Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

“A CLERGYMAN’S DAUGHTER” by George Orwell (first published in 1935)

           

Last posting I examined George Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days, beginning my plan to examine, in the sequence in which they were written, all of Orwell’s novels. Later I will deal with Orwell’s three works of non-fiction. Introducing Orwell’s second novel, however, I’m a little abashed. Published in 1935, just a year after Burmese Days was first published in America, A Clergyman’s Daughter is widely regarded as the weakest and most poorly-structured of Orwell’s novels. It is certainly the least read. Orwell himself came to dislike it and (checking this out from Bernard Crick’s biography George Orwell – A Life) I discover that in later years he insisted that it should not be re-published or translated into other languages. Of course his wish was ignored after he was dead.

As ever, I begin with a very simplified synopsis. Dorothy Hare, aged 28, is the daughter and sole child of the Rector, Rev. Charles Hare, (really just a vicar) of St. Athelstan, an Anglican church in Knype Hill a small, gossipy and impoverished town in East Anglia. Rev. Charles Hare is a widower and a self-absorbed, selfish, penny-pinching man who does little more than conduct his religious services. He expects his daughter to do nearly all the housework, to provide all the food and prepare all the meals and in fact to do all the pastoral duties that he himself should be doing. In effect he exploits her and treats her like a servant. She has to spend her time conducting the Girl Guides or Mothers’ Union, preparing festivals for the children of the parish, making pastoral visits to the sick, encouraging parishioners to come to Communion services and other deeds of mercy. Dorothy is profoundly religious, pious to the point of mortifying her flesh by shoving pins into her arm to punish herself for thinking inappropriate thoughts. Oddly though (and somewhat implausibly) the person with whom she can most easily converse in the small town is a rakish, bohemian older man, Mr Warburton, who is an atheist and who frequently spars with her about religion.

But when Mr Warburton attempts to seduce her, she runs home and then has a sort of (vaguely explained) mental breakdown. Suffering from amnesia, she walks away from home and never stops walking. When she becomes more-or-less conscious again, she doesn’t know who she is, where she is, and where she has come from. She falls in with a group of three Cockneys  (two young men and one young woman) who are on their way to Kent for a season of hop-picking. They accept her because she has a little money. So she spends a number of weeks toiling away in the hop fields and learning, painfully, how difficult it is to do hard physical work. At this time, somebody gets a sensationalist newspaper which headlines a story about a rector’s daughter disappearing, spiced up with salacious stories about her possible sex-life. But she does not recognise this as being herself and none of her fellow hop-pickers get the connection either. Things go wrong (I won’t go into the details), the three other workers in her group disappear and she’s left alone. She suddenly (rather too conveniently) remembers who she is and where she came from as well as understanding that the salacious newspaper story was supposedly about her.

Taking her very meagre pay, she does not go home but heads for London. She is still ashamed by the gutter-press version of her life that has been published. Therefore she feels she cannot look her father in the face, let alone face the villagers. When she writes to her father for help he doesn’t reply. In wildest London, with little money in her purse, Dorothy has to take cheap lodgings in a filthy and unsanitary boarding house, infested with prostitutes. She sees at first hand what poverty is like in the slums. She tries to get a job as a housekeeper or maidservant, but her educated middle-class voice means potential employers don’t want her as they expect servants to be their inferiors. Penniless, she joins tramps and other vagrants seeking warmth by swarming together in Trafalgar Square at night. All this time she is, step by step, losing her religious faith when confronted with daily misery.

This can’t go on. A distant relative gets in touch with her in London, looks after her for a while, and then finds a job for her as a school-mistress in a marginal part of London. The school is a private school run by (a very Dickensian character) a Mrs Creevy, widow, mean, miserly and paying the lowest possible wage, as well as almost starving Dorothy with very frugal meals. But at least it is a job. Dorothy is the sole teacher of 21 girls aged from tots to teenagers. Dorothy has no experience as a teacher, but she soon realises that what the girls have so far been taught has been very limited. She suddenly finds that she has a natural talent for educating children, livens up the lessons and even introduces the girls to Macbeth which the girls enjoy… but their lower-middle-class and largely puritan Nonconformist parents object to such teaching and are outraged that in one lesson she has used the term “womb” (“Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” – said in Macbeth). Young girls should not be told about wombs!! All the parents want are “practical” lessons – handwriting and arithmetic – and none of this fancy literature stuff. Dorothy has to revert to teaching pointless nonsense… until she is dismissed by Mrs. Creevy when she finds somebody who will accept an even smaller wage.

