Coming Up for Air
GEORGE ORWELL
Coming Up for Air
He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.
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Contents
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
PART I
PART II
PART III
PART IV
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Coming Up for Air
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police Force in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for me Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: ‘You have made an indelible mark on English literature … you are among me few memorable writers of your generation.’
Peter Davison is Research Professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne and studied for a London External BA (1954) by correspondence course. He edited an Elizabethan text for a London MA (1957) and then taught at Sydney University, where he gained a Ph.D. He was awarded a D.Litt. and an Hon. D. Arts by De Montfort University in 1999. He has written and edited fifteen books as well as the Facsimile Edition of the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the twenty volumes of Orwell’s Complete Works (with Ian Angus and Sheik Davison). He is a Past-President of the Bibliographical Society, whose journal he edited for twelve years. He was made an OBE in 1999 for services to literature.
A Note on the Text
Coming Up for Air presents few editorial problems though there are one or two textual points of interest. Orwell was seriously ill early in 1938 and had spent some months in a sanatorium at Aylesford, Kent. He was advised to spend the winter in a warm climate. The novelist L. H. Myers anonymously, through Dorothy Plowman, gave £300 to enable him to go. Although this was a gift, Orwell insisted on regarding it as a loan and when he could afford to repay it in 1946 he still did not know his benefactor’s name; Myers had, in fact, died in 1944.
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