Of Human Bondage was published by George H. Doran in New York in 1915 (the UK edition from Heinemann followed shortly after). At nearly 700 pages, it is Maugham’s longest novel and his most personal: a thinly veiled autobiography tracing the first thirty years of his life through the character of Philip Carey — born with a clubfoot (Maugham’s equivalent for his own stammer), orphaned, raised by a cold clergyman uncle, and seeking meaning through art, sex, medicine, and philosophy before arriving at a stoic acceptance of life’s fundamental purposelessness.
The novel’s central obsession — Philip’s masochistic love for Mildred Rogers, a vulgar, cold, manipulative waitress who treats him with contempt and exploits his devotion — is among the most agonizing depictions of sexual obsession in literature. Maugham refuses to make Mildred sympathetic (she is genuinely unpleasant) or to explain Philip’s attachment (it defies reason, which is the point). The “bondage” of the title is not merely the bondage of convention or class but the bondage of desire itself: the human incapacity to desire what is good for us or to cease desiring what destroys us.
Philip’s liberation comes not through love (his eventual marriage to a kind, ordinary woman is contentment rather than passion) but through an insight borrowed from Spinoza: life has no inherent meaning, and this absence of meaning is not cause for despair but for freedom. If nothing matters inherently, then one is free to create one’s own pattern — and Philip’s pattern (medicine, family, modest happiness) is chosen rather than imposed.
Theodore Dreiser called it “the best novel written in English in the twentieth century.” The judgment is excessive but not absurd — the novel’s honesty about desire, failure, and the slow construction of a tolerable life from unpromising materials has kept it continuously in print for over a century.
Collecting Of Human Bondage
First edition (George H. Doran, New York, 1915): Cloth binding, dust jacket. The US edition precedes the UK edition.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $2,000–$6,000
- Without dust jacket: $100–$300
- Heinemann first UK edition in jacket: $1,000–$3,000
- Signed first edition: $3,000–$10,000
The cornerstone of any Maugham collection and one of the most valuable twentieth-century literary first editions. Fine copies in intact dust jackets are genuinely rare — the 1915 date and the novel’s length (thick volumes are more vulnerable to wear) make pristine copies scarce.