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  A CLERGYMAN’S DAUGHTER

  George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, in modern Bihar, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service. He grew up in Oxfordshire and was a King’s Scholar at Eton from 1917 to 1921. Between 1922 and 1927, he worked for the Indian Imperial Police; after returning to England, he spent some years living as a tramp and casual manual worker, episodes that informed Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933 under his newly chosen pseudonym ‘George Orwell’. His first novel, Burmese Days, which drew on his imperial experience, appeared in 1934. Between 1935 and 1940 he published three more novels and three non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican volunteer. In 1936 he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who died in 1945. At the beginning of the Second World War Orwell, turned down for military service due to ill health, joined the Home Guard. From 1941 to 1943 he worked as a talks producer for the BBC Eastern Service, after which he became literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune for two years, to which he also contributed a column ‘As I Please’. Throughout the war he wrote a large number of occasional articles and periodical essays. Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm, was completed by the end of February 1944 but not published until August 1945, when it enjoyed enormous success. From 1946 he spent long periods on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides working on the novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four and struggling with worsening tuberculosis; the novel was published in 1949, again to great acclaim. Confined to a sanatorium, he married his second wife, Sonia Brownell, late in 1949; he died of a tubercular haemorrhage in January the following year.

  Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer in Early Twentieth-Century and Modernist Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Modernist Nowheres: Politics and Utopia in Early Modernist Writing, 1900–1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Modern John Buchan: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-edited volumes of essays on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Wyndham Lewis, musicality, and utopianism.

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  GEORGE ORWELL

  A Clergyman’s Daughter

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  nathan waddell

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Editorial material © Nathan Waddell 2021

  Chronology © Stefan Collini 2021

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2021

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  ISBN 978–0–19–884842–4

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–258780–0

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  Acknowledgements

  A good many people have helped me to prepare this edition. Stefan Collini, Richard Hallam, Darcy Moore, and Ian Squires commented encouragingly and perceptively on drafts of my Introduction, making it much better than it would otherwise have been. Others have assisted with specific textual queries. For the latter I have to thank Duncan Bell, Peter L. Caracciolo, Jim Cheshire, Melissa Dickson, Oliver Double, Peter Fifield, Dennis Frost, Vic Gammon, David Griffith, Robert Irwin, Martin Janal, Richard Lance Keeble, Luke Kennard, Christina Lee, Tyrus Miller, John Mullen, Natasha Periyan, Richard Porteous, Luke Reeve-Tucker, Derek Scott, Luke Seaber, Michael Shallcross, Marina Warner, Alison Young, and Richard Young. James Barnett, Jem Bloomfield, Darcy Moore, and D. J. Taylor deserve particular thanks for putting up with multiple queries. At Oxford University Press, Kizzy Taylor-Richelieu, Christina Fleischer, Luciana O’Flaherty, and Jacqueline Norton have been nothing but patient, kind, and encouraging. Thanks also to Lisa Eaton and Peter Gibbs, and especially to Rosemary Roberts, my invaluable copy-editor, whose eagle-eyed responses, general knowledge, and thoughtful evaluations of my research have improved this volume considerably.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of George Orwell

  A CLERGYMAN’S DAUGHTER

  Explanatory Notes

  Glossary of Slang

  Introduction

  Readers who are unfamiliar with the plot may prefer to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.

  Corresponding with his friend Brenda Salkeld in December 1933, George Orwell noted that his novel Burmese Days (1934) was with his agent, Leonard Moore, and expressed his hope that the ‘next one’ would be ‘better’.1 The ‘next one’ in question was A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935). Written between January and October 1934, it was the second of the four novels Orwell published in the 1930s, the others being Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). It has never enjoyed the comparative esteem of these novels, however, and tends to be viewed as the runt of the litter. Yet we should be wary here. A Clergyman’s Daughter gains much in re-reading, and remains valuable as a record of Orwell trying his hand at episodic storytelling. That this same point tends to be used against the novel may tell us less about its supposed failures and more about the priorities of those committed to the seeming ascendancy of so-called ‘organic’ forms, such as the literary romance or the novel of sentimentality. Orwell dismissed A Clergyman’s Daughter in a letter of 1936 to the novelist Henry Miller as ‘bollox’, before including the qualifying point that in it he ‘made some experiments’ that were ‘useful’ to him.2 Peter Davison, the most influential Orwell scholar of the last half-century, adds the important detail that Orwell’s dissatisfaction with A Clergyman’s Daughter and with Keep the Aspidistra Flying may have had a lot to do with their muddled publication histories, not least because both novels were censored owing to concerns about accusations of obscenity and anxieties over libel to do with the naming of advertising companies and real-life individuals and businesses.3 That said, the truth is likely to have been more complex than Orwell’s self-directed criticism implies.

