Boothby Avenue

Boothby Avenue is a street in the unnamed city where Alex and his droogs roam, serving as the setting for their first act of violence in the novel—the assault on an old professor leaving the Public Biblio.

Location and First Appearance

Boothby Avenue is introduced on the first night of the story, when Alex and his three droogs—Pete, Georgie, and Dim—leave the Korova Milkbar on Marghanita Boulevard and turn into Boothby Avenue. There they find "what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with": a doddery old schoolmaster-type man with glasses, books under his arm, and a crappy umbrella, coming round the corner from the Public Biblio. The street is otherwise empty, reflecting the era's shortage of police and the danger of nightfall for older citizens.

The Assault on the Professor

On Boothby Avenue, Alex and his gang confront the professor with mock politeness, asking to see his books. They take three volumes—'Elementary Crystallography,' 'The Miracle of the Snowflake,' and 'The Rhombohedral System'—and pretend to find filthy words in them, then rip the pages to shreds and scatter them over the old man. They hold him, yank out his false teeth, crush them under their boots, strip him to his vest and long underpants, kick him, and riffle through his pockets. The attack is described as only "the start of the evening," a warm-up for the night's further violence.

Later Return

Near the end of the novel, after Alex has been released from prison and subjected to the Ludovico Technique, he walks down Marghanita Boulevard and turns into Boothby Avenue again, then round the corner to the Public Biblio, where he goes to look for a book on painless suicide. The street thus bookends his journey: it is where he first asserts his violent power and where, broken and conditioned, he returns seeking escape from his own existence.