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George OrwellA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
We meet Gordon Comstock as he works his shift as a clerk at a bookstore. He reflects angrily on how he accepted a threepenny in change when buying cigarettes from a shop girl. Gordon finds just having a threepenny embarrassing: “Because how can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it’s the answer to a riddle” (4).
Gordon surveys the novels in the store’s lending library and bitterly thinks about his own book, a poetry collection titled Mice, which sold poorly. He feels only contempt for all the novels in the book collection. They remind him not only of his failed book, but also that he has been working on a new poetry book, London Pleasures, for years and still has not finished: “For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer,’ and he couldn’t even write!” (8-9). His only comfort is that many of the books in the store, even the classics, are neglected and decaying.
Gordon also turns his cynical and cruel eye to his customers, who include:
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