Search Results for: shooting an elephant

Actor Alan Cox performs ‘An Incident in Rangoon’, one of Orwell’s preliminary sketches for Burmese Days. Adapted by Dominic Cavendish, exclusively for the Orwell Prize Launch 2010: What next for Burma?

Video

Alan Cox is a respected actor on stage and screen. Before attending LAMDA, he appeared as a young John Mortimer in A Voyage Round My Father (opposite Sir Laurence Olivier) and as Young Watson in Young Sherlock Holmes. He recently played David Frost in the US national tour of Frost/Nixon (and was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award) and appeared as George Orwell and O’Brien in Orwell: A Celebration during summer 2009.

Dominic Cavendish is comedy critic for the Daily Telegraph as well as its deputy theatre critic, and has written on theatre and the arts for The Independent, Time Out and The Big Issue. He is also the founder of theatreVOICE. In 2008, he adapted George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air as a one-man show (starring Hal Cruttenden) at the Edinburgh Festival; it also formed the basis for summer 2009’s Orwell: A Celebration, for which Dominic also adapted ‘A Hanging’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and part of 1984.

Orwell is a writer who continually experimented with narrative voice and presence. Failure to understand Orwell’s play with narrative perspective is perhaps an underlying cause of critical dissatisfaction with Orwell’s fiction. For what has been largely missed is the fact that the narrative voices, which are subject to continual shifts in psychological perspective and narratorial positioning, have been carefully placed in accordance with a high degree of narrative understanding. It has to be said that this is not how Orwell’s work is considered by many: ‘[Orwell’s] four pre-war efforts constitute a sort of amateur throat clearing’[1]. And: ‘[Orwell’s] whole work is a kind of didactic monologue’[2].

In Down and Out in Paris and London, as with his other documentary works, a relatively straightforward authorial point of view operates, one that is manifestly different from the variable, third-person voice of Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and also the first-person voice in Coming Up for Air. In Down and Out, as one would expect, the speaking voice works appropriately as a conduit for the author’s thoughts and perspective. Orwell’s thirties’ novels are widely perceived to be failed attempts at leaving the journalistic tone behind. At best Orwell is seen only to half succeed in establishing another voice, and when he does it is claimed that one cannot distinguish, for the greater part, between Orwell’s voice and that of his characters’. In fact, Orwell does make distinctions in his novels; what is more, he layers his narrative with different voices, thereby distancing the omniscient narrator and bringing in a fallible human voice that has the effect of softening the didacticism by way of truer-to-life accents.

Orwell’s alternating narrative style can be immediately discerned by contrasting Down and Out in Paris and London (given first) with Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping (D&O, p. 76).

Women, women! … Why should one, merely because one has no money, be deprived of that? … What else could you expect? He had no hold over her. No money, therefore no hold. In the last resort, what holds a woman to a man, except money? (KTAF, pp. 113-4)

In the first passage on poverty there is no uncertainty about who is speaking – it is Orwell; it is a ‘straightforward’ authorial point of view. In the second passage, on the fickleness of women, is it as clear from whom the fictive utterance comes? Should this insight into the female disposition in relation to love and money be taken as representing the author’s thoughts? And if not, is this voice valid in itself, i.e. is this an example of a Dostoevskyan author-thinker whose argument should be treated with the respect one affords an author? David Seed puts it neatly when he writes, referring to Burmese Days, that Orwell’s protagonist ‘Flory enacts the novelist’s dissatisfaction with the Anglo-Indians by renouncing the club’[3]. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell employs various narrative devices to signal that Gordon Comstock in no way enacts the author’s dissatisfaction with the moneyed world by his renunciation of it. This is mostly achieved through free indirect thought (or free indirect speech) presentation where a character’s thoughts replace the voice of the omniscient narrator. Many critics mistake a character’s, often flawed, vision of the world for authorial commentary. With free indirect thought a character’s thoughts are not formally indicated with the he/she thought tag, nor are there any quotation marks, but instead the narration unobtrusively shifts into their perspective, although adopting key linguistic markers to alert the reader to the altered internal focalisation, through the use of exclamation marks, colloquial language, viewing position and so on.

Orwell as a proletarian novelist was keen to reflect the thought processes of ordinary people and this meant showing their often limited and prejudiced view of the world. For example, when Flory, in Burmese Days, makes one of his typical anti-imperial remarks, such as, ‘The official holds the Burman down while the business man goes through his pockets’ (p. 38), all might be well in terms of valid comment. However, Flory adds, ‘The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to … gangs of Jews and Scotchmen’. This political observation, then, whilst being partly true is shown as too complex for Flory’s intellectual grasp; but, after all, he is just your ‘average sensual man’ and therefore limited[4]. The leitmotif of limitation works on all narrative levels. There is a crucial point in the book where Flory is tormented because he believes the woman he loves, Elizabeth Lackersteen, may be having an affair with the handsome and wealthy young Lieutenant, the Honourable Verrall:

But meanwhile, was it true, what he suspected? Had Verrall really become Elizabeth’s lover? There is no knowing, but on the whole the chances were against it, for, had it been so, there would have been no concealing it in such a place as Kyauktada (p. 236).

