A Clergyman's Daughter

A Clergyman's Daughter
First US edition cover, the novel published in America with a slight change of title as The Clergyman's Daughter
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.

Background

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.

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.

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 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 of vagrants, comprising a young man named Nobby and his two friends, who relieve her of her remaining half-crown and take her with them on a hop-picking expedition in Kent.

Meanwhile, the rumour is spread by Mrs Semprill that Dorothy has eloped with Mr Warbuton, and this story captivates the national press for a while. After hard work in the hop fields, culminating in Nobby's arrest for theft, she returns to London with her negligible 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; ultimately she is forced to leave the hotel and live on the streets, and takes up residence in 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 twelve hours for failure to pay the fine.

Chapter 4

Dorothy believes that her father, distraught at the rumours of her running away with Mr Warburton, has ignored her letters for help. In actuallity, he has contacted his cousin Sir Thomas Hare in London, whose servant locates her at the police station. Hare's solicitor procures a job for her as a "schoolmistress" in a small "4^th rate" private girls' "academy" run by the grasping Mrs Creevy. Dorothy's attempts to introduce a more liberal and varied education to her students clash with the expectations of the parents, who want a strictly "practical" focus on handwriting and basic mathematics. The work, which initially she enjoyed, quickly becomes a drudgery. Mrs Creevy eventually dismisses her, without notice, when she finds 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 that she and her malicious gossip have been discredited. He has come, therefore, to take her back to Knype Hill. On the trip home, Warburton proposes marriage. Dorothy rejects him, recognising but disregarding his argument that, with her loss of religious faith, her existence as a hard-working clergyman's daughter will be meaningless and dull, and that marriage, while she is still young, is her only escape.

The story ends with Dorothy back in her old routine, only without the self-mortification.

Characters

• Dorothy Hare – a spinster 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 beneath him and consequently, refuses to pay them. He has some money, albeit dwindling, in stocks, and accumulates gargantuan debts. He works at St. Athelstans church.
• Mr. Warburton – an easy-going and friendly bachelor in his late forties. He has three illegitimate children (whom he refers to as "Bastards") by his Spanish mistress, Dolores. He is seen as highly immoral.
• Mrs. Evelina Semprill – Knype Hill's malicious gossip monger—she gets her come-uppance when she is sued for libel.
• Nobby – a vagrant who lives by begging, casual work and petty crime. He is eventually arrested for theft whilst working in the hop fields.
• Sir Thomas Hare "good-hearted, chuckle-headed" baronet—a caricature Wodehousian baronet.
• Mrs. Creevy – the mean proprietress of a small school—she is financially tight-fisted and enjoys minor victories at the expense of others.

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 inevitably returns.

In the case of the private-school system in the England of Orwell's era, he delivers a two-page critique of how capitalistic interests have rendered the school system useless and absurd. His attack on the commercial imperative is conveyed in Mrs Creevy's primary focus: "It's the fees I'm after," she says, "not developing the children's minds." This is manifested in her overt favouritism towards the "good payers'" children, and in her complete disrespect and marginalisation of 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.^{[citation needed]} 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. 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."

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.

See also

• Bibliography of George Orwell

References

• Orwell, George (1986), A Clergyman's Daughter, The Complete Works of George Orwell, London: Secker & Warburg, ISBN 0-436-23129-8 
• Orwell, George (1998a), A Kind of Compulsion 1903–1936, The Complete Works of George Orwell, London: Secker & Warburg, ISBN 0-436-20542-4 
• Orwell, George (1998b), Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937–1938, The Complete Works of George Orwell, London: Secker & Warburg, ISBN 0-436-20538-6 
• Orwell, George (1998g), I Have Tried To Tell The Truth 1943–1944, The Complete Works of George Orwell, London: Secker & Warburg, ISBN 0-436-20552-1 

External links

• A Clergyman's Daughter – Searchable, indexed etext.
• Online text