teaching. He started writing A Clergyman's Daughter in mid-January 1934 and had finished by 3 October 1934. After sending the work to his agent Leonard Moore, he left Southwold to work part time in a Hampstead bookshop. After various last-minute alterations for fear of libel, Gollancz published A Clergyman's Daughter on 11 March 1935.
Plot summary
The story is given in five distinctive chapters.Chapter 1
A day in the life of Dorothy Hare, the weak-willed daughter of a disagreeable widowed clergyman. Her father is Rector of Knype Hill, a small provincial East Anglian town. She keeps house for him, fends off the trade creditors, visits parishioners and makes costumes for fund-raising events. All the time she practises self-mortification
Mortification of the flesh
Mortification of the flesh literally means "putting the flesh to death". The term is primarily used in religious and spiritual contexts. The institutional and traditional terminology of this practice in Catholicism is corporal mortification....
in order to be true to her faith. In the evening she is invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, Knype Hill's most disreputable resident, a middle-aged bachelor and an unashamed lecher and atheist. He attempts to seduce Dorothy, as he has done before more than once. As she leaves he forces another embrace on her, and they are seen by Mrs Semprill, the village gossip and scandal-monger. Dorothy returns home to her conservatory late at night to work on the costumes.
Chapter 2
Dorothy is transposed to the Old Kent Road
Old Kent Road
The Old Kent Road is a road in South East London, England and forms part of Watling Street, the Roman road which ran from Dover to Holyhead. The street is famous as the equal cheapest property on the London Monopoly board and as the only one in South London....
with amnesia
Amnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
. Eight days of her life are unaccounted for. She joins a group with Nobby and his 2 friends, who relieve her of her remaining half-crown and take her with them on a hop-picking
Hops
Hops are the female flower clusters , of a hop species, Humulus lupulus. They are used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, to which they impart a bitter, tangy flavor, though hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine...
expedition in Kent. Meanwhile the rumour has arisen that she has eloped with Mr Warbuton, and the story makes the national press for a few weeks. After hard work in the hop fields she returns to London with her small earnings. As a single girl with no luggage she is refused admission at "respectable" hotels and ends up in a cheap hotel for "working-girls" (prostitutes). Her funds are constantly dwindling until she is forced to leave the hotel, to live on the streets, namely Trafalgar square
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
.
Chapter 3
Dorothy spends the night sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
(in a chapter presented entirely as dramatic dialogue). She is arrested for vagrancy and ends up in a police cell for 12 hours for failure to pay the fine.
Chapter 4
Dorothy's father, has seemingly ignored her letters for help, while in actuallity, he had contacted his cousin Sir Thomas Hare in London, whose servant finds her at the police station
Police station
A police station or station house is a building which serves to accommodate police officers and other members of staff. These buildings often contain offices and accommodation for personnel and vehicles, along with locker rooms, temporary holding cells and interview/interrogation rooms.- Facilities...
. She is given a job as a 'schoolmistress
Teacher
A teacher or schoolteacher is a person who provides education for pupils and students . The role of teacher is often formal and ongoing, carried out at a school or other place of formal education. In many countries, a person who wishes to become a teacher must first obtain specified professional...
' in a small '4th rate' private girls' "academy" run by the grasping Mrs Creevy. Her attempts to introduce more liberal and varied education clash with the expectations of the parents, as they had wanted solely handwriting and basic maths taught. The work which she had enjoyed becomes a drudgery. Meanwhile she endures Mrs Creevy's pettiness until Mrs Creevy turns her out without notice because she has found another teacher.
Chapter 5
Shortly after Dorothy steps out of the door of the school, Mr Warburton turns up in a taxi to say that Mrs Semprill has been charged with libel and she and her malicious gossip are discredited and largely ignored. He has therefore come to take her back to Knype Hill. While bringing her home, Warburton proposes marriage and Dorothy rejects him. She recognises but ignores his arguments that with her religious faith lost, her existence as a hard-working clergyman's daughter will be rendered meaningless and that marriage, while she is still young, is the only escape from a life of hardship, loneliness and poverty.
The story ends with Dorothy back in her old routine, with the exception that having lost her faith she no longer indulges in self-mortification.
Characters
- Dorothy Hare – a spinsterSpinsterA spinster, or old maid, is an older, childless woman who has never been married.For a woman to be identified as a spinster, age is critical...
in her late twenties (28 at first), she lacks the ability to direct her own life and ends up as a trapped victim in every situation. She is successively dependent upon her father for a home, upon a fellow transient (Nobby) for means of survival and direction whilst a vagrant, upon fellow pickers for food in the hop fields, upon her father's cousin to find her employment, upon Mrs. Creevy whose school appears the only job available to her, and finally upon Mr. Warburton to bring her home. - Rev. Charles Hare – the father of Dorothy, he is a self-centred clergyman whose spirituality and charity exists only in outside form. He believes that the tradsmen and working class are like 2nd class citizens and consequently, refuses to pay them. He has a lot of money, albeit dwindling, in stocks. He works at St. Athelstans church.