This kind of narration demonstrates that there is restricted vision, and this serves to limit the powers of the narrator. Again, it is the deliberate use of a ‘limited intermediary’ and this brings the reader into play. A sense, almost of deficiency, often strong in Flory’s political commentary, is woven into the narrative, which undermines the asides, reflections, casual comments and universal truths expressed, so that nothing can be taken at face-value because the ‘integrity’ of the speaker is not, in a sense, known. Toward the end of the story, Verrall leaves without saying goodbye to Elizabeth. The narrative runs, ‘Whether Verrall had started the train early to escape Elizabeth, or to escape the grass-wallahs, was an interesting question that was never cleared up’ (p. 279). Of course, this also operates as a joke, but it is very much in keeping with an overall narrative caprice or seeming caprice that vacillates between omniscience and limitation—a feature of Orwell’s political aesthetic throughout his writing career.

Orwell’s desire to reduce the presence of the author in his narration can also be traced through the excessive use of the second-person ‘you’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter and the novels that follow. Unlike Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter opens with the informal ‘you’. It serves to create a subjective, intimate mood from the outset, and the voice that follows, while not Dorothy’s, is aligned with her way of seeing and thinking, and gives the illusion that the narrator is an active participant in the story: ‘The alarm clock continued its nagging, feminine clamour, which would go on for five minutes or thereabouts if you did not stop it’ (p. 1). It would be natural enough to write this as a passive sentence and thus avoid the subject ‘you’: ‘which would go on for five minutes or thereabouts if it were not stopped’ [my italics], but to do that would create a more objective commentary. The passive sentence is practically non-existent in Orwell’s thirties’ novels. Moreover, it is the narrator behind the ‘you’ that is significant. Who is speaking here? Who would be inclined to describe the alarm of a clock as a ‘nagging, feminine clamour’?

Daphne Patai believes that the description of the ‘nagging’ clock unwittingly betrays a masculine bias, one that will subsequently fall short in portraying a female character with any real sympathy: ‘If the book’s title prepares us for a narrative about a woman, the novel’s second line reveals that this woman and her story will be judged from a conventionally biased masculine perspective’[5]. Patai does not consider that Orwell has intentionally opted for this patriarchal inferiorization of female association in the description. This is more likely to be Dorothy’s feeling toward the clock that might wake her father, which, if it did, would certainly be viewed by him as ‘nagging, feminine clamour’[6]. Dorothy is even afraid to let the bath water run freely lest it awaken her father: ‘Dorothy filled the bath as slowly as possible—the splashing always woke her father if she turned on the tap too fast’ (p. 2). So the narrative, whilst appearing to have a sexist bias, is actually always aligned with Dorothy’s point of view.

I have just given a taste here of the degree to which Orwell delivered highly controlled narratives; and even this brief demonstration of Orwell’s narrative method should make it astonishing that many of his novels are dismissed as half-baked, with critics cavalierly asserting, with exiguous recourse to textual example, that ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter is pretty well unreadable today’[7]. Orwell’s novels are demonstrably more than this, and it has to be understood that Orwell was a ruthless and blinkered critic when it came to his own work. Moreover, he was never constructive when criticizing himself; he was merely emotional, and a good demonstration of this is the fact that he ‘destroyed an entire manuscript after a single publisher’s letter’[8].

Notes

[It] display[s] two obvious weaknesses. Like his other novels, this too deals with a solitary character, but Orwell has compounded this fact with the greater failing—as he himself was soon to pronounce it—of making it a first-person narrative (David Wykes, A Preface to George Orwell (London: Longman, 1987) p. 106).

Typically, no examples of this obvious weakness are provided; in their place is Orwell’s self-denigration.

Loraine taught English as a foreign language in Brazil, Germany and Poland after graduating from university. She went on to complete her PhD in English literature at Liverpool University and then taught at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and currently Hope Liverpool. Having just had her first book published, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell she is currently pursuing further subjects. This essay is an extract from her book, The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1936)
• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1942)
• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling

One of the greatest of modern British writers was an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, and returned to the East to work after leaving school. Empire, and the relation between those in authority and those under authority, became one of the principal themes of his writing, both in journalism and in fiction. He lived by his pen, and made a name as an author of strong political convictions. Many of his stories and phrases have embedded themselves in the English language and the consciousness of its users, even of those who have never actually read his work. Both admired and hated in his own lifetime, his genius made him a spokesman and a symbol in the great ideological contentions of modern times, and after his death he was considered not only an important writer, but also but a particular embodiment of the character of his country.

Well actually, not one of the greatest of modern British writers. Two of the greatest of modern British writers.

Orwell and Kipling emerge – and I think are beginning to emerge, even in the academic discourse of English literature – as giant figures, or twinned heraldic animals like the lion and the unicorn, of modern British writing. And though our first instinct is to think of them as opposites, the curious similarities between them proliferate. Both of them were patriots, though highly critical of their fellow-countrymen and frequently of their government. Both were public intellectuals who used their writing to raise political consciousness. Both loved animals and wrote books about them, and both had a strong feeling for the English countryside.

Both were men of principle, but they were also realists in the sense of a non-theoretical empiricism. They were both impatient with orthodoxy and theory. Orwell’s disgust at W. H. Auden’s glib phrase about “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” – “It could only be written,” Orwell said, “by a person to whom murder is at most a word” (XII, 103) – reminds me a little of Kipling’s rage at liberals like “Pagett M.P.” who pontificated about India without bothering to learn about it [1]. Both attitudes, to be sure, have something of the smugness of a man of the world, playing the trump card of experience.

Importantly – this is part of what makes them modern – both had a global vision. Though Orwell at one point kept a village shop, and Kipling for years impersonated a country gentleman at Burwash, they were the opposite of provincial. Both of them were exasperated by British (English?) insularity. “What do they know of England, who only England know?” was Kipling’s lament that his neighbours knew and cared so little about their achievements, and obligations, in the wide world. Orwell agreed about the ignorance. He pointed out that most ordinary people at home had no idea or understanding of the fact that their whole economic way of life depended on Britain’s “coolie empire” overseas. His words, though brutally phrased, have a resonance for those of us who enjoy a more modern form of globalization. “We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue” (XIII, 153). This comes from his Horizon essay on Kipling (1942), one of the best he wrote.

