Born in 1727, eighteenth century portrait and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough was far less ambitious and canny than his main rival and the dominating artist of the day, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Early in his career Gainsborough was fairly happy churning out portraits of local worthies in his nearest large town, Ipswich until he was encouraged to go to Bath to seek a higher class of client. Unlike Reynolds (a lifelong bachelor) Gainsborough married young – aged just 19 – the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat who had settled a £200 annuity on her for life. The earnings from his portraits supplemented this basic family income.
Suffolk (1727 to 1740) childhood in Sudbury
London (1740 to 1748) apprenticeship, prints, acquaintance with Hogarth, marries Margaret Burr
Suffolk again (1748 to 1758) first Sudbury, then the more profitable town of Ipswich
Bath (1759 to 1773: 14 years, first in Abbey Street, from 1767 at 17 King’s Circus)
London again (1774 to 1788)
In his letters we have Gainsborough’s own testimony that he didn’t really like painting portraits, and he actively disliked the ‘ugly’ aristocrats who were his clients. But he was good at it and by the 1760s found himself renting a big town house in Bath, with a coach and horses and servants to run, and paying for tutors for his two beautiful daughters. By 1769 he calculated his annual expenses at £1,000. He didn’t like his clients, he would have preferred to spend his life painting idyllic landscapes. But he was trapped.
By the 1760s Gainsborough was established as one of the best portrait artists of the day and so was invited to join the new Royal Academy of Art set up in 1768, but he repeatedly argued with the hanging committee about the placing of his works in the annual exhibitions, and in other ways kept his distance from the kind of elite London circles which his frenemy, Reynolds, moved in.
Handsome and attractive, Gainsborough had a reputation among his friends as a womaniser and party animal, which he acknowledged in his letters. His wife had to put up with a lot. But the real sadness of his biography is that, although he lavished love and attention on his two beautiful daughters things didn’t turn out as he hoped – one divorced within weeks of her wedding and the other suffering premature dementia.
Detailed review
Far less authoritative and comprehensive than Ian McIntyre’s life of Joshua Reynolds, for at least two reasons. The main one is Gainsborough’s life was far more fleeting and elusive. Reynolds led an active social life among leading figures of the day who all kept records of their dinners and conversations, dedicated their books to him, plus one of his pupils kept notes and wrote a detailed biography soon after his death, plus the minutes and accounts of the clubs and societies he was a member of, not least the Royal Academy of the Arts which he helped found and was the first president of. Reynolds kept a detailed appointments book which recorded all his sitters, the dates and times of their appointments. In other words the biographer if Reynolds has a mass of paperwork and evidence to work with.
Gainsborough is an altogether more fleeting character. He left relatively few letters (150 in all), no diary or journal or accounts book. He didn’t even own many books at his death. He didn’t cultivate the best circles or make sure he was mentioned in their books by the best writers. He painted the rich and famous but didn’t like them very much, unlike super-sociable Reynolds.
For the biographer who requires a constellation of dates to steer by, Gainsborough supplies thin pickings. (p.6)
Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 into a large extended family based in the Suffolk town of Sudbury. His father was a weaver with ambitions to be a businessman, which got him into financial trouble – he only escaped debtors’ prison because of a family whip-round. A benevolent uncle – also named Thomas – left some money to help young Tom to pursue ‘some light handy craft trade’, and the family decided to send him to London at the tender age of 13 in 1740,
Here he trained under engraver Hubert Gravelot, of Huguenot extraction. Hamilton goes into some detail about the expanding print market of the mid-eighteenth century and the dominating figure of William Hogarth, whose moralised pictures had created a sensation in the 1730s – A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733), A Rake’s Progress (1735), Four Times of Day (1738). Gainsborough probably came into contact with Hogarth, but mainly worked for an established painter named Francis Hayman, although details about the period are sketchy.
[During his early years in London] whoever it was that nurtured him, Hayman or Hogarth or Canaletto or Hudson or other painters such as Arthur Devis who took assistants and apprentices, they all gave him something of what follows. (p.59)
The second reason this is not such a compelling book as McIntyre’s is that Hamilton makes an editorial decision to roll with the relative lack of information about Gainsborough and to make his approach a bit more impressionistic. Thus the opening sentences don’t tell us much about Gainsborough, but tell us everything about Hamilton’s style:
Thomas Gainsborough lived as though electricity shot through his sinews and crackled at his finger tips. There is a fire in Gainsborough: it lights up his paintings…
He is going to embroider and speculate – based on facts for sure, but a fairly thin picking of facts meringued up with many a fluffy turn of phrase.
Landscape, however, hovered around him like an old flame (p.84)
Like a family of cats jumping off a ledge, the Gainsboroughs had landed on their feet (p.160)
Whole pages pass wherein we learn a lot about mid-century Sudbury or Ipswich or Bath, embroidered and elaborated from contemporary accounts by diarists and commentators – but where Gainsborough himself doesn’t make an appearance. Other pages pass in speculation and guesswork and Hamilton is fond of drawing comparisons between aspects of Gainsborough’s society and our own.
Just as a salesman or marketing person or builder must drive an expensive car in the twenty-first century to reassure the world that he or she is doing all right, so in the eighteenth century a portrait painter had to look neat, confident and successful to attract the custom he needed. Fine clothes were very expensive indeed, and much aspired to: flash car and flash waistcoat are probably equivalent as status signifiers, if not in monetary terms. (p.120)
Or he quotes a letter where Gainsborough brags about owning 5 viola da gambas, three Jayes and two Barak Normans:
Today, a star of the art world might tell a friend, My comfort is I have 5 Lamborghinis, 3 Ferraris and two Aston Martins’ Their value as status symbols is roughly similar. (p.262)
Hamilton’s relentless urge to give eighteenth century people and customs a 21st century comparison can get pretty annoying, and sometimes offensive. After half a page giving a reasonable enough analysis of Gainsborough’s great portrait of the young women musician Ann Ford, Hamilton concludes:
With Ann Ford, Gainsborough added extra titty to the fluctuating city. (p.188)
Key learnings
Jack the Lad
The biggest surprise, which Hamilton announces early and then refers repeatedly is that Thomas Gainsborough was a bit of a lad, a roaring boy, one for wine and the ladies. Hamilton routinely refers to Gainsborough as a lad, to his laddish behaviour, and to his ‘mates’.
There are distinct Jack-the-Lad tendencies about Gainsborough the young man… The 19th century song about Jack-the-Lad ‘swigging, gigging, kissing, drinking, fighting’ had echoes in the young Gainsborough…(p.133)
The idea is that although Gainsborough mixed professionally with numerous aristocratic sitters – ‘the Quality’, in the contemporary term – his tastes remained those of a country boy who came to London in his teens and was introduced to a dizzying world of booze and broads (Hamilton has a section describing the delights of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens) and what letters we have contain rather oblique references to regretting being led astray, particularly on his visits to London.
This is a striking claim but I don’t think he actually backs it up with that much evidence, mostly hearsay collected after his death, for example Joseph Farington quoting the artist’s daughter as saying he ‘was passionately fond of music… and this led him much into company with musicians, with whom he often exceeded the bounds of temperance & his health suffered from it, being occasionally unable to work for a week after’ (quoted page 111). Fine, but she was a small girl at the time and this report comes from decades later. Reliable?
Hamilton asserts that one his visits to London from Bath he had ‘the casual sexual encounters that punctuated his life’ but immediately goes on to say:
How many or how regular these were is impossible to tell. (p.199)
Well, if it is ‘impossible’ to tell how many ‘casual sexual encounters’ Gainsborough had, how come Hamilton is confidently telling us that they ‘punctuated his life’? Throughout the book I had the uneasy feeling that Hamilton was bending or interpreting the evidence to suit his vision of a freewheeling Jack the Lad. The more he asserted it, the more reluctant I felt to acquiesce, the more doubtful I felt of Hamilton’s opinions.
Hamilton quotes the daughter of an Ipswich friend describing him as ‘very lively, gay and dissipated’ (p.118) which fits his Jack the Lad thesis, but then goes on to explain that ‘dissipated’ might have its 18th century meaning of ‘spendthrift, an simply indicated that he spent beyond his means in order to dress his wife and growing daughters appropriately.
In autumn 1763 Gainsborough was very ill, laid up for three months unable to work, and a Bath newspaper even reported that he had died! Hamilton interprets the handful of letters we have to mean the illness was associated with a sexually transmitted disease because Gainsborough describes feeling guilt and regret. But then, to my surprise, Hamilton concedes:
It may be the case that Gainsborough’s long near-fatal illness had nothing to do with his sex life… (p.200)
So Hamilton’s entire speculation about the illness being related to an STD is just that – speculation. This kind of building castles in the sky and then, reluctantly, admitting the castles may all speculation, slowly and steadily undermined my trust in Hamilton as a guide and interpreter to Gainsborough’s life.
Making it up
It’s a feeling compounded by the amount of sheer invention which appears on every page.
Now, in his late thirties, he was active, busy, in demand. His sitters’ book in Bath, assuming he had one, would have bulged with the names of old clients, new clients, their friends and relations and their various requirements. (p.203)
‘Assuming he had one’. Hamilton did warn us in his introduction that he would be weaving a certain amount of fantasia around the very thin documentary evidence which survives, and I wouldn’t mind if I thought his spinning were justified, but… his relentless habit of inventing things and then commenting on them didn’t agree with me and I came to dislike reading this book.
Destroyed letters
We learn that part of the reason that so few of Gainsborough’s letters survive is because a surprising number were in Hamilton’s view ‘filthy’ – presumably sexually explicit – and so Gainsborough’s executors destroyed them – for example, the cache of letters sent to his friend Samuel Kilderbee and destroyed by Samuel’s heirs because of their ‘obscenity’.
But if they have been destroyed… how can we know what they contained? The generations after Gainsborough’s were not only more puritanical about sex but about religion too, and about family values. I.e. there could be a number of grounds why the letters gave offence to later generations and it was considered best to destroy them.
Spirited
What is believable – because we can read it in the letters and in many diary accounts and memoirs of the period – is that Gainsborough was very high spirited. Good-looking, cutting a graceful figure, lively and talkative, he said whatever was on his mind, a fountain of lively observations, so much so that surviving letters and memoirs agree that, next morning, on sober reflection, he often regretted things he said. But being over-talkative and shooting from the hip is very different from being sexually promiscuous.