  In a letter of 1946 to the anarchist literary critic George Woodcock, Orwell stated: ‘There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and [Keep the Aspidistra Flying] is one of them. There is an even worse one called “A Clergyman’s Daughter.” This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote “Keep the A.”’4 Orwell reiterated this position in notes (signed 31 March 1945) for his literary executor, in which, faced with the prospect of a uniform edition of his books appearing after the Second World War, he described both A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying as ‘silly potboilers’ which he ‘ought not to have published in the first place’.5 L. P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between (1953), described A Clergyman’s Daughter as ‘neither new nor convincing’, whereas the critic Geoffrey Stone was of the view that the novel’s characters ‘have not the self-sustaining quality of characters in memorable novels, being conceived as illustrations of the gloomy thesis’ that ‘life is no fun at all’.6 Many readers today no doubt would agree with these estimations, but there are multiple senses in which this intriguingly experimental, sometimes tedious, yet always characteristic novel has yet to find the audience it deserves.

  Influences and Narrative Stru
cture

  The story of A Clergyman’s Daughter is extracted in large part from Orwell’s early 1930s experiences, in particular the time he spent picking hops in the Kentish countryside from August to October 1931; his employment in 1932 and 1933 as a teacher at The Hawthorns, a private school for boys in Middlesex; and then his teaching work at Frays College, Uxbridge, in 1933. Much of the local colour of the book, especially its gently disparaging depictions of the fictional town of Knype Hill in its first and final chapters, is drawn from Orwell’s knowledge of Southwold, the Suffolk seaside resort his parents retired to in 1921.7 Certain passages in the novel also owe their details to the time Orwell spent researching urban destitution in London, the focal point for the second half of his non-fictional work Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Searching for a way to combine these and other experiences into a narrative whole, Orwell was inspired by literature as much as by life. Famously, Orwell tried in the third chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter to imitate the structure of the ‘Circe’ episode in James Joyce’s modernist magnum opus Ulysses (1922). The title A Clergyman’s Daughter echoes the title of James Stephens’s The Charwoman’s Daughter (1912), just as its protagonist, Dorothy Hare, who is partly based on Salkeld, evokes the similarly named and similarly intelligent Dorothea Brooke, the protagonist of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872).8

  Another possible influence is Samuel Butler, whose novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) aligns with A Clergyman’s Daughter in positing that ‘significant emotional and intellectual growth must inevitably lead to a loss of religious faith’.9 Charles Dickens is in the orbit of the novel, too, not only in the ‘Micawberish’ (p. 30) Mr Warburton, who could be a character straight out of David Copperfield (1850), but also in the miserly schoolteacher Mrs Creevy, who shares a deplorable educational philosophy with Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times (1854). Yet another stimulus was George Gissing, whose novel The Odd Women (1893) Dorothy reads, leaning ‘against a great gnarled beech tree’ (p. 193). The image is apposite. Envisaging A Clergyman’s Daughter as a kind of exploratory branch growing out from the trunk of literary tradition, Orwell aimed in this novel to investigate what he later called, in his 1948 essay on Gissing, ‘the pressure of social conventions which are obviously absurd but which cannot be questioned’.10 Dorothy faces the pressure to extricate herself from social and religious habits that she knows, or comes to believe, are false. Yet the ‘force of habit’ (p. 222) is too strong to be denied, the internal admonitory conscience too obtrusive to be ignored. Dorothy’s story ends more or less where it begins, with her making costumes for schoolchildren. This closing vignette invites readers to think less about Dorothy’s supposed inability to leave Knype Hill and do better for herself elsewhere, and more about the power of provincial routine to structure the terms of a life.