Kipling and Orwell were citizens of the world. But the origin of this cosmopolitanism was rather different in their two cases. For Kipling, it was a function of empire. He travelled all over it, he came to think of himself as its bard, and though he was an acute observer of its local differences, he also found it everywhere the same. The empire he knew or imagined was a world network of power, hierarchical relationships, security and welfare. Globally diffused, it had little to do any more with the European island that had given birth to it. Sometimes when he speaks of it, he makes it sound like the United Nations. Empire was something the African bushman and the Himalayan hillgirl and the Irish infantryman had in common. It was, at its most exalted, a global moral force. At its core, of course, for Kipling, was the authority and duty of white people, the “white man’s burden”. Kipling’s empire was a vision of the world, a global Utopia, but it was a racially understood and organized world, under white government. Like his friend Cecil Rhodes, he continued to hope that the United States would re-federate with the British Empire (perhaps after a handsome apology on both sides?) and rule the world.

Orwell, of course, did not recognize that empire in the least, except as a foreshadowing of the terrible warring superpowers envisaged in Nineteen Eighty Four. His own global vision derived from his socialism, which is always a kind of internationalism. That was what gave him a feeling of kinship with the Italian militiaman he describes meeting in the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia; and it was that sense of the world that had brought him to fight with the POUM militia in Spain, among people with whom, admittedly, he had very little in common and whose speech he could hardly understand. It was the betrayal of that internationalism, first in Barcelona and later everywhere else, that most disgusted him about Stalin and the regime he ruled in a country that had the word “socialist” in its name. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Orwell and Kipling were globalists. There was nothing narrow about either of them. They could see the whole picture.

The similarities are intriguing. The differences, of course, were polar. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person,” Orwell writes (XIII, 151). Kipling was an imperialist – though not a fascist (his outlook was “prefascist”, says Orwell carefully). Orwell was anti-imperialist; in fact his entire politics was erected on the emotional experience of his service in Burma as a policeman of the British Empire, and it was when he came to understand the relation between that, and what he saw and experienced in Spain, that the Orwellian politics emerged in its mature form. He was prepared to argue that some of what empire did was for the good: what it was, however, was indefensible.

There were personal and aesthetic differences as well as ideological ones. Kipling was brilliant and precocious, doing some of his best work in his twenties. He had his unhappiness, but I think he never doubted his imaginative and creative powers. He would not have understood Orwell’s gloomy statement that writing a book was like undergoing an illness. Orwell’s genius was entirely prosaic, he was a slow starter, diffident and often clumsy, always disappointed with his own work, the kind of writer for whom every book was doomed to be, in T. S. Eliot’s words, a different kind of failure. I don’t know that Kipling ever read anything written by Orwell. When Orwell criticizes Kipling’s work, he objects to his ideas, but also repeatedly to his vulgarity, and this is a complaint that probably has its roots in Eton rather than on the road to Wigan Pier. But one thing that the 1942 essay shows very clearly is that Orwell knew Kipling’s writing very well indeed. [2]

This is hardly surprising. For a boy of Orwell’s class and generation, and especially for one whose father actually worked for the Government of India, Kipling was the author of childhood. First The Just So Stories, then the Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies, Kim, Stalky and Co…. Not just a favourite on the nursery bookshelf, Kipling was the author of childhood for the sons (daughters too) of empire in a wider sense; they experienced the world through his eyes, and Kipling’s books helped them to see and relate to the important things in their environment – animals, the natural world, home, parents and other adults, jokes and games, friends, school, and later more abstract issues, like duty, work, country, masculinity and femininity.

When the young Eric Blair, fresh from school, went to Burma to serve in the police, he was going to a place that Kipling had more or less invented for the benefit of his fellow-countrymen: they knew about the Orient, and Orientals, through him. Leonard Woolf, who belonged to the generation between Kipling and Orwell, went to work as a colonial official in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1904, and found the place uncannily familiar. It was Kipling country. Woolf said he could not decide whether Kipling had been brilliantly accurate in his description of the British in the East, or whether by now the British in the East modelled themselves on Kipling’s characters. [3]

Orwell too must have felt a sense of déjà vu in the “Kipling-haunted clubs” of British Burma. Kipling is a ghostly background figure in “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”, and above all in Burmese Days. The racist mediocrities who hang out in the club at Kyauktada are Kipling characters, stripped of the glamour and charm with which Kipling invested them. But Veraswami, the comically pro-British Indian doctor, is a variation on a theme by Kipling too, and so is the wily and corrupt U Po Kyin. As for the central character Flory, his local mistress, his white fiancée, his enjoyment of the jungle, his sporting activities, his close friendship with an Indian, his moment of heroism during a riot, his disgrace, and his eventual suicide, all have identifiable precedents in Kipling. One thing you do not find in Kipling, though, is the central theme of Burmese Days, an Englishman in the East who has lost his faith in empire.

A knowledge of Kipling helps us to understand Orwell, for no writer was more important to him, as an influence, example, and antagonist. In some sense Orwell’s whole life was a conversation, or quarrel, with Kipling. He seemed to acknowledge this when he wrote, when Kipling died, “I worshipped [him] at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him” (X, 409).

