Decline and Fall

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Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. It was Waugh's first novel, based in part on his schooldays at Lancing College and his experience as a teacher in Wales. It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s. The novel's title makes an ironic comparison between the fall of the Roman empire and the protagonist's own antics, while also referencing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a seminal text among a British educationalists that neatly reflects the novel's social setting.

Plot summary

The novel tells us the story of Paul Pennyfeather, a student at the fictional Scone College Oxford who is sent down for running through the college grounds without his trousers, having been inadvertently immersed in the activities of the fictional Bollinger Club. Having defaulted on the conditions of his inheritance, he is forced to take a job teaching at an obscure public school in Wales called Llanabba, run by Dr Fagan. Attracted to the wealthy mother of one of his pupils, Pennyfeather becomes private tutor to the boy, Peter, and is eventually engaged to be married to Peter's mother, Margot Beste-Chetwynde (who later becomes "Lady Metroland," and appears in Waugh's other novels); Pennyfeather, however, is unaware that the source of her income is a number of high-class brothels in South America. Arrested on the morning of the wedding, Pennyfeather takes the fall to protect his fiancée's honour and is sentenced to seven years at a thinly disguised Dartmoor prison. Fortunately, with some outside assistance he is able to fake his own death and escape. In the end he returns to where he started at Scone. He studies under his own name, having convinced the college that he is the distant cousin of the the Paul Pennyfeather who was sent down previously. The novel ends as it started, with Paul sat in his room listening to the distant shouts of the Bollinger Club.

Decline and Fall

Plot summary

See also