This high-spiritedness is a quality Gainsborough readily admits in himself, indeed actively promotes in some of his letters, writing:
I am the most inconsistent, changeable being, so full of fitts and starts… (quoted p.257)
or describing himself as:
a Long cross made fellow [who] only flings his arms about like threshing-flails without half an Idea what he would be at. (p.258)
Joshua Reynolds
Later memoirists, notably Ephraim Hardcastle, give colourful accounts comparing and contrasting Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. Hardcastle paints Reynolds in conversation as pursuing ‘a steady philosophic course’, while
the lively Gainsborough was a skipping and gambolling backwards and forwards from side to side… none for enthusiasm and vivacity could compare with he. (p.199)
Now this is the aspect of Gainsborough which is most consistently reported – his unbuttoned liveliness and spontaneity.
Margaret
Aged 19, Thomas married a local woman Margaret Burr. She was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who acknowledged her and had settled a £200 annuity on her. Thus Thomas was marrying into what counted, in Sudbury, for money. It was to be a difficult marriage. Both were faithful, there was no divorce, Thomas had no mistresses, but Margaret owned and managed her own money, and there is plenty of evidence that she took a strong-willed approach to Thomas’s income, too (from his own letters and the accounts of others). He sometimes felt too much under her thumb. It was an effective working relationship but he writes on a couple of occasions that he didn’t feel worthy of her and the cumulative sense is that it was not a very loving marriage.
A life in five acts
The trajectory of his life is indicated by the five parts of Hamilton’s account:
Suffolk (1727 to 1740) childhood in Sudbury
London (1740 to 1748) apprenticeship, prints, acquaintance with Hogarth, marries Margaret Burr
Suffolk again (1748 to 1758) first Sudbury, then the more profitable town of Ipswich
Bath (1759 to 1773: 14 years, first in Abbey Street, from 1767 at 17 King’s Circus)
London again (1774to 1778)
Landscapes
He knew he was better at landscape than at portraits, and enjoyed painting landscapes more, but portraits paid the bills (in fact, Hamilton tells us that during his time in Ipswich 1752 – 1759, Gainsborough painted so many landscapes that he ended up giving them away, p.108).
Gainsborough’s landscapes are indebted to the style of Dutch landscape painting crossed with his own immersion of the Suffolk countryside around Sudbury. His early landscapes are already a joy to look at. This one was painted when he was only 20 years old. Pretty impressive.
Cornard Wood by Thomas Gainsborough (1748)
Doll paintings
Whereas most of his portraits before the 1750s are embarrassingly bad. They look like skinny children’s doll’s with empty dolls’ faces plonked in lovely landscapes. In fact, Hamilton explains that the bodies really were painted from so-called ‘lay dolls’, wooden mannekins with jointed bodies which could be arranged in different postures. Later, from the 1760s, he pained bodies and clothes from life, but not from the actual sitters, from much cheaper models brought in and made to wear the sitters’ clothes (p.218).
Sarah Kirby and Joshua Kirby by Thomas Gainsborough (1751-1752)
Music
Gainsborough was very musical, unlike Reynolds. He was proficient on the violin and a member of the Ipswich Music Club which held regular concerts. He was easily distracted by invitations to play music, and portrayed musicians, with their instruments e.g. Johann Christian Fischer, Carl Friedrich Abel, Ann Ford,
Hamilton quotes the letter to William Jackson, well-known to Gainsborough buffs, in which the artist declares he is sick of painting portraits and wishes he could go off somewhere quiet in the country, just him and his viola da gamba, and live a quiet life of music and paint Landskips (p.260). However, Hamilton marshals the evidence of friends that he wasn’t, actually, that good at music and also that he was very impulsive, taking up a string of different instruments each time he heard one being played, and never becoming proficient on any of them (p.266-270).
Style transformed
Hamilton doesn’t really identify how and why Gainsbrough’s depiction of human figures and faces changed, but change it did, drastically, between the early 1750s (when, to be fair, he was still only 23, 24, 25) and the later 1750s. But it amounts to a revolution in style, which allowed him to create depictions of human faces and figures of transcendent grace and beauty, such as this, the famous unfinished portrait of his two young daughters, Mary and Margaret.
The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat by Thomas Gainsborough (1760-1761)
Bath
Bath was hectic with social life and also with artistic competition. Over the 18th century as a whole some 160 artists worked in Bath, the majority portrait miniaturists. The most successful, like Gainborough, provided life-size portraits in oil on canvas and had a permanent show room as well as a ‘painting room’ (the Italian word studio was only introduced in the 19th-century).
Until Gainsborough arrived the most successful portrait painter in Bath was William Hoare (1707 – 1792) who Gainsborough quickly eclipsed, though the two men became friends. A flick through his work shows that it is very capable at catching a likeness, but a bit dead and, above all, set inside.
A glance at one of the largest and most ambitious (double portraits) Gainsborough painted at Bath, The Byam Family (1764) instantly shows you how placing his sitters outside, in a kind of generic gentle south-of-England wooded countryside immediately transforms the subjects, giving them a lordly sense of style and movement as well as a sense of ownership of the land they walk through. And gives the viewer a similar sense of breadth and ease
Gainsborough’s painting method
The younger painter Ozias Humphrey observed Gainsborough painting on numerous occasions and left detailed descriptions (pp.217-218).
Surprisingly, Gainsborough painted by candlight in a room kept perpetually dark.
He painted the sitter’s face in chalk and arranged the canvas so it was only inches from the sitter’s face.
He was very restless, stepping back from the canvas to size it up, then quickly right back up to it to paint more, in an endless round of fidgety movement.
All he needed was the face; the costume was painted afterwards, worn by a model (often his wife or one of his by-now grown-up daughters was dragooned in).
He painted for 5 or 6 hours a day continuously, quite a physically demanding regimen (although this is from the account of the unreliable witness, Philip Thicknesse, quoted page 339).
Contempt for sitters
Gainsborough was fairly open about not liking most of his sitters: he described portrait painting as ‘my dam’d business’ and a ‘curs’d face business’, of the clients as ‘damn gentlemen’ and ‘confounded ugly creatures’ (quoted page 275).
Royalty
Ironically, for all his focused ambition, Joshua Reynolds had a troubled relationship with King George III (ascended the throne in 1760) not least because Reynolds associated with writers and politicians associated with the Whig i.e. anti-royal faction. Whereas Gainsborough who was far less professionally and socially ambitious than Reynolds, was asked to do portraits of the king and queen in 1780 and ended up getting on famously with both of them, invited back to do portraits of their large brood of children and individual portraits.
Models
No, not that sort. Later in his career, Gainsborough enjoyed making models for landscapes which could fit on a table and were constructed from broccoli, moss and stones.
Prices
At the height of his fame, in the 1780s, Gainsborough charged for a three-quarters portrait 40 guineas, for half-length 80 guineas, and for a full-length 160 guineas.
Religion
Hamilton describes Gainsborough as ‘a devout Anglican’, though there are almost no references to him going to church and only the most generic religious references in his letters, which are strewn with swearing (lots of ‘Damns’). It was a religiously tolerant family. His older brother, Humphrey, was a non-conformist minister, and his sister Mary, was a Methodist.
Kew
Gainsborough is buried, not back home in Suffolk, in fashionable Bath, or in mercantile London, but in the graveyard of St Anne’s Church, Kew. I used to go and sit by his tomb and eat my sandwich lunch, when I worked at Kew.
Concluding image
There are a lot of Society ladies and gentlemen to choose from, but I think one of Gainsborough’s greatest paintings is this portrait of his wife, Margaret, done in the late 1770s. It is an extremely subtle, sensitive, sensuous depiction of his spouse of 25 years, a brilliant portrait of any middle-aged woman, honest and frank and a universe away – not only in terms of art, but of experience – from the silly doll-figures of the 1740s. It is a triumph of technique but also of human wisdom.
Portrait of Mrs Gainsborough by Thomas Gainsborough (1778) @ The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
This exhibition is pure visual, intellectual and emotional pleasure. It is beautifully hung and really informatively labelled and guided. In particular the American scholar who curated it, David Solkin, is pitch perfect in his audioguide commentary, telling you exactly what you need to know about each key painting, and about Gainsborough’s wider family background.
It’s a simple enough idea: Thomas Gainsborough (1727 to 1788) was one of the 18th century’s most successful portrait painters, rising from modest beginnings in Sudbury Suffolk, to owning a mansion on Pall Mall and being painter to Britain’s aristocracy, rivalled only by the towering figure of his contemporary, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
But alongside his formal commissions he painted an unusual number of portraits of his immediate and extended family. This exhibition brings together some 50 of these paintings and a few drawings, some familiar from national collections, some never before publicly displayed, to tell the story of his changing and evolving painterly style, as well as the biographies of himself, his wife and daughters, parents, brothers and sisters, and other members of the extended family.
It’s not quite a portrait of the age but it’s certainly a portrait of a charming, sometimes tragic, often comic and endearing family, told via sketches, drawings and paintings which are sometimes breath-takingly beautiful.
The two Gainsboroughs
It’s always seemed to me there are two Gainsboroughs: the early paintings from the 1740s feature beanpole figures with Woodentop faces which I personally find difficult to take seriously.
Then something seismic happened to his technique during the 1750s, so that within a decade his handling of the human face had become marvellously expressive, and his handling of the volume and shape of the human body, masterful.
The following is one of my all-time favourite paintings, one of the best depictions of love and affection and innocence I know of. it looks and feels as if by a completely different artist from the painting above.
It demonstrates several of Gainsborough’s qualities. One is the characteristic ‘feathering’ of the trees and clouds in the background. Another is that it is unfinished – a lot of the paintings in this exhibition are unfinished. They demonstrate his sprezzatura, his ability to rough out an image at astonishing speed.
And for me, personally, I love the way you can see the artist at work. I almost like the rough sketching of the arms and hands as much as the smooth finish of the seraphic faces. They remind me of the quick evocative charcoal sketches by Degas which were exhibited next door at the National Gallery earlier this year. I love draughtsmanship, outlines, the miraculous way a few lines on a flat surface can conjure up the look and feel of warm human bodies, and many of even the most mature paintings on display here have an unfinished quality, which allows you to enjoy Gainsborough’s terrific verve and confidence.
Gainsborough’s speed
In fact Gainsborough’s legendary speed often caused him problems. One was that, even once he was famous, his clients regularly complained that he’d left his paintings unfinished. There’s an example here of his wife, done in sumptuous silks but, when you look closer, lacking hands, as if he was in too much of a hurry to bother.
As to sheer speed the commentary tells us that he made this painting of his nephew and protégé, Gainsborough Dupont, in one hour. One hour. It is riveting to be able to examine this painting really closely and observe the nerveless precision of his draughtsmanship and the dash and confidence of his brushstrokes. The eyes and eyebrows in particular dazzled me. Note the ‘feathering’ effect of the background and the quick, dashed-off impression of the boy’s ‘cavalier’ costume.
