A Clergyman's Daughter

Also in the book

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  Mr Tallboys

  An unfrocked clergyman on the benches of Trafalgar Square, and the loudest voice in the chapter Orwell wrote as a play. He spends the night reciting the liturgy backwards and remembering his rectory.

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  Victor Stone

  The Church schoolmaster and organist at Knype Hill, twenty-seven and permanently at war. He produces the school plays Dorothy makes the costumes for, and writes a letter to the Church Times most weeks.

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  Mrs McElligot

  An old Irishwoman Dorothy meets on a village green in Kent and again in Trafalgar Square. She knows which farms are hiring, where the churches open for the winter, and how to keep warm on a bench.

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  Mr Blifil-Gordon

  Proprietor of the sugar-beet refinery that employs more than half of Knype Hill, and the Conservative candidate in the by-election running through chapter 1. He smiles at Dorothy for the first time in years on the morning of the campaign.

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  Ellen

  The Rectory's maid of all work, and the only other servant in the house. Dorothy borrows her first name when she needs one on the road, which is the largest thing Ellen does in the book without knowing it.

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  Miss Mayfill

  The Grange's ancient owner, and the only communicant besides Dorothy at the seven o'clock service. She has never been known to put more than sixpence in the collection bag, and her contribution to the jumble sale is two handleless chamber-pots.

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  Proggett

  The sexton at St Athelstan's, forty, red-faced and permanently on the verge of swearing. He has decided that the Church of Christ means the actual walls, roof and tower of the building, and reports on the state of the belfry about once a fortnight.

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  Mrs Pither

  One of the few genuinely pious people on Dorothy's visiting list, and one of the most exhausting. She has two subjects, the miseries of her rheumatism and the joys of Heaven, and she is ready for a little prayer at any hour of the night or day.

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  Sir Thomas Hare

  Dorothy's cousin, a widowed baronet of about sixty-five who has never met her and cannot remember whether she is his cousin or his niece. He has her tracked down and locked in his empty London house, chiefly because she shares his surname and the newspapers keep printing it.

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  Miss Beaver

  Geography mistress at another Southbridge school, met by chance in the public library, and the only friend Dorothy makes in eight months. Twenty years of slave-driving have brought her four pounds a week, a bed-sitting room, and the photographs of one trip to the Tyrol in 1913.

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  Mr Booth

  The visiting chemistry lecturer at Ringwood House, at two and sixpence a time. Every lecture begins with the ninety-three elements and never gets much further, and the very interesting little experiment promised for next week is never performed.

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  Mavis Williams

  A pupil of eleven who has spent a term and a half filling books with pothooks. Her mother pays the fees regularly and believes she is only backward; Mrs Creevy knows otherwise and has not mentioned it.

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  Deafie

  A weazened old tramp, a ship's steward by profession and deaf as a post, who becomes Dorothy's bin-mate after Nobby goes. He sings one line over and over and turns up again on the benches in Trafalgar Square. Orwell met a Deafie on his own 1931 hop-picking trip and kept the name.

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  Ginger

  One of the Trafalgar Square regulars: three days down from York, in charge of the tea, and the one who keeps proposing that everybody stamp their feet in time to a song. Like Deafie, he carries the name of a man in Orwell's 1931 diary.

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  Flo

  One of the two cockneys who go hop-picking with Nobby and Dorothy Hare. She had had a good home until she was seduced and turned out of doors, and she has been on the streets in London ever since. She had never heard of walking twenty miles in a day, refuses to carry anything, cries all night in the rain, and finally makes eyes at a lorry driver and leaves with the food, the bedding and both bundles.

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  Charlie (on the road)

  The dark youth who walks to Kent with Flo, Nobby and Dorothy Hare, and whose name the book only supplies in passing. He answers morosely at every halt and speaks in a surly, disagreeable way. He is the one who reads out the poster about the Rector's daughter and her disappearance with intense relish, and comments appreciatively on the details, in front of the woman it is about. He had been in good employment until fairly recently, and he absconds with Flo and both bundles.

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  Charlie (in Trafalgar Square)

  The loudest of the Trafalgar Square regulars through the night chapter, and the one who opens it, singing a hymn in a voice that carries across the Square. He has nine convictions, has had his bellyful of Dartmoor, works the streets with Snouter at Christmas singing carols, and talks in his sleep in the formula of the police court.

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  Snouter

  A Trafalgar Square regular who marks every hour Big Ben strikes by mimicking it and saying Cripes. He is a pub-tapper by trade, made fourpence in six hours that day and blames a rival with a wooden leg, threatens what he will do to the man when he catches him, and coaches the youngest of the group in how to cadge tea by looking miserable. His speech is printed largely as dashes.

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  Mrs Bendigo

  One of the women on the Square, and the angriest voice in the chapter. Her husband earns four pounds a week in Covent Garden and sleeps warm while she is out in the cold, and she swears at him in most of her sentences. She was put out in a hurry and has not even got her drawers on, complains about people sitting on her bad leg, and has no patience with the prostitutes or with Dorothy Hare. She will not go up to Covent Garden in the morning: one black eye in a week is enough for her.

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  Mrs Wayne

  The genteel one on the Square, who adopts Dorothy Hare on sight because she knew at once that she was a lady born and bred. She keeps returning to how far she has come down in the world, to her late mother, to the little tobacco and sweetstuff business on the corner, and to the tea things she lost, including real Pekoe Points at two and nine a pound. When a young man sits on her lap she says primly that she did not ask him to, and then laughs in spite of herself.