But a knowledge of Orwell also helps us to understand Kipling, in a number of ways. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot talks about how, when a new literary work appears on the scene, every existing work is modified by it and the whole scene subtly rearranged. Thus, we can’t really read Kipling’s stories of the Raj in the same way once we have read Burmese Days. Though Kipling’s words are unchanged, the Orwell novel has changed how we read them.

Kipling, who died in 1936, did not know that the empire he loved would disappear within a lifetime. So in a sense we know more about the British Empire than Kipling did, because we know what was to happen to it. The one thing Kipling seems not to have been able to imagine was an alternative to empire. But if we know Orwell, we know the work of someone who devoted his whole writing lifetime to answering the question of what such an alternative might look like, and how – and how difficult it would be – to achieve it.

Notes

Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Clarendon Press), George Orwell (Writers and their Work series), and co-editor, with Julia Kuehn, of A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong University Press). He is also a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.

First published by Finlay Publisher

The Orwell Foundation is delighted to make available a selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell.

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. All queries regarding rights should be addressed to the Estate’s representatives at A. M. Heath literary agency.

The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

Sketches For Burmese Days

• 1. John Flory – My Epitaph
• 2. Extract, Preliminary to Autobiography
• 3. Extract, the Autobiography of John Flory
• 4. An Incident in Rangoon
• 5. Extract, A Rebuke to the Author, John Flory

Essays and articles

• A Day in the Life of a Tramp (Le Progrès Civique, 1929)
• A Hanging (The Adelphi, 1931)
• A Nice Cup of Tea (Evening Standard, 1946)
• Antisemitism in Britain (Contemporary Jewish Record, 1945)
• Arthur Koestler (written 1944)
• British Cookery (unpublished, 1946)
• Can Socialists be Happy? (as John Freeman, Tribune, 1943)
• Common Lodging Houses (New Statesman, 3 September 1932)
• Confessions of a Book Reviewer (Tribune, 1946)
• “For what am I fighting?” (New Statesman, 4 January 1941)
• Freedom and Happiness – Review of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Tribune, 1946)
• Freedom of the Park (Tribune, 1945)
• Future of a Ruined Germany (The Observer, 1945)
• Good Bad Books (Tribune, 1945)
• In Defence of English Cooking (Evening Standard, 1945)
• In Front of Your Nose (Tribune, 1946)
• Just Junk – But Who Could Resist It? (Evening Standard, 1946)
• My Country Right or Left (Folios of New Writing, 1940)
• Nonsense Poetry (Tribune, 1945)
• Notes on Nationalism (Polemic, October 1945)
• Pleasure Spots (Tribune, January 1946)
• Poetry and the microphone (The New Saxon Pamphlet, 1945)
• Politics and the English Language (Horizon, 1946)
• Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels (Polemic, 1946)
• Reflections on Gandhi (Partisan Review, 1949)
• Rudyard Kipling (Horizon, 1942)
• Second Thoughts on James Burnham (Polemic, 1946)
• Shooting an Elephant (New Writing, 1936)
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (Tribune, 1946)
• Spilling the Spanish Beans (New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937)
• The Art of Donald McGill (Horizon, 1941)
• The Moon Under Water (Evening Standard, 1946)
• The Prevention of Literature (Polemic, 1946)
• The Proletarian Writer (BBC Home Service and The Listener, 1940)
• The Spike (Adelphi, 1931)
• The Sporting Spirit (Tribune, 1945)
• Why I Write (Gangrel, 1946)
• You and the Atom Bomb (Tribune, 1945)

Reviews by Orwell

• Anonymous Review of Burmese Interlude by C. V. Warren (The Listener, 1938)
• Anonymous Review of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis (The Listener, 1938)
• Review of The Pub and the People by Mass-Observation (The Listener, 1943)

Letters and other material

• BBC Archive: George Orwell
• Free will (a one act drama, written 1920)
• George Orwell to Steven Runciman (August 1920)
• George Orwell to Victor Gollancz (9 May 1937)
• George Orwell to Frederic Warburg (22 October 1948, Letters of Note)
• ‘Three parties that mattered’: extract from Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Voice – a magazine programme, episode 6 (BBC Indian Service, 1942)
• Your Questions Answered: Wigan Pier (BBC Overseas Service)
• The Freedom of the Press: proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945, first published 1972)
• Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (March 1947)

External links are being provided for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by The Orwell Foundation of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organisation or individual. The Foundation bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

Welcome to The Orwell Foundation’s library of works about George Orwell and his writing, consisting of material exclusive to this site and links to external sites.

We continue to add to the library, so please get in touch if you find any good work about Orwell online. Pages behind paywalls are indicated with a ‘£’. Please consider making a donation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

If you have any recommended additions to The Orwell Foundation online library, or encounter any broken links, please contact us.

External links are being provided for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by The Orwell Foundation of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organisation or individual. The Foundation bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division.

Orwell’s five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there. Almost nothing is known of Orwell’s time in the province, other than that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). It also ruined his health. Although disillusioned by the Imperial ‘racket’ he had helped to administer, he left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return.

For the next five years he led a vagrant life. Some of this time was spent at his parents’ home in Southwold, Suffolk. There were periods teaching in private schools, living in Paris and masquerading as a tramp, the background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His professional alias, which combined the name of the reigning monarch with a local river, was adopted shortly before publication. His teaching career was brought to a close by a bout of pneumonia and at the end of 1934, having used a long, recuperative stay in Southwold to complete a second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he decamped to London to work in a Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and married his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Orwells began their married life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although the book’s second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on Socialism, Orwell’s political views were still not fully formed. The defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against Franco. He was wounded in the throat – the bullet passing within a few millimetres of his carotid artery – and was present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit-squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyist POUM militia, of which he had been a member. Spain made Orwell ‘believe in Socialism for the first time’, as he put it, while instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose: this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC’s atmosphere, he complained, ‘is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless’. In 1943 he secured a more congenial billet as literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he also contributed a column under the heading ‘As I Please’.

