HE REMAINED, AND THOUGHT of himself as, Eric Blair, but he learned that a pseudonym can quickly create a life of its own. When reviews began to arrive, and he chose to acknowledge or respond to them, how should he sign his letters? Signing Eric Blair would give away the whole game, not to mention jeopardizing his job should the book prove controversial. But to sign George Orwell raised problems of its own. Was he accepting an alter ego, even if only a literary one? The pen name was no closely held secret—pieces of Down and Out had been derived from published articles that had been signed by Eric Blair, and literary detectives would not face too much of a mystery in putting the two together. But who was to become the important writer? Whose name, finally, would appear on the “collected edition” that the young author so rarely thought of any more? Closer to the present, should Blair’s or Orwell’s name go on the novel of Burma that was in the typewriter?
Down and Out in Paris and London settled those questions. It was no world-shaking success, but at least initially the book did well. Before Down and Out had been in the stores a month its 1,500 copy first printing was gone, and a second printing of 500 copies had been ordered. As the second month passed another 1,000 copies were printed. In America, Harper Brothers printed 1,750 copies, but no second printing was required. While its surge did not last in Britain, the book did sell well for an author’s first book, and it became clear to Orwell that his pen name would be used on his novel. Gollancz pointed out that though Down and Out was no bestseller, it had introduced George Orwell to the book reviewers and to a few thousand book buyers. Eric Blair remained unknown, except by his friends. Socially, he used his own name throughout his life.
Orwell was pleased with the book’s sales, and even more pleased with the reviews, which were generally favorable. He saw his name and his book mentioned in newspapers and magazines where he had reviewed other writers’ works. J. B. Priestley commended Down and Out in Paris and London. More than one critic praised the style of the book, noting the effectiveness of its quiet, straightforward narrative manner. Readers and reviewers seemed to realize from the first few pages that they were in the presence of a real talent, a writer who not only wrote clearly, but also had seen corners of the world they could only imagine.
Mingled with the praise were occasional criticisms that expressed doubt about Orwell’s own poverty. Wasn’t he just an affluent person traveling among the poor in disguise, some critics asked. Orwell made no response to such reviews, but when the veracity of his account of restaurant kitchens was questioned, he wrote a letter to The Times maintaining that every filthy practice he mentioned was true, and had been witnessed during his days as a dishwasher. The letter, which appeared late in January 1933, was signed George Orwell, with the pseudonym coyly enclosed in quotation marks.
Orwell’s family in Southwold was not surprised that he had made a book out of his experiences, but their reaction to its contents and especially its frank language made Orwell certain the pen name had been a sound decision. He had no wish to embarrass anyone. He knew as well that his Burmese novel would be equally frank, drawing an unflattering portrait of the workings of empire. His parents seemed more baffled than hurt, but Blair wished to cause no pain at all.
He continued to put in long hours at the novel, but would give his agent no projection of when it would be finished. Orwell was eager to pursue writing full time once more, but Down and Out in Paris and London would earn him barely more than one hundred pounds. While that was rare wealth when compared to his days in Paris, he was not yet prepared to abandon teaching. Little would be accomplished by surrendering the security of the job at The Hawthorns and returning to a cheap room while his savings were eaten away. Orwell’s agent, Leonard Moore, had shown some enthusiasm for the first hundred pages of the Burmese novel, and Orwell resolved to hold on to his teaching position until that novel was completed and published. Perhaps then he would be able to devote all of his time to writing while still living in some comfort at least.
Gradually the initial feeling of exuberance Orwell had experienced at the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London faded. Teaching became more and more drudgery, and the evenings and weekends of work on the novel became bouts with frustration. For all of his struggles with Down and Out, and his uncertainties about form and style through that book’s many drafts, Orwell found his new manuscript to be far more difficult. Although Down and Out was categorized by publishers and critics as a novel, and many of the incidents it contained were fictionalized, the book was less a work of fiction than Orwell’s amalgamation of fiction, nonfiction, and reminiscence. Its accomplishment was measured against his own memories and observations; he had in his past experience a good gauge of the book’s effectiveness.
