Mr Charrington
The proprietor of the junk shop where Winston bought his diary: a widower of sixty-three in an aged black velvet jacket, who sells him a glass paperweight, rents him the room upstairs, and remembers fragments of nursery rhymes nobody else can.
To have his rubbish admired. He fingers each worthless object with faded enthusiasm and never asks Winston to buy anything, and Orwell says he has the air of a collector rather than a tradesman.
The book
At a glance
- Junk-shop proprietor, and Winston's landlord for the rented room
- Sixty-three, by his own account; Winston reads him as about sixty
- Frail and bowed, a long nose, thick spectacles, almost white hair with bushy black eyebrows
- A prole, so no overalls: an aged jacket of black velvet
- Thirty years in the same premises, still trading under the name Weeks
- A widower; he and his wife lived in the upstairs room until she died
- The blank book that becomes the diary, and the coral paperweight
- Part One, Chapter 8
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe shop stands in a poor quarter north-east of what was once St Pancras Station, under three discoloured metal balls that were once gilded. The name over the window says Weeks; the man inside has been meaning to change it for thirty years and has never got round to it. He is about sixty, frail and bowed, with a long benevolent nose, mild eyes distorted by thick spectacles, almost white hair and still-black eyebrows, and an aged jacket of black velvet that gives him the air of a literary man or a musician. His accent is less debased than most proles'. He is a widower of sixty-three and has lived above the shop the whole thirty years.
He sold Winston the blank book that became the diary — he calls it the young lady's keepsake album, and admires the cream-laid paper — and on Winston's second visit he sells him the glass paperweight with the coral in it for four dollars, and would have taken two. Then he takes him upstairs with a lamp and shows him a room that is still furnished as though somebody meant to live in it: a strip of carpet, a slatternly armchair by the fireplace, a twelve-hour clock ticking on the mantelpiece, an enormous mahogany bed, and no telescreen. He is apologetic about the bugs.
What he mostly offers is not stock but company. He shows Winston a china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a locket with a strand of a long-dead baby's hair, never asking that he buy them, only that he admire them. He points out a steel engraving of St Clement Danes, a bombed church outside the Law Courts, and produces the line about oranges and lemons that goes with it, then more fragments over the following weeks: four and twenty blackbirds, the cow with the crumpled horn, the death of poor Cock Robin. He can never get more than a few lines of any of them. He keeps an ancient gramophone with an enormous horn in a back kitchen and seems never to go out.
When Winston asks about renting the room for a love affair, Charrington neither takes offence nor becomes knowing. He looks into the middle distance, observes that privacy is a valuable thing and that anyone who knows about such a place should keep the knowledge to himself, and mentions, almost fading out of existence as he does so, that there are two entrances to the house and one of them gives onto an alley at the back.
How the book draws them
- How he movesGently and fussily, with a bowed back; he takes the stairs slowly and peers at Winston over the top of the thick spectacles. His eyebrows are bushy as well as black, under hair that has gone almost white, and his voice is soft and sounds faded. He is a prole, so he wears no overalls.
- The shopDusty picture frames stacked round every wall, trays of nuts and bolts and broken penknives and watches that do not pretend to go, and one small table of snuffboxes and agate brooches that might contain something interesting. He says the antique trade is finished: no demand, and no stock either, since the metal has mostly been melted down.
- The paperweightA heavy hemisphere of glass with a pink convoluted piece of coral at the heart of it, embedded more than a hundred years ago. He names four dollars, and grows noticeably more cheerful when Winston pays without haggling.
- "Oranges and lemons"He gives Winston the first two lines and says he cannot get further, though he knows how it ended: here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head. He explains that it was a kind of dance, and that the arms came down and caught you on the last line.
- The roomHe lights a second lamp and leads the way up worn stairs, holding it high so the whole room shows. He is selling the furniture off by little and little, he says. He and his wife lived there until she died.
- DelicacyTold what the room is for, he speaks entirely in generalities about the value of privacy, seeming to become partly invisible while he does it, and volunteers the existence of a back entrance onto an alley.
- An extinct animalWinston's own phrase for him. Talking to him is like listening to a worn-out musical box; he keeps a ghostlike existence between the dark shop and a tiny back kitchen, has almost no customers, and appears to be the last man alive who remembers what the London churches were called.