"Bringing off a Successful Swindle": The Educational Climate and Its Capitalist Discontents in Orwell’s “A Clergyman’s Daughter”
"Bringing off a Successful Swindle": The Educational Climate and Its Capitalist Discontents in Orwell’s “A Clergyman’s Daughter”
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Abstract
Compared to George Orwell’s best-known works, 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945), his earlier fiction has attracted significantly less critical attention. Yet, these novels deserve attention for the way Orwell draws on his own life, lending them some autobiographical quality, and for their exploration of many of the same socio-political concerns that preoccupied him as a journalist and essayist. One such concern is his representation of the lower tier of the private school system—an interest shaped by his experience as a private school teacher. This essay examines how Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), reflects the capitalist ethos that was present in the educational climate of fourth-rate schools. By tracing the milestones of the protagonist Dorothy’s teaching career, I argue that her failure to reform the curriculum and her powerless resistance to Mrs Creevy, the proprietress of Ringwood House Academy, expose deeper structural flaws within the educational institutions of suburban London in the 1930s.
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