With his Burmese novel, however, Orwell measured his success not only against his memories of Burma, but also against the success of novels he admired. Orwell was attempting to write a literary novel, lush with language, a story created in his imagination, tempered by his control of technique. He’d read novels all his life, had studied them and reviewed them, and understood the requirements and demands made of an effective piece of fiction. But most days his achievement at the typewriter fell far short of his intention and desire, and few of the passages satisfied him. There were whole sections of the book he felt were unworthy of comparison even with cheap potboilers. He found himself becoming bogged down in too much language, not enough story, or too much story without sufficient characterization. He wrote and rewrote. Having become a demanding critic of other writer’s works, Orwell held himself to the same high standards, lapsing into depression when he failed to meet them.
The ferment and revolution of the nineteen twenties and early thirties extended to literature as well as politics, and even as he sought to master the art of the conventional, naturalistic novel, Orwell was aware of the changes that had overtaken literature. Writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce had probed farther into human psychology than more traditional novelists, with Joyce stretching the limits of language and narrative in an attempt to present the thoughts of ordinary people on the page in an extraordinary way. Ernest Hemingway, himself an expatriate American who had lived poorly in Paris not long before Orwell, had stripped language to a spare and cadenced simplicity, and by that approach sought to put reality in print. Other Americans, John Dos Passos and William Faulkner, were using stream of consciousness techniques—attempts to recreate thought in written language—or cinematic techniques to further extend the range of novelistic effects. D. H. Lawrence, more traditional in form than other contemporary novelists, had pushed farther into the nature of sexuality than others, and was trying to break down barriers against language considered obscene. Aldous Huxley, whom Orwell recalled as a French instructor at Eton, had built a reputation during the twenties for sharp, satirical novels resonant with the emptiness that afflicted many following World War I. The art of novel writing was changing.
George Orwell, though, pursued a more traditional path as he shaped his first novel. He knew his strengths and weaknesses, and endeavored to build a novel around the strengths. Orwell had great admiration for Ulysses, James Joyce’s masterpiece, and recommended it to friends while it was still illegal to own a copy of Ulysses in Britain. But for all his acute understanding of Joyce’s accomplishment, Orwell felt himself more technically limited. He wanted his novel to possess realistic, memorable characters, to move through a plot that provided readers with a sense of pattern and structure, and to be well written. Coupled with these three challenges—that sound far easier to meet than they are in reality—was the dilemma of coming to terms with Burma. Orwell did not want to lose his story or his characters in a mass of symbolism, but he did wish to create a novel that synthesized his feelings about imperialism, as well as his own experience of it.
Orwell set the book in northern Burma, away from the Irrawaddy Delta where he had passed so much disagreeable time. He was not interested in writing a novel solely about the Imperial Police, and created a protagonist, James Flory, who was a timber merchant. Orwell wrote in the third person, putting distance between himself and his central character.
Not that Burmese Days, as Orwell called the novel, was an objective portrait of the empire in Burma. Despite his agonies during the book’s composition, Orwell’s long-simmering anger, resentment, and hatred gave him a power on the page that was clear from the opening chapter. Burmese Days was intended as a novel, and it certainly succeeded as one, but Orwell’s opinions, political and moral, shaped every passage. Even character descriptions and introductions carried political weight. U Po Kyin, the corrupt and manipulative Burmese civil servant with whom the novel opens, is presented matter-of-factly as a man who understands the best way of coexisting with the empire; it was an understanding he had possessed since childhood, when “In his childish way he had grasped that his own people were no match for this race of giants. To fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition, even as a child.”
Flory, around whom Burmese Days revolved, was also introduced by way of his relationship to the empire and its power and customs. The reader is made aware of Flory’s problem with alcohol, but almost immediately Orwell enlarged the reader’s perspective. Flory’s home was near the real seat of empire. “Beyond that was the European Club, and when one looked at the Club—a dumpy one-storey wooden building—one looked at the real centre of the town. In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. It was doubly so in this case, for it was the proud boast of the Kyauktada Club that, almost alone of Clubs in Burma, it had never admitted an Oriental to membership.”
That segregation, and the setting of Kyauktada as one of the final Burmese communities to abandon old imperial customs in view of the rising tide of Burmese nationalism and anti-imperialism, gave Orwell the dramatic tension for his novel. He kept his prose low-key, almost laconic in places, occasionally lapsing into floridity as though recreating with words the thick overgrowth of the jungle. But even the purple passages of Burmese Days read well, and as spring 1933 gave way to summer, Orwell began to fill with excitement at the thought of finishing the book. He sent sections of the manuscript to friends, along with apologetic covering letters in which he explained that the book needed a rewrite, that it was nowhere near so good as it would be after a summer spent strengthening it.
