George Orwell wrote “A Clergyman’s Daughter” in 1935. In it he paints a verbal picture of England in the early 20th century, commenting on class, gender, education, and religion. As Orwell had been a teacher himself, the picture he paints of the education system of the time is interesting. The book looks at the life of Dorothy Pare, a clergyman’s daughter, over an eight-month period.
As the book opens, Dorothy is portrayed as a strongly religious person, one who keeps a pin with her to prick herself when she feels she has committed a misdeed or even had a bad thought. Her life is totally under the control of her father, who is a stern and hard man. He more or less sees Dorothy as something of a servant.
One day, Dorothy is seen kissing one of her village’s more disrespectable persons, and a scandal begins to emerge. Not knowing what to do, Dorothy runs away or, as the book says, “goes missing”. During her time “missing” which Orwell treats as separate chapters for each experience, Dorothy comes to face herself and her beliefs in a wide variety for settings.
Dorothy spends time in London among the homeless, a life she had never seen or imagined. Orwell reflects here on his own experiences as a “down and outer” and makes particular observations on English society through her experiences.
As with Orwell himself, she eventually becomes a teacher at a “down at the heels” private school. Her observations about the students, parents, and herself are again reflective of both the education system, the class structure in England and what Orwell observed about his own experience. Dorothy, like Orwell, comes to be challenged to see the world differently. As she says “It is not what we do that matters, it is how our thinking changes because of it.”