‘Gainsborough Dupont, the artist’s nephew’ by Thomas Gainsborough (1773) Waddesdon (the Rothschild family)
The influence of van Dyck
As he became more successful the young painter moved from his Suffolk home to the fashionable spa resort of Bath. Here he made important contacts with rich clients and also got the opportunity, when visiting the aristocracy, to see their collections of Old Masters.
Of all the past masters, the one that struck him most was Sir Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish painter who came over to work at the court of Charles I in the 1630s. I’d love to know whether it was the deliberate attempt to copy van Dyck which led to the revolution in his work which I indicated above. Certainly Gainsborough revered van Dyck till his dying day. In fact the exhibition tells us that, as his death from terminal cancer approached, he told those around him he wanted to be measured against van Dyck, and apparently his very last words were ‘Van Dyck is right’.
The commentary on the Gainsborough Dupont portrait mentions that van Dyck used flicks of red to create depth of colouring of human skin and then points out just such red flecks which you can see if look closely above the figure’s left eye. It’s the type of opportunity to lean right into the real paintings, and to really appreciate their subtle technique – to see at first hand exactly how paint is laid onto the canvas – which makes visiting exhibitions like this so worthwhile.
Gainsborough’s daughters
The exhibition brings together all twelve surviving portraits Gainsborough made of his beloved daughters. The ones of them as children are wonderful (see above) but the portraits follow them through into young womanhood and then maturity. We learn at one point that he taught them both how to paint landscapes so that they would have a trade to fall back on in case he should be struck down. Later on we learn that the younger sister married but the marriage broke down after just two years. She suffered mental illness and moved in with her older sister who never married and cared for her for the rest of her life.
In this painting I was drawn to the peripheral details, to Gainsborough’s ‘feathery’ treatment of the trees’ foliage, and to the shaggy dog, a symbol, we are told, of fidelity, to the extraordinary finish on the shimmering silk of the daughter on the left. But keep returning to the faces, especially of the daughter on the right, which seems to frank and open and candid.
‘Mary and Margaret Gainsborough, the artist’s daughters’ by Thomas Gainsborough (1770 to 1774) Private collection
Gainsborough’s wife
Family tradition had it that Gainsborough painted a portrait of his wife every year and gave it to her as a present on their wedding anniversary.
The commentary doesn’t make a meal of it but strongly hints that Gainsborough was serially unfaithful to his wife who was well known for having a fierce temper. Maybe the paintings were a form of atonement.
Rather beautifully, their relationship is discussed in terms of their dogs because Thomas owned a brisk alert collie which he called Fox (maybe because it looked a bit fox-like but also in humorous reference to the fat radical politician of the day, Charles James Fox). His wife owned a spaniel, which she named Tristram after the hero of the wildly popular contemporary novel, Tristram Shandy. Moreover:
‘Whenever [Gainsborough] spoke crossly to his wife …he would write a note of repentance, sign it with the name of his favourite dog, ‘Fox’, and address it to his Margaret’s pet spaniel, ‘Tristram’. Fox would take the note in his mouth and duly deliver it…’
In 1746, aged just 19, Gainsborough had married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who settled a £200 annuity on the couple. The commentary points out that at various tight moments in the 1750s and before he became successful, the couple had to borrow extensively against the promise of this annuity.
Apparently, Margaret was the tough-minded, business-minded person in the relationship, with Gainsborough being the more slothful and phlegmatic. He casually had affairs. She went mad with anger.
None of this is present in the later portraits of her, quite a few of which are gathered here, which really beautifully capture the flavour of maturemarried love, of mutual forgiveness and affection. Next to the daughters with the invisible cat, this painting of Margaret Gainsborough was my favourite work in the show. It is marvellous how he has captured (or invented or created) the impression of deep and affectionate character in her face, in the deep calm accepting maturity of her gaze.
‘Margaret Gainsborough, the artist’s wife’ by Thomas Gainsborough (1777) The Courtauld Gallery, London
Other points
The exhibition has other themes. Although he made his living as a Society portrait painter, throughout his life Gainsborough’s first love was landscape painting, and the exhibition contains a massive unfinished landscape, included on the pretext that two of the figures in its central incident of a farm cart pulled by unruly horses are based on his two daughters (the white-chested figure looking up, and the woman being pulled up into the cart).
‘The Harvest Wagon’ by Thomas Gainsborough. (1767) The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
We learn an awful lot about Gainsborough’s extended family and there is a big family tree at the start of the show showing just how extensive it was. The wall labels give us interesting anecdotes about his father and mother (he went bankrupt) about his sisters (one was a milliner which gave him a lifelong interest in fabrics and women’s dresses) about one brother, Humphrey, who became a non-conformist minister and was also a noted inventor, while the other one, John, became known in the family as ‘Scheming Jack’ because of his endless moneymaking plans and schemes all of which came to nothing with the result that Scheming Jack and his family lived on handouts from his siblings.
In other words, there’s a lot of fascinating gossip-cum-social history mixed in with the art appreciation.
And then there is the steady sequence of self-portraits, not quite as profound and searching as, say, Rembrandt’s, but stretching from his earliest works in the 1740s right to the end of his life in 1788, which take you on a fascinating journey from ambitious neophyte, to proud father, to accomplished craftsman, to ageing husband.
The exhibition tells us that he wanted this self-portrait to be the approved one, with (as the commentary points out) its rather quizzical raised eyebrow, and the air of a calm mature man, confident in his powers and conscious of a life well lived (and note the jazzy, unfinished squiggles which depict his neckerchief. Dazzling sprezzatura and confidence right to the end!)
Self Portrait by Thomas Gainsborough (1787) Royal Academy of Arts, London
This is a wonderful, gossipy, beautiful and life-affirming exhibition.
Battle of the videos
NPG have commissioned an official video of the show:
But there’s also an informal review by Visiting London Guide which shows more pictures and gives more information.
This is another of Maugham’s well-made comedies. Apparently it was written during the Great War, in 1915, but not staged in England until 1923 because it was thought that it might alienate American public opinion, which we were trying to persuade to enter the war.
It is set in the cynical but stylish High Society we are used to from Maugham, but this time concerns a group of Americans, not posh Brits – Americans who have married into British or European ‘Society’.
The characters
There is a sort of chorus of three mature American matrons who have married British, French or Italian aristocrats:
Pearl, Lady Grayston who married George Grayston, a baronet
Minnie Hodges who married and then divorced the Duc de Surennes and now is always in love with some beautiful young man or other, currently the gorgeous pouting young Tony Paxton
Flora van Hoog, who married an Italian aristocrat to become the Princess della Cercola but, when he began taking mistresses, abandoned him to come and live in London and now pursues philanthropic causes and charities which she pesters her friends about.
There is also a couple of older American men who have made their way in British society: the brash, loud and over-dressed Thornton Clay, and the corrupt 70-year-old American Arthur Fenwick who made his fortune selling poor quality food to the American working classes and is now opening stores to do the same here in London.
Together these five represent a variety of ways older Americans have integrated and exploited their position. Set against them are the Younger Generation who are trying to make their life decisions, namely whether to marry for love or money (a dilemma which would have been familiar to Jane Austen a century earlier).
Young Bessie Saunders is heiress to an American fortune staying with her older sister, Pearl. Pearl’s husband, Lord George Grayston, very conveniently doesn’t live with her, allowing her to conduct her gay social life and numerous flirtations in London’s High Society without hindrance. All three acts are set in her houses – Act One in her grand town house in Grosvenor Square Mayfair, and Acts Two and Three in Pearl’s country retreat at Abbots Kenton, Suffolk.
Bessie has only recently arrived from America and been swept off her feet by the giddy whirl of London society. Back in the States she was engaged to a nice, unspoilt, young American gentleman, Fleming Harvey when she was 16 and he 18. Soon after arriving in London and seeing the wider world she wrote him a letter breaking off the engagement. She is being wooed by an English aristocrat, Lord Harry Bleane. Now Harvey has arrived in London and, understandably, commences trying to woo her back.
Meanwhile Act One introduces the love triangle between the good looking, slender, immaculately dressed but poor young Brit, Tony Paxton, with whom the ‘Duchesse’ (original name Minnie Hodgson, daughter of a Chicago millionaire who made his money in pork) is besottedly in love. It only slowly emerges that Tony is revolted by the desperation of the Duchesse’s passion and has become smitten with Pearl, precisely because she is so playfully unavailable.
Comedy
Comedy is extracted from the interaction of all these types – the three cynical ladies, the earnest and easily shocked young American boy Harvey, the sincere English Lord Bleane, the spoilt brat Tony Paxton, with Bessie playing her part: only slowly does it emerge that the play hinges on Bessie’s choice of whether to stay in England and marry an English lord in order to join the kind of amoral if stiflingly ‘correct’ lifestyle the three ladies live – or whether to reject European corruption and return to pure and innocent America (the subject of many of Henry James’s novels).
And there is something deeply comic about the way all these amoral characters pursue their cynical schemes against the backdrop of the impeccable formality of the grand house in Grosvenor Square Mayfair and at Pearl’s country retreat at Abbots Kenton, Suffolk, with their silent servants, especially the butler, Pole.
Just the existence of a dutiful and obedient butler, overhearing all their selfish schemes with complete discretion, is itself funny. ‘Very good, m’lady.’
Speaking of Funny, Maugham isn’t Oscar Wilde. His bon mots don’t ring and dazzle. But the play does have quite a few moments of brightly comic dialogue.
Bessie: Does George know?
Pearl: Who is George?
Bessie: Don’t be absurd, Pearl. George – your husband.
Or:
Fleming: Has it occurred to you that he wants to marry you for your money?
Bessie: You could put it more prettily. You could say that he wants to marry me with my money.
Or:
Clay: Some of these American women are strangely sexless.
Fleming: I have an idea that some of them are even virtuous.
Pearl [with a smile]: It takes all sorts to make a world.
Or:
Duchesse: I know he’s lying to me, there’s not a word of truth in anything he says. But he’s so slim I can never catch him out.
Or:
Pearl: You’re the very person we want, Thornton. An entirely strange young man has suddenly appeared on my doorstep and says he is my cousin.
Clay: My dear Pearl, that is a calamity which we Americans must always be prepared for.
And:
Duchesse: He makes me so miserable but I love him… He wants to marry me, Pearl.
Pearl: You’re not going to!
Duchesse: No, I won’t be such a fool as that. If I married him I’d have no hold over him at all.