He was writing love letters as well, having become enamored of Eleanor Jaques, a friend from Southwold with whom he’d often discussed literature. Orwell’s interest in her deepened, and he composed long letters to Eleanor, courting her in the same fashion as he had Jacintha Buddicom when he was younger. He thanked Eleanor for every kindness, wrote of how he missed her, asked if they might meet on occasions to walk together or make love. Orwell had no more success with this romance by mail than he had with the previous one, and Eleanor married someone else the next year. Although Orwell enjoyed occasional dalliances and even short affairs with women, he entered his early thirties with no serious romantic prospects.
It appeared briefly that spring that his financial prospects would be equally bleak. The Hawthorns had run upon the harsh facts of the Depression, the school was being sold, and Orwell was out of a job. He may have looked upon the school’s collapse as a blessing, for to become a full-time writer as a result of an employer’s default was far different from casting off a steady job in order to write. Orwell’s unemployment was short lived, however, and he was hired to teach at Frays College in Uxbridge in southeastern England. Frays was considerably larger than The Hawthorns, with an enrollment that approached two hundred students, both boys and girls. Orwell’s position—he was hired as Eric Blair, of course—was to begin in September, giving him the summer to work on Burmese Days.
He did not complete the novel during his vacation, and took the manuscript with him to Uxbridge. Orwell spent his days teaching, but in the evening, when the other instructors gathered around a fire to talk and unwind, Orwell went quickly to his room where he’d set up his typewriter. The pages came no more easily than ever, but they came steadily, as Orwell built his vision of the British Empire, and its decline as a result of its own nature. No one in the novel escaped his caustic, critical eye. The Burmese were as corrupt as the British, the merchants as bad as the military. It was not a question of the British Empire being bad; it was, Orwell made clear, an unavoidable fact of imperialism that all whom it touched were corrupted. Throughout the fall of 1933 he put his characters through their paces, moving the plot toward its tragic, inescapable end.
Occasionally he took an afternoon or a weekend off for relaxation. His fellow teachers recalled knocks at their doors and the sight of Orwell with a string of fresh fish presented as a gift. Some evenings, perhaps weary of the novel or simply out of a sense of decorum, he joined the others in their common room. He did a bit of gardening. At the dinner table Orwell proved a pleasant, wide-ranging conversationalist, annoying his companions, though, by smoking cigarettes while others ate. Orwell was only rarely without a cigarette, despite a chronic cough, and had mastered the talent of rolling his own cigarettes one-handed, leaving his other hand free to gesture as he spoke.
That fall Orwell took some of his savings and bought another motorcycle. He took advantage of his increased mobility to travel throughout the area, often with his fishing rod strapped to the motorcycle. The days grew colder and Orwell continued to go on occasional rides, buttoning his jacket around him but wearing no overcoat. He finished Burmese Days early in December and not long afterward was on a motorcycle jaunt when he was soaked to the skin by a winter rain. He caught pneumonia, and once more his health collapsed.
The hospital in Uxbridge was clean and crisp, run with British efficiency. But during the delirium that accompanied his high fever, Orwell called out to his nurses again and again that he was worried about his money. As a tramp he’d learned to sleep with his funds clutched beneath his pillow; sick and hospitalized he knew only that the space beneath his pillow was empty. His nightmare fears passed along with his fever, and despite the deathwatch to which Ida and Avril Blair had been summoned, Orwell began to regain his health. His physicians made it clear that he was not strong enough to resume his teaching duties, and Blair, his novel done and its sale, he was certain, imminent, took the opportunity to become a full-time writer. Shortly after New Year 1934, Orwell returned to Southwold to live with his parents as he completed his recuperation and began his career in earnest.
As January passed, Orwell’s health improved, but his spirits were dampened by the response to Burmese Days. Victor Gollancz rejected the book, informing Orwell’s agent that he was too frightened of possible libel suits to publish it in good conscience. Heinemann, another important publisher of novels, rejected Burmese Days for similar reasons. The novel was fiction, but Orwell had drawn upon his memories, and written clearly and bitingly. His novel’s portrait of colonial life was so scathing that it seemed likely to provoke lawsuits from readers who saw or thought they saw themselves unfavorably portrayed in its pages.
