Editing George Orwell (section)

==Personal life==

===Childhood===
[[Jacintha Buddicom]]'s account, ''Eric & Us'', provides an insight into Blair's childhood.<ref name=autogenerated4>Jacintha Buddicom ''Eric & Us'' Frewin 1974.</ref> She quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms: "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall him having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in holidays.<ref>remembering Orwell, p. 22</ref> [[Cyril Connolly]] provides an account of Blair as a child in ''[[Enemies of Promise]]''.<ref name=Connolly>{{cite book |author=Connolly, Cyril |author-link=Cyril Connolly |title=Enemies of Promise |orig-date= 1938 |year=1973 |publisher=Deutsch |location=London |isbn=978-0233964881}}</ref> Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the essay "[[Such, Such Were the Joys]]", claiming among other things that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that "he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not like his name because it reminded him of a book he greatly disliked—''[[Eric, or, Little by Little]]'', a Victorian boys' school story.<ref>Orwell Remembered, p. 23</ref>
[[File:Eton College front 4.jpg|alt=A large gothic facade|thumb|Orwell's time at Eton College was formative in his attitude and his later career as a writer.]]
Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself".<ref name=Connolly/> At Eton, [[John Vaughan Wilkes]], his former headmaster's son at St Cyprians, recalled that "he was extremely argumentative—about anything—and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys&nbsp;[...] We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments—or think he had anyhow."<ref>John Wilkes in Stephen Wadham's ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984.</ref>

Blair liked to carry out practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a railway carriage like an orangutan to frighten a woman passenger out of the compartment.<ref name="autogenerated1"/> At Eton, he played tricks on John Crace, his [[Master in College|housemaster]], among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a college magazine implying pederasty.<ref>{{cite book |author=Hollis, Christopher |author-link=Christopher Hollis (politician) |title=A study of George Orwell: The man and his works |publisher=Hollis & Carter |location=London |year=1956 |oclc=2742921}}</ref> Gow, his tutor, said he "made himself as big a nuisance as he could" and "was a very unattractive boy".<ref>Crick (1982), p. 116</ref> Later Blair was expelled from the [[Cram school|crammer]] at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor.<ref name="autogenerated1984">Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick ''Orwell Remembered'' 1984</ref>

Blair had an interest in natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he wrote about caterpillars and butterflies,<ref name="Crick-S&W">{{cite book |author=Crick, Bernard |title=George Orwell: A Life |publisher=Secker & Warburg |year=1980 |location=London |isbn=978-0436114502}}</ref> and Buddicom recalls his keen interest in ornithology. He also enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting experiments as in cooking a hedgehog<ref name="autogenerated1"/> or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it.<ref name=Mynors>Roger Mynors in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984.</ref> His zeal for scientific experiments extended to explosives—again Buddicom recalls a cook giving notice because of the noise. Later in Southwold, his sister Avril recalled him blowing up the garden. When teaching he enthused his students with his nature-rambles both at Southwold<ref>Peters, R. S. "A Boy's View of George Orwell" in ''Psychology and Ethical Development''. Allen & Unwin, 1974.</ref> and at Hayes.<ref>Geoffrey Stevens in Stephen Wadham's ''Remembering Orwell''. Penguin, 1984.</ref> His adult diaries are permeated with his observations on nature.

