This is the worst Orwell book I’ve read so far. The book starts off well enough with a good description of a clergyman’s daughter’s life of drudgery. Her father is stuck up, lazy, distant and lives beyond his means, which makes her life all the more difficult. He squanders what savings he does have speculating on the stock market with disastrous consequences. This is very sad because they could be used to help his daughter’s desperate attempts to keep him in the style he has become accustomed. All of a sudden, she finds herself homeless and on the streets in London. This is where the trouble began for me!
From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.
Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.
Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.
The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.
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