First he has to fly to Marseille, where a consignment of her girls bound for Brazil has been held up by the police, who need bribing. Living in her country mansion, he becomes aware of her lovers and drug use but fails to realise that her business is running a chain of high-class brothels in Latin America.

Paul soon discovers that the other masters are all failures in life.Īttracted to the mother of one of his pupils, a wealthy widow called the Honourable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, he is delighted to be hired by her as tutor to her son during the vacation. Having thereby defaulted on the conditions of his inheritance, he is forced to take a job teaching at an obscure private school in Wales called Llanabba, run by Dr Fagan. Modest and unassuming theology student Paul Pennyfeather falls victim to the drunken antics of the Bollinger Club and is subsequently expelled from Oxford for running through the grounds of Scone College without his trousers. The novel was dedicated to Harold Acton, 'in homage and affection'. In the text of the 1962 Uniform Edition of the novel Waugh restored a number of words and phrases which he had been asked to suppress for the first edition. Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and 'themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam.both drive the novel forward and fuel its humour.' This 'undertow of moral seriousness provides a crucial tension within, but it does not dominate them.' Waugh himself stated in his 'Author's Note' to the first edition: 'Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.' Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel.

The title alludes also to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. The novel's title is a contraction of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s. Decline and Fall is based, in part, on Waugh's schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales. It was Waugh's first published novel an earlier attempt, titled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928.

The history of the decline and fall