Mrs Wisbeach
Gordon's landlady at 31 Willowbed Road: twenty-seven and six a week for a top floor back, meals in a dining-room full of aspidistras, no women in the house, and no tea made in bedrooms.
To know exactly what her lodgers are up to. She inspects everyone who comes through the door, tiptoes upstairs at all hours in the hope of catching them at something, and handles their letters before she gives them up.
The book
At a glance
- Gordon's landlady at 31 Willowbed Road, NW
- About forty-five
- Twenty-seven and six a week, meals included
- No women in the house, and no tea made in bedrooms
- Flaxman on the first floor, Lorenheim on the second, and a night-shift engineer
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMrs Wisbeach specialises in single gentlemen. Bed-sitting rooms with gaslight laid on and find your own heating, baths extra, and meals in a tomb-dark dining-room with a phalanx of clotted sauce-bottles in the middle of the table. Gordon Comstock, who comes home for his midday dinner, pays twenty-seven and six a week out of two pounds. George Orwell describes her as one of those malignant respectable women who keep lodging-houses: about forty-five, stout but active, with a pink, fine-featured, horribly observant face, beautifully grey hair, and a permanent grievance.
She is the enforcer of the respectability the book is named for. It is impossible to get in or out of the house before eleven at night without her door opening a foot at the end of the passage and her face emerging to inspect you. She tiptoes up and down the stairs at odd hours hoping to catch the lodgers at something. Gordon's life in the house is furtive in every particular, and the two capital offences are bringing a woman in and making tea in your bedroom.
How the book draws them
- The face round the doorYou mostly see her in pieces. The door at the end of the passage opens a foot, her face comes out, inspects whoever has just come in, and goes back. Elsewhere it is a brief nosy glance round the corner of the door, or her voice ringing shrewishly up the stairs. The full-length description comes once, in Chapter 2: about forty-five, stout but active, pink, fine-featured and horribly observant, with beautifully grey hair.
- The postShe darts out of her lair at the postman's knock and gathers the letters jealously to her breast, holding each up to the light, feeling its thickness and reading the postmark before yielding it. Orwell calls it a sort of droit du seigneur over letters. In two years Gordon never once gets to one first.
- The climbShe also resents carrying them upstairs. You hear the footsteps ascend very slowly, then loud aggrieved breathing on the landing to let you know what you have put her through, and finally a little impatient grunt as the letter goes under the door.
- The teaShe refuses to give her lodgers tea with supper because she cannot be bothered hotting up extra water, and at the same time forbids them to make it themselves. Gordon brews his in secret and disposes of the leaves down the W.C. two floors below.
- The dining-roomAspidistras on the sideboard, on the floor, on occasional tables, a whole florist's stand of them blocking the window, and one in the grate instead of a fire. Orwell compares sitting there to being in a sunless aquarium among the dreary foliage of water-plants.
- The tableGordon had to fight her for a plain kitchen table to write on, in place of the bamboo occasional table she thought proper for a top floor back, a mere stand for the aspidistra. She has been nagging ever since, because he will not let it be tidied.
- Young womenRosemary is announced sourly as "a young woman to see him" and is never allowed indoors, not even into the hall. Orwell says you would have thought young women were plague-rats from the way she spoke of them.