This book is the third of three books I was given as Christmas presents and I saved this one until last as it is non-fiction and I didn't feel ready to tackle it just after Christmas.
It's a biography of George Orwell and the main focus is the time he spent on the Outer Hebridean Island of Jura. I must confess that I have only read one of Orwell's books as a set book at school, and I can't say I enjoyed it very much, so I never went on to read 1984 or any of his other works.
The style of writing here struck me as being more of a research paper than a mass market biography as the text is often supplemented with superscript numbers leading to endnotes, and those take up twelve pages at the back. There are also plenty of quotes from books and letters used to support the narrative and this book is clearly aimed at students of Orwell and other literary types rather than casual readers.
Orwell was born in India in 1903 in the heyday of the British Empire and was given the name Eric Arthur Blair to reflect his Scottish ancestry. He later changed it to George Orwell to make himself sound more English after he developed a great dislike of Scottish people. His bias against the Scots began during his prep school days when his mother bought him back to England to attend St Cyprians School in Eastbourne, Sussex. The school had been chosen by his parents because it was favoured by wealthy Scots even though it was such a long way from Scotland. It also took in bright boys on reduced fees and Orwell was one of those pupils, although he wasn't aware of that until one of the masters revealed the truth in his final year.
Orwell felt humiliated by the revelation and took against his class mates who he felt were snobbish, self entitled sprogs of the imperial ruling class. He then went on to attend Wellington College and Eton on scholarships so he had plenty of time to develop a decent grudge to the point where he even described himself as an 'odious little snob'. He could have gone on to either Oxford or Cambridge without costing his father a penny, but by that time he could no longer bear the feeling of inferiority and went back to India to join the British Imperial Police where presumably he could grow to feel superior to lots of people.
This combination of a feeling of inferiority tempered by a certain snobbishness seems to be an on-going personality trait and it surfaces in some of his fictional characters. He certainly comes across as difficult to live with, and although he did marry as a young man he had extra marital affairs and seems to have expected women to just be there for him when he needed something.
He ended up on Jura because he became obsessed with the idea that the Russians would destroy most of England with atomic bombs and he wanted to have somewhere that could be made self-sufficient in the event of a war. His first wife Eileen died not long after the couple adopted a little boy so he found himself on a remote Island with a toddler to bring up. At this point he persuaded his sister to come and be a housekeeper and nanny to young Richard and she had to pack up her comfortable life in exchange for a croft that was miles from anywhere.
Orwell wrote 1984 on Jura but also suffered greatly with recurring chest problems that culminated in him contracting TB. The farming families on Jura were very kind towards him and after spending several years there he was forced to revise his opinion of Scottish people. He still wasn't the easiest person to get along with but at least island life knocked the edges off him before he died of TB aged 46.
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