Animal Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was written by the middle of 1944. Publishers’ timidity, and the covert pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. By this time Orwell’s personal life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his sister Avril, determined to raise on his own.

Through his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel’s enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too late for its author. He was transferred to University College Hospital in September and died there on 21 January 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death he made an unexpected second marriage to Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Sitting down to read his obituaries on the day of his funeral, his friend Malcolm Muggeridge thought that he saw in them ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich.

Although George Orwell (Eric Blair) was born in India and grew up in Henley-on-Thames, he was a Londoner by adoption[1]. He lived and worked in various places around the city, not all of them marked with commemoration plaques. It was in London in the early 1930s that he was down-and-out, and in London in the late 40s that he found a fame and fortune he would never live fully to enjoy. London features in much of his writing, and one can still recreate important stretches of his life by visiting parts of the city where, at various times, he tried to scratch a living as schoolteacher, bookseller, novelist and reviewer.

View Orwell’s London in a larger map

By 1917, young Blair was a scholarship boy at Eton. At about that time, his mother moved from Henley to London to do war-work for the Ministry of Pensions, renting a pied-à-terre at 23 Cromwell Crescent, Earl’s Court, a house sadly no longer there. Later, in one of his ‘London Letters’ for the Partisan Review, he wrote disdainfully of ‘The foul… endless… “London fogs” of my childhood’, and, in The Road to Wigan Pier, about ‘the dreary wastes of Kensington and Earl’s Court’, home of the slowly expiring upper middle-classes.
View Orwell’s London in a larger map

But not everything about Georgian London was distasteful to him. His Bohemian Aunt Nellie Limouzin lived not far away, in a top-floor flat at 195, Ladbroke Grove where she frequently entertained her Suffragette and literary friends. There he met such figures as G.K. Chesterton and E. Nesbit, the children’s writer and composer of socialist hymns, and the communist vicar, Conrad Noel, who famously ran the red flag up the tower of his parish church at Thaxted. It was through Nellie (a one-time vaudevillian) that he first discovered the London music halls (the world of the vulgar seaside postcard brought to life, as he saw it), and came to relish the bawdy humour of Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Little Tich and later Max Miller.

During the Second World War, he reviewed a Miller performance at the Holborn Empire for Time and Tide. ‘Max Miller, who looks more like a Middlesex Street hawker than ever when he is wearing a tail coat and a shiny top hat,’ he wrote, ‘is one of a long line of English comedians who have specialized in the Sancho Panza side of life, in real lowness. To do this probably needs more talent than to express nobility.’ However, he rated Little Tich ‘the real master’ of the low comedic art, concluding that ‘It would seem that you cannot be funny without being vulgar.’

The musical theatre obviously appealed to the young Etonian. Seeing the long-running musical Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, as a boy, gave him a vision of the mysterious East (somewhat different from that of Kipling), which may have coloured his expectations of Burma when he went there as a nineteen year-old. The charm of the show, he recalled, ‘lay in the fantastic unreality of the whole thing, and the droves of women, practically naked and painted to an agreeable walnut-juice tint. It was a never-never land, the “gorgeous East”, where, as is well-known, everyone has fifty wives and spends his time lying on a divan, eating pomegranates.’ And he long remembered seeing Nigel Playfair’s acclaimed productions of The Beggar’s Opera and The Blue Lagoon in 1920 at the Lyric Hammersmith.

By 1918, the Blairs had moved to a flat in Mall Chambers on Kensington Mall at Notting Hill Gate. They were not particularly well-off (his father was a retired Indian Civil Servant), and Mall Chambers was a block of low-rental flats provided mainly for artisans. The area probably suited him well because of its many literary associations — Wyndham Lewis, Hilaire Belloc and Ford Madox Ford lived nearby and William Cobbett had set off on his rural rides from Notting Hill.

After Eton, Blair joined the Indian Police Service in Burma, but resigned after five years, disgusted with what policing the Empire had required of him. (Famously, he was once witness to a hanging.) His first novel, Burmese Days, and the confessional passages in The Road to Wigan Pier are good guides to his state of mind at that time. He was determined to seek redemption by sinking into the lower depths. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, his third novel, he writes of his alter ego, Gordon Comstock:

He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to sink…It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.

Gordon finds that purgatorial underground in the slums of old Lambeth, but initially the twenty-four year-old Eric Blair sought it elsewhere.

In late 1927, his friend Ruth Pitter, the poet, found him an unheated attic at 22 Portobello Road, a short walk from his old home at Notting Hill Gate. The room was so cold that he had to warm his hands over a candle-flame before he could start writing in the morning. From this icy cell he set out in old clothes to mingle with the tramps and down-and-outs who slept along the Embankment, in common lodging-houses and ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses. Most of these spikes and lodging-houses (or ‘kips’) have long gone, though a few of the old workhouse buildings survive, often as NHS hospitals. It was from a kip in Lambeth that he tramped down to Kent to go hop-picking among the East Enders and gypsy families who migrated there every year for a working holiday. This experience is recaptured in his very first article for the New Statesman in October 1931, and also lies at the heart of his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.