Act Two
In Act Two, at Pearl’s country house, various interactions give us a deeper sense of the characters – of the three older women’s American backgrounds, the men they married, how they’ve coped with divorce and separation and so on.
Fleming is still really sweet on Bessie but she is agonising over whether to accept Lord Bleane. Fleming would like to hate Bleane but is disappointed to discover that he’s actually a good guy who tells Bessie he was originally attracted to her money (the fact that she was rich being broadcast all over London by her elder sister, Pearl) but that now he really is in love with her.
Their story is, for this middle part of the play, eclipsed by the passion with which pretty young Tony Paxton a) is revolted by the cloying over-attention the lurid Duchesse lavishes on him b) is powerfully attracted to Pearl. Against the latter’s better judgement Paxton persuades her to accompany him to the tea-house in the garden. Duchesse, in her violent jealousy, suspecting something is up, despatches innocent little Bessie to fetch her handbag from the same tea-house where Bessie sees… something so horrible that she rushes back into the drawing room where all the other characters are playing cards (are the couple having just a snog or actually having sex??). When Minnie provocatively asks what on earth is wrong with her, it prompts the tear-filled admission that she has seen Pearl and Tony… together!
When Pearl and Paxton make a nonchalant entrance to the drawing room it is to discover that everybody knows (know what? were they having a snog? a grope? full-on sex? it is never explained).
Tony has blown his relationship with Duchesse. More fatally, the doting old millionaire Fenwick has all his fond illusions about Pearl being pure and romantic utterly burst. ‘The slut, the slut’ he repeats, in angry despair. Given that he substantially funds her lifestyle this is a major blow.
Act Three
Act Three takes place in the same drawing room on the afternoon of the following day. The atmosphere is very strained, Pearl didn’t come down from her bedroom for either breakfast or lunch, the innocent menfolk (Clay and Fleming) and women (the Princess) tiptoed around the furious fuming Duchess while Fenwick was purple with rage. Their conversation informs us that the previous evening turned into a blazing row with words exiting the dementedly angry Duchess’s mouth that none of them had ever heard before, as she screamed her rage at Tony and Pearl.
The Duchess is pouring her heart out to the Princess when Tony sidles in looking for cigarettes. There is a comic scene where she turns on him, all outraged pride and anger, insisting he leave the house immediately and will be booted out of the flat in London which she pays for him to live in, while Tony is all sullen pouting. But the comedy is in the slow insinuating way in which their positions shift until the Duchesse is begging Tony to be nice to her and, eventually, she makes the Grand Concession of relenting and saying she will marry him – to which Tony’s only response is ‘Does that mean I’ll be able to drive the Rolls-Royce?’ By this stage we have grasped the depths of the Duchess’s helpless infatuation and the true extent of Paxton’s shallow selfishness.
The remaining scenes showcase Pearl’s brilliantly scheming to redeem a tricky situation: it will take all her wiles and cunning.
First she makes an entrance looking fabulous. Then she holds tete-a-tetes with Bessie, Clay, the Duchess and Fenwick. She reveals all her cunning ploys to Clay (and thus, to us, the audience).
1. To the Duchess she reveals that she has been phoning all her contacts that morning and has managed to get Tony a job in the government, nothing too demanding. Over the course of feline dialogue she is slowly able to win the Duchess back round to being her friend.
2. Then she explains to Clay how she is going to play the little-girl-lost for Fenwick whose self-image is of a Strong Masterly Man; she will play weak to encourage his narcissistic sense of his own masculine resilience, and so it pans out. After five minutes she has him back eating out the palm of her hand under the delusion that he is magnanimously forgiving her.
Only Bessie, her sister, sees straight through her and indeed through the lifestyle of all these Americans-in-Europe.
She has a big scene where she begs Lord Blaine to release her from their engagement. At the centre of the scene is the Author’s Message: Bessie has seen that English girls are bred up to responsibility and dignity and so know how to handle and manage their wealth; whereas the American women who marry into the British aristocracy have no sense of noblesse oblige or duty, but simply see it as an opportunity for frivolous pleasure, hence their silly flirting and superficial romances. It is not them, it is the niche they move into, which turns them into monsters. As Bessie has seen at close quarters how her beloved elder sister Pearl has become a monster of manipulation. Bessie is determined not to become like that.
The play ends with her witnessing her sister’s pièce de resistance – first thing that morning Pearl had sent her Rolls to London to collect the most fashionable dancing teacher in London and beg him to come down and stay the night. When he enters all the guests who swore they would leave in disgust at her behaviour (Fenwick, the Princess, but especially the Duchesse and Paxton) all confirm that they will stay for dinner and dancing. Despite committing just about the worst social crime imaginable (being caught red-handed being unfaithful to her elderly lover and stealing her best friend’s lover) Pearl has manipulated everyone into forgiving and forgetting.
Bessie watches all this with disgust and, in the last line of the play, vows she will be returning to America at the first opportunity.
So it’s a brittle social comedy of comically amoral, upper-class behaviour among rich American title-hunters in England – with just enough of a sting in the tail to elude the censorship but have the more high-minded critics admitting that it does have a sound moral message. It is, in other words, a clever and entertaining theatrical confection perfectly suited for its times.
Adaptations
The play was turned into a Hollywood movie in 1933, directed by George Cukor. Here’s a clip.
It was adapted for BBC radio in 1998.
It had previously been revived at the Chichester Theatre in 1997, with the throaty American actress Kathleen Turner playing Pearl and Rula Lenska as the Duchesse. The fact that Turner plays the same role in the radio broadcast suggests that one led on to the other. The Daily Telegraph reviewed the stage play. I am puzzled why Patrick O’Connor casually calls Maugham misogynist since a) all the strongest characters are women, the men being just foils and pretexts b) the women themselves cover a wide range from the strong, clever, scheming Pearl to the genuinely innocent but, ultimately decisive, Bessie.
This is nowhere near a complete bibliography. Maugham also wrote countless articles and reviews, quite a few travel books, two books of reminiscence, as well as some 25 successful stage plays and editing numerous anthologies. This is a list of the novels, short story collections, and the five plays in the Pan Selected Plays volume.
1897 Liza of Lambeth
1898 The Making of a Saint (historical novel)
1899 Orientations (short story collection)
1901 The Hero
1902 Mrs Craddock
1904 The Merry-go-round
1906 The Bishop’s Apron
1908 The Explorer
1908 The Magician (horror novel)
1915 Of Human Bondage 1919 The Moon and Sixpence
1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection) 1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before the Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1948 Quartet (portmanteau film using four short stories –The Facts of Life, The Alien Corn, The Kite and The Colonel’s Lady)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook
1950 Trio (film follow-up to Quartet, featuring The Verger, Mr. Know-All and Sanatorium)
1951 The Complete Short Stories in three volumes
1952 Encore (film follow-up to Quartet and Trio featuring The Ant and the Grasshopper, Winter Cruise and Gigolo and Gigolette)
1963 Collected short stories volume one (30 stories: Rain, The Fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, The Pool, Mackintosh, Appearance and Reality, The Three Fat Women of Antibes, The Facts of Life, Gigolo and Gigolette, The Happy Couple, The Voice of the Turtle, The Lion’s Skin, The Unconquered, The Escape, The Judgement Seat, Mr. Know-All, The Happy Man, The Romantic Young Lady, The Point of Honour, The Poet, The Mother, A Man from Glasgow, Before the Party, Louise, The Promise, A String of Beads, The Yellow Streak) 1963 Collected short stories volume two (24 stories: The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Alien Corn, The Creative Impulse, The Man with the Scar, Virtue, The Closed Shop, The Bum, The Dream, The Treasure, The Colonel’s Lady, Lord Mountdrago, The Social Sense, The Verger, In A Strange Land, The Taipan, The Consul, A Friend in Need, The Round Dozen, The Human Element, Jane, Footprints in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity) 1963 Collected short stories volume three (17 stories: A Domiciliary Visit, Miss King, The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman, The Greek, A Trip to Paris, Giulia Lazzari, The Traitor, Gustav, His Excellency, Behind the Scenes, Mr Harrington’s Washing, A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature, Sanatorium) 1963 Collected short stories volume four (30 stories: The Book-Bag, French Joe, German Harry, The Four Dutchmen, The Back Of Beyond, P. & O., Episode, The Kite, A Woman Of Fifty, Mayhew, The Lotus Eater, Salvatore, The Wash-Tub, A Man With A Conscience, An Official Position, Winter Cruise, Mabel, Masterson, Princess September, A Marriage Of Convenience, Mirage, The Letter, The Outstation, The Portrait Of A Gentleman, Raw Material, Straight Flush, The End Of The Flight, A Casual Affair, Red, Neil Macadam)
2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings
She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful, and acceptable. (p.295)
Orwell’s second novel, published in March 1935, is an oddity. A decade later he wrote it off as a potboiler and he even prevented it from being republished when the original print run sold out.
Along with its fellows Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up For Air (1939), A Clergyman’s Daughter is generally overlooked because readers in a hurry prioritise his world-class classics, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the reportage of Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia, and the brisk, no-nonsense clarity of his numerous political and literary essays.
Are these neglected novels worth reading?
A Clergyman’s Daughter
A Clergyman’s Daughter is divided into five distinct parts and, once you’ve finished the book, you realise they don’t fully hang together, both stylistically and in terms of plot.
Part one
Introduces us to Dorothy Hare, the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s Church, Knype Hill, a large village in Suffolk. Dorothy is pushing 28, plain and honest, wakes up every morning around 6am to light the kitchen fire and heat the water for her father to shave in, and makes breakfast for him. They have a lacklustre live-in servant, Ellen, but the atmosphere is of extremely run-down, shabby-genteel poverty. Dorothy is continually berating herself for failing her own religious ideals – exemplified by her habit of sticking her hat pin into her forearm every time her mind wanders off during Holy Communion or she has a wicked thought. Consequently, her arm is a rash of little red marks.
In among a detailed account of her daily routine (visiting the rural poor, shopping with her meagre allowance and trying to manage the rector’s debts with the numerous town merchants) we learn she is sort of friends with the shamelessly immoral local ‘artist’ (who never paints anything), Warburton, who has a mistress and three illegitimate children. Warburton invites Dorothy to dinner to meet a novelist friend and his wife.
