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Novel

Decline and Fall

Evelyn Waugh · 1928

Synopsis

Paul Pennyfeather, an uneventful theology student, loses his trousers one drunken evening of the Bollinger Club and crosses the college quad without them. Sent down from Oxford for indecent conduct, and deprived by his guardian of the allowance his father had left him, he becomes a master at a Welsh boarding school whose headmaster wants vision, not degrees. There he meets Grimes, who gets engaged to the headmaster's daughter for the day when he will be in a fix, and Prendergast, a former clergyman gnawed by doubts. A very rich pupil's mother takes notice of him.

Context

The novel grew out of the months its author had spent as a schoolmaster at a Welsh school, and its title is borrowed from Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire. The hero passively accepts everything that happens to him, and the narrative passes no explicit judgement on him. According to the Oxford biographical dictionary, the publisher of his previous book refused it for indecency; the firm run by his father accepted it on condition that cuts were made. It was published in September 1928, with six drawings by the author.

Who it is for

A little over two hundred pages; translated into French by Henri Evans in 1981, after a first version of 1946 published under another title.

Prizes and reception

Arnold Bennett hailed in the Evening Standard an uncompromising satire of brilliant malice.

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