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  Nosy Watson

  The bitterest of the Square regulars, muttering mostly to himself about a job he was blamed for and never did. He was narked by his own sister into prison at eighteen, and the first thing he bought when he came out was a hammer. He has fourteen convictions, an obsessive hatred of a detective he calls Smith of the Flying Squad, and a habit of composing verse in the back of the police van.

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  Daddy

  The oldest of the Trafalgar Square group, fifty years on the road, man and boy. His head comes out of his overcoat like a tortoise's out of its shell, he sleeps with his mouth open and an Adam's apple like the blade of a tomahawk, he belches, and his advice on money is that you should never buy what you can bum.

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  Florry

  A girl who turns up on the Square with a whoop, comparatively fresh from having spent part of the night in bed, with four other girls and a group of youths in blue suits. She flatters Ginger into giving her the tea, drinks it and goes without thanking anybody, which draws the verdict that she swallows her tea and then jacks off.

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  The policeman on the Square

  A constable works along the benches until midnight, shaking people awake because sleeping on the Square is not allowed and Trafalgar Square is not a common lodging house. A new one comes on duty after that, and he is the one unexpectedly kind to Dorothy Hare, offering to take her down to the shelter run by the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which he calls the M.A.B., and telling her that anyone can see with half an eye that she is a cut above the others there.

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  Mr Wilkins

  The proprietor of the coffee shop off the Square, who lets the night people in out of the cold on his own terms and holds the glass door against forty of them while he lays the terms down: no hokey-pokey, and anyone still asleep after seven goes out on his neck.

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  Blyth

  Sir Thomas Hare's butler, and also, as George Orwell puts it, his confidant and intellectual guide: a small sharp-featured man with a voice that never rises above a whisper and is as nearly silent as a voice can be while remaining one. He takes about a week to track Dorothy Hare down in London, lifts his bowler a quarter of an inch to her, pays the fares, and brings her meals with a mixture of deference and disapproval.

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  Mr Cargill

  The butcher of Knype Hill, a tall evil-looking man in a blue-striped apron with a lean scraped face as purple as one of his own joints of meat. He never speaks in the book and is a standing dread all the same: Dorothy Hare has to pass his shop, he watches her from the doorstep with a sidelong meaning gaze, keeps her waiting behind the other customers, and sends the bill with a line underlined to say it has been owing a very long time.

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  Miss Foote

  The other woman who works for the Rector: a tall, rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five who means well and makes a mess of everything, in a perpetual state of flurry. Mr Warburton compares her to a blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit. Her orthodoxy is suspect — she has said she can worship God best under the blue dome of the sky — and in Dorothy Hare's absence she starts a war in the Mothers' Union with one tactless remark, takes in seven of Mr Tombs's cats, and reads novels aloud to the members.

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  Mrs Sawyer

  The woman the boys all call Mary, who manages the Lambeth lodging house where Dorothy Hare stays: a drabby old creature with remarkably thin hair and a face so emaciated that it looks like a rouged and powdered skull, with a cracked, shrewish and ineffably dreary voice. She asks no questions, scarcely looks at her, takes ten shillings and says: twenty-nine, third floor, go up be the back stairs. She had been a prostitute in her day and looked it.

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  Father McGuire

  The Roman Catholic priest of Knype Hill, a very large rotund man who dwarfs his bicycle and is balanced on top of it like a golf-ball on a tee, under a black and very dusty shovel hat. His face is rosy, humorous and a little sly. He rides towards Dorothy Hare with a faintly amused air and then passes without a sign, which the narration identifies as the Cut Direct. He and the Rector had once wrangled disgracefully over an open grave.

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  Mr Toagis

  A surly retired market gardener whose attachment to the Church rested entirely on the privilege of decorating a window at the Harvest Festival. He grew a monstrous pumpkin for it, was in raptures over it, could not tear himself away and kept bringing friends to admire it, and when it was removed he went over to chapel, taking his heirs with him for ever.

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  Miss Allcock

  Dorothy Hare's predecessor's predecessor at Ringwood House, described as an incompetent old hack who had been at thirty-eight different schools and was not fit to have charge of a tame canary. She was very good at double-crossing her employers: she stole three of her last employer's seven pupils and sold them to Mrs Creevy, who beat her commission down from fifteen per cent to twelve and a half, while Miss Allcock planned to rob her in turn.

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  Miss Strong

  The teacher Dorothy Hare replaces at Ringwood House, never seen and constantly quoted. She was a B.A., which Mrs Creevy mentions often, but did not come up to Mrs Creevy's ideas on what she calls the moral side. She kept the bedroom untidy, never let one particular girl go to the lavatory alone, and was eventually taken bad. Late in chapter 4 Dorothy thinks of the two roads open to a third-rate schoolmistress, one of them Miss Strong's road, via whisky to the workhouse.

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  Mr Poynder

  A commercial traveller with a grey face, mobile lips and a bald scalp with damp hair plastered across it, chosen as spokesman by the parents who come to complain about Dorothy Hare's teaching. He holds the floor throughout and talks until flecks of yellowish foam appear at the corners of his mouth, chiefly about Shakespeare, the facts of life, and new-fangled methods.