After almost two years in Paris, where poverty forced him into working as a menial plongeur in the kitchens of a luxury hotel, he returned home. His family were now living in Southwold on the Suffolk coast, but he often tramped to London to spend time with his friends the Fierzes, who lived in Oakwood Road, Golders Green. Mabel Fierz, a vivacious and opinionated middle-aged woman, considered herself something of a talent-spotter, and it was she who took the manuscript of what was then called Days in Paris and London to the literary agent who sold it to Victor Gollancz. The re-entitled Down and Out in Paris and London, for which he first took the pseudonym ‘George Orwell’, appeared in 1933.

A year earlier, in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled, Orwell decided to get himself arrested. He thought of starting a bonfire in Trafalgar Square — where occasionally he slept out under newspapers with the other vagrants — but his friend, Jack Common, told him that if he wanted a decent stretch inside he should go in for theft. Finally, he went down to the Mile End Road, drank five pints followed by a quarter bottle of whisky and ended up in an East End police cell. Sadly for Orwell, however, after just one night behind bars, the magistrate dismissed him with a small fine. This experience produced a short essay, ‘Clink’, published for the first time in The Complete Works of George Orwell (2000), and also found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Other experiences of underground London further informed his novels. Rayner Heppenstall, the novelist and broadcaster, remembered how difficult it was to pry Orwell loose from the clutches of an eager tart in a Hampstead pub, and earlier he had been thrown out of lodgings in Paddington for entertaining ladies of the night in his room. But this was all grist to his fiction-mill. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, he describes how Dorothy finds herself unexpectedly in a house of ill-fame, and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying how Gordon is whisked off to a brothel by a Piccadilly prostitute. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith recalls a loveless encounter with an aging hooker (‘She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary, in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.’) Each of these descriptions smacks of first-hand experience.

In 1934, like certain other contemporaries — Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, for example — Orwell did a stint as a schoolteacher, first in Hayes (The Hawthorns) then at Uxbridge (Frays College), where he lamented the encroachment of hideous suburbs across the idyllic country landscape of southern England. Even so, it was amid this urban desolation that first he completed Burmese Days, then caught pneumonia and came close to death. The following year, he was back in the city, working at a Hampstead bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, at the corner of South End Green and Pond Street, just below the Royal Free Hospital. The bookshop has gone, but Orwell’s time there is commemorated with a plaque[2]. The shop and his life as a bookseller were described in his 1936 essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’, later included in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968), and feature in somewhat exaggerated form in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

For a while he lived at 77, Parliament Hill, overlooking Hampstead Heath, and there at a party he met his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, an Oxford English graduate who had been taught by J.R.R. Tolkien. She was then doing an MA in psychology at University College and living with her widowed mother in Greenwich. Finding the rent too high, Orwell moved into a flat with his young friends, Heppenstall and the Irish poet and critic, Michael Sayers, at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, where Sayers made a strange discovery about their eccentric housemate. One day, in the first-floor living-room, he found the man he called ‘Eric Orwell’ copying passages from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trying, he said, to perfect a style which excluded adjectives. It was a style he demonstrated soon afterwards in his celebrated essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ — probably the first example of the windowpane-like prose for which he is now celebrated.

For the next four years, after marrying Eileen in 1936, he lived in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington, with absences to investigate unemployment in the North, fight in the Spanish Civil War, and finally, after an attack of TB, convalesce in Morocco. Before leaving for Spain and after his return, the couple stayed at 24 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, the home of Eileen’s surgeon brother Laurence. It was there in October 1939, that Orwell had a grim but prophetic vision of the looming war, as he told Rayner Heppenstall — ‘I was down at Greenwich the other day and looking at the river I thought what wonders a few bombs would work among the shipping.’ He was also staying with Laurence in Greenwich on the day war broke out, 3 September 1939, and from there that in August 1940 he watched the first real raid of the London blitz and saw the East India docks going up in flames.

Occasionally during those immediate pre-war years, he travelled into the city to visit his publishers, whose offices stood just off the Strand — Victor Gollancz, to the north, at 14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and Secker and Warburg to the south, at 22 Essex Street, down towards the Thames. The Strand is where George Bowling, hero of Coming Up For Air, has the Proustian moment — a newspaper headline and the recalled smell of sainfoin chaff evoking the Golden Age of his Thameside childhood — which sends him off in search of lost time. Pedestrians swarming along the Strand also provided him with another eve-of-war vision — a recurrent one for Orwell — of England sleeping even as bombs and a war of annihilation threaten:

The usual crowd that you can hardly fight your way through was streaming up the pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their faces that people have in London streets, and there was the usual jam of traffic with the great red buses nosing their way between the cars and the engines roaring and horns tooting. Enough noise to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleep walkers…And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round the corner and that war’s the end of all things… We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what’s coming to them. It was as if I’d got X rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking.

Mostly, the ungainly, ascetic Orwell avoided London literary circles and what he called ‘the slimy careerism’ of certain writers and critics, but on at least one occasion in the 30s, at a time when left-wing politics were becoming fashionable, he attended a party thrown by his friend Cyril Connolly at his flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea (at number 312) attended by a number of fashionable women, and made an unexpected impression.

He came along, looking gaunt and shaggy, shabby, aloof [recalled Connolly], and he had this extraordinary magical effect on these women. They all wanted to meet him and started talking to him, and their fur coats shook with pleasure. They were totally unprepared for anyone like that and they responded to something — this sort of John the Baptist figure coming in from the wilderness — and suddenly the women feel it doesn’t matter what his political views are, he’s a wonderful man. And that was rather the effect he had everywhere, I think.