The novelist couple never turn up. In fact, they don’t even exist: fat (always the worst crime for tall, skinny Orwell), bald (another no-no) middle-aged Warburton invented them solely to lure Dorothy to his house under a false sense of security so he can seduce her. This consists of standing behind the after-dinner chair she’s sitting in, placing his hands on her shoulders and then running them up and down her bare arms. Dorothy leaps to her feet and tells him to stop, insists on putting on her coat and leaving. At the gate to his garden he tries to kiss her but she averts her mouth, wriggles free of his grasp and walks home to the rectory. Here, as chastisement to herself for getting into such a ridiculous situation, Dorothy carries on preparing costumes for the children’s village play, though it’s midnight and she keeps dozing off…
Part two
opens with a surprising piece of experimental prose describing a human being slowly waking to consciousness of themselves, as a mind, as a series of sensations, as a body and then of a unified person. It is the nearest Orwell gets to acknowledging the influence of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf among the many other modernist novelists who were experimenting with stream of consciousness prose and other attempts to describe non-normal states of mind.
Dorothy has lost her memory. She slowly comes to awareness, standing on a street in London dressed in shabby black outfit, with no idea who she is or how she got there. If a sympathetic helper had taken her to a police station she might have quickly regained her past, but instead she is almost immediately taken up by three street people, two young lads and a girl, who are off to Kent to pick hops.
Confused and dazzled by their patter (specially when they discover she is the proud owner of half a crown), she finds herself inveigled into the shattering process of walking the thirty or more miles into Kent, which takes three days of hunger and begging. This ordeal is followed by even more penurious traipsing round Kent farms looking for work. Finally they get ‘lucky’ and Dorothy spends a month or so in the extremely demanding and badly-paid work of picking hops by hand, alongside a community of other hop pickers, beggars from London, and bands of gypsies.
The introduction to the modern Penguin edition I’m reading refers to the fact that in Orwell’s original conception of the novel, at the end of part one Warburton successfully seduces or rapes Dorothy, before bundling her into a car and driving her to London, there – presumably – to dump her and abandon her on the street, as we find her in part two. This is in fact the account given to everybody, including the press, by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill, who claims to have seen Warburton driving off at speed in his car, with a scantily-clad woman in the passenger seat. However, apparently due to the risk of prosecution, the whole rape scene had to be dropped and replaced with the weird non-sequitur we now have – in the text as we have it Dorothy resists the seduction and goes safely home to the rectory where she dozes off and then… mysteriously appears in London.
Eventually, right at the end of the hop-picking sequence she comes across a newspaper giving salacious account of ‘Scandal of Rector’s Daughter’, complete with photo, which repeats Mrs Semprill’s salacious account – and Dorothy undergoes the physical shock of realising it is her in the newspaper – this is her name and identity and story!
But even with her memory back, she can’t make sense of the account the newspaper gives of her being seen sitting in a car being driven by Warburton. Did he get her drunk and persuade her to elope with him? That’s certainly not what happens at the end of part one as we have it. Of course, Dorothy’s version – resisting seduction, cycling home, falling asleep – could be explained away as a kind of ‘fake memory’ she concocts to repress the brutal truth, as sometimes happens to trauma victims. But then the third-person narrator who described her cycling home would have been deliberately misleading us, which seems unlikely because part one is narrated in Orwell’s sensible, matter-of-fact voice.
If in doubt, I simply go with what is in the text – so many novels, plays, and especially movies and TV series, have mucked about with time and consecutive narrative, with shock reversals, ‘it was all a dream’ scenarios, that we 21st century readers are very used to all kinds of tricks and sleights of hand. She fell asleep in her rectory. She wakes up in London nine days later having lost her memory. OK. I’ll buy that.
Meanwhile, the detailed description of going ‘on the tramp’ down to Kent, of begging and scrounging on the road, and then of the hard outdoors life of the hop picker, are quite obviously straight from Orwell’s personal experience. It has the scrupulous attention to detail of his other works of reportage, right down to the appearance of individual pickers, details of conditions on the farm, the disadvantages of sleeping in straw as opposed to hay, the slang of the various tramps and beggars, the songs sung by the pickers and the gypsies, and much much more. If you skip part two’s ‘experimental’ woman-with-amnesia opening section, this long passage of reportage could easily have been added into Down and Out in Paris and London.
So: by the end of part two Dorothy has remembered her identity and quit the hop-picking (which was drawing to its end anyway). She makes her way back to London where she pawns her last belongings and spends the money rooming for a week in a filthy, damp room in a run-down lodging house for prostitutes off the Cut, behind Waterloo Bridge. She had written to her father from the hop camp hoping he’d reply, forgive her and take her back. But no reply comes. She writes again from London, but no reply.
Dorothy spends her one week with a roof over her head in public libraries copying out adverts for servants and then traipsing all over London to apply for them. But she finds that a single woman, with an educated accent and no luggage, is instantly perceived as what she in fact is (is she?) – a woman who’s been seduced and dumped. An immoral woman. Her predicament is an opportunity for a characteristic outburst of Orwell’s love of social ‘types’ (and studied dislike of health cranks).
She trudged enormous distances all through the southern suburbs: Clapham, Brixton, Dulwich, Penge, Sydenham, Beckenham, Norwood – even as far as Croydon on one occasion. She was was haled into neat suburban drawing-rooms and interviewed by women of every conceivable type – large, chubby, bullying women, thin, acid, catty women, alert, frigid women in gold pince-nez, vague rambling women who looked as though they practised vegetarianism or attended spiritualist seances. (p.147)
Dorothy can find no work. At the end of the week she is forced out of the lodging house and onto the street.
Part three
continues the vein of stylistic experimentation – confirming the sense from the opening of part two that Orwell is dipping his toe into contemporary modernist techniques. For part three is written entirely in script format, giving brief location settings and then extended passages of the dialogue of various characters. He uses the format to convey the incessant and inane chatter of the down-and-outs, hobos and tramps among whom Dorothy has fallen, congregated one bitter night in Trafalgar Square – namely Charlie, Snouter, Mr Tallboys, Deafie, Mrs Wayne, Mrs Bendigo, Ginger and The Kike.
I find scripts difficult and boring to read and Orwell seems to agree. This is by far the shortest section, making up only 30 pages of this 300-page novel, with a few passages of prose scattered in it to explain the few bits of action, and it soon gets tiresome. I can, however, see that the script format emphasises the way that:
a) Nothing happens; the tramps mostly just lie or sit around near benches in Trafalgar Square in a kind of Samuel Beckett-like stasis.
b) Also, they are each stuck within their own stories and so don’t converse, don’t talk to each other: each one is like a robot or the proverbial cracked gramophone record – the old lady cursing her husband for kicking her out, mad Deafie singing an obscene song over and over, Ginger complaining about how he was set up to organise a robbery where he was caught and sent to prison. Each one is a prisoner of their own consciousness and life story.
Around midnight, Charlie starts stamps up and down giving a rousing performance of the bawdy ballad, ‘Rollicking Bill The Sailor’, evidently a song Orwell has heard, and which I tracked down on YouTube. It certainly is as bawdy as Orwell claims (again, due to publishing law, Orwell doesn’t include any of the lyrics):
Thus we are to imagine the chaste and devout rector’s daughter among this company of obscene automatons, a picture of human misery.
DOROTHY [starting up]: Oh, this cold, this cold! I don’t know whether it’s worse when you’re sitting down or when you’re standing up. Oh, how can you all stand it? Surely you don’t have to do this every night of your lives?
MRS WAYNE: You mustn’t think, dearie, as there isn’t SOME of us wasn’t brought up respectable.
CHARLIE [singing]: Cheer up, cully, you’ll soon be dead! Brrh! Perishing Jesus! Ain’t my fish-hooks blue! [Double marks time and beats his arms against his sides.]
DOROTHY: Oh, but how can you stand it? How can you go on like this, night after night, year after year? It’s not possible that people can live so! It’s so absurd that one wouldn’t believe it if one didn’t know it was true. It’s impossible!
In the end, she is arrested for vagrancy by the – it must be said – not unfriendly policeman who patrols the Square.
Part four
After these experimental episodes the narrative reverts to a traditional third-person voice for a refreshingly humorous passage going back to Knype Hill and describing how the rector was awoken by Ellen the servant, on the morning of Dorothy’s disappearance, and was more shocked by the fact that he had to prepare his own breakfast than by the news that his daughter had eloped.
Being completely hopeless, the rector hands the task of tracking Dorothy down over to his cousin, Sir Thomas Hare, from the moneyed part of the family, who lives in London and so is assumed to have ‘contacts’.
The Sir Thomas sections are done in broad humour for he is a caricature of a Sir Bufton-Tufton type, all ‘what what’ and tugging on his moustachios, while continually forgetting what he is saying.
Sir Thomas Hare was a widower, a good-hearted, chuckle-headed man of about sixty-five, with an obtuse rosy face and curling moustaches. He dressed by preference in checked overcoats and curly brimmed bowler hats that were at once dashingly smart and four decades out of date. At a first glance he gave the impression of having carefully disguised himself as a cavalry major of the ‘nineties, so that you could hardly look at him without thinking of devilled bones with a b and s, and the tinkle of hansom bells, and the Pink ‘Un in its great ‘Pitcher’ days, and Lottie Collins and ‘Tarara-BOOM-deay’. But his chief characteristic was an abysmal mental vagueness. He was one of those people who say ‘Don’t you know?’ and ‘What! What!’ and lose themselves in the middle of their sentences. When he was puzzled or in difficulties, his moustaches seemed to bristle forward, giving him the appearance of a well-meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn. (Chapter 4.1)
He has a manservant, Blyth, who speaks so softly you have to watch his lips carefully to make out what he is saying. This character feels directly descended from Dickens, as Sir Thomas descends from a long line of titled buffoons sprinkled throughout English fiction. The rector sends Sir Thomas some money and asks him to find out Dorothy’s whereabouts. Sir Thomas passes this request onto the silkily efficient Blyth (reminiscent, maybe, of the legendary Jeeves and a thousand other silently capable butlers of popular fiction) who commences his task the day after Dorothy had been arrested and bailed for vagrancy. Blyth swiftly locates Dorothy, approaches her in the street and invites her back to Sir Thomas’s Mayfair house. Astonished at this turn of events, Dorothy goes with him, washes, buys a new outfit of clothes and is transformed.
Kindly Sir Thomas is flabbergasted by how impressive she looks and speaks. What to do next? Somehow it is assumed by everyone that she can’t go back to Knype Hill – ‘the shame my dear’ – and so Sir Thomas’s solicitor suggests she gets a job as teacher in a suburban prep school. Within days it is arranged and she departs for Ringwood House Academy for Girls in Southbridge, ‘a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London’.
