Robert Southey 1804

“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 an important insight into his personality. It also aligns with what Sir Richard Rees (Orwell’s friend, editor and literary executor) believed: to understand Orwell, you must know Blair. I would go one step further than Rees and say that to know Orwell you need to understand his family too! This is particularly important in an effort to understand why Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922 – and his subsequent resignation from this career five years later.

While endeavouring to untangle why Orwell went East, it became apparent that much of the biographical information about his family was very limited, poorly analysed – and often wrong. This is particularly the case with his maternal side – the Limouzins and Hallileys – especially in relation to the significance of the professional career of his aunt, Nellie Limouzin, in his own life. There has also been much misunderstanding about the Blair side of the family which became apparent during the lengthy, ongoing process of researching and writing about his Scottish ancestry and Anglo-Indian family diaspora. The many ancestral trails, illuminating his personal and family context, have often been too numerous to follow – but I made notes for later reference.

One of these notes related to Robert Southey (1774-1843) who was not a literary figure that Orwell wrote about, except one minor reference in the Adelphi to “the then poet laureate” in a 1932 review of a book about Lord Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister. He would have been fascinated, and possibly he did know about this, that Southey wrote amusingly about his own forebears (and there is much evidence that his aristocratic ancestry was important to him as it was to his family).

Orwell at home in Islington, Vernon Richards, 1946

Ancestral family portraits were hanging on his wall in 1946 when Vernon Richards, the Anglo-Italian anarchist, photographed Orwell at home in his Islington flat. It is not possible to identify with certainty which Blairs adorned his otherwise spartan abode but a portrait of Lady Mary Blair née Fane (c.1741-1813) was in the possession of his sister, Avril Blair née Dunn (1908-1978), who had lived with him on Jura, in the last years of her life. Indeed, if this was the case, it was a peculiar choice of home decoration for a socialist.

Lady Mary Blair née Fane (H. Dakin, Orwell Archive)

Scattered throughout his essays, novels and diaries are many clues to his very British obsession with class and status. Eileen Blair’s own letters to a friend reveal her perceptions of his family, around the time she married Orwell in 1936:

“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. The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish & dull but one of them made a lot of money in slaves & his son Thomas who was inconceivably like a sheep married the daughter of the Duke of Westmorland (of whose existence I never heard) & went so grand that he spent all the money & couldn’t make more because slaves had gone out. So his son went into the army & came out of that into the church & married a girl of 15 who loathed him & had ten children of whom Eric’s father, now 80, is the only survivor & they are all quite penniless but still on the shivering verge of gentility as Eric calls it in his new book which I cannot think will be popular with the family.”

The ’new book’ was Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) where the protagonist Gordon Comstock (common stock) is acutely aware of his status:

“The Comstocks belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landless gentry. In their miserable poverty they had not even the snobbish consolation of regarding themselves as an ‘old’ family fallen on evil days, for they were not an ‘old’ family at all, merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity and then sank again faster than the wave itself.”

Tosco Fyvel noted in his memoir of Orwell that the Blair family’s social status was evident in the late eighteenth-century family bible whose inside covers contained the detailed tree outlining “the descendants of Charles Blair, Esq., and Lady Mary Blair (Fane) to whose children their uncle, the Earl of Westmorland, stood godfather”:

“As I looked down the list of generations in this family bible (which I think I was the first of Orwell’s friends to see) it became apparent that Orwell’s ‘dreary’ Comstock family with its working-class origin in Keep the Aspidistra Flying was no direct portrait of the Blairs. On the contrary, the Blairs resembled that other English social phenomenon which Bernard Shaw called an upper-middle-class ‘downstart’ family, with younger sons slipping successively a little down the social scale, but making it not so strange for Orwell to go to Eton on a scholarship.” (George Orwell: A Personal Memoir)

Charles Blair, Esq. & Lady Mary

Lady Mary Fane married Orwell’s great-great-grandfather Charles Blair (1743-1802) in 1762. Around this time Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) commenced a painting which was to take five years to complete and became his largest group portrait. Lady Mary’s new husband and her brother (along with Inigo Jones) are represented in all their aristocratic leisure. Charles Blair, whose wealth came from slavery, had inherited an estate on the death his father John Blair (before he was born) estimated to worth £20 342.91 in Jamaican currency (of which £12 269 was the estimated value of the enslaved people). You can read more about this wealth, interconnections and marital alliances between the Blair, Fane and other families which emanated from the society of Jamaican planters in the eighteenth century here. Orwell’s father, R.W. Blair (1857-1939) had an estate worth £505 16s. 1d. on his death nearly two hundred years later.

