Editing Coming Up for Air (section)

==Style==
In their 1972 study of Orwell, ''The Unknown Orwell'', the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams described the novel as ''Wellsian''. Whilst at his prep school in Sussex (1911–1916), [[H.G.Wells|Wells]] had been a favourite author of Eric Blair/Orwell. As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian's Prep school, – [[Rudyard Kipling|Kipling]], [[P.G. Wodehouse|Wodehouse]], [[Jonathan Swift|Swift]], [[George Bernard Shaw|Shaw]], [[William Thackeray|Thackeray]] – his loyalty was virtually unwavering. What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before [[World War I]] recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own. He and [[Cyril Connolly|Connolly]] would leave the school grounds and set out across the [[South Downs|Downs]] to [[Beachy Head]], or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the [[Sussex]] countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and [[Westdean]] and [[Jevington]]. They would pause in each, and buy penny sweets and various fizzy drinks. This was the plain, decent, bread-and-sunlit world that Orwell recalled so nostalgically the further it retreated from him; eventually he would write [a] Wellsian [novel of this kind], in ''Coming Up For Air.''"<ref>Stansky & Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell, pp. 66–67</ref>

The writer Michael Levenson remarked upon the influence at this period in Orwell's life, of [[Henry Miller]], and Miller's attitude to what was happening in the world. Miller sees what is happening, but is ''[[Inside the Whale]]'', he "feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential [[Jonah]] act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, ''accepting'' – even when this means accepting "concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]], bombs, aeroplanes."  "George Bowling is Orwell's Jonah, and ''Coming Up For Air'' is in significant respects a contribution to the 'school of Miller'. Hemmed in on every side ̶ by job, home, history – Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. He merely wants to rediscover the grounds of happiness. In its central movement, ''Coming Up For Air'' is an unembarrassedly affirmative recovery of early-century innocence:boyhood, family life and country rambling in the town of Lower Binfield. Fishing in ''Coming Up For Air'' is what sex was in ''[[Tropic of Cancer (novel)|Tropic of Cancer]]''. 'Fishing', as Bowling puts it, 'is the opposite of war'.<ref>Michael Levenson, ''The fictional realist'' in the Cambridge Companion to George Orwell pp. 72–73 {{ISBN|978-0-521-67507-9}}</ref>