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 […]
It was with great expectation that I sat down to read Paul Theroux’s latest novel, Burma Sahib, the story of Eric Blair’s experience as a colonial policeman during the 1920s. A much experienced and admired master of the art of travel writing, who better to breathe life into the historical setting, landscape and people of the period? […]
“… sufficient evidence remains to be able to assert with confidence that Orwell was in male line descent from Alexander de Blair who flourished in the first half of the 13th century.” […]
George Orwell was employed in the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service during World War Two but no recording of his voice has survived. A cache of his BBC radio scripts was discovered forty years ago – but many are still lost. My lengthy list of ideas to pursue, people and sites to visit […]
“Miss Elaine Limouzin’s recital at the Salle Erard on Thursday evening, May 4th, drew a large audience, which thoroughly appreciated the very agreeable entertainment… Miss Limouzin has an effective way of writing drolleries for herself, and her bright fun in telling one of her own pieces – “Henry Sees Life” – an account of a […]
In 1930, Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) wrote a comic poem parodying her relationship with the man who was to become George Orwell. “Eros with Chilblains”, Pitter’s ironic reaction to Eric Blair’s attempts at seduction, remained unpublished in her lifetime. Ruth Pitter’s observations of Eric Blair’s struggle to become a writer, during the period 1927-33, make her […]
Why were two of the earliest pieces of Orwell’s journalism, written in Paris during the late 1920s when he was still E.-A. Blair, published by a newspaper in Saigon? E.-A. Blair published four personal essays in a left-wing weekly Parisian newspaper, Le Progrès Civique: Journal de Perfectionnement Social, during 1928-1929. Three of the articles explored poverty […]
“Once a biographer has mastered his subject, sucked it dry as an ant does an aphid and stored its own juice in his own book, the rest of us need no longer bother our heads about inconvenient notions the biographer’s subject may have offered for our consideration.” Germaine Greer “A map is not the territory […]
“When Eric returned to England in 1927, he spent a fortnight with Auntie Lilian at Ticklerton, where Prosper and Guiny were then staying. But completely unavoidable circumstances prevented me from joining the party.” Jacintha Buddicom, Eric & Us (1974) […]
“I have begun the Chartreuse de Parme, but have read only a few pages as yet, for I saw a reference in some work to The Prince and, as I had never read it, I have begun that also and am about half way through it. I suppose you have read it long ago, probably […]
“She was the mistress of a peer of the Realm for over thirty years but would not marry him when the subject was raised because his intellect was not, apparently, equal to his sex drive.” Eric & Us (2006) Eric Blair, better known by his pen-name George Orwell, proposed marriage on more than one occasion […]
While holidaying in Cornwall with his family during the summer of 1927, Eric Blair announced his intention to quit a well-paid job with the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer. Six years later he published his first book as George Orwell. This was not the first time the Blair family had holidayed in Cornwall […]
“I want this one to be a work of art, & that can’t be done without much bloody sweat.” […]
Bibliophiles love literary curios and, with such a fascinating publishing history, George Orwell is a particularly interesting and collectible author. Often Orwell published in obscure leftwing periodicals, with small print circulations, even after the fame Animal Farm (1945) bought him. Contextually, it is often quite illuminating to see the publications where his writing first appeared. […]
“The ayah is a most important personage in the Anglo-Indian nursery, one on whom very often the whole future health and happiness of the English child depends, and yet how little care is often taken in her selection!” The English Baby in India (1893) On the day Eric Blair was baptised by […]
My new book is a Utopia in the form of a novel. I ballsed it up rather, partly owing to being so ill while I was writing it, but I think some of the ideas in it might interest you. We haven’t definitively fixed the title, but I think it will be called “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. […]
Orwell & Empire Douglas Kerr Oxford University Press, 2022, pp 240 ISBN: 978 0 192 86409 3 Once there was a British writer, an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, returned to the East after leaving school, and lived and worked there for a […]