Of Human Bondage: Born Free, and Everywhere in Chains

Rousseau has a line so often quoted that we forget how much weight it carries: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, written in 1915, takes that sentence apart and tests it inch by inch. He follows a club-footed young man from childhood to the age of thirty, lets him try religion, art, love and poverty, and finally answers only one question: can a person ever break free of himself?

Maugham’s Childhood: Pain Is the Best Material

To read this book well, you first need to know what Maugham lived through.

At eight he lost his mother to tuberculosis; before he turned ten, his father died of cancer. In two short years he lost both parents, was sent back to England, and was taken in by his uncle’s household in the small Kentish town of Whitstable. His uncle was cold and short on warmth, and the life of a dependent child left the already lonely boy more stifled than before.

Beyond the missing family, a physical affliction tormented him too. Maugham had a severe stammer, and being small as well, he was often bullied and mocked at school; sometimes even a teacher humiliated him in front of the class.

Those years shaped the man he became: withdrawn, sensitive, poor at socialising, with a private grief he had nowhere to pour out, retreating into his own world to digest it slowly. Luckily he was quick and gifted, and soon found a refuge — reading. Books opened a new country for him, where imagination could run free and where his pain and loneliness found some comfort in words.

As an adult he began to write, fusing his gift for storytelling with the inner material he had stored up early. Maugham admitted that writing was a kind of salvation for him: he had to keep following an inner voice and keep putting words down, and in the long process of thinking about life he slowly healed the wounds of his early years.

That is why so many of his characters read like spiritual autobiography. Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage is the clearest case — born club-footed, orphaned young, adopted by a cold uncle, ridiculed throughout his school years; as a man he tries accountancy, then painting, then medicine, and is tortured again and again in love until he nearly breaks.

Maugham swapped the stammer for a club foot, and poured his own sensitivity and estrangement from the world into the character without holding anything back.

The First Bondage: The Club Foot

Maugham held that the bonds of a human life come in roughly two kinds. The first is imposed on us by the outer world, or by fate. The most obvious instance is the body itself.

Philip was born with one foot deformed. It does not stop him walking, but the limp makes him desperately self-conscious. Whenever he passes other people he feels curious or mocking eyes fixed on him, and his face burns.

School life is a nightmare for him. His physical defect becomes the excuse some classmates use to torment him — they imitate his walk to his face and laugh among themselves. Facing a room of boys doubled over with laughter, Philip feels as though his whole body were on fire. Sometimes even younger pupils come to tease him, knowing that with his bad leg he cannot fight back properly.

When the other children run eagerly onto the football pitch, Philip sits quietly at the edge of the field. He says out loud that he does not like football at all, while inwardly, with a bitterness he cannot voice, he pictures himself running on that pitch faster than anyone. In such moments he is so ashamed and hurt that tears are about to spill over, but he is stubborn, and would rather die than cry in front of others. The poor boy can only wait until lights-out and sob secretly under the blankets. More than once he falls asleep with wet eyes, dreaming that he is back in his mother’s room as a small child, as if he had never left it.

While she was alive his mother had doted on him, watching him play on the floor with a look both tender and pitying, thinking to herself: poor child, what will become of him?

After his parents died, Philip was raised by his uncle and aunt. The elderly couple had no children of their own, were serious and rigid, and disciplined him rather strictly. Yet Aunt Louisa was in truth a gentle, kind and inwardly delicate woman. She loved Philip as if he were her own, fretting that he might not eat or dress well enough; she was simply too reserved to show affection, and did not know how to close the distance between herself and the child.

It was Aunt Louisa who, with the picture books in the house, slowly thawed the ice around little Philip’s heart. She saw how much he loved those books, was delighted, and encouraged him to try drawing too. One Christmas she gave him a box of paints. Sadly, the boy’s interest lay in words, not pictures. Gradually he roamed the house’s vast library — books carried him to medieval monasteries, old castles, far-off forests and rivers, and let him live through hair-raising adventures alongside figures from history. Only when reading was he happy and content.

In any case, Aunt Louisa’s rather clumsy affection was the one warmth of his childhood.

The Second Bondage: Religion

The other great presence in Philip’s childhood is his uncle, the vicar Carey. He is the town’s clergyman, and the role earns him considerable local respect.

Raised in that atmosphere, little Philip takes a keen interest in religion and often goes to his uncle with questions. Pleased to see the boy so earnest, his uncle is glad to groom him for this path, hoping he will grow up to a respectable and holy profession. Uncle Carey’s first step for Philip is to send him to a church boarding school, and from there to Oxford — the nursery of future clergymen.

