The Crisis of Values and Spiritual Decay in Evelyn Waugh's a Handful of Dust

The investigation pursues four analytically distinct but interlinked questions: first, how the figure of the protagonist Tony Last and his Gothic Revival estate Hetton Abbey function as the symbolic locus of an exhausted chivalric tradition that no longer commands ethical assent from the social order that ostensibly preserves it; second, how the moral collapse of the metropolitan elite, focalised through Brenda Last and her affair with the parasitic socialite John Beaver, registers a generalised pragmatic rupture in the contractual basis of marriage, friendship, and communal obligation; third, how the protagonist’s terminal captivity in the Amazonian jungle, where he is condemned to read the complete works of Charles Dickens aloud for the remainder of his life to the deranged Mr. Todd, constitutes the structural peak of Waugh’s ironic method and a deliberate inversion of the Conradian civilisation-savagery axis; and fourth, how the novel’s title and overall conceptual architecture draw upon T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) to inscribe the narrative within the broader Modernist diagnosis of post-war cultural sterility. The methodological approach combines close textual analysis with intertextual comparison and draws upon the critical tradition extending from James Carens’s foundational The Satiric Art of Evelyn Waugh (1966) through Jeffrey Heath’s The Picturesque Prison (1982) and Douglas Lane Patey’s critical biography (1998) to Naomi Milthorpe’s Evelyn Waugh’s Satire (2016), while engaging the theoretical framework of Modernist dark humour proposed by Lisa Colletta (2003). The principal findings establish that A Handful of Dust operates not as a conventional satirical critique of social decadence directed at correctable vice, but as a sustained allegorical inversion in which the formal apparatus of comic narrative is enlisted to register a metaphysical condition for which no corrective alternative remains accessible to the represented social world. The novel therefore constitutes a decisive moment in the formation of the anti-satirical mode that would reach its mature articulation in Waugh’s post-war fiction, and supplies a paradigmatic instance of how inter-war English prose absorbed and redirected the cultural diagnostics of high Modernist poetry.