Letters to Change the World by Travis Elborough

Author:Travis Elborough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2018-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

27

George Orwell’s Letter to Noel Willmett on Totalitarianism, 1944

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In the spring of 1944, after eight years of childless marriage, George Orwell and Eileen Blair were making plans to adopt a son. Animal Farm, Orwell’s recently completed satirical fable, had finally found a publisher, after being rejected by at least four houses. The author of Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia was also by then the literary editor of Tribune, the left-leaning paper, for which he composed a weekly column entitled ‘As I Please’. Professionally busy and on the brink of a major literary success and impending parenthood, Orwell’s mind, perhaps naturally, turned to the state of the world to come.

A letter written to one of his critics at this time revealed that, some three years before he finally sat down to write it, the building blocks of his great dystopian novel, 1984, were already in his mind.

A month after this letter was posted, the Orwells’ flat in Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn, was hit by a German V-1 rocket. No one was injured, but the building suffered substantial damage and the couple were forced to seek new accommodation in Canonbury Square, Islington. Further tragedies were to come – Eileen died during a routine operation in 1945 and, by the time 1984 was published in June 1949, Orwell had contracted tuberculosis and had less than a year to live.

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