===Relationships and marriage===
Blair's adolescent idyll with Buddicom was shattered in the summer of 1921, when he attempted to take their relationship further than Buddicom was ready for, in what was characterised as a ''botched seduction''.<ref name="hughes">{{cite web|last=Hughes|first=Kathryn|author-link=Kathryn Hughes|date=18 February 2007|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/17/georgeorwell.biography|title=Such were the joys|work=[[The Guardian]]|access-date=25 June 2024}}</ref> When Blair left for Burma the following year, he wrote to Buddicom but she soon stopped replying to his letters.<ref name="postscript">{{cite book |last1=Buddicom |first1=Jacintha |title=Eric & Us |date=2006 |publisher=Finlay Publisher |location=Chichester |isbn=978-0-9553708-0-9}}</ref> Returning from Burma in 1927, Blair went in search of Buddicom at her family home to ask her to marry him but could not find her.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Davison |first1=Peter |title=Orwell - A Life in Letters |date=27 January 2011 |publisher=Penguin Classics |isbn=978-0141192635 |pages=576}}</ref> What had been ''a very serious business indeed'' for Blair had apparently been dismissed by Buddicom, leaving Blair potentially emotionally vulnerable.<ref name="Times Media Limited"/> Buddicom and Blair revisited those memories briefly in 1949 in three letters and three telephone calls but without closure.<ref name = Pathway>{{cite journal |last1=Loftus |first1=Guy |title=A Pathway to Orwell |journal=The Orwell Society Journal |date=September 2024 |volume=24 |pages=32–36}}</ref>

Mabel Fierz, who later became Blair's confidante, said: "He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he'd been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends I think in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't attractive."<ref name=autogenerated6>Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984</ref>

Brenda Salkield (Southwold) preferred friendship to any deeper relationship and maintained a correspondence with Blair for many years, particularly as a sounding board for his ideas. She wrote: "He was a great letter writer. Endless letters, and I mean when he wrote you a letter he wrote pages."<ref name=Wadhams/> His correspondence with Eleanor Jacques (London) was more prosaic, dwelling on a closer relationship and referring to past rendezvous or planning future ones in London and [[Burnham Beeches]].<ref>Correspondence in ''Collected Essays Journalism and Letters'', Secker & Warburg, 1968.</ref>

[[File:Richard Blair 1.jpg|thumb|right|Orwell's adopted son [[Richard Blair (patron)|Richard]] in 2018 reciting his father's work at his graveside during an annual visit to All Saints' churchyard, Sutton Courtenay]]

When Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent, his wife Eileen's friend Lydia Jackson visited. He invited her for a walk and out of sight "an awkward situation arose."<ref>Davison, Peter (ed.). ''George Orwell: Complete Works'' XI 336.</ref> Jackson was to be the most critical of Orwell's marriage to Eileen, but their later correspondence hints at a complicity. At the time Eileen was more concerned about Orwell's closeness to Brenda Salkield. Orwell had an affair with his secretary at ''Tribune'' which caused Eileen much distress, and others have been mooted. In a letter to Ann Popham he wrote: "I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc."<ref>Crick (1982), p. 480</ref> Similarly he suggested to Celia Kirwan that they had both been unfaithful.<ref>Celia Goodman interview with Shelden June 1989 in Michael Shelden ''Orwell: The Authorised Biography''</ref> There are several testaments that it was a well-matched and happy marriage.<ref name=Dakin>Henry Dakin in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell''</ref><ref name=Donahue>Patrica Donahue in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell''</ref><ref>Meyer, Michael. ''Not Prince Hamlet: Literary and Theatrical Memoirs'' 1989</ref>

In June 1944, Orwell and Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy they named [[Richard Blair (patron)|Richard Horatio]].<ref>{{cite book|title=The Lost Orwell|first=Peter|last=Davison|author-link=Peter Davison (professor)|page=244|publisher=Timewell Press|year=2007|isbn=978-1857252149}}</ref> According to Richard, Orwell was a wonderful father who gave him devoted, if rather rugged, attention and a great degree of freedom.<ref>{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/orwell-and-son|title=Orwell and Son|magazine=The New Yorker|access-date=2 September 2017|date=25 March 2009}}</ref>

Orwell was very lonely after Eileen's death in 1945 and was desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard. He proposed marriage to four women, including Celia Kirwan, and eventually [[Sonia Brownell]] accepted.<ref>Spurling, Hilary. 2002. ''The girl from the Fiction Department: a portrait of Sonia Orwell.'' New York: Counterpoint, p. 96.</ref> Orwell had met her when she was assistant to Cyril Connolly, at ''[[Horizon (British magazine)|Horizon]]'' literary magazine.<ref>Crick (1982), p. 449</ref> They were married on 13 October 1949, only three months before Orwell's death. Some maintain that Sonia was the model for Julia in ''Nineteen Eighty-Four''.

