Novel: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Overview
George Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a sharp, often comic study of poverty, pride, and the worship of money in interwar London. It follows Gordon Comstock, an embittered young poet who rebels against the “Money God” and discovers that defiance of economic necessity carries its own humiliations. The book dissects the lower-middle-class hunger for respectability while satirizing both bohemian pretensions and genteel socialist scruples.

Setting and Premise
The story unfolds in the drab streets, dingy lodgings, and shabby shops of Depression-era London. The aspidistra, a hardy, unfashionable houseplant commonly displayed in respectable parlors, serves as Orwell’s central emblem for middle-class propriety, stasis, and the small-bore ambitions of people who cannot afford grandeur but dread disgrace.

Plot Summary
Gordon Comstock, once on the rise as a promising copywriter at a respectable advertising firm, throws away his career because he despises the world’s submission to money. He takes a poorly paid job in a grimy secondhand bookshop, determined to salvage his artistic “integrity” and write poems that will matter. His defiance quickly turns into a ritual of privation: pawning clothes, counting pennies for tea and cigarettes, and drifting through damp bedsits and cold, gaslit streets. The very poverty he chose corrodes his spirit and sabotages his creativity.

His girlfriend, Rosemary Waterlow, practical and affectionate, wants a future with him but recoils at his proud squalor. Gordon’s wealthy friend Philip Ravelston, a conscientious socialist and editor of a small literary review, lends money with nervous guilt and urges Gordon toward stability. Gordon publishes a slim volume of poems that is greeted with polite neglect. He plans a long, great poem and cannot write it. He drinks, quarrels, and suffers a string of petty degradations, including a drunken scrape with the police that leaves him exposed and ashamed.

On an outing with Rosemary beyond the city, resentment and desire collide; they finally sleep together. She becomes pregnant. The news forces Gordon to confront what he has been denying: that his rebellion has become a pose that harms those he loves. He rages against the “trap” of marriage, a steady income, and the aspidistra, the symbol of everything he vowed to reject. Rosemary, calm and resolute, will have the child. Gordon can either cling to his solitary pride or accept responsibility.

He capitulates. He returns to advertising, marries Rosemary, and takes a decent flat. In the window, an aspidistra goes up, conspicuous and undeniable.

Characters
Gordon is at once idealist and egotist, his hatred of money tangled with fear of failure and a need to feel superior to the world he despises. Rosemary embodies ordinary decency and the claims of love and life against abstract principle. Ravelston, generous but compromised, represents the conscience of the comfortable class, keen to criticize capitalism yet cushioned by it.

Themes and Symbols
Orwell anatomizes the psychic violence of poverty: its pettiness, its dirt, its erosion of dignity and desire, and its capacity to make noble gestures look ridiculous. The Money God is not only cash but the social tyranny of respectability, the pressure to keep up appearances. The aspidistra symbolizes that tyranny and also the stubborn endurance of domestic life. Art versus survival, class shame, sexual frustration, and the limits of political sympathy thread through the narrative.

Ending and Significance
Gordon’s final choice can read as surrender or hard-won maturity. Orwell leaves a characteristic ambiguity: the aspidistra is both capitulation to convention and a sign of human attachments that outlast grand refusals. The novel’s unsparing honesty about money and its grip anticipated Orwell’s later work, while its grim humor and social detail make it one of the most incisive portraits of lower-middle-class existence in 1930s London.