There follows a long chapter satirising the shortcomings of minor private schools in the 1930s, reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh’s debut, Decline and Fall (1930). Most of the public school authors of this generation (Auden, Waugh, Greene, Orwell himself) did a spot of private school teaching, Orwell in 1932 and 1932 at a private school in Hayes, West London – an experience this chapter is very much indebted to.
Ringwood House turns out to be a scandalous scam, run by the scheming, bitter, joyless Mrs Creevy who’s made a living dunning money from the uneducated local shopkeeper parents of fifteen or so girls from age 8 or so to 15, who have remained scandalously uneducated. The previous teacher had been sacked for getting paralytically drunk in class. Initially daunted at the responsibility of being ‘a teacher’, Dorothy finds out on the first morning that the children know nothing, have been taught nothing. Their lessons consisted solely of hours practicing their hand-writing – forced to write out over and over a trite ‘essay’ about the joys of spring – of learning a handful of French phrases, and the bare minimum of ‘sums’ i.e. some adding and subtracting.
We remember from part one the love and attention Dorothy lavished on the school play back at Knype Hill and so are not surprised that, first chance she gets, she goes into London to buy a decent atlas, some mathematical tools, some plasticine and a bunch of copies of Macbeth. She sets the girls to building a map of the world out of the plasticine, pins up a frieze of paper round the wall to create a timeline of British history onto which they pin pictures cut out from magazines of historical characters, and so on. The children love her.
But, ‘of course’, it can’t last. The children love their daily joint reading of Macbeth but in the last scene, when MacDuff explains that he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped, many of the children end up going back home that night and ask their puritanical non-conformist parents what a ‘womb’ is. This causes a rebellion of outraged parents who the next day storm into Ringwood House and subject Dorothy to a humiliating inquisition which brings her close to tears.
That isn’t all. Even when they’ve left, Mrs Creevy starts on Dorothy in her own right, carefully and cynically explaining the situation: the children are not to be educated; they are to be rote taught to perform the basic tricks which their parents expect of them – fancy handwriting, a handful of French phrases, enough maths to be able to help out in the shop. Mrs Creevy throws away the plasticine map of the world, burns the timeline of British history and sells the copies of Macbeth.
Dorothy, in complete misery, has to abandon any hope of genuinely teaching her children: she needs this job; the memory of the nights in Trafalgar Square rises up before her; she has no choice but to obey wretched Mrs Creevy. When the new Dorothy appears before them, the children’s attitude turns from disbelief to devastation to sullen bitter resentment. They taunt her, play up, act rebellious. She has abandoned them; they take every opportunity to rub it in. In the climax of her humiliation, Dorothy finds herself taunted one step too far by the most vicious child and hits her. She has become her own worst nightmare.
She submits to Mrs Creevy’s every whim. She completely abases herself up to and including faking the children’s end-of-year school reports. They have all made ‘outstanding progress’. Dorothy receives small indicators from frosty old Mrs Creevy that she is warming to her. It is a recurrent joke that Mrs Creevy half starves Dorothy but in the last weeks before the end of term she allows her slightly more food and – in a solemnly comic moment – even (reluctantly) allows her access to the marmalade jar at breakfast.
However, it is only the more effectively to trick her. On the very last day of term, when Dorothy expects to have her contract renewed, Mrs Creevy summarily sacks her. A wizened old crone from another wretched private school has agreed to decamp to Mrs Creevy’s establishment, bringing with her half a dozen paying pupils. This is a financial boost Mrs Creevy cannot ignore and so – despite having humiliated herself and stomped all over her better nature and principles in order to please her – Dorothy finds herself out on her ear again. Mrs Creevy turns the screw by promising to forward her luggage once Dorothy is established somewhere – but for a fee of five shillings!
Part five
BUT there is to be a fairy-tale ending, worthy of Charles Dickens whose spirit hovers over so much of Orwell’s writing.
Just as Oliver Twist spends 400 pages enduring life among thieves and beggars on the streets of London, only to be magically revealed as the heir to a fortune in the final pages – so Dorothy is walking down the street when who should draw up in a taxi but – a beaming chuckling Warburton!
Immediately we are swept out of the world of powerless poverty and into the calm confidence of the amiable man-of-the-world. When he hears that Mrs Creevy has gouged the five shillings out of Dorothy, he turns the cab round and he and the cabman go and retrieve the money – just like that. ‘What a hole’, Warburton comments of the school, calmly and confidently, and away he whisks her.
For the reader, who has accompanied Dorothy on her knees through so many valleys of humiliation, it is an astonishing psychological transformation to be lifted into the bright sunlight. It is also striking that it is effected by a man. There is a sense of re-entering a kind of virile world of power and activity. Warburton, in his way, is every bit as nonchalantly confident and effective as the equally caddish Verrall, in the previous novel, Burmese Days. Maybe this is:
an unconscious prejudice on Orwell’s part – that the feminine is helpless victim and the masculine bold and decisive
or is a deliberate piece of feminist satire, highlighting how helpless and downtrodden a woman can be by patriarchal society
or is simply the structural requirement that there had to be some kind of ‘salvation’ from Dorothy’s apparently endless plight, and ‘poetic justice’ makes it come from the very man who apparently caused it all in the first place
or a combination of all the above
In short order Warburton tells Dorothy that Mrs Semprill’s salacious account of their elopement has been disproved, she is redeemed not only with the good gossips of Knype Hill but with her father, who wants her to return home immediately. He takes her for a slap-up meal and then they catch a train to Suffolk. The topic of conversation turns to Dorothy’s ‘loss of faith’, Warburton disputes that she was ever a Christian, but could never actually face it. Hence her loss of memory -it was a psychological route out of an impossible situation:
He saw that she did not understand, and explained to her that loss of memory is only a device, unconsciously used, to escape from an impossible situation. The mind, he said, will play curious tricks when it is in a tight corner. Dorothy had never heard of anything of this kind before, and she could not at first accept his explanation.
Neither can we. Why did this tight corner suddenly occur on that night rather than any other? And how did she get to London?
Meanwhile, the train journey turns into a long discussion of faith and its absence i.e. living in a meaningless universe. This is no problem for Warburton, who is an amused hedonist: everything boils down to pleasure. But Dorothy tries to express the strangeness of the feeling she’s experiencing, living in a world newly devoid of faith. Imperceptibly, by steps, Warburton manoeuvres Dorothy into a mood wherein he suddenly takes off his hat (revealing his pink bald head) and proposes marriage to her. The reader is as startled as Dorothy. He follows up by spending two pages painting an extremely biting portrait of what the rest of her life will be like as a skivvy to her increasingly impoverished and gaga father, and then how she’ll be left penniless at his death and have to take a job as a governess or return to school-teaching. This is the fate of the spinster woman in the 1930s.
It is a hypnotically awful prospect and allows Warburton to take Dorothy’s hand, lift her to her feet, and then he’s begun to embrace her and is moving to kiss her before the spell is broken. Dorothy realises it was all yet another attempt of the revolting bald fat old man to seduce her.
a) It’s a strikingly slow-building scene b) It tends, yet again, to completely refute the rape notion.
Dorothy leaps back, revolted. Warburton subsides into his seat, amused and cynical: oh well, it was worth a try. The rest of the journey continues in trivial chat.
Dorothy is delivered back to her father who is delighted that his breakfasts will now be served on time. He accepts her explanation that she ‘lost her memory’ though she sees that he doesn’t really believe her. The final section of the book is a fairly long meditation on Dorothy’s loss of faith. What does it mean to live in a world without God? How can she continue to go through the motions of helping out at communion and other services, of officiating over semi-religious works with the Girl Guides and so on? She is back in the scullery making fancy dress costumes, this time for the big pageant she is organising, on her knees cutting and pasting just as she did when she ‘fell asleep’ in part one. She prays for help, for guidance in her Unbelief – and is suddenly brought back to the present by the smell of the glue heating on a pot on the stove. The glue brings her back to the world of projects and tasks. She really must get on with the costumes. Then there are the village bills to be paid. Dinner tonight to organise. And so on.
She has discovered one of the great truths – that happiness or contentment, ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ aren’t things in themselves – they are the by-products of absorption in a task.
She did not know this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful, and acceptable. She could not formulate these thoughts as yet, she could only live them. Much later, perhaps, she would formulate them and draw comfort from them. (p.295)
And this makes sense of the epigraph to the book, a quote from Hymns Ancient and Modern:
The trivial round, the common task
from the hymn New every morning is the love written by John Keble in 1827. Read as autobiography, the opening and especially the close of the book suggest Orwell’s strong, unbreakable roots within the Anglican tradition.
Conclusion
Rape or memory loss?
There’s a lot to consider and mull over in this book: the biting portraits of poverty among the down-and-outs and the back-breaking work of the hop-pickers; the long section exposing the scandal of fourth-rate private schools; the decision to use ‘experimental’ techniques; the final meditation on the meaning of life. But the central question is, How effective or believable is the character of the clergyman’s daughter – Dorothy – herself?
Certainly Orwell’s aim is to be sympathetic to women. The book is a sort of rake’s progress through 1930s England except the central character is deliberately a woman in order to show the hundred small humiliations as well as a couple of huge central injustices, to which women of his day were liable to be victim.
Nonetheless, there are scores of problems. The whole novel is predicated on the notion that Dorothy is hopelessly shamed by being seduced and dumped – exactly as in the cheesiest Victorian melodrama. But in this bowdlerised/confused narrative, she isn’t raped or seduced, she went home to work on the school play costumes and then… then what? We never really find out why she ends up a week later in London in strange clothes with no memory. In chapter 5 Dorothy herself appears to give the reason to Warburton:
‘And do you think that’s really the end of it? Do you think they honestly believe that it was all an accident — that I only lost my memory and didn’t elope with anybody?’
As to why she lost her memory, there’s Warburton’s explanation that it was something to do with mental conflict, with her realising she was not a Christian — but there had been absolutely no indication of that in the previous text. And anyway, none of this explains how she came to be standing in a London street in someone else’s clothes eight days later.
Lacking this central motor for the plot, all the ancillary circumstances seem forced and gratuitous. Why can’t she go back to her father? Why doesn’t she contact the police and ask them to intervene? Or any other family members? Why doesn’t she go to the nearest church and explain the situation?
It’s hard to work out, but she fails to take any of these steps due to her sense of shame. Isn’t this all a very Victorian motivation for an entire novel? Isn’t it a bit out of place in a woman of the 1930s? It’s difficult to judge.