- Mr. Warburton – an easy-going and friendly bachelor nnd lech in his late forties. He hasm three illegitimate children (whom he refers to as 'Bastards' by his Spanish mistress, dolores, is seen as highly immoral.
- Mrs. Evelina Semprill – Knype Hill's malicious gossip monger—she gets her come-uppance when sued for libel.
- Nobby – a vagrant who lives by begging, casual work and petty crime, he is eventually arrested for thievery while working in the hop fields.
- Sir Thomas Hare "good-hearted, chuckle-headed" baronet—a caricature WodehousianP. G. WodehouseSir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...
baronet. - Mrs. Creevy – a mean proprietress of small school—she is financially tight-fisted, and mean in spirit enjoying minor victories at the expense of other people.
Major themes
Dorothy is economically pressed to work extremely hard. Her low earnings, in all cases, restrict her escape and function to perpetuate her dependent state. Orwell draws a picture of systematic forces that preserve the bound servitude in each scenario. He uses Dorothy's fictitious endeavors strongly to critique certain institutions. In the case of the hop harvest Orwell critiques the fashion in which wages are systematically lowered as the season progressed and why the wages are so low to begin with. He describes the life of a manual labourer down to the constant state of exhaustion that somehow eliminates any potential for a questioning of the circumstances in which one has found herself. Orwell even captures the strange feeling of euphoric happiness that is achieved from a long, monotonous day of labouring. He describes the attitude of the seasonal worker who vows not to return the following year, but somehow forgets about the hardship and remembers only the positive side during the off season, and doubtlessly returns.In the case of the private school system in England of Orwell's era, he includes a two-page critique
Critique
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic analysis of a written or oral discourse. Critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgement, but it can also involve merit recognition, and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt...
(irrelevant to the plotline) of how capitalistic interests have rendered the school system useless and absurd. The description of the commercial imperative is illustrated by the overt attention Mrs. Creevy pays to the "good payers'" children, while completely disrespecting and marginalizing the "bad payers'" children. Mrs. Creevy is even seen to manage a better cut of meat for the children of "good payers", while saving the fattier pieces for the "medium payers" and damning the "bad payers" children to eat brown bag lunches in the school room, apart from the rest of the students.
Literary significance and criticism
The book is largely experimental. The novel contains an interlude, the night scene in Trafalgar SquareTrafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
, which most critics have accepted as written under the influence of James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, and specifically the celebrated 'Nighttown' scenes at the end of Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
. In a letter to Brenda Salkeld, Orwell himself disowned it as 'tripe', "except for chap 3, part 1, which I am pleased with..." and prevented it being reprinted during his lifetime. In a letter to Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
a week after the book's publication in the US (August 1936) Orwell described the book as "bollox", though he added that he'd made some useful experiments with it.
In a letter to George Woodcock
George Woodcock
George Woodcock was a Canadian writer of political biography and history, an anarchist thinker, an essayist and literary critic. He was also a poet, and published several volumes of travel writing. He founded in 1959 the journal Canadian Literature, the first academic journal specifically...
on 28 September 1946, Orwell noted that there were two or three books he was ashamed of and called A Clergyman's Daughter an even worse one than Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results....
and said "it was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money".
The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh however, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared it as having affinities with George Gissing
George Gissing
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist who published twenty-three novels between 1880 and 1903. From his early naturalistic works, he developed into one of the most accomplished realists of the late-Victorian era.-Early life:...
, a writer Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
and Gissing: "Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated. The stages of Dorothy's plight - the coming to herself in the London street, the sense of being cut off from friends and the familiar, the destitution and the cold - enact [-] the nightmare in which one may be dropped out of respectable life, no matter how debt-laden and forlorn, into the unthinkable pit of the beggar's hunger and the hopelessly declassed."
Translations
The book was translated into Thai as Lok Khong Khru Sao (โลกของครูสาว) by Sunantha Laojan (สุนันทา เหล่าจัน) and first published in 1975 by Kledthai Publishers.It was first translated into Russian by Kenneth MacInnes and Vera Domiteeva (1994) and released by Azbooka Publishers (2004) and Astel (2011).
There was no French version of A Clergyman's Daughter until 2007, when Silvain Chupin's translation was published by Éditions du Rocher.
External links
- A Clergyman's Daughter – Searchable, indexed etext.
- Online text