At first Philip studies with real enthusiasm. He is clever, quick to understand, with a good memory; even the headmaster thinks he is gifted and has a future. Philip is deeply moved, because this is the first time in his life that anyone has approved of him — he is used to having words like “idiot” and “cripple” attached to him.

More important still, Philip hears that God is all-powerful and that sincere faith brings blessings. He thinks: God will surely heal my foot by a miracle. So he begins to pray devoutly. To prove his sincerity he makes each prayer a small ordeal, lying naked on the freezing floor on cold days until he is shivering all over — because he has read that certain devout saints did exactly this.

But the days pass and God seems not to answer. He goes to his uncle and asks why his prayers have had no effect. His uncle always says, “Because you are not sincere enough.” But how sincere is sincere enough?

After one disappointment too many, Philip finally understands: God will not heal his foot. What hurts more than the foot is that his uncle would deceive him, pinning the blame on his own lack of faith.

His fervour slowly cools. He cannot understand how God can watch people suffer and feel nothing.

Unless there is no God at all.

The reading habit he formed as a child has taught him to think for himself. He comes to feel that religion is a bond laid on a person, one that keeps them from exploring their own life and inner world with reason and a practical spirit.

He also sees his uncle’s hypocrisy more and more clearly: the virtues religion preaches are nowhere visible in the man himself. Christ teaches generosity, and his uncle is miserly to a fault; Christ teaches love of one’s neighbour, and he loves no one but himself. Outside the church he is cold and self-serving. Philip simply cannot grasp how a man can solemnly preach every virtue to others while never practising a single one.

So he resolves to keep religion at arm’s length.

He can no longer stay at the boarding school. In his mind the beauty of nature has replaced the word of God — towering mountains, clear rivers, vivid green fields; everything beyond the school’s high walls is fresh and wonderful. The whole world is calling to him, and like a bird escaped from its cage he longs to stretch his wings at once.

For this he quarrels bitterly with his uncle. His uncle is disappointed but cannot bend the boy. That craving for freedom is precisely the force that drives Philip to break his bonds.

Paris: Talent, Poverty and a Corpse

Meanwhile his interest in painting grows strong, and he wants to become an artist. Aunt Louisa gives him half a lifetime’s savings and sends him to art school in Paris to start from the beginning.

At eighteen, Philip is utterly intoxicated by life in Paris. In the free, wild world of young art students there seem to be only two subjects, art and company. He gathers a circle of like-minded friends, cultivated people who talk endlessly about art and philosophy. Unlike before, no one here cares about his physical defect.

But the savings his aunt left him slowly fail to cover his daily costs. More troubling still, becoming an artist is far harder than he imagined. He comes to see that he lacks the artist’s essential sensitivity — the instinct that finds beauty in things. He does not know whether he will ever produce real work, and the doubt begins to shake him.

Then the fate of a fellow student in the studio settles the matter for him.

Her name is Fanny Price. She is slovenly, sour-tempered, always snapping at people; everyone keeps their distance, and the newly arrived Philip is more or less her only friend. Later she stops coming to class, and Philip never sees her again.

Then one day he gets a letter from her, and the words are strange: “Come at once when you get this. I can’t go on any longer.”

Philip rushes to her lodging and can get no answer at the door, so he calls the police. When the door is forced open, the sight terrifies him — Fanny Price is hanging from the ceiling, dead.

Only afterwards does Philip understand: she was always unkempt, always in the same set of clothes, and stopped coming to class, because she was desperately poor. She had crossed the Channel to study painting in Paris, spent every penny she had, and knew no one; for a long time she lived on nothing but milk and bread. In the last three days of her life she ate nothing at all.

She plainly lacked talent, and after more than two years had hardly improved beyond the newest beginners. Yet she refused stubbornly to give it up, whether from love of art or from flight from reality. She may also have known she would never be a painter, and despaired. Hunger, loneliness and despair advanced like three chess pieces to the last rank of the board and trapped her there.

Fanny Price’s death hits Philip hard.

Ordinarily we say: because we must survive, because we must eat, we must work, earn, and make all of life’s choices. But Philip realises that survival is itself a bottomless trap. You make frantic choices in the name of “survival”, yet “survival” can collapse in an instant through illness, bankruptcy or hunger. If the most basic condition of all — being alive — cannot be guaranteed, then what does all your careful planning for “living well” amount to? Whether to be a writer or a painter, whether to go to Paris or stay in London — does any of it matter?