Burmese Days was too strong for English publishers to accept, but Harpers agreed to publish an American edition if Orwell would make some changes in the manuscript. The revisions were intended to reduce the possibility of lawsuits, and Blair made them quickly. Burmese Days was scheduled for American publication in the fall of 1934. British publishers remained uninterested.
In Southwold, Orwell had begun a new novel, this one set in England, with a female protagonist. He wanted to produce a work of fiction more fully imaginative than Burmese Days. Orwell also gave himself the task of writing a more experimental novel, in which a variety of literary techniques and strategies could be employed to unfold the story and investigate its heroine’s psychology. Dorothy Hare, Orwell’s character, was the spinsterish daughter of an Anglican clergyman, a woman whose life was composed of little defeats and no victories: her existence is ruled by her father’s demands, the demands of her faith, the propriety of the small English village in which she lives. Orwell wrote the first hundred pages or so of the novel rapidly and easily. He was confident in his creation of Dorothy and in his imagination of her surroundings.
Having set the novelistic stage, though, he dramatically altered it by having Dorothy stricken with amnesia as a result of a pass made at her by an unwanted suitor. Dorothy Hare wanted no suitors, and although Orwell did not become explicit in the novel, the kiss on the cheek that Dorothy received was an almost arbitrary gimmick, used to propel her from her safe existence into a life on the road, down and out as Orwell himself had been, a middle-class woman living among the poor and the rough. Orwell returned to his own experiences as sources for scenes, putting Dorothy to work as a hop picker and having her experience life in the slums. Even as he created the scenes, Orwell made it clear to his friends that he thought the book was in trouble. Its plot seemed too arbitrary, Dorothy’s motivations so nebulous as to be invisible. He could not abandon the book, though; he was desperate to have a novel published in Britain. The summer of 1934 passed as Orwell pressed on.
By October the book was complete, Dorothy’s amnesia cured, and the restored Dorothy returned to her father. Orwell called the book A Clergyman’s Daughter, and he was not proud of it. Some of the passages seemed almost slavishly imitative of techniques introduced by James Joyce. Other sections made little sense. The entire plot still struck Orwell as a good idea, and amnesia an interesting fulcrum on which to turn a plot, but he wrote his agent of his dissatisfaction with the novel. He did not offer to revise the book, and instead planned other projects. A poem, “On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory,” had appeared in the Adelphi, and was selected for inclusion in a book called The Best Poems of 1934. He wrote some reviews, and for a while gave thought to writing a brief biography of Mark Twain, although he could not find a publisher for the project. During October Burmese Days was published in America, with Harper Brothers using the fear of libel and its rejection by British publishers as an advertising ploy to attract readers seeking controversy or sensation. The ploy did not work well, for although the book was favorably reviewed, it sold few copies.
Orwell had stayed long enough in Southwold, but had no interest in resuming a teaching career. That fall he found a job as a clerk in a bookshop in London, perhaps thinking that proximity to so many works of literature would have a beneficial effect on his own work. The error in such thoughts became clear after only a short while as an employee of Booklovers’ Corner. There were rows of shelves and tables crammed with thousands of books of all sorts. The books blended together in Orwell’s vision until it was possible to lose sight of them as individual titles possessed of worth, and see them only as a great dusty mass, unwanted good books no better than unwanted bad ones. Orwell felt his affection for books as physical objects begin to fade.
Nor were bookbuyers or browsers any better. While Orwell met more than a few people who shared his love of literature and with whom he became friends, most of his meetings with them took place outside the bookshop. Many of those with whom he felt sympathy were writers like himself, struggling up, or artists or students. The customers Orwell encountered while working in Booklovers’ Corner were not interested in literature, and for the most part they were not interested in reading. Some of them entered the shop to purchase a gift for a relative, and expected the clerk to know exactly the sort of book that would be appropriate. Others came in, paid their pennies of rental for a temporary loan of a book, and were never seen again, doubtless taking the volume and selling it to another bookstore in another part of London. There were customers who bought books by the yard, books that would furnish a room but would never be opened and read. The majority of customers were those who entered the store simply as a means of escaping the elements, browsing for hours until the weather cleared or the shop closed, never purchasing anything. Within the walls of the Booklovers’ Corner Orwell began to feel like a prisoner choking on dust.