===Social interactions===
Orwell was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of literary ability. Ungregarious, he was out of place in a crowd and his discomfort was exacerbated when he was outside his own class. Though representing himself as a spokesman for the common man, he often appeared out of place with real working people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin, a [[Hail fellow well met|"Hail fellow, well met"]] type, who took him to a local pub in Leeds, said that he was told by the landlord: "Don't bring that bugger in here again."<ref>Ian Angus Interview 23–25 April 1965 quoted in Stansky and Abrahams ''The Unknown George Orwell''</ref> Adrian Fierz commented "He wasn't interested in racing or greyhounds or pub crawling or [[shove ha'penny]]. He just did not have much in common with people who did not share his intellectual interests."<ref>Adrian Fierz in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell''</ref> Awkwardness attended many of his encounters with working-class representatives, as with Pollitt and McNair,<ref>John McNair ''George Orwell: The Man I knew'' MA Thesis – Newcastle University Library 1965, quoted Crick (1982), p. 317</ref> but his courtesy and good manners were often commented on. [[Jack Common]] observed on meeting him for the first time, "Right away manners, and more than manners—breeding—showed through."<ref>Jack Common Collection Newcastle University Library quoted in Crick (1982), p. 204</ref>

In his tramping days, he did domestic work for a time. His extreme politeness was recalled by a member of the family he worked for; she declared that the family referred to him as "[[Stan Laurel|Laurel]]" after the film comedian.<ref name="autogenerated1996"/> With his gangling figure and awkwardness, Orwell's friends often saw him as a figure of fun. [[Geoffrey Gorer]] commented "He was awfully likely to knock things off tables, trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly co-ordinated young man. I think his feeling [was] that even the inanimate world was against him."<ref>Geoffrey Gorer&nbsp;– recorded for Melvyn Bragg BBC Omnibus production ''The Road to the Left'' 1970</ref> At the BBC in the 1940s, "everybody would pull his leg"<ref name =Wilshin>Sunday Wilshin in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984</ref> and Spender described him as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie Chaplin movie".<ref>Stephen Spender in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984</ref> A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and humour, often at Orwell's expense.<ref name=Donahue/>

One biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780805076936-1 |title=Powell's Books&nbsp;– Synopses and Reviews of D J Taylor ''Orwell: The Life'' |publisher=Powells.com |date=12 October 2010 |access-date=21 October 2010}}</ref> One of his former pupils recalled [[school corporal punishment|being beaten]] so hard he could not sit down for a week.<ref>Interview with Geoffrey Stevens, Crick (1982), pp. 222–223</ref> When sharing a flat with Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of loud inebriation. The upshot was that Heppenstall ended up with a bloody nose and was locked in a room. When he complained, Orwell hit him across the legs with a [[shooting stick]] and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a chair. Years later, after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote a dramatic account of the incident called "The Shooting Stick".<ref>Heppenstall ''The Shooting Stick'' Twentieth Century April 1955</ref>

Orwell got on well with young people. The pupil he beat considered him the best of teachers and the young recruits in Barcelona tried to drink him under the table without success.<ref name= Dakin/>

In the wake of his most famous works, he attracted many uncritical hangers-on, but many others who sought him found him aloof and even dull. With his soft voice, he was sometimes shouted down or excluded from discussions.<ref>Michael Meyer ''Not Prince Hamlet: Literary and Theatrical Memoirs'' Secker and Warburg 1989</ref> At this time, he was severely ill; it was wartime or the austerity period after it; during the war his wife suffered from depression; and after her death he was lonely and unhappy. In addition to that, he always lived frugally and seemed unable to care for himself properly. As a result of all this, people found his circumstances bleak.<ref>T. R. Fyval ''George Orwell: A Personal Memoir'' 1982</ref> Some, like [[Michael Ayrton]], called him "Gloomy George", but others developed the idea that he was an "English [[secular saint]]".<ref>{{cite news|first=Robert |last=McCrum |author-link=Robert McCrum |title=George Orwell was no fan of the News of the World |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/jul/14/george-orwell-news-world |work=[[The Guardian]] |date=14 July 2011|access-date=7 May 2018}}</ref>

