A Collection of Essays

by George Orwell

  The Betrayal of the Left, by Victor Gollancz, George Orwell, John Strachey and others, London, 1941.

  Victory or Invested Interest? by G. D. H. Cole, George Orwell and others, London, 1942.

  Talking to India, edited with an introduction by George Orwell, London, 1943.

  Animal Farm, London, 1945; New York, 1946.

  Critical Essays, London, 1946; (American title) Dickens, Dali and Others, New York, 1946.

  James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, London, 1946 (Pamphlet).

  Love of Life and Other Stones, by Jack London. Introduction by George Orwell, London, 1946.

  The English People, London, 1947.

  British Pamphleteers, Vol. 1, edited by George Orwell and Reginald Reynolds. Introduction by George Orwell, London, 1948.

  Nineteen Eighty-Four, London, 1949; New York, 1949.

  POSTHUMOUS COLLECTIONS

  Shooting an Elephant, London, 1950; New York, 1950.

  Such, Such Were the Joys, New York, 1953.

  England Your England, London, 1953.

  The Orwell Reader, edited by Richard H. Rovere, New York, 1956.

  Collected Essays, London, 1961.

  Appendix II: Chronology

  1940

  On 11 March Inside the Whale was published by Victor Gollancz.

  On 13 March Orwell returned home to The Stores, Wallington, after spending six weeks, part of the time ill with influenza, at Grooms Hill, Greenwich. His wife, Eileen, had been living since September 1939 at this address, the home of her brother Laurence O'Shaughnessy, partly to be company for his wife, Gwen, when he went into the army, but principally to take a job in the Censorship Department in order to supplement Orwell's meagre earnings.

  His first contribution to Tribune, a review of The Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, appeared in the issue of 29 March 1940. In the spring of this year he was projecting a long novel in three parts which he had had in his mind since the late autumn of 1938. Financial worries, his disappointment at being rejected as medically unfit by the army or to find any job in which he could serve his country, and the distraction of the war situation prevented his settling down to the writing of it.

  During May Orwell left Wallington, still keeping on, however, The Stores as a country cottage till 1947, and he and his wife moved into 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, near Regent's Park. On 18 May Orwell's first piece of theatre criticism for Time and Tide appeared. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers, formed on 10 May, and became a sergeant in "C" Company of the 5th County of London Home Guard Battalion in St John's Wood. At the beginning of June Laurence O'Shaughnessy was killed at Dunkirk.

  From August to October Orwell was writing The Lion and the Unicorn, which was to be the first of the Searchlight Books. This was a series of booklets focusing attention on wartime problems and offering solutions to them, which was edited by T. R. Fyvel and Orwell for Seeker & Warburg. Out of the projected seventeen titles only ten were published over the next two years.

  1941

  On 3 January Orwell wrote the first of the fifteen "London Letters" he contributed to Partisan Review over the next five and a half years. On 19 February The Lion and the Unicorn was published. On 3 March Victor Gollancz published The Betrayal of the Left which contained two chapters by Orwell, "Fascism and Democracy" and "Patriots and Revolutionaries". By the beginning of April Orwell and his wife, who about this time gave up working in the Censorship Department, had moved to a flat at 111 Langford Court, Abbey Road, St John's Wood. On 18 August Orwell joined the British Broadcasting Corporation at a salary of PS640 a year, as a Talks Assistant, later becoming Talks Producer, in the Indian section of its Eastern Service.

  1942-3

  During these two years, in addition to his full-time work at the B.B.C., Orwell contributed to Horizon, Partisan Review, Tribune, the New Statesman and Nation, and the Nation (New York) and wrote for Poetry London and New Road. He also carried out Home Guard and firewatching duties. In April 1942 Eileen Blair began working for the Ministry of Food, organizing the "Kitchen Front" broadcast talks.

  On 8 March 1942 Orwell contributed an unsigned political comment, "Mood of the Moment", to the Observer and on 10 May there appeared his review of Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow, the first of many articles and reviews Orwell wrote for the Observer until February 1949. On 15 May Routledge published Victory or Vested Interest? which included the lecture "Culture and Democracy" Orwell had given to the Fabian Society on 22 November 1941.

  By the summer of 1942 Orwell and his wife had moved to a flat at 10a Mortimer Crescent, Maida Vale. At the end of June Orwell spent a fortnight's fishing holiday at Callow End, Worcestershire. In 1942 Orwell's mother and his sister, Avril Blair, came to live in Alexandra Road, which adjoined Mortimer Crescent. Ida Blair worked at Selfridge's and Avril Blair worked in a sheet metal factory at King's Cross. On 19 March 1943 Ida Blair, aged sixty-seven, died of a heart attack.

  On 18 November 1943 Allen & Unwin published Talking to India: A Selection of English Language Broadcasts to India, edited with an introduction by George Orwell. On 23 November Orwell left the Home Guard on medical grounds. He resigned from the B.B.C. on 24 November and before the end of the month he had become literary editor of Tribune. In November he started writing Animal Farm.

  Ian Angus

  About the Author

  George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) was born in India in 1903, and was educated at Eton. From 1922 to 1928 he served in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police. For the next two years he lived in Paris, and then came to England as a school-teacher. Later he worked in a bookshop. In 1937 he went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. During the Second World War he was a member of the Home Guard and worked for the B.B.C. In 1943 he joined the staff of Tribune, contributing a regular page of political and literary commentary, As I Please. He later became a regular contributor to the Observer, for which newspaper he went as a special correspondent to France and Germany. He died in London in 1950.

  His publications include Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Homage to Catalonia, and Inside the Whale. Orwell's name became widely known with the publication, in 1945, of Animal Farm, which has sold more than two million copies. Nineteen Eighty-Four had a similar success, and aroused extraordinary interest as a film and on television.

  COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND

  LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL

  Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus

  The remaining volumes in this set are as follows:

  1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940

  This first volume is drawn from the years when George Orwell began to explore the life of the poor and was struggling to establish himself as a novelist and factual reporter. Disillusioned with Communism in Spain, rejected for service in the war against Hitler, already ill, he faced hostilities in a mood of frustration.

  3: As I Please, 1943-1945

  For some eighteen months during the war Orwell was employed as literary editor of Tribune. The new freedom he experienced was expressed in the title and style of the regular feature he contributed -- "As I Please." Animal Farm, the book most likely to immortalize his name, was written during the period covered by this volume. . . and refused by three leading publishers. Briefly after the Second Front, he was a war correspondent.

  4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950

  This last volume contains the letters, reviews and other pieces which Orwell wrote during the last five years of his life: they include "Such, such were the joys", a reminiscence of his preparatory school. Animal Farm had eventually relieved him of financial worry, but during the drafting and writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four he was increasingly handicapped by the illness of which he died early in 1950.

  Scan Notes, v3.0: For the most part, footnotes were placed at the bottom of the paragraph that refers to them and are in 10pt Times New Roman, while blockquotes are represented with 10pt Arial. I
n a few cases, I determined that the footnotes would look better after a line of verse that folowed the paragraph. Changed 'British style quotes' to "American style quotes". Proofed carefully against DT, italics and special characters intact.