His growing distaste for books as artifacts did not interfere with Orwell’s own literary ambitions. The one good thing about the bookshop job was that he worked only during the afternoons; the early hours and evening hours were devoted to his typewriter, which he set up in the room he lived in above the bookstore. He was already at work on another novel, again set in England, in a bookstore, with a protagonist who was a struggling writer, bitter about his fate.
Orwell was still struggling, but less bitter than many writers he met. Gollancz had accepted A Clergyman’s Daughter in spite of its flaws and despite its author’s reservations. The publishers did insist on a series of changes to make the book less likely to provoke lawsuits from people who imagined themselves caricatured in its pages. Orwell was by now accustomed to such editorial work, if not enthusiastic about it. There had been no lawsuits over the American edition of Burmese Days, and with that seeming a good omen, Gollancz asked to see the book again. Orwell sent him a copy and Gollancz at last agreed to publish a British edition, but only after further editorial surgery and careful examination by attorneys.
A Clergyman’s Daughter appeared in March 1934, in an edition of 4,000 copies that sold moderately well, although no second printing was required. Orwell announced to his friends that he was embarrassed by the book, that its amateurishness disgusted him, and that he had written the story of Dorothy Hare and her amnesia only as a means of making money. Now he wanted from the literary public a sort of amnesia of its own. He wished his second novel to be forgotten, and boasted that he would not allow it to be reprinted even if demand for the book grew. The demand did not grow, and more than a few reviewers took Orwell to task for the clumsiness with which he manipulated his heroine. Orwell tried to ignore the reviews and get on with newer, better work.
Orwell had moved that March from his room above the bookstore to a small flat not too far away. With his second novel just published in England, and his first due belatedly in June, Orwell felt a growing sense of well-being, of strengthened powers. His income had not yet risen, but it surely would. More importantly, he’d continued to write throughout the difficult years just past, and had continued, in spite of problems that would have discouraged many writers, to publish his writings. He began to overcome some of his shyness. He made friends with his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, who was studying for an advanced degree in psychology at London’s University College. Together with Mrs. Obermeyer, Orwell decided to give a small party, and they each made up their guest lists. Orwell invited friends from the literary community, and his landlady invited some of her fellow students, including a young woman named Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Eileen was two years younger than Orwell, an honors English graduate who, after a wide variety of experiences in teaching and business, had returned to school with the goal of earning a master’s degree in psychology. Dark haired and pretty, as well as opinionated, articulate, and intelligent, Eileen O’Shaughnessy captured Orwell’s attention at the party, and he passed much of the evening in conversation with her. Within a few days he was accompanying Eileen on horseback rides and long walks, and he even mentioned to some of his friends that she was the sort of woman he could marry.
Marriage was on his creative mind as well as in his romantic thoughts. Orwell’s new novel was taking shape, and his protagonist, Gordon Comstock, was a minor poet torn between clinging to his artistic gifts, and scorning the material world, or returning to copywriting in order to marry the woman he loved. Orwell set the novel up carefully, making Comstock just enough of a success—one small book of half-good poems, a long poem in the works—to make his artistic pretensions believable. But he made him just enough of a failure—Comstock spent more time moaning about his writing than he did writing—to make the middle-class temptation ultimately unavoidable. The novel moved along smooth tracks, scene after scene drawing the contrast between Comstock’s goals and the middle-class world his fiancée desires. Comstock, working in a bookstore, trying to write, feeling his vision and strength to resist fading simultaneously, was a marvelous creation.
It was not, however, a portrait of George Orwell, and the bitter account of Comstock and Rosemary was no description of Orwell’s courtship of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. By fall 1935, Orwell and Eileen were discussing marriage, but there was never any question of Orwell abandoning his literary career. For one thing, despite his low income, Orwell’s career was off to a good start, and continued to give promise of a brighter future. For another, Eileen was as independent and committed to ideas as was the man she would marry. They came from similar backgrounds—both of their fathers had been civil servants. While neither was interested in joining wholeheartedly the pursuit of profit that characterized the middle-class world as Gordon Comstock saw it, neither were they eager to starve for art or an ideal. Orwell had starved, perhaps deliberately, for the sake of experience, and Eileen had seen enough thin days to be unwilling to marry Orwell until her education was complete and his income increased. Those prospects, though, seemed achievable. Burmese Days appeared in Britain and quickly sold out its 2,500-copy first printing, earning generally favorable reviews, one of them from Orwell’s schoolmate Cyril Connolly, now becoming established as an influential critic. Connolly’s name, in fact, was better known than Orwell’s; the two had maintained only sporadic contact since Eton. Victor Gollancz, despite his fears of litigation, continued to believe in Orwell as a writer of promise. Orwell, hard at work on a novel about a would-be writer who lacked the determination to stick to it, continued to believe in himself.