The Honourable Henry Fane with Inigo Jones and Charles Blair (1766) by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) Wikimedia Commons

A less well-known painting provides a glimpse of Lady Mary and Charles Blair’s two sons. Henry Charles Blair (1775-1794) and, Orwell’s great-grandfather, Charles Blair (1776-1854) were captured by Thomas Beach (1738-1806), a favourite pupil of Reynolds. Beach was an assured figure painter and natural colourist, noted for his ability to capture a good likeness. Both of these privileged boys attended Westminster School which specialised in preparing many students for an Oxford education followed by a life in the clergy.  Henry enrolled on 25th February 1785 and Charles was admitted on the 18th June 1787. It was here that they met Robert Southey.

Thomas Beach (1738-1806) Portrait of the Masters Blair: Charles and Henry Blair (Wikimedia Commons)

In 1788, Southey enrolled at the school. He suffered bullying and brutality but made lasting friendships evident in his extensive correspondence. Reading Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon and Goethe’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther, challenged his religious beliefs and made him into something of a subversive. He was expelled in 1792 for publishing an article attacking corporal punishment as an invention of the devil. The headmaster warned Christ Church, the Oxford college he expected to enter, that Southey was of undesirable character.

Portrait of Robert Southey, Aged 21, 1795 by Peter Vandyke (Wikimedia Commons)

Henry Blair died young. He purchased a commission in the 23rd Regiment of Foot, enlisting as lieutenant on the 30th June 1790. Four years later, Captain Blair died of fever while serving in the West Indies. Southey’s amusing description of his friend is worth quoting at length as it vividly portrays the world these Blairs inhabited in the late 18th century.

That fever proved fatal to a good many of my Westminster school-fellows, who, some of them because they were fit for the army, and others because they were fit for nothing else, took to that profession at the commencement of the revolutionary war. Rather a large proportion of them perished in the West Indies. “Who the devil would have thought of my burying old Blair!” was the exclamation of one who returned; and who of the two might better have been buried there himself. Blair was a cousin of the present Countess of Lonsdale, and I was as intimate with him as it was possible to be with one who boarded in another house: though it would not have been easy to have found a boy in the whole school more thoroughly unlike myself in everything, except in temper. He was, as Lord Lonsdale told me, a spoilt-child—idle, careless, fond of dogs and horses, of hunting rats, baiting badgers, and above all of driving stage-coaches. But there was a jovial hilarity, a perpetual flow of easy good spirits, a sunshine of good humour upon his countenance, and a merriment in his eye, which bring him often to my mind, and always make me think of him with a great deal of kindness. He was remarkably fat, and might have sat for the picture of Bacchus, or of Bacchus’s groom; but he was active withal.

Lord Lonsdale was a Tory peer and patron of William Wordsworth. The Countess was Lady Mary’s sister. Southey continues to amuse, in delightful detail, describing his friend’s peccadilloes:

Blair spent one summer holidays with his mother Lady Mary, at Spa, and used to amuse me greatly by his accounts of the place and the people, and the delight of travelling abroad, but above all by his description of the French postilions. He had brought back a postilion’s whip, having learnt to crack it in perfection; and that French flogger, as he called it, did all his exercises for him: for if Marsden, whom he had nominated to the office of secretary for this department, ever demurred when his services were required, crack went the French flogger, and the sound of what he never felt produced prompt obedience. The said Marsden was a person who could have poured out Latin verses, such as they were, with as much facility as an Italian improvisatore performs his easier task. I heard enough about Spa, at that time, to make me very desirous of seeing the place; and when I went thither, after my first visit to the field of Waterloo, it was more for the sake of poor Blair than for any other reason. Poor fellow, the yellow fever made short work with his plethoric frame, when he went with his regiment to the West Indies. The only station that he would thoroughly have become, would have been that of abbot in some snug Benedictine abbey, where the rule was comfortably relaxed; in such a station, where the habit would just have imposed the restraint he needed, he would have made monks, tenants, dependants, and guests all as happy as indulgence, easy good-nature, and hearty hospitality could make them. As it was, flesh of a better grain never went to the land-crabs, largely as in those days they were fed.”

Henry had a cruel streak too:

“There was another person in the remove, who, when he allowed himself time for such idle entertainment, was as fond of Blair’s conversation as I was (our intercourse with him was only during school-hours), but to whom I was attached by sympathies of a better kind. This was William Bean, the son of an apothecary at Camberwell, from which place he walked every day to school, a distance of more than three miles to and fro. He had a little of the cockney pronunciation, for which Blair used to laugh at him and mimic him; his appearance was odd, as well as remarkable, and made the worse by his dress. One day when he had gone into the boarding-house with me, Dickenson (the present member for Somersetshire, a good-natured man) came into the room; and fixing his eyes upon him, exclaimed with genuine surprise, “O you cursed quiz, what is your name?” One Sunday afternoon, when with my two most intimate associates (Combe and Lambe) I had been taking a long ramble on the Surrey side of the river, we met Bean somewhere near the Elephant and Castle returning home from a visit, in his Sunday’s suit of dittos, and in a cocked-hat to boot. However contented he might have been in this costume, I believe that, rather than have been seen in it by us, he would have been glad if the earth had opened, and he could have gone down for five minutes to Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. However, the next morning, when he threw himself upon our mercy, and entreated that we would not say that we had met him in a cock and pinch, my companions promised him, as willingly as I did, to be silent.”

