| A Clergyman's Daughter | |
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First US edition cover, the novel published in America with a slight change of title as The Clergyman's Daughter |
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| Author(s) | George Orwell |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz |
| Publication date | 11 March 1935 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | NA |
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.[1]
Contents |
After Orwell returned from Paris in December 1929, he used his parents' house in Southwold 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.[2]
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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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.[5]
The story is given in five distinctive chapters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
The book is largely experimental. The novel contains an interlude, the night scene in Trafalgar Square, which most critics have accepted as written under the influence of James Joyce, and specifically the celebrated 'Nighttown' scenes at the end of Ulysses.[6] In a letter to Brenda Salkeld, Orwell himself disowned it as 'tripe', "except for chap 3, part 1, which I am pleased with..."[5] and prevented it being reprinted during his lifetime.[7] 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.[5] 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".[8] 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." [9]
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.