This lunchtime in Cheapside’s Daunt Books I watched an assistant stock the shelves with new editions of George Orwell’s best-known books. The most striking was David Pearson’s daring Nineteen Eighty-Four: adapted from the Penguin Classics series he successfully riffed upon for his Great Ideas, Great Loves, Popular Classics and Pocket Penguins.
The design makes a statement: both title and author have been censored. The status of Nineteen Eighty-Four is disproportionately skewed when placed beside the hobbitry of J R R Tolkein; but just as every child in Britain is at some point faced with the prospect of making tracks to Middle Earth, so they are, perhaps more crucially, ushered by their guardians into Room 101.
The new series also includes Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and Politics and the English Language. The reissues are officially released on 21 January, the day Orwell died. This date has been chosen by Penguin, the Orwell Estate and Orwell Prize to celebrate the prolific author’s life and work in perpetuity. You can view the range in full on the Creative Review website.
While the canon atrophies, spare a thought for the following three novels – snubbed by critics over the years, their pages browning in some abject corner of an Oxfam Bookshop near you.
The Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): Orwell’s most experimental novel, it includes a chapter in which the eponymous daughter, Dorothy Hare, spends time living rough in Trafalgar Square, written under the influence of the Circe (“Nighttown”) chapter of Ulysses. Follows Dorothy from her father’s country rectory to hop picking and homelessness after she suffers from amnesia and wakes up on the Old Kent Road. Contains some of Orwell’s most revealing thoughts about belief and the individual.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936): When he reviewed the book for the NS in 1936, Cyril Connolly called the book a “harrowing and stark account of poverty,” written “in clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is sitting in a dentist’s chair with the drill whirring”. He summed it up as follows: “The hero works for two pounds a week in a bookshop. He has a girl whom he is too poor to marry, and is writing a poem on which he is too poor really to concentrate. It is winter. The book is the recital of his misfortunes interrupted by tirades against money and spiritual evil it causes.”
Coming Up for Air (1939): Written in Morocco while Orwell coalesced following his return from the Spanish Civil War, the novel is narrated in the first-person by George Bowling, who revisits his childhood home only to find the country of his youth has been “paved over” and his erstwhile aspirations smothered by quotidian responsibilities. Bowling is, as Orwell himself put it in his essay about Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, “inside the whale”, too busy with himself to resist the oncoming war, about to rip through the country, concrete and not.
Beginning on 21 January, the New Statesman website will run pieces from the archive by and about Orwell, including a piece the magazine’s editors famously refused to run.
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