A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell.
First published by Gollancz in 1935.
Genre: Classic fiction
After a few pages of “A Clergyman’s Daughter”, I had the eerie feeling that I was Dorothy. The author plunges you into her relentless routine, and I was soon wound up in it and exhausted by it. She is caring for a difficult parent, cycling around a small town juggling the household bills, delivering the parish magazine, soothing the complaining church volunteers and fending off her over-familiar neighbour, Mr Warburton. “What a life you lead!” he declares, early in the book, when she is leaving after dinner to make some boots for the school play from paper and glue. Although Dorothy finishes the boots, a curtain then falls. The next we see of her, she’s in the East End, she doesn’t know who she is, and she is grateful to fall in with some Cockneys heading off to Kent to pick hops.
This is the only George Orwell novel in which the main character is a woman. The extraordinary events are seen from Dorothy’s point of view. She is a well-drawn, sympathetic character. The supporting cast is extensive, and they are all interesting in their own way. A few are one-dimensional, but memorable for it. The selfishness of Dorothy’s father and the cynicism of headmistress Mrs Creevy are particularly irksome.
The story is always Dorothy’s, but the novel is designed to expose injustice, from the desperate conditions of the hop-pickers and the homeless, to the poor quality of unregulated schools. It has been reported that “A Clergyman’s Daughter” was an experimental novel, and that Orwell hated it and tried to stop it being reprinted. His publishers regarded it as odd, but worthy of release after amendments by the censor. It was an early novel in which Orwell was mixing social reality with story-telling. The plot seems to be contrived so that Dorothy is the vehicle for the author to relate experiences from his participatory research with the downtrodden. He is best known now, and was best known in the 1930s, for his social commentary. “A Clergyman’s Daughter” was published just two years after “Down and Out in Paris and London”, in which Orwell described his experiences of homelessness and low-paid casual work.
“A Clergyman’s Daughter” is not as perfectly crafted as Orwell’s later works such as “Animal Farm” or “1984”, but the book is well-written, with vivid descriptions and purposeful dialogue. The author’s use of script style in one long passage to convey the camaraderie of the homeless in Trafalgar Square is a distraction, but it does not spoil the rest of the prose. Although the plot is clumsy in a few places, I was content to suspend disbelief as Dorothy plunges from her precarious but respectable existence as the clergyman’s daughter to the exhausting manual labour at the hop-bines, then to the bitter cold of homelessness in London. I could accept that in the 1930s, if a woman like Dorothy suffered mental illness, this was all possible. It is an important book for its commentary on the degrees of poverty that a single woman might face then, and how succumbing to stress would catapult her downwards. Dorothy’s “bone-deep memories of the cold of Trafalgar Square” send a chilling warning to the reader – it could be you.
The plot does not just injure Dorothy. She suffers insults as well. Embarrassing rumours that she has run off with Mr Warburton are circulated in the press, prompting a distant relative to make an effort to find her. After a short spell in a police cell for vagrancy, when it seems that Dorothy’s situation is hopeless, she is collected and placed in a teaching job in a cheap private school. This twist may have been constructed for the author to explore his own experiences of teaching.
Dorothy has some poignant moments of joy as a teacher. The girls warm to her and she to them – “something stirred in Dorothy’s heart as she took the ugly flowers” – but her efforts to make her pupils’ learning enjoyable are trampled, and fickle fate deals her yet another strange card.
Poor Dorothy! She becomes a victim in whatever circumstances engulf her, and there is a hint in the narrative that her Christian faith is the problem. She believes that life is her preparation for heaven, and this seems to lead her to accept the unacceptable. Yet, her faith keeps her going. She questions it, but not for long. She needs it.
It is not often that I re-read books, but I have read “A Clergyman’s Daughter” a few times since I first discovered Orwell as a teenager and eagerly devoured all his output. I’m always interested in books that help me to appreciate how hard life was for my grandparents’ generation, but would I love this book quite so much if it were not George Orwell’s work? I read it initially only because it was his writing, and his writing has stardust for me. Had it been presented to me as “by ANOther”, I might have been more sensitive to its oddities, but I believe that I would still want to read about Dorothy.
Dorothy’s experiences make for harrowing reading. Orwell had a mission to raise awareness of social conditions in England in the awful 1930s, when economic depression was leading to political catastrophe and war. He did not set out to entertain or uplift; he set out to provoke. He took advantage of Dorothy to showcase some of his research, just as characters in the book take advantage of Dorothy. He underestimated what a compelling character he had created. She is all the more compelling for the misfortune that he piles upon her, and it is Dorothy, the heart and soul of this novel, who carries it to a “must read” recommendation. Don’t expect to love this book, but let it move you.
