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 is a reference to Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman...
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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 is a reference to Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, comparing Rome's decline with the loss of power experienced by England after World War I.
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...
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