As the pages of his new novel grew into a thick pile beside his typewriter that fall, Orwell began to cast about for a fitting title. Gordon Comstock lacked enough confidence to succeed as a poet, or enough anger to resist the invitation of the “money-god,” as Orwell called it. He also lacked enough self-control to keep from impregnating Rosemary, and found himself increasingly drawn toward a predictable life in a small flat, with wife and children, a job as an advertising copywriter. This lack of individuality was perhaps compensated for by a sense of community with other, identical, households. All such households had their lace curtains, and their front windows all held huge aspidistra plants. Those plants became a symbol, and at the novel’s cynical but conventionally happy ending, Gordon Comstock, his poetic vision abandoned, is seized by a final, social vision.
“Our civilisation is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras—they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’—kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.
“The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.”
And so Gordon Comstock abandoned one dream, trading it for another that seemed to Comstock neither better nor worse, his artistic intent and commitment being far less serious than that of his creator. In this reverie, Orwell found the title of his novel; he called it Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and finished it late in 1935. He’d railed against the money-god, but as it related to his characters, not in any political way or as an angry indictment of a social system. The novel was no Burmese Days. Its focus was too tight for that. And even as Orwell wrote of Comstock’s failure to overcome his attraction to the money-god, Orwell moved from the flat rented from Rosalind Obermeyer, a bit embarrassed to be so poor as to rent from one of Eileen’s fellow students. When he and Eileen dined out, infrequently, Orwell insisted on paying the check himself, and often worried throughout the meal whether he had sufficient funds. He wore a loose-fitting sportcoat and baggy flannel trousers—Eileen wore suits that were the female equivalent—but both Orwell’s and Eileen’s clothes were of good quality. They were caught, in their own way, as was Comstock: critical of the middle class but ineradicably of it, captured in a contradiction of which they were aware, neither fasting nor feasting, but somewhere on the low end in between.
Victor Gollancz accepted Keep the Aspidistra Flying without hesitation and scheduled the book for publication in spring 1936. Early that year Orwell gave up his job in Booklovers’ Corner and started looking for a new writing project. He continued to do reviews and articles, but with Eileen’s graduation approaching he wanted to write another novel, something more ambitious and potentially more successful, as a means of breaking out of his economic trap. He could not marry Eileen until he had enough money, and the only way he saw of earning enough money was by writing. He gave some thought to a long novel, perhaps a story that spanned several generations.
Orwell’s plans were interrupted by Victor Gollancz. In addition to being an important publisher, Gollancz was an important figure in Britain’s political left. He gave time, money, and his personal prestige to a variety of left-wing causes, and in early 1936 he had become intrigued by the nature of unemployment in Britain. Mines, factories, and mills had closed as a result of the Depression, and unemployment was reaching disastrous levels. Gollancz wanted to publish a report on conditions in northern England, an industrial area. What was it like there now, Gollancz wanted to know. How did men and women who’d worked all their lives cope with the failure of their employers? What were their political feelings? Could socialism solve their problems, and Britain’s problems, too? Gollancz sent for Orwell.
The topic seemed perfect for the author of Down and Out in Paris and London and the essays about life among the working poor and the tramps. Gollancz was willing to give Orwell free rein to do his own investigation, and to develop the proper format for the book that would follow. Orwell was certainly up to the challenge, enthusiastic about the project even before he learned Gollancz’s terms. For his report on the conditions in the north of England, George Orwell would receive an advance of £500, the largest of his career, and a large advance for writers far more successful than Orwell. It was enough money to last Orwell and Eileen a year or two, and they could begin to plan their wedding.
But first Orwell had to make his investigation, and in late January he set out on the road once more, eager to learn, open to new experiences, not quite certain what he would find.