ABSTRACT

George Orwell practised as a school teacher between 1932 and 1933 at ‘Hawthorns High School’, a small private school comprising fourteen boys and two teachers at Hayes in Middlesex. One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aims in Philosophical Investigations is to correct ‘grave mistakes’ in his earlier work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The ‘grave mistakes’ is centre on Wittgenstein’s earlier conception of how language functions. He had subscribed to a theory of language where ‘Every word has a meaning. A Clergyman’s Daughter was released in Britain in 1935. It tells the story of the eponymous clergyman’s daughter Dorothy Hare, who is driven by an overbearing father, overwork and sexual repression into a nervous and emotional collapse. After recovering her memory, she works for a short period as a teacher. When Dorothy faces her new class for the first time, she is suddenly nervous. It occurs to her she has ‘taken this teaching job under false pretences’.