For a couple of years after the outbreak of war, he reviewed both plays and films for Time & Tide, for some months commuting from his cottage in Hertfordshire for the purpose. Eileen found employment first at the Censorship Office in Whitehall and later for the Ministry of Food in Portman Square; Eric (unfit to fight) went to work as a radio producer with the BBC’s India Service, for which he worked from August 1941 until November 1943 from make-shift offices in the old Peter Robinson store at 200, Oxford Street (known familiarly as the ZOO). To be near their work they moved back into London, living first in a tiny flat at Dorset Chambers in Chagford Street, close to Regent’s Park (where he drilled with his Home Guard platoon), then at the more spacious Langford Court in Langford Place off Abbey Road (said to be the model for Victory Mansions in Nineteen Eighty-Four), and finally at 10 Mortimer Crescent, in Kilburn, which was wrecked by a flying bomb in June 1944. They then found a large top-floor flat at 27 Canonbury Square, Islington, while Orwell worked as Literary Editor for the left-wing review, Tribune (at 222, the Strand). There, with some help from Eileen, he completed Animal Farm and began sketching out Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Islington flat was reached by a back-breaking climb up a brick staircase at the rear of the building, which was hard on Orwell’s weak lungs. But he ran a cosy household, the climax of each day being the 5 o’clock ritual of high-tea, always with the same appetizing menu. In a fond memoir, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’, first published in the London Magazine, Paul Potts, the rangy Irish-Canadian poet Catholic-educated libertarian, notorious sponger and haunter of London’s Bohemia, recalled the Pickwickian scene:

Nothing could be more pleasant than the sight of his living-room in Canonbury Square early on a winter’s evening at high tea-time. A huge fire, the table crowded with marvellous things, Gentleman’s Relish and various jams, kippers, crumpets and toast. And always the Gentleman’s Relish, with its peculiar unique flat jar and the Latin inscription on the label. Next to it usually stood the Cooper’s Oxford marmalade pot. He thought in terms of vintage tea and had the same attitude to bubble and squeak as a Frenchman has to Camembert. I’ll swear he valued tea and roast beef above the OM and the Nobel Prize. Then there was the conversation and the company, his wife, some members of his family or hers, a refugee radical or an English writer. There was something very innocent and terribly simple about him. He wasn’t a very good judge of character. He was of roast beef, however. He loved being a host, as only civilized men can, who have been very poor. There was nothing bohemian about him at all. However poor he had been it did not make him precarious. But he tolerated in others faults he did not possess himself.

One of his best and most lyrical short Tribune pieces, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, celebrated the end of the cruel winter of 1946 and the signs of a belated spring to be glimpsed in even the gloomiest of London streets and round and about the Bank of England. While some wartime winters had appeared to be permanent, he wrote, spring, like the common toad, always stirred eventually. Despite the grimness of the bombed-out city, Orwell was ever alert to the movement of the seasons and never as enshrouded in gloom as he is sometimes depicted.

After Eileen died unexpectedly during an operation in early 1945, he kept on the Islington flat but began spending more time on the Hebridean island of Jura with his young adopted son, Richard. There, in 1948, as his health continued to deteriorate and he was often too exhausted even to get out of bed, he finally completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The setting of that novel — a society terrorized by the all-seeing Big Brother whose Thought Police torture and brainwash their victims in Room 101 at the Ministry of Love — is really the bombed-out London Orwell remembered from his war years there. Winston Smith, the book’s persecuted hero, works at rewriting history along Party lines at the Ministry of Truth, based partly on London University’s Senate House in Malet Street, wartime headquarters of the Ministry of Information (where Orwell worked occasionally in 1941), and partly on Broadcasting House and 200 Oxford Street. The infamous Room 101 itself was a committee room at 55 Portland Place. On a day Orwell’s department is known to have had a meeting there he succumbed to a violent attack of bronchitis, which could explain why he associated that room with torture.

In the novel, Trafalgar Square becomes Victory Square and Nelson’s Column stands as a monument to Big Brother. The rundown proletarian district where Winston and Julia find a love-nest over Mr Charrington’s antique shop is the area between King’s Cross and Islington through which Orwell usually walked home while working at Tribune. Reading the book, anyone familiar with the capital will recognize the London where Winston is misguided enough to think that he can outwit Big Brother and remain a freethinking individual.

As most people know, finally, under the weighty effort of completing this depressing novel, Orwell’s health collapsed completely, and he spent several months in early 1949 trying unsuccessfully to recover at a Gloucestershire sanatorium. However, he did return one final time to London.

On 3 September 1949 he was transferred to University College Hospital where first he got married to the youthful Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of the literary magazine Horizon, the model for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia — the girl from the Fiction Department — and then, on 21 January 1950, died of a haemorrhage of the lungs brought on by TB. His last months were spent not only dying wretchedly but also observing in his then gloomy way how the equalities of austere wartime London were being eroded as advertisements for servants reappeared in The Times and Rolls Royces once again began to be seen on the streets.

He had two funerals, one for George Orwell, the now famous author, and the other for Eric Blair, the obscure presence behind the name. The first, Orwell’s funeral, attended by his many friends, was held at Christ Church, Albany Street, near Regent’s Park, now an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral whose patron saint, curiously enough, is St George. Blair’s funeral, attended by his widow and a solicitor, was held in Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire where he lies buried between the First World War Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and a family of local gypsies — taking in the compass-range of his whole being: the nineteenth century liberal on the one hand and the travellers and hop-pickers on the other.

