Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Summary

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is George Orwell's satirical novel about a young man's war against money. Gordon Comstock, aged twenty-nine, comes from a shabby-genteel family that sacrificed everything to educate him. He has published one thin book of poems and quit a good job at an advertising agency, the New Albion, to declare war on the 'money-god', vowing never to be respectable or ambitious. He works in a small second-hand bookshop in London for two pounds a week and lives in a dreary lodging house where the landlady forbids visitors and cooking, and where an aspidistra plant in the window symbolizes the respectable life he despises. Gordon's poverty makes him bitter and self-pitying. He sponges on his long-suffering sister Julia, resents his wealthy socialist friend Ravelston, who edits a left-wing magazine and tries to help, and treats his loving girlfriend Rosemary badly. When an American magazine pays him ten pounds for a poem, he takes Rosemary out and squanders it on a drunken evening that ends in his arrest and the loss of his job. He sinks lower, working in a seedy lending library in Lambeth and living in a squalid room. Then Rosemary tells him she is pregnant. Faced with the choice between abortion and marriage, Gordon chooses life: he returns to the advertising agency, marries Rosemary, and buys an aspidistra for their new flat. The novel ends with his acceptance of ordinary decency, family and work. Although Orwell satirizes the commercialism of advertising, the book finally honors the ordinary people who 'keep the aspidistra flying' and the responsibility of fatherhood. Gordon's refusal of abortion is a striking moment in a secular novel of the 1930s. Orwell drew on his own months working in a Hampstead bookshop, and the shop's customers, snobs, bargain hunters and lonely eccentrics, are among the book's comic delights. The 1936 novel stays in US copyright through 2031, so Gordon's tirades against the money-god are paraphrased, not quoted.

Top Lessons

• Pride disguised as principle

  Gordon's war on money is partly vanity and self-pity.

• Choosing life

  Gordon chooses fatherhood over abortion.

• Ordinary decency

  The aspidistra comes to stand for ordinary, decent life.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Gordon's drunken spree and Rosemary's pregnancy.

• Chapter 8

  Gordon's drunken night and its consequences.