Gulliver’s Travels meant more to George Orwell ‘than any other book ever written’ and was an important literary antecedent in the development of Newspeak. From the opening sentences of his first professional article as a journalist, published in Paris during 1928, Orwell was obsessively interested in how the state endeavoured to censor language: “The present […]
“In England, for centuries past, our so-called aristocracy has been recruited by successive waves of scoundrels who have enriched themselves upon the current swindle and whose position depends solely upon money.” […]
A happy vicar I might have been Two hundred years ago, To preach upon eternal doom And watch my walnuts grow; But born, alas, in an evil time, I missed that pleasant haven, For the hair has grown on my upper lip And the clergy are all clean-shaven. (The Adelphi, December 1936) A Clergyman’s Daughter, […]
“I admit he needs a little handling but he has a lot to give.” (David Astor, 22 Nov. 1942) The proprietor and editor of the Observer newspaper, David Astor (1912-2001), was an important figure in the story of George Orwell’s professional and personal life; nor can the significance of Orwell in Astor’s be underestimated. They […]
Why did George Orwell join the Indian Imperial Police? He told Sonia Brownell – who was curious as to why her husband pursued this career rather than ‘Oxbridge’ – that it was a ‘long and complicated story’. He died before answering her question. The careers of two uncles, George Limouzin (1881-1977) and Arthur Blair (1846-1879), […]
George Orwell wrote at least thirteen letters to Siegfried Charoux which appear to be unknown to Orwell scholars. Twelve of these were handwritten from beds in three different hospitals, and one typed, at Orwell’s home on the Isle of Jura. On the 19th November 1948, Orwell wrote to his friend, the editor of The Observer, […]
“We are staying with the Blairs & I like it. Nothing has surprised me more, particularly since I saw the house which is very small & furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors.” Eileen Blair née O’Shaughnessy (1936) Orwell’s admission, in ‘Why I Write’, about his inability to “abandon the world-view … acquired in childhood” provides […]
“I was working in Southwold, but my home was at Bedford. What we used to do mostly was to go for long walks, talking – discussing books, like Ulysses, and he would rail against Roman Catholicism … He really felt he ought to get down and really know what life was like without anything so […]
“It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered a friend of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able to help me. I had first met him in the public ward of a hospital, where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He had told me to […]
I knew a man, I knew a man As thin as any grudging crow. “Eros with Chilblains” was not the only poem Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) wrote about George Orwell. “The Crow”, published in The Bridge (1945), was scribed at her lowest ebb during World War II. She crossed the Battersea Bridge each day to work […]