A Clergyman's Daughter - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

The book is largely experimental. The novel contains an interlude, the night scene in Trafalgar Square, written under the influence of James Joyce, specifically the "Nighttown" scenes in Ulysses. In a letter to Brenda Salkeld Orwell himself disowned the novel as "tripe ... except for chap 3, part 1, which I am pleased with". He prevented it from being reprinted during his lifetime. In a letter to Henry Miller a week after the book's publication in the United States (August 1936) Orwell described the book as "bollocks", though he added that he felt that he had made some useful experiments with it. In a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 Orwell noted that there were two or three books he had written that he was ashamed of and called A Clergyman's Daughter even worse than Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as "it was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money". The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared that it had affinities with the work of George Gissing, a writer whom Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens and Gissing: "Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated. The stages of Dorothy's plight - the coming to herself in the London street, the sense of being cut off from friends and the familiar, the destitution and the cold - enact the nightmare in which one may be dropped out of respectable life, no matter how debt-laden and forlorn, into the unthinkable pit of the beggar's hunger and the hopelessly declassed."