CRITICS WHO SEE Nineteen Eighty-Four as the product of a death wish and as a sado-masochistic fantasy with its roots in childhood traumas then leap to the conclusion that the essay was written immediately before the book (see p. 1 and fn. 3 to Chapter 1). Well may they, for although the editors recognize some uncertainty, they sensibly printed the text in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters immediately following Orwell’s letter of 31 May 1947 to Fred Warburg transmitting the essay. All that Ian Angus properly and cautiously says is that it was “written by May 1947” (CE IV, p. 519). Here, however, is the relevant paragraph of the covering letter which is printed in The Collected Essays immediately before the essay (CE IV, p. 330).
I I am sending you separately a long autobiographical sketch which I originally undertook as a sort of pendant to Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, he having asked me to write a reminiscence of the preparatory school we were at together. I haven’t actually sent it to Connolly or Horizon because apart from being too long for a periodical I think it is really too libellous to print, and I am not disposed to change it except perhaps the names. But I think it should be printed sooner or later when the people most concerned are dead, and maybe sooner or later I might do a book of collected sketches. I must apologize for the typescript. It is not only the carbon copy, but is very bad commercial typing which I have had to correct considerably—however, I think I have got most of the actual errors out.
Consider the language carefully: “. . . which I originally undertook as a sort of pendant” to Connolly’s Enemies of Promise (1938), “he having asked me to write. . . .” This clearly suggests that at least a first version was written much earlier. Against this are two facts: (i) Orwell says in the last section of the essay, “All this was thirty years ago and more”, which places the composition in 1947 exactly. But the text could have been updated in just an obvious respect and the heading would also be compatible with a revision in the Jura period, indeed he must then have revised it thoroughly enough to necessitate retyping; and (ii) that the typescript and carbon that survive have on the top right-hand of the first page, “George Orwell, Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire”.
The typescripts give no other clue as to date and the type-face is certainly not that of Orwell’s typewriter. The letter implies that he was only sending a carbon, whereas what in fact survives in the Orwell Archive (from which the printed text was set) is a top copy and a carbon, and they are not “very bad commercial typing which I have had to correct considerably”. The typescripts are, in fact, remarkably clean with only very occasional and small corrections of literals and these not in Orwell’s hand. The presumption must be, then, that these typescripts are a retyping in Secker & Warburg’s offices (though no one can now remember what happened) of whatever Orwell himself corrected. So they do not help to date the essay. There is, moreover, no record or memory of him farming out any work while at Jura; only in Canonbury did he even briefly use a secretary, and only after Eileen began war work in the autumn of 1939 would he not have had help, which he normally did not need, except when he was himself working full-time at the B.B.C. from 1941–43.
All that can be said confidently about the style is that it was written after his stylistic break-through as regards his book-length work, the vivid, conversational, descriptive realism of Homage to Catalonia. But its angry tone, at times its rather ranting “I’ll make yer flesh creep” style, and its uncertain pose between the autobiographical and the polemical, is far more consistent with his bitter and jagged writing of the 1938–43 period, with his mood of failure and frustration, indeed, than with the calm, composed and measured post-war essays.
A number of contemporary references strengthen this hypothesis. Orwell wrote to Connolly on 8 July 1938 (CE I, p. 343), “I wonder how you can write about St Cyprian’s. It’s all like an awful nightmare to me,” but also on 14 December 1938 (CE I, p. 363), “I’m always meaning one of these days to write a book about St Cyprian’s . . . people are wrecked by those filthy private schools.” In “Inside the Whale” (1940) he mocked Connolly for making virtually the same assertion. Orwell saw him as having accepted “permanent adolescence” unlike continental intellectuals who have gone out into a real world of “hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour” (CE I, p. 517). Prejudice against the cult of Scotland, very similar to that in the essay, appeared in a book review in The New Statesman and Nation (21 September, 1940, p. 290); his only other reference to bed-wetting, as the kind of “dark secret” that psychological novelists pretend to rip out of one, also occurs in a New Statesman book review (7 December 1940, p. 574); and when he reviewed, also in 1940, Stephen Spender’s novel, The Backward Son (in Tribune, 24 May, p. 14) he said “it is about a prep school’, one of those (on the whole) nasty little schools at which small boys are prepared for public school entrance examination. Incidentally, these schools, with their money-grubbing proprietors and their staff of underpaid hacks are responsible for a lot of the harm that it is usual to blame on the public schools. A majority of middle class boys have had their minds permanently lamed by them before they are thirteen”—which is very close to the precise sentiments and language of the essay. And early in 1942 he began a broadcast on European literature with a reminiscence about how badly he was taught history when at school (“The Rediscovery of Europe”, originally broadcast on 10 March 1942, CE II, p. 198).
Against these indications of a probable composition around 1940 is a section of Tribune “As I Please” column of 14 March 1947 in which he told an anecdote of the lunacies of learning history by rote, which began: “The other day I had occasion to write something about the teaching of history in private schools, and the following scene, which was only rather loosely connected with what I was writing, floated into my memory. It was less than fifteen years ago when I witnessed it.” The anecdote would have come from his own teaching days, but the writing to which he refers could only be “Such, Such Were the Joys”. But again this is compatible with a revision.
An intellectual and a practical consideration also point towards the earlier date. The intellectual point is to ask whether it is sensible for all of Orwell’s considerable knowledge about extreme forces in European politics in the 1930s and 1940s to be reduced to the traumas of an English childhood? We have argued in the text that, in any case, the political systems of the true St Cyprian’s and of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are quite different, one authoritarian and the other totalitarian, a distinction which was clear and important to him. If, moreover, it is argued that the totalitarian aspects of his literary St Cyprian’s were, after all, historical (the sense of not being able to escape and having no control whatever over one’s life), and thus can be seen as the direct cause of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is at least as plausible to reverse this argument and to argue that because of the needs of plot and characterisation in Nineteen Eighty-Four he reimagined and recreated “St Cyprian’s”—if it was written or even revised in 1947. The practical point is simply that the essay is very long, all but 20,000 words. Desperately wanting to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, is it likely that Orwell could have paused to dash this off first? If he felt compulsive and obsessional about it, he would have dashed it off; but there is simply no evidence for that, and he mentions the essay in none of his fairly full letters of this period to his friends or to his agent.
Probably he was giving Warburg for safe-keeping a fairly quick revision of 1947 of a manuscript originally written in 1940. His letter shows that he realised that it could not be published until the people concerned were dead. He may have given it to Warburg fearing that, if anything happened, Avril might destroy it, or at least not want it published, as did neither his literary executor (see p. xxii) nor Andrew Gow (see p. 26). He may have let the side down with his fine polemic, but I do not believe that he exposed autobiographically the roots of Nineteen Eighty-Four, they lay in his whole life, most of all his mature experience, not just in his childhood.
Citations from Orwell’s own published books are all to the Secker & Warburg Uniform Edition (1948–65), not to the original editions. References to material in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, four volumes (Secker & Warburg, London, 1968) are all rendered “CE”. (These should not be confused with the one-volume Collected Essays, first published in 1961.)
Material in the Orwell Collection in the Manuscripts and Rare Books Department of University College, London is referred to as “Orwell Archive”. Reference numbers are not given, since at this moment some questions of access are unresolved which might mean rearrangement of the papers. But the existing finding lists are adequate.