Eagleton on Jeorge Orwell/ 伊格尔顿评乔治·奥威尔

Terry Eagleton/ Reach-Me-Down Romantic

George Orwell by Gordon Bowker · Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00

Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor · Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00

Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas · Haus, 180 pp, £8.99

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Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have castigated Britain's class-ridden education system, but he put his adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of Taylor's beginning 'Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses' turns out to concern Orwell's letters home rather than his person.) One friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as 'that evil despotism'; but he also admired empire-builders for their practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-wing Adelphi magazine for target practice.

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