Of Human Bondage in 10 Minutes — How a Clubfooted Orphan Learns to Let Himself Go

The people around him fall roughly into three circles. The first is childhood: his uncle William, a cold vicar who is the one who force-feeds him religion and also the first to make him doubt it; his aunt Louisa, gentle, the only person in that house who loves him without conditions. The second is youth: Hayward, a Heidelberg aesthete full of grand talk; Cronshaw, a threadbare, drunken poet decaying in the Latin Quarter of Paris; and Fanny Price, a fellow art student convinced she has talent she does not have, who eventually hangs herself in her garret. The third is adulthood: Mildred Rogers, a cold, vain tea-shop waitress who becomes his most lethal bondage; Norah Nesbit, kind and self-sufficient, who writes cheap novels for a living and could have saved him; and Thorpe Athelny, a down-at-heel journalist, and his loud, cheerful household, where Philip finally stops running.

The story opens in Blackstable, a coastal town in Kent, then drifts to Heidelberg, to the Latin Quarter in Paris, to London, and finally circles back to a country practice in Kent. Across three countries, Philip manages to take nearly every wrong turn open to a middle-class English boy of his time.

How the plot moves

Philip is first sent to live with his uncle in Blackstable. William is the kind of vicar whose piety smothers rather than warms; Louisa is gentle but never brave enough to stand up to him. Philip is packed off to King's School, Canterbury, where his classmates turn his foot into a taunting rhyme, the first time he understands, plainly, that he is different, and that the difference is not going away.

To get away, he skips Oxford and spends a year studying in Heidelberg instead. His lodgings are full of Oxford-bred aesthetes who never stop quoting Shelley, Wilde, and the eternity of art. Hayward talks the loudest. Philip is drawn in by the talk, then sees through it argument by argument: men who quote poetry and philosophy nonstop while living in genteel poverty, calling it ideals when it is really just a respectable way to dodge the world. It is in Heidelberg that he throws off, for the first time and completely, the religion he was raised on.

Back in England he apprentices as an accountant, hates it, and bolts for Amitrano's art school in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Two blows land on him there. The first comes from Cronshaw, penniless, drunk, liable to collapse in the street at any moment, who holds up a Persian rug as an image of life: the pattern was never designed to mean anything by the man who wove it, and if you go looking for a meaning you will not find one; but once you accept that it has none, it stops crushing you. Philip does not fully understand this at the time. He carries it around for ten years before it lands.

The second blow is Fanny Price. She is so poor she lives on bread to save money for paint, and everyone in the studio can see she has no talent except Fanny herself, who refuses to believe it. Rejected again and again, ground down, she finally hangs herself in her garret. Philip hears the news in passing and goes cold. It is only afterward that he realizes his own drive to paint was separated from Fanny's delusion by no more than a hair.

His teacher eventually gives Philip an honest verdict: good eye, no talent. Philip accepts it, and that acceptance is cleaner than any of his earlier awakenings. He goes back to London to study medicine at St. Luke's, retracing, more or less, his dead father's own path.

Then comes the heaviest stretch of the book. He meets Mildred Rogers, a waitress, in a tea shop. Philip himself can't say how it happens; he knows she is cold, coarse, and contemptuous of his foot and his awkwardness, and he throws himself at her anyway. Mildred leaves him first, to marry a cad, gets beaten and pregnant, and comes back to him; Philip takes her and her baby in, gives her money, a roof, and what dignity he can.

Then Griffiths turns up, the best-looking of Philip's medical-school friends. Mildred takes up with him in front of Philip, and for a while Philip is a man with the bones taken out of him. It is right then that Norah Nesbit enters, an independent woman who writes cheap novels for a living, gentle, considerate, wanting nothing from him, giving him the only real comfort he gets in this stretch of the book. Then Mildred comes back, and Philip drops Norah. I stalled the first time I read this too: he knows perfectly well he is repeating the same mistake, and he chooses the one who will wreck him anyway.

Then the money goes too. He puts what little savings he has left into a mining stock and loses every penny. Philip Carey, once a medical student, ends up as a floorwalker in the basement of a London department store, ordered around all day by a spiteful supervisor. His uncle William dies around this time and leaves a small legacy, which is what finally lets him crawl back and finish his medical degree.

The ending is quietly unremarkable. Philip falls in with the Athelny household: Thorpe, a journalist, his wife, and a noisy crowd of children. Thorpe is poor, warm-hearted, and prone to boasting, but it is in his house that Philip first feels at ease without having to perform. Philip and Thorpe's eldest daughter, Sally, drift into love without any fireworks, the way two people fall into the habit of passing each other a bowl in the kitchen. He decides to marry Sally, settle into a small country practice in Kent, and give up the trip around the world, the search for some ultimate meaning of life. This is the moment Cronshaw's Persian rug finally comes to rest.

Theme and craft

On the surface this is a novel about growing up. Underneath, it is a novel about letting go. Philip spends his whole life asking what life means; he tries God, art, philosophy, love, and every door shuts in his face. What finally lets him breathe is not an answer but the discovery that the question doesn't need one. Cronshaw's Persian rug carries the most weight in the book: the fact that the pattern was never meant to mean anything is itself the release.

The other thread running under the book is bondage to one's own passion. The obsession with Mildred is the real bondage in the novel; nobody chains Philip to her, he keeps handing over the key himself. Maugham is unsparing here: he never lets Mildred become a stock villainess. She is cold and calculating, but she is also a woman driven by poverty and want. Philip is drawn to her precisely because she shows him the part of his own insecurity he has never managed to beat. Once you see that, the title earns its weight.

The real climax of this novel isn't the line where he becomes a doctor. It's the second he stops asking what life means.

Maugham's technique is deeply restrained. He doesn't reach for sentiment or long interior monologues; he lets objects and actions carry the feeling instead: a foot that won't fit an ordinary boot, a Persian rug that takes years to hand back, an empty narrow bed in a garret. He keeps a tight lid on the confessional tone that semi-autobiographical fiction so easily falls into, so the whole thing reads like a level-headed man telling you his own old story, and the more level he stays, the harder it lands.

Why read the novel itself