He concludes that the fear of hunger is enough to dim every dream. So he gives up his artistic career without hesitation: he does not want to drain his life away in the double bind of poverty and talent, as Fanny Price did.

Philip leaves Paris to study medicine in London. His father had been a doctor, and now he means to inherit the profession — medicine offers a stable prospect: five years of study, pass the exams, and he has the physician’s qualification and a comfortable, respectable life. He has also inherited a small sum from his father; not much, but enough to let him study in peace.

The Third Bondage: Mildred

And then fate plays another joke on him.

Philip falls in love with a teashop waitress named Mildred. She is pretty but thin and spare, her face pale as paper, with the unwell look of anaemia and poor nourishment. It is precisely this that first draws the similarly afflicted Philip.

He is almost obsessively fixated on her, driven by a fierce desire he cannot suppress. Yet inwardly he plainly dislikes her, judging her selfish, vulgar and mercenary. He knows perfectly well that Mildred is only using him — she shows a flicker of warmth only when he takes her to dinner, to a play, or brings her a gift.

So when he hears that Mildred has thrown him over for another man, Philip is heartbroken, yet strangely, at the level of reason, feels a kind of relief. He understands at last that this feeling was never love, only a wishful attachment tangled up with desire.

Before long, however, Mildred appears before him again. That pitiable face still makes his head swim. She weeps and tells him she has been deceived — she became the mistress of a married man, bore his child, and is now cast off with nowhere to turn but him.

Philip is thrown into confusion. He feels wretched, jealous, disgusted, even humiliated. But in the end he takes her in. Not out of pity, but because the desire deep in him has come alive again — he believes that a Mildred in such a state must at last be able to love him without distraction.

So he rents her a room and cares for her with great tenderness until she gives birth safely, then looks after mother and child as though they were a happy little family. When they go out together they are taken for husband and wife more than once, and a feeling of happiness rises in Philip.

This is the deepest reason he is caught in so twisted a relationship: he wants to make up through his own effort for the wounds of his childhood. He is afraid of being alone; he longs to be loved, needed, depended on, and Mildred happens to fill exactly that role. In other words, the feeling was never love but emotional dependence — he depends on being needed to confirm his own worth.

That is why, knowing the happiness is an illusion and knowing that Mildred does not love him, he chooses to sink into it anyway.

In the end Mildred shatters the dream: she runs off with Philip’s good friend Griffiths, and later makes off with his money too. Philip is listless and broken for a long stretch afterwards.

When he finally calms down, he finds that he no longer loves her. As the love fades, he feels instead a genuine pity for the woman — because he has understood that Mildred, like him, is a poor soul trapped by desire. Reason is powerless before desire; a person is almost always driven blindly on by impulse, even to acts that humiliate them.

What is more, as a poor, uneducated woman of no family, Mildred’s vulgarity, snobbery and readiness to use any means were largely shaped by the environment she had to survive in. She stakes her body and her charm just as Philip stakes his money and his care; at bottom, both are bartering for a little of what they want.

The Answer in a Persian Rug

In his days with Mildred, Philip squanders nearly everything he has. When the last penny is gone he has to interrupt his studies, and each day he crowds into the street, queues in long lines and waits anxiously for an interview.

His defect makes every door close on him. Again and again he comes out of unknown offices disappointed, met only by sympathetic, deadened looks — the unemployed, exactly like him. They leave early and return late, queue all day on an empty stomach, just to compete for a job with a pitiful wage.

In the end, unable to pay rent, Philip dodges his landlord by living on the street, sleeping on park benches, a vagrant in earnest.

He longs for some power to pull him out of the depths. The only one he can think of is his uncle, but his uncle refuses him any help — in his view, since Philip suffers from his own extravagance, he should accept the lesson and live with the consequences.

In desperation Philip begins to wish his uncle would die soon, so that he might inherit another sum. The thought shocks even him. His conscience rebukes him, yet the despair in front of him keeps driving the thought back up.

In those days he often walks and daydreams to dull the pain of hunger and the misery of his mind. He thinks that he is nearly thirty, that his youth is gone, that the passion of life has quietly worn away in the waste of the years. What, after all, is the purpose and meaning of a life spent in such relentless effort?

Then he thinks of a friend he made in Paris — a shabby, middle-aged poet named Cronshaw. Cronshaw’s cynical philosophy and his live-for-today attitude left a deep impression on Philip, shocking and fascinating him at once. When they parted, Cronshaw gave Philip a small, beautiful Persian rug and told him: “The secret of life is on that rug. You must find the answer yourself.”

