Fading Ink: Melancholy & Archives

“Came home to hear [illegible] Eric Blair is dead.”   Jack Common Archival research into the melancholic world of the past, where nearly everyone who lives on the page is long dead, can be incredibly poignant – no matter how long ago the events being recovered took place. Turning the pages of Jack Common’s near illegible […]

Orwell’s Ancestors & Robert Southey

“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 […]