It is traditional to expect some kind of psychological ‘development’ in a literary novel. It’s not really clear that Dorothy changes at all. For example, if she had been raped or even seduced, lost her virginity and dumped, you’d have expected this to have left quite a psychological mark, but it doesn’t. Maybe Orwell dropped the rape idea not only because it might have led to prosecution, but because he knew he wasn’t up to imagining or describing the psychological consequences.
2. Loss of faith
Similarly, Dorothy is described as ‘having lost her faith’ during her trials and tribulations. A reasonable enough development and Orwell describes it in persuasive terms which probably apply to lots of people throughout the long decline of the Church of England:
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 in 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 spent in church. On the contrary, she looked forward to her Sunday mornings as blessed interludes of peace; and that not only because Sunday morning meant a respite from Mrs Creevy’s prying eye and nagging voice. In another and deeper sense the atmosphere of the church was soothing and reassuring to her. For she perceived that in all that happens in church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something — it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness — that is not easily found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom. She knew very well that she would never again be able to utter a prayer and mean it; but she knew also that for the rest of her life she must continue with the observances to which she had been bred. Just this much remained to her of the faith that had once, like the bones in a living frame, held all her life together.
Good, eh? Insightful into the feel of losing religious faith – but he doesn’t really show its impact on her personality. There’s no real change in perception or thought between the woman who pricked herself with pins for having the slightest unreligious thought and the woman who doesn’t think about God for weeks on end and has completely stopped praying. She’s just a bit sadder, that’s all (as described on page 273).
Something had happened in her heart, and the world was a little emptier, a little poorer from that minute. On such a day as this, last spring or any earlier spring, how joyfully, and how unthinkingly, she would have thanked God for the first blue skies and the first flowers of the reviving year! And now, seemingly, there was no God to thank, and nothing — not a flower or a stone or a blade of grass — nothing in the universe would ever be the same again.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe this is what ‘loss of faith’ amounts to. Warburton and Dorothy discuss what ‘loss of faith’ means to her on the train to Suffolk but it’s an oddly inconsequential conversation with no real outcome. There’s plenty more at the end of the book, but the whole theme seems very dated, very Victorian.
The meaningless of life in a world without God was exercising many continental writers, of whom Albert Camus (whose first work Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism was published the same year as Orwell’s book) and Jean-Paul Sartre (whose first novel Nausea, was published in 1938) spring to mind as the most obvious.
But they were starting from emptiness and then trying to build meaning. Orwell starts from deep within the comforting bosom of the Church of England and, although his heroine goes far beyond its bounds in her physical adventures, the novel shows that she never really leaves its imaginative realm in her mind.
This may or may not present a persuasive imaginative journey, depending on your temperament. I was certainly glad that she didn’t marry Warburton, but chose a life of integrity to herself and of service to religious customs, even if her faith had died. More interesting.
3. Sexual coldness
Another ‘issue’ is the way Dorothy is described early on as being averse to men. After Warburton has met her in the street and managed to kiss her cheek, Dorothy finds a quiet corner and wipes it off so fiercely she draws blood. She hates being mauled and pawed. She is repulsed by the touch of men, ‘like some large furry beast that rubs itself against you’ (p.81), and nauseated at the thought of sex (the word sex appears nowhere in the book, Dorothy refers to it as ‘all that’).
Orwell goes out of his way to explain that her revulsion was due to witnessing, at age eight, certain scenes between her mother and father. Later, still a child, she was horrified by prints of nymphs and hairy goatish satyrs. For months afterwards she was terrified of going through the woods in case a satyr leaped out on her. Now, on the one hand this seems to me a sympathetic imagining into the mind of a child and then into the mind of the woman the scared child has become. Where Orwell crosses a line which we nowadays would consider reprehensible is where he judges her ‘sexual coldness’ to be ‘abnormal’.
It was her especial secret, the especial, incurable disability that she carried through life. (p.80)
This may or may not have been the way women of the 1930s thought about their aversion to sex, as some kind of ‘abnormality’. It is plausible in the context of the book and the general setting. It echoes how my mother, born in 1932, talked about the attitude to sex of her mother, aunts and other relations.
Then Orwell takes the matter further and makes one of the many generalisations-cum-jibes which litter the book. He concludes of Dorothy’s sexual coldness that the psychological impact of her childhood experiences is too deep to be changed:
It was a thing not to be altered, not to be argued away. It is, moreover, a thing too common nowadays, among educated women, to occasion any sort of surprise. (p.83)
Is Orwell saying that many of the educated women of his day are ‘frigid’? Controversial. (And see my point about Orwell’s sweeping generalisations, below.)
At the end of the book, when Warburton proposes marriage, Dorothy recoils.
She took it for granted that he ‘knew why she couldn’t’, though she had never explained to him, or to anyone else, why it was impossible for her to marry. Very probably, even if she had explained, he would not have understood her.
I don’t understand her. Is this is a continuation of her sexual coldness or – as hovers over the whole subject – is Orwell hinting that she’s a lesbian? Or is that too crude and too modern an interpretation? Discuss…
Recap
To recap: I think the lack of Dorothy’s psychological development – or the way it is described but not really dramatised – is tied up with the massive hole at the centre of the plot i.e. the motivation for her flight and descent into the netherworld. Both undermine the book’s claim to literature or even coherence. However, neither problem prevented me in the slightest from really enjoying reading it.
The hop-picking section is a brilliant piece of reportage which will record for all time in fascinating detail the exact nature of this type of work. My next-door-neighbour in London is an old man, just turned 80, who several times has talked about going hop-picking in Kent as a boy. He loved it. Obviously, if you were a penniless adult and it was your only source of income it was different, and this long section deserves to go into any collection of sociological reporting from the era.
Same for the script-format account of One Night In Trafalgar Square, which really conveys the cold, lack of sleep and insistent presence of other smelly, half-mad humans, the sense of abasement and humiliation, horribly well.
Sitting down, with one’s hands under one’s armpits, it is possible to get into a kind of sleep, or doze, for two or three minutes on end. In this state, enormous ages seem to pass. One sinks into a complex, troubling dreams which leave one conscious of one’s surroundings and of the bitter cold. The night is growing clearer and colder every minute. There is a chorus of varying sound–groans, curses, bursts of laughter, and singing, and through them all the uncontrollable chattering of teeth. (Chapter 3)
And also, although looking at the big picture, the character of Dorothy doesn’t quite add up, there are literally hundreds of details which Orwell describes very persuasively about Dorothy’s thoughts and hopes and feelings and experiences, which do make for very compelling reading. Her daily round in the Suffolk village is extremely believable and so is her sense of daily misery and failure in the school.
So, despite its ‘failure’ as a coherent work of literature (if you like to judge novels in those terms) it is still a brilliant and compelling read. As usual with Orwell, the vividness and immediacy of his prose makes you want to reread entire sections for the pure pleasure of their accuracy and incisiveness.
Some stylistic features
Of course and etc
Orwell often gives the impression of being too impatient to be a novelist. By the 1930s he had very settled opinions and these involved very much seeing people as types, who all conform to type and speak according to type. An Anglican vicar will of course say X, a non-conformist will say Y, a Socialist will reply with Z. Mrs Creevey is the type of head mistress, the philistine parent who criticises Dorothy is the type of half-educated blustering bully, Ellen is the type of the feeble live-in servant. Orwell’s text is full of descriptions of ‘one of those sort of people or schools or days…’
Like every Anglo-Catholic, Victor had an abysmal contempt for bishops. (p.66)
He was one of those people who say ‘Don’t you know?’ and ‘What! What!’ and lose themselves in the middle of their sentences.
She was one of those people who experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do somebody else a bad turn. (p.218)
It was one of those schools that are aimed at the type of parent who blathers about ‘up-to-date business training’, and its watch-word was Efficiency; meaning a tremendous parade of hustling, and the banishment of all humane studies.
It was one of those bright cold days which are spring or winter according as you are indoors or out. (p.271)
This reduction of people (and situations) to types who always say the same kind of thing explains Orwell’s frequent usage of the phrase ‘of course’ and ‘etc etc’.
‘Of course’ indicates that, yes, of course and predictably enough, this is the same old situation and the same old thing happens and the same old person does the same old kind of thing.
And Orwell’s use of ‘etc etc’ at the end of people’s dialogue indicates that he is bored, and he expects the reader to be bored, by listening to the same old predictable rigmarole.
It is an odd attitude for a novelist to take towards his own creations.
Etc
The constant singing round the bins was pierced by shrill cries from the costerwoman of, ‘Go on, Rose, you lazy little cat! Pick them ‘ops up! I’ll warm your a– for you!’ etc., etc.
Some mornings he had orders to ‘take them heavy’, and would shovel them in so that he got a couple
of bushels at each scoop, whereat there were angry yells of, ‘Look how the b–‘s ramming them down! Why don’t you bloody well stamp on them?’ etc.
THE POLICEMAN [shaking the sleepers on the next bench]: Now then, wake up, wake up! Rouse up, you! Got to go home if you want to sleep. This isn’t a common lodging house. Get up, there! [etc., etc.]
YOUTHS VOICES FROM THE REAR: Why can’t he —- open before five? We’re starving for our —- tea! Ram the —- door in! [etc., etc.]
MR WILKINS: Get out! Get out, the lot of you! Or by God not one of you comes in this morning!
GIRLS’ VOICES FROM THE REAR: Mis-ter Wil-kins! Mis-ter Wil-kins! BE a sport and let us in! I’ll give y’a kiss all free for nothing. BE a sport now! [etc., etc.]
There was an essay entitled ‘Spring’ which recurred in all the older girls’ books, and which began, ‘Now, when girlish April is tripping through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs
and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds’, etc., etc.
Various of the coffee-ladies, of course, had stopped Dorothy in the street with ‘My dear, how VERY
nice to see you back again! You HAVE been away a long time! And you know, dear, we all thought it such a SHAME when that horrible woman was going round telling those stories about you. But I do hope you’ll understand, dear, that whatever anyone else may have thought, I never believed a word of them’, etc., etc., etc.
Of course
The tell-tale phrase ‘of course’ is liberally scattered throughout the text, indicating the author’s rather tired sense of the inevitability of his own story and the predictability of his own characters.
After that, of course, his heart was hardened against Dorothy for ever.
Of course, the Rector denied it violently, but in his heart he had a sneaking suspicion that it might be true.
But several more days passed before this letter was posted, because the Rector had qualms about addressing a letter to ‘Ellen Millborough’ – he dimly imagined that it was against the law to use false names – and, of course, he had delayed far too long. Dorothy was already in the streets when the letter reached ‘Mary’s’.
It was very little use, of course, telling him that she had NOT eloped. She had given him her version of the story, and he had accepted it.