The riddle stays with Philip, and he never understands it — until, in his down-and-out days in London, he learns of Hayward’s death.

Hayward was a friend Philip made while studying. Philip respected him, thought him learned and talented, certain to make something of himself one day. Yet Hayward drifted through the years and accomplished nothing, then joined the British war against the Boers in South Africa and died of typhoid soon after landing.

Grieving and regretful, Philip cannot help thinking: what a useless and meaningless life Hayward’s was too. And in that daze he suddenly remembers the rug Cronshaw gave him, and the puzzle hidden in it opens at last —

Life has no meaning.

Yes: life is like that finely woven Persian rug, its only purpose to be pushed blindly along by fate and to weave, unconsciously, an ever more intricate pattern. The patterns are gorgeous, and quite meaningless.

Because he has seen the secret of life, Philip is suddenly at ease. If life has no meaning, then a wealthy life and a poor one are at bottom no different; whether a man is crippled or sound makes no fundamental difference. And so all the suffering before him becomes bearable.

Then how should a person live?

Philip understands at last that all these years he has been believing the ideals others drilled into him. His uncle told him to hold a respectable station; his teachers in Paris told him to achieve something — but none of it was what he truly wanted. He was simply being pulled by one invisible thread after another, circling inside other people’s expectations.

Now he sees clearly: how a person wants to live can be dictated neither by others nor by worldly dogma, but must be explored, chosen and borne by oneself. There is no single right road in this world, and no standard answer. Life has no meaning to begin with — and precisely because it has none, every person is free to define it. Only a free heart can lead a person onto the road that is his own.

Now Philip has nothing left, and has at last won his inner freedom.

After the Break

Philip’s transformation owes much to the Athelny family.

Athelny was a friend Philip made earlier, during his hospital training. The family lives on little, yet is always ready to help. When Philip is out on the street, it is they who reach out, take him in and help him find work.

More important, the Athelnys are always warm together. They love one another sincerely, and enjoy the noisy life they share. This cheerfulness overturns everything Philip’s rough experience had taught him, and shows him that life need not be spent entirely in chains. For the first time he feels the joy of being alive.

At the end of the story his uncle dies, Philip inherits some money, and can at last resume his long-interrupted studies. Soon love arrives once more — he falls for Sally, Athelny’s eldest daughter.

Sally is easy and open, strongly built, with a composed face and a mature steadiness; a healthy gentleness radiates from her, like a maiden from Greek myth. In her presence Philip no longer feels the frantic, painful desire he felt with Mildred, but a warm, secure, reassuring tenderness — he has finally learned what real love is.

Philip resolves to become a country doctor in an English seaside town and live the simplest of lives with Sally. He realises that such ordinary happiness is not a compromise with reality but a life he chooses on purpose and embraces wholeheartedly after seeing the emptiness of things. It is the truest, the most moving, and the deepest wish of his heart.

One day the two agree to meet at the gallery. Philip has things he wants to say to Sally and has practised them privately many times, but once they meet they simply sit side by side in silence. Neither feels awkward — they always enjoy these moments of quietly keeping each other company.

At last Philip speaks: “Will you marry me, Sally?”

Sally’s eyes do not turn to him, but her voice is gentle and firm: “Of course. I’d like a home of my own too.”

Philip smiles and takes her hand. They walk out of the gallery. Outside, cabs stream endlessly across the square, the crowd is thick, the bright sun shines on everything, and even the air is golden. Philip looks into Sally’s gentle blue eyes, and a thought rises in him:

“I’m so happy.”

What the Bondage Means

For each of us, every experience in life is precious. What matters is not what you are going through, but whether you can keep learning from it — which is enough to change a person gradually and completely. Before exploring the world and exploring life, one should first explore oneself: what kind of life do I truly want?

Have the courage to change what can be changed, and accept calmly what cannot. Perhaps only then can we win our inner freedom. Only when we are free can we truly take responsibility for our lives and feel what happiness means.

Maugham swapped his stammer for Philip’s club foot, wrote his own childhood of losing his mother at eight and living as a dependent into the novel, and wrote in his Paris years of struggling in poverty as well. He spent thirty years letting one character ask that question on his behalf, and then gave the answer.

Rousseau said: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Having finished the book, perhaps we can put it another way — man is everywhere in chains, and yet born free.