Orwell dismissed A Clergyman’s Daughter as “tripe” and more bluntly as “bollocks”, and prevented it from being reprinted during his lifetime. He thought it even worse than Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as “it was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money”.
Is it really that bad, or was this simply false modesty?
Dorothy Hare, 28 years old and single, works tirelessly as an unpaid curate (vicar’s assistant) to her father, the rector of Knype Hill, a small town based (it is believed) on Southwold in Suffolk, where Orwell’s parents lived after retirement from India. Dorothy is run ragged with the responsibilities of the parish and her household. Her father is feckless and totally unsympathetic, so she takes the weight of the whole parish on her shoulders, from running the girl guides and Mothers’ Union, typing up his sermons, and visiting the sick. One day, following a particularly challenging day’s work, she is sexually assaulted by Mr Warburton, an aging lothario who casually attempts to seduce her (as he sees it). This assault triggers an episode of amnesia for Dorothy, who wakes up several days later in the Old Kent Road wearing a new set of clothes. How she got to London from Suffolk is never explained. Knype Hill society assumes she has eloped with Warburton, who has conveniently gone on a long European trip at exactly the same time.
Dazed and confused, and extremely vulnerable, Dorothy joins a group travelling to Kent for the hop-picking season. Slowly her memory returns, and she writes to her father explaining her situation and asking for help. When no reply comes she assumes she is persona non-grata and at the end of the hop season she travels back to London. Once her money runs out she ends up living on the street joining a group of tramps in Trafalgar Square. The chapter describing the night spent sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square is written experimentally, with a nod to Ulysses, in play format. As the cold worsens and lack of sleep leads to exhaustion, Dorothy enters an almost dream-like state which only ends when she is arrested and imprisoned for vagrancy.
Dorothy’s father meanwhile, has reached out to his well-to-do cousin, Sir Thomas Hare, to try and find Dorothy and help her. Bringing her home seems out the question, the implication being that the rector believes the rumours that she has eloped, despite her reassurances to the contrary. Sir Thomas has an efficient man-servant who quickly tracks Dorothy down – easily enough as she is in custody – and finds a a job for her in a small private school run by the monstrous Mrs Creevy. At first Dorothy enjoys attempting to awaken her students’ dormant interest in learning, but these attempts are quickly quashed when parents protest about the lack of focus on practical learning, writing and mathematics. The children rebel, understandably, but the issue quickly becomes moot when Mrs Creevy dismisses her without notice when she finds a replacement.
There is just time for Mr Warburton to appear out of the blue as Dorothy’s unlikely saviour and to take her back to Knype Hill. Here she quickly resumes her old routine. Although she has now lost her faith she still retains a belief in the value of service to others, and this is where the novel closes.
A key element of the plot of A Clergyman’s Daughter is Dorothy’s loss of memory. Orwell uses this plot device to send her on a journey round his old haunts – hop-picking in Kent, dossing down in Trafalgar Square, and teaching in private schools in the suburbs. We are invited to believe that exhaustion combined with her distress at Mr Warburton’s sexual assault triggers this amnesia. There’s no attempt to explain how she finds herself in London in a new set of clothes, or anything that happens to her in the meantime. What we do now know is that in an earlier draft of the novel Warburton’s attack is more explicitly described as an attempted rape. I think we would today see the surviving description as such an event, but the point is that to an 1930’s audience the description could more easily be dismissed as a clumsy attempt at seduction.
This sentence jumped from chapter Chapter 5 (page 285 in the Penguin classic edition):
“It was one of those bright cold days which are spring or winter according as you are indoors or out.”
Ring any bells? Here’s the first line from 1984:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
The re-use of content from Orwell’s journalism is pretty blatant. Reportage from Down and Out in Paris and London and Orwell’s hop-picking diaries seems shoe-horned into the novel with only the flimsiest of pretexts. The later chapter on Dorothy’s time as a school-teacher are also largely autobiographical. Orwell certainly wasn’t the first writer to re-purpose some of his journalism into novel format – Raymond Chandler for example welded his shorter stories written for magazine publication into novels such as The Big Sleep – but this is clumsily done.
There are also some horribly out-dated attitudes on display in this novel. Of course there is always the defence that these are his characters’ views not the novelists, but that defence feels weak in a novel which relies so heavily on reportage, and where the same attitudes are reflected elsewhere in both his novels and his journalism. For example here is the narrator’s description of the travellers at the hop farm:
Quite half the pickers in the set were gypsies—there were not less than two hundred of them in the camp. Diddykies, the other pickers called them. They were not a bad sort of people, 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 of some wild but sluggish animal—a look of dense stupidity existing side by side with untameable cunning. 118
More generally there is the novel’s views on the working class. There is plenty of evidence here and elsewhere in his work to suggest that lower-upper-middle-class, privately educated, Old Etonian Eric Blair thought that working class people smell – not least because he tells us more than once that he did. This is a contentious view, I appreciate, and there has been a surprising amount written on either side of the issue. It was already a debate while Orwell was still alive and writing, used by his political opponents to undermine his arguments. But for someone who didn’t really think the working classes smell there’s an awful lot of references to the smelliness of the working class.
In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell defined the attitude of his class towards the working class as “an attitude of sniggering superiority, punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred.” At times some of that approach emerges, perhaps subconsciously, in Orwell’s own work.
Consider this description from the first chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, while Dorothy does her parochial visits:
Dorothy knocked at the Pithers’ badly fitting door, from beneath which a melancholy smell of boiled cabbage and dish-water was oozing. From long experience she knew and could taste in advance the individual smell of every cottage on her rounds. Some of their smells were peculiar in the extreme. For instance, there was the salty, feral smell that haunted the cottage of old Mr Tombs, an aged retired bookseller who lay in bed all day in a darkened room…. In nearly all the cottages there was a basic smell of old overcoats and dish-water upon which the other, individual smells were superimposed; the cesspool smell, the cabbage smell, the smell of children, the strong, bacon-like reek of corduroys impregnated with the sweat of a decade.
Orwell addresses this issue face on elsewhere in The Road to Wigan Pier:
“Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West–the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.
…..in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body; you would not get nearer to it than you could help. You watched a great sweaty navvy walking down the road with his pick over his shoulder; you looked at his discoloured shirt and his corduroy trousers stiff with the dirt of a decade; you thought of those nests and layers of greasy rags below, and, under all, the unwashed body, brown all over (that was how I used to imagine it), with its strong, bacon-like reek. “
You’ll notice the language from Wigan Pier, which was published in 1937, echoes much of that in the earlier passage from Clergyman’s – ‘bacon-like’, ‘sweat/dirt of a decade’ etc. Also, I can’t let this paragraph pass without mentioning the casual way Orwell lumps together murderers and sodomites in this passage!
A Clergyman’s Daughter isn’t really a bad novel. But it shows every sign of being quickly thrown together: the characters are pretty two-dimensional, the plot a mess, and the discussion on faith which closes the novel is perfunctory at best, tacked on to give some much needed but unconvincing depth. Another one for Orwell completists only.
The Reading Bug 