===Lifestyle===
Orwell was a heavy smoker, who rolled his own cigarettes from strong [[Shag (tobacco)|shag tobacco]], despite his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took him to cold and damp situations. Described by ''The Economist'' as "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of [[Culture of England|English culture]]",<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11826680 |title=Still the Moon Under Water |newspaper=The Economist |location =London |date=28 July 2009}}</ref> Orwell considered [[fish and chips]], [[association football|football]], the [[pub]], strong tea, cut-price chocolate, [[Cinema of the United Kingdom|the movies]], and radio among the chief comforts for the working class.<ref>{{cite book|author=Dewey, Peter |date=2014|title=War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945|page= 325|publisher= Routledge}}</ref> He advocated a patriotic defence of a British way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state:

{{blockquote|"We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the "nice cup of tea". The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above."<ref>{{cite book |title=The Complete Works of George Orwell: A patriot after all, 1940–1941 |date=1998 |publisher=Secker & Warburg |page=294}}</ref>}}

{{Quote box
| quote = "By putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk, whereas one is likely to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round"
| source = — One of Orwell's eleven rules for making tea from his essay "[[A Nice Cup of Tea]]" which appeared in the ''[[Evening Standard|London Evening Standard]]'', 12 January 1946<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jun/25/science.highereducation "How to make a perfect cuppa: put milk in first"]. ''The Guardian'' (London). Retrieved 30 December 2014</ref>
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Orwell enjoyed strong tea—he had [[Fortnum & Mason]]'s tea brought to him in Catalonia.<ref name=Taylor/> His 1946 essay, "[[A Nice Cup of Tea]]", appeared in the ''[[Evening Standard|London Evening Standard]]'' article on how to [[Tea in the United Kingdom|make tea]].<ref>{{cite book|author1=Orwell, George |author2= Angus, Ian |author3= Davison, Sheila|date=1998|title=The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered under journalism|orig-date= 1946|page=34|publisher= Secker & Warburg}}</ref> He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of [[lager]],<ref>Lettice Cooper in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'', Penguin Books 1984</ref> and wrote about an imagined, ideal [[Pub|British pub]] in his 1946 ''Evening Standard'' article, "[[The Moon Under Water]]".<ref>{{Cite journal|url=http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/|first=George|last=Orwell|title=The Moon Under Water|journal=[[Evening Standard]]|date=9 February 1946|access-date=24 June 2013|archive-date=7 August 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130807034239/http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-moon-under-water/|url-status=dead}}</ref> Not as particular about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie"<ref>Julian Symonds in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'' Penguin Books 1984</ref> and extolled canteen food at the BBC.<ref name=Wilshin/> He preferred traditional English dishes, such as [[roast beef]], and [[kipper]]s.<ref>Crick (1982), p. 502</ref>

His dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual.<ref>Crick (1982), p. 504</ref> In Southwold, he had the best cloth from the local tailor,<ref>Jack Denny in Stephen Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'', Penguin Books 1984</ref> but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement.<ref>Bob Edwards in Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick ''Orwell Remembered'', 1984</ref><ref>Jennie Lee in Peter Davison, ''Complete Works'' XI 5</ref> David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master,<ref>David Astor Interview, in Michael Shelden</ref> while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/07/opinion/edorwell.php |title=Watching Orwell – International Herald Tribune |access-date=23 December 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080914180341/http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/07/opinion/edorwell.php |archive-date=14 September 2008}}</ref>

Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner<ref>Jack Braithwaite in Wadhams ''Remembering Orwell'', Penguin Books 1984</ref> and, on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen<ref>John Morris "Some are more equal than others", ''Penguin New Writing'', No. 40 1950</ref>—helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/18/in-search-of-english-eccentric|title=Review: In Search of the English Eccentric by Henry Hemming|last=Pindar|first=Ian|date=17 April 2009|newspaper=The Guardian|language=en|access-date=19 September 2018}}</ref>