One interesting feature of the London districts in which Orwell lived, is that all of them figure in the novels of his favourite author, Dickens. The Dickensian interest is also to be seen in some of the London characters in Orwell’s own work — Bozo the screever and Ginger the thief, in Down and Out in Paris and London; the down-and-out Mrs McElligot and the demonic Mr Tallboys in A Clergyman’s Daughter, kipping among the tramps in Trafalgar Square [3]; Gordon Comstock, the dropped-out poet, slumming through Lambeth in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Mr Charrington the antique-shop owner in Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of these characters would be out of place in a Dickens novel, and one might still come across them in the back-streets and dingier corners of the capital.

Orwell’s preferred Soho pub was the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place; his favourite restaurants were the long-gone Barcelona Café in Beak Street, the still-thriving Elysee in Percy Street and Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. It was at Bertorelli’s in 1935 that he entertained Sir Richard Rees and three others to the dinner at which he blew his £50 advance for the US edition of Burmese Days, and after which, in drunken high spirits, he knocked off a policeman’s helmet, leaving Rees to smooth things over and escort him home. The incident duly found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying, re-enacted with much panache by Richard E. Grant, with Julian Wadham, and Helena Bonham-Carter in attendance, in Robert Bierman’s 1997 film of the novel.

The Moon Under Water pub described so enthusiastically by Orwell in an Evening Standard article of February 1946, was imaginary, and the five pubs with that name in today’s London phonebook have clearly borrowed it from Orwell’s fantasy.

Orwell claimed to hate London, as did Eileen, but in many ways, along with Dickens, George Gissing, Patrick Hamilton and Peter Ackroyd, he is one of those novelists who has contributed most to the tradition of the London novel. He had a feeling, too, for the people who lived there. During the war he wrote movingly about the Londoners sheltering from air-raids in the city’s crypts and underground stations, praised London theatre audiences who remained to watch the show even while the bombs were falling, and told his friend Julian Symons, ‘I hate London. I really would like to get out of it, but of course you can’t leave while people are being bombed to bits all around you.’

What he loved about London were the art galleries — inexpensive places to take girls he fancied — and the parks — convenient spaces for casual seductions. He enjoyed the Regent’s Park zoo and had a great affection for the city’s junk-shops — treasure-houses of the past, as Winston Smith discovers in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But against what he might have regarded as the ‘romantic’ aspect of the city, he was ever conscious of its inhuman aspect. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote that ‘London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous. Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.’ That was his picture of the city in the mid-1930s, but, for those living on its margins, the grim London Orwell described there so vividly is no doubt still a cruel reality.

© Gordon Bowker 2008

The Orwell Prize is very grateful to Gordon Bowker for permission to publish this piece online. An earlier version of this article appeared in Planet in June 2006.

Notes

I was born in Buckinghamshire in 1890. My father was an Indian civil servant, & met & married[1] my mother in 1882 in India, where she had gone to stay with an aunt for the cold weather. In ’83 my father was sent to Burma on some job or other, & there in ’84 my brother was born, & died, aged seven months. My eldest sister was born in ’85, & my second in ’88. In that year my mother went home, bringing her two daughters, aged two and a half, & four months. In ’89 my father came home on leave, & I was born early the next year. I saw my father twice in the next ten years, for about six months at a time. In 1903 he retired, & died very suddenly at the end of 1908.

Before 1900[2] I do not remember much except odd incident & patches of existence, some of which remain in my mind more clearly than what happened yesterday. After 1900 my recollections˚ become pretty continuous.

My father was rather like myself, only taller, thinner & with more colour in his face. He always had a rather harassed look, except when he was sitting in his library, where my mother seldom penetrated. The atmosphere of this room was quite unlike the˚ that of any other room in the house. There were perhaps a thousand books in it, many of them books about Hindu mythology, or about fishing, shooting or travelling in India. I cannot say that I ever read any of these books, but I remember oftening˚ turning over their pages & looking at strange pictures of people hanging upon hooks, or elephants composed of maidens in extraordinary postures, & wondering vaguely about them in my own mind. I never troubled to enquire their real significance, for the curiosity of children is not very intelligent.

My father used to sit reading these books, with his white shirt open at the neck smoking cigars from Dindigul. The chairs in the room were of wicker work, such as one finds in India, & there were two faded[3] tiger skins upon the floor. On the walls were old yellow photographs, & a few eastern weapons, among them one or two beautiful[4] dahs captured in the Burma war. I used to look at the handles & scabbards[5] of these dahs, bound with plaited fibres,[6] & speculate dully about the men who used them. The windows[7] were always open, & there was generally a fire in the grate, so that a current of air flowed through the room. And this wind, mingled with cigar smoke, seemed to me like a wind from another land, bearing with it the names of far off dusty places. When I came into the room, & stayed quiet for awhile, my father would talk to me sometimes, & tell me the simple stories of the rubbish that lay about here & there; empty cartridge cases, bad rupees, or dried up peacock feathers. My mother often threatened to “do out” this room, but refrained, probably from mere laziness.

My father & I might have been called friends. The reticence that lies between all blood relatives held us apart, & then I scarcely seen him till I was thirteen years old. Still, in the family

Notes

Peter Davison, from the Complete Works

Written 1926-1930?, CW 73. This sketch exists in two forms: handwritten in ink on the verso of Government of Burma paper, stock date 1 February 1925; and typed (not by Orwell?) on thin foolscap typing paper (13 by 8 inches) with the watermark BRITISH EMBLEM, a rose, and MADE IN ENGLAND. This watermark was first recorded in 1928. The handwritten version is printed here; the notes refer to this manuscript. The changes made in typing are slight. Preliminary sketch for Burmese Days