Analysis of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 24, 2025

This novel of satire was the first published by Evelyn Waugh, one of the great English satirists of the 20th century, and many scholars consider it to be his best. The narrative unfolds through a third-person omniscient point of view and relates the misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, a young divinity student at Oxford.

Paul has the misfortune of strolling on the quad one night as the Bollinger Society concludes a drunken revel; the intoxicated aristocrats who make up the society seize Paul and divest him of his trousers. When Paul complains to the university, he himself is expelled for indecent behavior on the quad. Paul’s guardian cuts off the legacy that has supported the young man’s studies, since a clause in the will of Paul’s father allows this action in the event that Paul’s performance is “unsatisfactory.”

Paul secures a position as a teacher in a private school at Llanabba Castle, where Dr. Augustus Fagan disguises the poor quality of his institution with pious lectures on service. His two daughters are the husband-hunting Flossie and the miserly Diana. Flossie is engaged to Captain Grimes, one of the masters at the school, but Paul learns that this engagement is actually a form of insurance for Grimes, who perpetually manages to land himself in trouble (or, as he says, “in the soup”). Paul’s other colleague is Dr. Prendergast, a former clergyman now afflicted by religious doubts. The school’s butler is Solomon Philbrick, a con artist with a different story for each of the school’s masters: Grimes thinks Philbrick is a novelist conducting research, while Prendergast believes him to be an eccentric aristocrat and shipping magnate.

Paul takes up his duties teaching the fifth form (approximately equivalent to an American 11th-grade class); he discovers that his unruly students are susceptible to bribes when he sees how diligent they become after he promises a monetary reward for the longest essay. His best student, he thinks, is Peter Beste-Chetwynde.

At the school’s annual sports meet, Paul meets Peter’s mother, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, a beautiful widow, and is smitten by her. One of the students at the school, young Lord Tangent, is shot in the heel with a starting pistol; as the term drags on, he dies of infection. Philbrick flees the school as detectives close in, investigating him for false pretense, and Grimes flees his marriage to Flossie, leaving his clothes and a suicide note on a nearby beach.

At the close of the term, Paul is hired to tutor Peter during the summer holiday. He arrives at the Beste-Chetwynde home, King’s Thursday, a starkly modernized Tudor site where Margot entertains an unending string of weekend guests. She is being courted by the minister of transport, Sir Humphrey Maltravers, but Paul manages to propose to her, and Peter declares him to be the better of the two options as a stepfather.

Shortly before the wedding, Margot sends Paul to Marseilles on a business errand connected with her late father’s South American “entertainment” enterprise, which also employs Grimes in some mysterious capacity. Paul does not realize that his errand involves bribes to various political officials—he thinks he is arranging passage for cabaret entertainers headed for Rio de Janeiro. On his wedding day, Paul is arrested for trafficking in the white slave trade and Margot flees to Corfu.

Paul stands trial for Margot’s criminal activities and is sentenced to seven years in prison. At Blackstone Gaol, he is reunited with Philbrick, who serves as a trustee, and with Prendergast, who serves as the prison chaplain until he is killed by an inmate. Paul is moved to Egdon Heath Penal Settlement; Grimes is a fellow prisoner there until he manages to disappear into the fog one day.

Margot visits Paul to tell him that she is marrying Maltravers, who has been named Lord Metroland and has risen to the post of home secretary. Soon, Paul is removed from Egdon Heath on orders from the home secretary for an appendicitis operation. He finds himself first at a nursing home owned by Dr. Fagan, where he is declared dead and spirited aboard a yacht bound for Margot’s Corfu home.

Paul rests there and grows a mustache so that he can return to his studies at Oxford. One year after his adventures began, Paul Pennyfeather is back in college, passing himself off as his own cousin. Peter Best-Chetwynde visits him after a drunken evening with the Bollinger Society and warns Paul against involvement with people like himself and his mother; upon Peter’s departure, Paul turns his attention back to his textbook on religious heresy.

Evelyn Waugh finds numerous targets for his satire: aristocrats, academics, clerics, the rich, the British government, the Church of England, modern architecture, and human folly of every stripe, among many others. Waugh uses effective name symbolism to give his characters a slightly allegorical dimension, making each of them representative of a class of folly. The tone of the narration is cheerful, with tragic elements revealed indirectly in an understated manner.

Paul Pennyfeather (an impoverished lightweight) is the protagonist rather than the hero of the novel: his passive acceptance of life’s reversals undermines his character and tarnishes what might otherwise be virtuous fortitude. Since he ends exactly where he began, the deterioration implied by the novel’s title has a broader application: society at large is in decline, the author implies, and those enmeshed in it must cope as best they can in a world that will not reward the good and punish the bad.