Frontpiece: The life & correspondence of the late Robert Southey, Volume 1, 1849

Southey’s literary output was vast and varied, encompassing poetry, history, biography and essays. One of the Lake Poets, alongside Wordsworth and Coleridge, he produced notable works like “Thalaba the Destroyer” and “The Curse of Kehama”, epic poems infused with myth and exotic settings. These anecdotes about Orwell’s great-uncle may whet your appetite for his “Letters from England” – the work of an imaginary Spanish traveller satirising the peculiar customs of 19th century English culture – offers equally keen social commentary on everything from the weather, to industrial capitalism and the English language. “There are too much riches and too much poverty”. While the satire is mostly gentle, Don Manuel “finds some aspects of English life alarming, comparing “commerce to a witch who has cast a baleful spell on the entire population, tainting every aspect of society”.

Although his later reputation dimmed compared to his contemporaries, his contributions. Southey, a radical in his youth grew more conservative as he aged and came to appreciate British institutions and life. This would be a fair description of George Orwell too.

Charles Blair, Orwell’s great-grandfather lived a long and eventful life. There is more to tell but in summary, he served as a Captain in 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, marrying in Dublin in 1796.  He was stationed in South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope, as a Collector of Customs from 1808-1826. Charles, born into wealth and privilege, ended up alone living with one servant at 15 Pulteney Street Bath. He appears to have been estranged from his wife for many years (she does not appear in census records with him) leaving £8650 to four of his children, including Orwell’s grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair. By the time Orwell’s father died, the wealth of aristocratic Fanes and slave-owning Blairs, as all Orwell’s biographers have understood, was very distant indeed.

R.W. Blair’s estate was worth £505 16s. 1d.

REFERENCES
Baetjer, Katharine, British Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575-1875, Yale University Press, 2010

Carnall, Geoffrey, “Southey, Robert (1774–1843), poet and reviewer.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011

Davison, Peter, The Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of George Orwell, Timewell Press, 2006

Fyvel, T.R, George Orwell: A Personal Memoir, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982

Graves, R. E., and Peter Tomory, “Beach, Thomas (bap. 1737, d. 1806), portrait painter”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2009

Southey, Rev. Charles Cuthbert (ed), The life & correspondence of the late Robert Southey, Volume 1, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849

Stansky, Peter & Abrahams, William, The Unknown Orwell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972

UCL Department of History, Charles Blair senior, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database, Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, University College London. Available online at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146636746

Westminster School Archives & Collections

FEATURED IMAGE
Robert Southey by Henry Edridge, 1804 © National Portrait Gallery, London

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Comments(2)

    • Ronald Binns

    • 2 months ago

    More fascinating connections, as well as the revelation of the Thomas Beach portrait! However, what I find particularly intriguing is the location of Henry Charles Blair’s death. It was (according to Peter Stansky and William Abrahams in The Unknown Orwell) Santo Domingo. Given the year of his death the implication is surely that Henry Charles Blair was involved in the suppression of the great slave revolt there. The extended Blair family not only profited from slavery, it appears that one member was actively involved in seeking to defend and perpetuate it by participating in military repression.

    It’s curious that Orwell wrote that he only knew the names of three slaves: Spartacus, Aesop and Epictetus (Tribune, 28 July 1944; CW XVI, p. 305). He appears not to have been aware of Santo Domingo’s Toussaint L’Ouverture, who not only inspired an admiring sonnet by William Wordsworth but who was the focus of C. L. R. James’s radical pioneering work, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published in 1938 by Secker & Warburg.

    This ignorance on Orwell’s part is perhaps even more surprising given that upon his return from Spain he’d met C. L. R. James and read and admired James’s pioneering anti-Stalinist book World Revolution 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. Orwell was a voracious reader but for whatever reason he seems never to have read a number of key texts from the 1930s which presented devastating critiques of colonialism and the British Empire. One of these, The Black Jacobins, cast a shadow over his ancestry.

      • Darcy Moore

      • 2 months ago

      Hi Ronald,

      Your superbly insightful comment led me to read, The Black Jacobins! It is incredibly well-written and researched; it must have been recognised as ground-breaking when published in 1938 and Orwell would have admired it. I hypothesise that Orwell may never have read the book due to the time it was published. As you know, he was convalescing after being badly wounded in Spain and then in Morocco, for the drier climate, due to his TB. WWII followed.
      I have done some more research into 1793-94 as a result of your observations and am currently thinking about the connections between Bordeaux shipbuilders with San Domingo in the light of records which show members of the Limouzin family travelling to Madeira.
      I will update my post in coming weeks to reflect these insights. More anon..
      Darcy

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