A Clergyman's Daughter - Major Themes

Major Themes

Dorothy is economically pressed to work extremely hard. Her low earnings, in all cases, restrict her escape and function to perpetuate her dependent state. Orwell draws a picture of systematic forces that preserve the bound servitude in each setting. He uses Dorothy's fictitious endeavours to criticise certain institutions. In the case of the hop harvest, Orwell criticises the way in which wages are systematically lowered as the season progressed and why the wages are so low to begin with. He describes the life of a manual labourer, down to the constant state of exhaustion that somehow eliminates any potential to question circumstances. Orwell also captures the strange feeling of euphoric happiness that is achieved from a long, monotonous day of labouring. He describes the attitude of the seasonal worker who vows not to return the following year, but somehow forgets about the hardship and remembers only the positive side during the off season, and inevitably returns.

In the case of the private-school system in the England of Orwell's era, he delivers a two-page critique of how capitalistic interests have rendered the school system useless and absurd. His attack on the commercial imperative is conveyed in Mrs Creevy's primary focus: "It's the fees I'm after," she says, "not developing the children's minds. This is manifested in her overt favouritism towards the "good payers'" children, and in her complete disrespect for the "bad payers'" children: she manages better cuts of meat for the children of "good payers", saving the fattier pieces for the "medium payers" and condemning the "bad payers" children to eat brown bag lunches in the schoolroom, apart from the rest of the students.