Mrs Creevy watched Dorothy’s innovations with a jealous eye, but she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to work.
But the instance which made me stop and really notice this mannerism comes in the middle of the private school section. After describing at length the steps Dorothy takes to genuinely educate her charges, the text reads:
But of course, it could not last.
Why ‘of course’? Why write ‘of course’? Only if you assume you are sharing with your readers a fatalistic sense that things always turn out for the worse. ‘Of course’ used like this assumes a kind of matey familiarity with stories of this type. I can’t quite put it into words but it is more the approach of a journalist in a newspaper who assumes that everyone shares his or her prejudices. ‘Of course the sexists did this or the racists did that or the wicked imperialists did the other’, if you’re reading the Guardian. Or ‘Of course health and safety did this, or red tape stifled the other, or EU bureaucrats imposed the other’, if you’re reading The Daily Mail. It evinces a long-suffering exasperation at the sheer bloody predictability of most people.
Orwell describes the scene where Dorothy reluctantly explains to the girls who’ve asked her, what a ‘womb’ is, and then editorialises:
And after that, of course, the fun began.
You feel the author coercing your responses. He assumes the odds are stacked against his heroine and expects you simply to fall in with his prejudices about people and life in general. Sometimes the reader bridles at being pushed.
Generalisations
Orwell’s prose is dotted with sweeping generalisations, which I thoroughly enjoy for their air of man-of-the-world confidence, even if I don’t in the slightest agree with them or sometimes even understand them.
It is a curious fact that the lure of a ‘good investment’ seems to haunt clergymen more persistently than any other class of man. Perhaps it is the modern equivalent of the demons in female shape who used to haunt the anchorites of the Dark Ages. (Chapter 1.2)
It is a fact – you only have to look about you to verify it – that the pious and the immoral drift naturally together. The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or impious unbelievers…
It is fatal to flatter the wicked by letting them see that they have shocked you. (Chapter 1.3)
Like all abnormal people, she was not fully aware that she was abnormal. (p.82)
No job is more fascinating than teaching if you have a free hand at it.
It was the fourth of April, a bright blowy day, too cold to stand about in, with a sky as blue as a hedgesparrow’s egg, and one of those spiteful spring winds that come tearing along the pavement in sudden gusts and blow dry, stinging dust into your face.
Nothing in the world is quite so irritating as dealing with mutinous children.
The generalisations are linked to the ‘of courses’ and ‘etcs’. They all indicate how much the novelist understands and comprehends human nature: he is familiar with all human types and the boring predictability with which they come out with the same old kind of speeches and arguments, and from this lofty vantage point he is able to dispense weighty-sounding generalisations about human nature and the world at large.
There are two kinds of avaricious person – the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the enterprise actually to make money, but who will always, as the saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. (Chapter 4)
Like most ‘educated’ people , she knew virtually no history. (p.207)
In these country places there’s always a certain amount of suspicion knocking about. Not suspicion of anything in particular, you know; just generalized suspicion. A sort of instinctive rustic dirty-mindedness.
Do you know that type of bright — too bright — spinster who says “topping” and “ripping” and “right-ho”, and prides herself on being such a good sport, and she’s such a good sport that she makes everyone feel a little unwell? And she’s so splendidly hearty at tennis and so handy at amateur theatricals, and she throws herself with a kind of desperation into her Girl Guide work and her parish visiting, and she’s the life and soul of Church socials, and always, year after year, she thinks of herself as a young girl still and never realizes that behind her back everyone laughs at her for a poor, disappointed old maid? (p.281)
The fact is that people who live in small country towns have only a very dim conception of anything that happens more than ten miles from their own front door. (p.288)
Although Orwell overtly and explicitly in his writings describes himself as a Socialist and takes every opportunity to ridicule the rich, the exploiters etc, although in other words the content of all his writing is left-wing – its manner and tone are the result of intensive training at Britain’s premier school for its managerial elite, Eton, and then of five years as an officer in the British Empire’s Military Police.
The sweeping generalisations, the bored descriptions of every social type and their oh-so-predictable speeches, all indicate the supreme confidence of the classic public school product. And it is this essentially patrician manner which, ironically, partly accounts for his popularity among his many left-wing fans.
Comedy
Orwell can be very funny, specially when in broad, humorous Dickensian mode. Take the description of Sir Thomas as an ‘exceptionally brainless prawn’. The long section about Dorothy’s humiliations in the school is essentially downbeat and grim but contains comic touches which prevent it being really despairing.
The district pullulated with small private schools; there were four of them in Brough Road alone. Mrs Creevy, the Principal of Ringwood House, and Mr Boulger, the Principal of Rushington Grange, were in a state of warfare, though their interests in no way clashed with one another. Nobody knew what the feud was about, not even Mrs Creevy or Mr Boulger themselves; it was a feud that they had inherited from earlier proprietors of the two schools. In the mornings after breakfast they would stalk up and down their respective back gardens, beside the very low wall that separated them, pretending not to see one another and grinning with hatred. (Chapter 4)
Comedy is itself often rooted in the predictability of social ‘types’. This bitter feud is funny because it is in fact a familiar trope – the embittered neighbours feuding over long-forgotten trivialities. Similarly, Sir Thomas waffling on for so long that he constantly forgets what he set out to say. Or the sly, almost silent man-servant, Blyth. Or Dorothy’s own father’s immense selfishness, more concerned about his late breakfasts than his missing daughter. These are all stock types with expected attributes, which could almost come from a Restoration comedy, certainly from an 18th century comic novel. What lifts them above the level of stereotype is Orwell’s genuinely imaginative turns of phrase.
Mrs Creevy got up from the table and banged the breakfast things together on the tray. She was one of those women who can never move anything without banging it about; she was as full of thumps and raps as a poltergeist. (page 204)
Even in small details Orwell reveals his debt to Dickens’s genius for anthropomorphising objects and giving them a character which slyly contributes to the scene or story. At Mrs Creevy’s penny-pinching school:
In honour of the parents’ visit, a fire composed of three large coals was sulking in the grate.
Pinching
An oddity in Orwell’s novels is the ubiquity of pinching. Apparently men signalled their sexual overtures to a woman by pinching her, particularly her arms and elbow. Thus Elizabeth, in Burmese Days, has to fight off the unwanted attentions of her employer.
The bank manager whose children Elizabeth taught was a man of fifty, with a fat, worn face and a bald, dark yellow crown resembling an ostrich’s egg. The second day after her arrival he came into the room where the children were at their lessons, sat down beside Elizabeth and immediately pinched her elbow. The third day he pinched her on the calf, the fourth day behind the knee, the fifth day above the knee. Thereafter, every evening, it was a silent battle between the two of them, her hand under the table, struggling and struggling to keep that ferret-like hand away from her. (Chapter 7)
She had come out of her bath and was half-way through dressing for dinner when her uncle had suddenly appeared in her room – pretext, to hear some more about the day’s shooting – and begun pinching her leg in a way that simply could not be misunderstood. Elizabeth was horrified. This was her first introduction to the fact that some men are capable of making love to their nieces. (Chapter 15)
Mr Lackersteen was now pestering Elizabeth unceasingly. He had become quite reckless. Almost under the eyes of the servants he would waylay her, catch hold of her and begin pinching and fondling her in the most revolting way. (Chapter 23)
Her aunt would be furious when she heard that she had refused Flory. And there was her uncle and his leg-pinching – between the two of them, life here would become impossible. (Chapter 24)
Pinching bums I heard of in the 1960s and 70s, and still gets reported today by scandalised feminists: but pinching a woman’s legs or arms or elbow? Anyway, the practice crops up here again, when the cad Warburton, supposed artist and bohemian, bumps into Dorothy in the village High Street.
He pinched Dorothy’s bare elbow – she had changed, after breakfast, into a sleeveless gingham frock. Dorothy stepped hurriedly backwards to get out of his reach – she hated being pinched or otherwise ‘mauled about’. (Chapter 1.3)
Dorothy was all too used to it – all too used to the fattish middle-aged men, with their fishily hopeful eyes, who slowed down their cars when you passed them on the road, or who manoeuvred an introduction and then began pinching your elbow about ten minutes later. (Chapter 3.6)
Pinching your elbow?
Social history
So this is the kind of shabby genteel squalor in which a 1930s vicar lived – big cold empty church, a dwindling congregation, a sprawling vicarage he can’t afford to heat or run, gloomy rooms lined with mouldering wallpaper and rickety furniture. So this is what a flophouse in the Cut looked and smelt like – peeling wallpaper, damp sheets, unspeakable toilets. So this is what rural poverty looked like, 70-year-old men and women still having to labour for money, living in small filthy cottages whose windows and doors don’t close, drawing water by hand from a deep well.
Lots of the detail reminds us how very long ago 1935 was. The rectory has no hot water, no electricity, no radio or TV, no shower, no fridge or freezer, washing machine, tumble dryer or dishwasher. All household chores are hard, bloody work which have to be done by hand. Early in the morning and after dark the house is lit only by candlelight. What a life! In many, many ways Orwell’s world is closer to Dickens’s than to ours, and this helps explain the lingering influence of Dickens in his writing, not least in the juxtaposition of brutal social realism with broad humour.
Beauty
And yet, in the midst of all the squalor and poverty, the down-trodden humiliation of shabby-genteel life or plain beggary, Orwell is also capable of noticing and describing beauty.
Dorothy caught sight of a wild rose, flowerless of course, growing beyond the hedge, and climbed over the gate with the intention of discovering whether it were not sweetbriar. She knelt down among the tall weeds beneath the hedge. It was very hot down there, close to the ground. The humming of many unseen insects sounded in her ears, and the hot summery fume from the tangled swathes of vegetation flowed up and enveloped her. Near by, tall stalks of fennel were growing, with trailing fronds of foliage like the tails of sea-green horses. Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. Its richness overwhelmed her, almost dizzied her for a moment. She drank it in, filling her lungs with it. Lovely, lovely scent — scent of summer days, scent of childhood joys, scent of spice-drenched islands in the warm foam of Oriental seas!
Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognized, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship. Then, less than a minute later, she discovered that she was kissing the frond of the fennel that was still against her face. (Chapter 1)
This celebration of the natural world is not what most people associate with Orwell, but it is there, along with lots of other unexpected qualities in this strange, uneven, unfinished, wildly uneven but compellingly readable book.
To answer the question I asked myself at the start, Yes, I think it is definitely worth reading, for all sorts of reasons.
Credit
A Clergyman’s Daughter was published by Victor Gollancz in 1935. All quotes are from the Penguin Classics paperback edition of 2000.
Books & Boots 