  We are introduced to Dorothy, who is in her late twenties, in the novel’s very first sentence. This tells of an alarm clock exploding ‘like a horrid little bomb of bell metal’ (p. 3). The simile is characteristically Orwellian, anticipating how the ticking of Mrs Wisbeach’s alarm clock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying marks ‘the sinister passage of time’, and affecting Dorothy in a way that foreshadows her experience of mental and physical violence at the hands of Mr Warburton.11 Badgered and manipulated by her ‘irritable’ (p. 6), standoffish father, the Rector, Charles Hare, Dorothy manages the household finances and does good work for the Knype Hill parish by delivering cornplasters to old ladies, gossiping with housewives, and keeping ‘sour-smelling’ (p. 39) children entertained. Mr Warburton, a middle-aged philanderer and mediocre artist, pursues her. The novel’s first chapter ends with Dorothy struggling in his arms, ‘violently and for a moment helplessly’ (p. 62), before, in Chaper II, she awakes in London, confused about her identity. Time has passed: ‘an interregnum in her life of not quite eight days’ (p. 73). Dorothy has suffered a traumatic episode—a consequence of ‘the exhausting and intolerable pressures’ she has undergone.12 Orwell’s descriptions of Dorothy coming into consciousness (pp. 67–9) evoke the strange impressions of a wounded mind—an emphasis reiterated later on in the novel when Dorothy imagines that the ‘clotted dark red blossoms’ of an ash tree look like ‘festerings from a wound’ (p. 216). She falls in with Nobby, Flo, and Charlie, three vagrants with whom she finds work in the hopfields south-east of London. A while later, Dorothy remembers who she is, and where she has come from, before spending a freezing night in the company of the destitute in Trafalgar Square, an experience Orwell himself underwent in August 1931.13 Thereafter, she works for the tyrannical and ‘nasty’ (p. 165) Mrs Creevy, before returning to Knype Hill and to her old life. A circular story, then, with stickiness as one of its guiding motifs (this being another link to Middlemarch)—from the glue pot Dorothy uses to make costumes, to the gloopy adhesions of domestic habit, from which she does not escape.

  Dorothy’s return to ‘respectable society’ (p. 146) is a return from the unexpected to the predictable, from the unsympathetic worlds beyond Knype Hill to the Rectory. Upon returning to this world, she sees it for what it is: empty and unfulfilling. But Dorothy internalizes that knowledge without doing much about it—the only changes she undergoes are ‘secret ones’ (p. 216), interior reorientations in thought that leave the outward structures of her life intact. Here, circularity can be taken to mean entrapment, as the literary theorist Terry Eagleton has pointed out: ‘the movement to freedom and renewal, here as in all of Orwell’s novels, ends in failure. Life is hopeless and sterile, but the worst false consciousness is to think you can change it.’14 This circular journey also reflects the novel’s search for a form with which to do justice to Dorothy’s traumatic dislocations. A Clergyman’s Daughter can never quite make up its mind about what sort of novel it wants to be. Domestic comedy, experimental prose-drama, a novel of faith tested and lost, educational satire—the book manages to be all of these things without settling on a unifying emphasis. And this would seem like a flaw in the novel’s design were it not for the possibility that this very same ‘lack’ of integration might, in fact, be precisely the book’s point: its attempt to embody, at the level of generic shifts and episodic transitions, Dorothy’s struggle to find rest in a changing world. A Clergyman’s Daughter stages these transitions at the level of rhetoric, moving ‘from the comforts of cliché and jargon’ in Knype Hill towards ‘the difficulty and intensity of expression that occurs’ in those places (London, the countryside, Mrs Creevy’s school) where ‘these conventions are stripped away’.15 Dorothy finds an ounce of peace in convention—in the ‘unutterably familiar’ (p. 222) smell of glue. Having pulled herself away from different kinds of social and psychological constraint, she chooses to glue herself back into the ‘pious concentration’ (p. 224) upon which duty to her community relies.

  Evidently, then, A Clergyman’s Daughter is a novel filled with imaginative interest. But, as we have seen, Orwell was not happy with it in retrospect, and thought, soon after he finished writing it, that he had ‘made a muck of it’, whatever his best intentions had been.16 The scholar Claire Hopley puts this down to bad structure. The ‘problem with A Clergyman’s Daughter as a whole’, she writes, ‘is not that it is badly written—it contains some of Orwell’s most evocative prose—but that it is poorly composed, the incipient novel never really developing from the pieces from which it is derived’.17 It may well be that the story of the novel is, to use its own words, ‘too thin a story altogether’ (p. 143); that it is the kind of ‘badly written novel where everyone talks a little too much in character’ (p. 152). The subject of the novel is a succession of ‘strange, anomalous position[s]’ (p. 170) that Dorothy finds herself in, which is itself embodied in a strange amalgam of anomalous styles. Yet for all that, there is a charm about A Clergyman’s Daughter which is not easily argued away. Some of the book—especially aspects of the hop-picking sequence and some of the school material in its second half—could perhaps have been trimmed a little, but the section that is often seen as the unanswerable failure of the text, the Joycean stretch at its centre, is not as disastrous as many have claimed, and there is much else in the novel that deserves our attention.