Of Human Bondage

As a very young man, Philip focuses on choosing a career based on what he finds interesting and largely disregards the financial consequences of his choices. However, as the plot develops, the experiences of both Philip and other characters reveal that financial instability can be utterly ruinous and should be avoided even if sacrifices are required. Philip’s decision to stop pursuing a career as an accountant and go to Paris to study art reflects his desire to pursue a satisfying life without considering the cost. During his time in Paris, Philip’s encounter with Fanny Price leads him to reassess these values and consider a more stable career.

Philip sees how Fanny’s desperate poverty eventually drives her to take her own life, and he becomes nervous about his own fate if he tries to make a living as an artist. When Philip consults with an experienced French art teacher, the older man cautions him, “Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off” (246). Philip’s growing unease about living in poverty, coupled with his doubts about whether or not he is talented enough to become a successful artist, drive him to abandon art and focus on a more stable career as a doctor.

However, Philip’s reckless expenditures—particularly driven by his relationship with Mildred—and attempt to generate money on the stock market eventually leave him in a dire financial state. At his lowest point, Philip has to drop out of medical training, has nowhere to live, and contemplates taking his own life (as Fanny did). In the days he spends aimlessly wandering London, Philip experiences the loneliness and abjection of poverty: “He had very little food and began to feel weak and ill, so that he had hardly enough energy to go on looking for the work which seemed so desperately hard to find” (499). Even once he is able to get help from Thorpe Athelny and finds a job at a shop, Philip detests his life and fixates on the money he will receive when his uncle dies. Financial instability corrupts Philip to point that he actively anticipates his uncle’s death and even fantasizes about killing the older man himself. There is nothing glamorous about Philip’s experiences.

While Philip is eventually able to return to financial stability thanks to the generational wealth he accesses after his uncle dies, Mildred’s fate provides an example of another character who is destroyed by poverty. Mildred is persistently unhappy with her life as a lower-middle-class woman and gets herself into difficult situations with men like Miller and Griffiths because she tries to leverage her appearance and sexuality into economic profit. As a woman, Mildred has even fewer options than Philip, and when she becomes destitute, she has to resort to sex work in order to survive. Mildred laments to Philip, “Oh, you don’t know what it is. Nobody knows till they’ve done it” (447). Mildred eventually contracts (and, by implication, will die from) a sexually transmitted disease, and even after this diagnosis, she continues trying to earn money. The experiences of Fanny Price, Mildred, and Philip all reveal that financial instability causes misery and can even cost someone their life.