Page "A Clergyman's Daughter" Paragraph 22

The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh however, reviewing the novel for the New York Herald Tribune Books in 1936, declared it as having affinities with George Gissing, a writer Orwell greatly admired, and placed the novel in a particular tradition, that of Dickens and Gissing: " Mr Orwell too writes of a world crawling with poverty, a horrible dun flat terrain in which the abuses marked out by those earlier writers have been for the most part only deepened and consolidated.

The stages of Dorothy's plight-the coming to herself in the London street, the sense of being cut off from friends and the familiar, the destitution and the cold-enact the nightmare in which one may be dropped out of respectable life, no matter how debt-laden and forlorn, into the unthinkable pit of the beggar's hunger and the hopelessly declassed.