But there is a deus ex machina in the (incredibly unlikely) form of Mr. Warburton, who meets Dorothy and escorts her back to her home, grumpy rector and all. Her good name has been restored when the rumours of her sexual encounters (which, being a virginal woman, she never had) have been completely discredited. They were all fed to a journalist by the town's notoriously unreliable gossip. En route to her home, Warburton once again tries to seduce her, but she again rejects him. The atheist Warburton discusses religion with Dorothy. Again they spar verbally, but while Dorothy has now discarded religious belief, she still has a strong attachment to “faith” in the sense of having a purpose in life and understanding that there is some goodness in the world. For her, goodness means doing good deeds and helping people… and so she returns to the same sort of life she began with – doing her rounds and bringing comfort to parishioners.

Before I get to the very obvious flaws in this novel, I’ll point out what does work. Far and away the most interesting and persuasive chapters are the opening ones set in the rectory and parish. They take up about a third of the novel. The coldness of the rectory, the nearly empty church with only a tiny group of worshippers, the bullying and sheer meanness of the rector to his daughter, and the rivalry in the small town between different denominations (there is an ongoing row between “Anglo-Catholics” – those Anglicans who wanted to follow Catholic ritual – and Anglicans who are appalled by the Catholic influence) – all this comes close to a portrait of a church that is actually dying a slow death. In a way, Dorothy’s initial piety is heroic, even if some of her self-mortification is extreme. But the rector’s snobbery, looking down on his lower-class parishioners, is unforgivable and barely Christian.  In his backstory we are told “He had been born in 1871, the younger son of the younger son of a baronet, and had gone into the Church for the outmoded reason that the Church is the traditional profession for younger sons. His first cure had been in a large, slummy parish in East London – a nasty, hooliganish place it had been, and he looked back on it with loathing. Even in those days the lower class (as he made a point of calling them) was getting decidedly out of hand.” (Chapter I, Part 2) We are also told that, by his dry sermons and quarrels with parishioners, “In twenty-three years he had succeeded in reducing the congregation from six hundred to under two hundred.”    (Chapter I, Part 2) [Rude comment by this reviewer – Nowadays that would be quite a sizeable Anglican congregation. A recent survey – in 2022 - said that in England now, the average Anglican church is attended by two people weekly.] Dorothy’s round is also presented convincingly:  “ ‘Visiting’, because of the distance she had to bicycle from house to house, took up nearly half of Dorothy’s days. Every day of her life, except on Sundays, she made from half a dozen to a dozen visits at parishioners’ cottages. She penetrated into cramped interiors and sat on lumpy, dust-diffusing chairs gossiping with overworked, blowsy housewives; she spent hurried half-hours giving a hand with the mending and the ironing, and read chapters from the Gospels, and readjusted bandages on ‘bad legs’, and condoled with sufferers from morning sickness; she played ride-a-cock-horse with sour smelling children who grimed the bosom of her dress with their sticky little fingers; she gave advice about ailing aspidistras, and suggested names for babies, and drank ‘nice cups of tea’ innumerable – for the working woman always wanted her ‘nice cup of tea’, out of the teapot endlessly stewing.”   (Chapter I, Part 4)

It is at least credible that Dorothy, devout and virginal, shows a deep aversion to men when the rake Mr. Warburton first makes an attempt to seduce her “What he had done upset her. Even now her heart was knocking and fluttering uncomfortably. I can’t bear that sort of thing! She repeated to herself seven times over. And unfortunately that was no more than the literal truth; she really could not bear it. To be kissed or fondled by a man – to feel heavy male arms about her and thick male lips bearing down on her own – was terrifying and repulsive to her. Even in memory or imagination it made her wince. It was her special secret, the especial, incurable disability that she carried through life.” (Chapter I, Part 6) It is also credible that Dorothy is idealistic enough to believe, at the horrible Mrs. Creevy’s dismal school, that she will be able to really enthuse the girls with a new way of teaching them: “She felt quite differently towards her job from that moment onwards. A felling of loyalty and affection had sprung up into her heart. This school was her school, she would work for it and be proud of it, and make every effort to turn it from a place of bondage to a place human and decent. Probably it was very little that she could do. She was so inexperience and unfitted for her job that she must educate herself before she could even begin to educate anybody else. Still, she would do her best; she would do whatever willingness and energy could do to rescue these children from the horrible darkness in which they had been kept.”   (Chapter 4, Part 2). I add that the school sequences are the second most readable sections of the novel.

