Following his mother’s death, Philip becomes the ward of his uncle, the Vicar of Blackstable, a rural parish in Kent. Philip, also oriented toward a clerical life, attends the King’s School, Tercanbury, where he finds himself isolated, lonely, and unhappy. He is by nature shy, and a clubfoot severely limits his participation in usual school activities.

Before completing his schooling, he decides against the clergyman’s life and travels to Heidelberg, where he absorbs German philosophy, culture, and art. The remainder of the novel largely concerns Philip’s efforts to establish a career and to discover the meaning of life. It chronicles his growth and clarifies the understanding he gains from experience, as he seeks to become first an accountant, then an artist, and finally, a physician. He succeeds in medicine after abandoning accounting for lack of interest and painting for lack of talent.

It is, however, the necessity for controlling his emotions that Philip learns most painfully--a lesson taught him by his long and unrequited love for Mildred Rogers. By the novel’s end, he can make sense of his life by accepting a philosophical position that reconciles suffering and pain with the quest for happiness. From a piece of Persian rug given him by an eccentric poet, he discovers the meaning of life.

The novel reflects the author’s fundamental values and interests-- a clinical detachment, a skeptical attitude, a distrust of passion, a belief in tolerance, a cosmopolitan point of view, and an essentially existential outlook on life.

Bibliography:

Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Praises Of Human Bondage for its theme and “remarkable detachment” considering that it is autobiographical. Discusses freedom realized through the “unfolding of an aesthetic sensibility.”

Calder, Robert. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Organized into ten chapters, each delineating approximately one decade. Of Human Bondage is most fully related to Maugham’s life in the first three chapters (1874-1907). Insightful, sympathetic treatment supported by useful illustrations.

Cordell, Richard A. Somerset Maugham: A Writer for All Seasons—A Biographical and Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. The earliest useful critical biography. Offers a separate chapter on Of Human Bondage and discusses the novel throughout. Warmer and more sympathetic than Ted Morgan’s Maugham (see below).

Curtis, Anthony, and John Whitehead, eds. W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. An anthology of reviews, including 150 selected items of British and American contemporary criticism, arranged chronologically within genres. Among the five items on Of Human Bondage is Theodore Dreiser’s landmark review “As a Realist Sees It: Of Human Bondage,” the first serious critic to praise the novel highly.

Morgan, Ted. Maugham. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. The standard critical biography, essential for worthwhile study. Establishes correlations between Maugham’s life and his works, particularly Of Human Bondage. Balanced, perceptive, and carefully documented with extensive notes.