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.
The book
At a glance
- Manageress of the lodging house where Dorothy Hare stays in Lambeth
- Mary, to everyone in the house
- Ten shillings a week, for a room Orwell values at five
- Chapter 2
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMrs Sawyer manages a lodging house in Wellings Court, off Lambeth Cut in south London. Nobody uses her name. The boys all call her Mary, and the house is known by the same word, so that Dorothy Hare -- the clergyman's daughter of the title, by this point destitute in London under a false name -- is sent to "Mary's" by a cafe proprietress who tells her that Mary is not particular and will let a room to anybody who can pay.
That is exactly what happens. Every respectable landlady in the district has already turned Dorothy away, chiefly because she has no luggage. Mrs Sawyer asks her nothing, scarcely looks at her, takes ten shillings and tells her the room number. It is the only door in London that opens to her, and it is the reason the week that follows is possible at all.
Dorothy works out later what the place is: not a brothel, but a well-known refuge of prostitutes, which is why a kennel not worth five shillings a week costs ten. Living there marks her in the eyes of the whole street. At the end of the week, with no letter from her father and nothing left to pay with, she walks out without the nerve to say she is going -- and without doing what any other woman in the house would have done, which is pitch a hard-up tale and cadge another night free.
How the book draws them
- How the book describes herA drabby old creature with remarkably thin hair, and a face so emaciated that it looks like a rouged and powdered skull.
- The voiceCracked, shrewish, and nevertheless ineffably dreary. George Orwell's other word for it is ugly.
- Where she is foundIn a subterranean den beneath one of four tall narrow houses in a small court, reached by an alley so narrow that its grimy plaster walls almost brush you as you pass.
- How she takes a lodgerNo questions, barely a glance, ten shillings, and then: "Twenty-nine. Third floor. Go up be the back stairs."
- The nameMrs Sawyer is her proper name and the book uses it once. Everyone else, including the narration afterwards, says Mary, in quotation marks, and means the house as much as the woman.
- What she runsNot the owner, only the manageress. The house is a known refuge of prostitutes, which is what the ten shillings a week is really charged for; the tenants steal each other's blankets in the night, and there is a name for it in the house.
- What she had beenOrwell states it in one clause and moves on: she had been a prostitute herself in her day, and looked it.