Even if they are verbose and sometimes repetitive, the steps towards Dorothy’s loss of faith are also credible. In a sequence where Dorothy goes to church on Sunday only because Mrs. Creevy thinks it’s a sign of genteelness, we are told “There was never a moment when the power of worship returned to her. Indeed the whole concept of worship was meaningless to her now; her faith had vanished , utterly and irrevocably. It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith – as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted to logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind. But however little the church services might mean to her, she did not regret the hours she had spent in church. On the contrary, she looked forward to her Sunday mornings as blessed interludes of peace…” Chapter 4, Part 5) When she is on her journey back home, she explains her faith to the mocking Warburton “My faith. Oh, you know what I mean! A few months ago, all of a sudden, it seemed as if my whole mind had changed. Everything that I believed in till then – everything – seemed suddenly meaningless and almost silly. God – what I’d meant by God -  immortal life, Heaven and Hell – everything. It had all gone. And it wasn’t that I’d reasoned in out; it just happened to me. It was like when you’re a child, and one day, for no particular reason, you stop believing in fairies. I just couldn’t go on believing in it any longer.”  (Chapter 5, Part 1) And yet later, on her own, she reasons “Faith vanishes, but the need for faith remains the same as before. And given only faith, how can anything else matter? How can anything dismay you if only there is some purpose in the world which you can serve, and which, while serving it, you can understand? You whole life is illumined by the sense of purpose. There is no weariness in your heart, no doubts, no feeling of futility… Ever act is significant, every moment sanctified, woven by faith as into a pattern, a fabric of never-ending joy.”  (Chapter 5, Part 2) This kind of agnostic faith is, Orwell implies in much of the novel, what many people cling to once they have lost religious faith.

But then the problems of the novel stack up.

First, Dorothy seems pushed about without any will of her own. Apart from her deciding to go to London after the hop-fields, she really makes no personal decisions. Things happen to her and people tell her what to do. She is a puppet at the author’s will. Then there is the sheer improbability of much of the novel – the mental breakdown causing her to suffer amnesia; the convenient largesse of Warburton in taking her home; the very convenient quick expunging of the evil repute that the gutter-press had made of her. The book is very episodic and not fully coherent. Rectory; hop-picking; poverty in London; nasty private school -  they are barely connected to one another and may as well be four separate stories. Picaresque in the extreme.

Worse, though, is the frequency with which Orwell forgets he is writing a novel and instead turns to being the journalist or polemicist. He is, after all, criticising four things -  : a redundant church many of whose ministers are not really believers but who stay the course for form’s sake; the hard lives of rural workers [hop-pickers in this case]; the extreme poverty in London and other British cities in the [then current] Depression years; and the extreme inadequacy of private schools. In the hop-picking section, he ignores his characters for about twelve pages in order to lecture us on how hops are harvested, how the workers are treated, what sort of people they are etc.  In the section concerning the private school he tells us “There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. Second-rate, third-rate and fourth-rate… they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection. And though some of them are better than others… there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is, they have ultimately no purpose except to make money…” [and so on and so on] (Chapter 4, Part 4)

And if being improbable, episodic and polemic aren’t enough, there is one stylistic sequence in A Clergyman’s Daughter that is positively jarring. This is the sequence where Dorothy seems to have a fugue while freezing at night with the other vagrants in Trafalgar Square. Suddenly we are given a cacophony of voices, some coherent and some incoherent, as multiple people talk over one another. It is presented as a playscript. Is it external, objective reality? Or is it the subjective product of Dorothy’s hunger and lack of sleep? Either way, it is stylistically at odds with the rest of the novel – a “show-off” piece, and very clearly, as many have noted, cribbing the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (George Orwell had read Ulysses as all the biographies attest.) It simply does not belong in this novel.

Just as a footnote, I notice that occasionally Orwell uses a few terms that would now be regarded as racist. In his description of Gypsies among the hop-pickers in Kent, he remarks they were  “friendly enough, and they flattered you grossly when they wanted to get anything out of you; yet they were sly, with the impenetrable slyness of savages. In their oafish, Oriental faces there was a look as if some wild but sluggish animal – a look of dense stupidity existing side by side with untameable cunning.” (Chapter 2, Part 3) in the Trafalgar Square sequence (Chapter 3, Part 1), he has a Jew in the crowd whom he characterises as “the Kike”. Autres temps, autres moeurs etc. and I'm not going to chastise Orwell for using words that were commonly accepted in England in the 1930s but that are not acceptable now.

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I am now going to skip one of Orwell’s novels not because I’m lazy but because I  reviewed it ten years ago on this blog where you can find it. I am referring to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936. To me it is ultimately one of Orwell’s happiest novels and one that I most enjoyed reading. One thing is very interesting to note however. All of Orwell’s first three novels concern main characters rebelling, but in the end surrendering to the status quo and either submitting or destroying themselves. John Flory in Burmese Days comes to hate British Imperialism but instead of openly fighting it he commits suicide. Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman’s Daughter runs away [sort of] from her home and parochial duties, but in the end, and after all her adventures, she returns home and resumes her duties. Gordan Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying tries to escape life as a copywriter for an advertising firm, spends some time as a bohemian trying to write poetry, but runs back to the advertising game once he needs the money to support a family. Often Orwell seems to be saying it’s better to continue with the life you have rather than pining after fresh fields.