Orwell went with his wife to North Africa, staying mainly in Marrakesh, from September 1938 to March 1939. Whilst he was there he wrote Coming Up for Air. The book was published by Gollancz on 12 June 1939 (2,000 copies) and almost immediately another 1,000 copies were called for. It was the first of Orwell’s books to be printed in Secker & Warburg’s Uniform Edition, 5,000 copies being published on 13 May 1948. Writing to Julian Symons on 10 May 1948, Orwell said:

I thought it worth reprinting because it was rather killed by the outbreak of war and then blitzed out of existence, so thoroughly that in order to get a copy from which to reset it we had to steal one from a public library.

The first American edition was published by Harcourt, Brace & Company on 19 January 1950 (8,000 copies), two days before Orwell died. It was proposed in August 1939 to include Coming Up for Air in a series of books in English circulated on the Continent of Europe by the Albatross Press. Certain unfriendly references to Hitler were to be excised (though not all of them) and a passage of about one page in length that suggested war was imminent was to be cut out. These changes were required (and accepted by Orwell) because Albatross books were distributed chiefly in Germany. The project came to nothing because war broke out the following month, though Orwell was still making inquiries about it in December 1939.

No typescript survives of Coming Up for Air but there is a corrected proof of the Uniform Edition which has been claimed to be Orwell’s though it more probably emanates from the publishing house. The references to ‘Boars’/‘Boers’ on page 45 caused the printers problems. In the first edition, Lady Astor was included in the list of ‘soul-savers and Nosey Parkers’ on page 183, line 4, but was omitted from the Uniform Edition. For reasons explained in the Textual Note to the Complete Works edition, VII, pages 250–51 (Secker & Warburg, 1986), it is probable that this cut was made by Orwell and her name is not included in this edition.

There is one minor but curious aspect about the composition of Coming Up for Air. When Orwell returned his set of proofs from Jura on 22 October 1947, he told Roger Senhouse, a Director of Secker & Warburg:

Did you know by the way that this book hasn’t got a semicolon in it? I had decided about that time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.

In fact, the surviving set of proofs and the Uniform Edition include three semicolons: after ‘streamlined’, page 22, line 20; after ‘Maybrick’, page 23, line 15; and after ‘Hashbadana’, page 30, line 24–incorrectly given as ‘Hashbadada’ in 1939 and 1948. It is impossible to tell whether Orwell missed this inclusion of the semicolons, or whether he marked their omission on another set of proofs no longer extant and his instructions were ignored. Orwell did not always pick up mistakes in proof so, despite his concern about semicolons, it is quite possible he missed these rather than that Senhouse went against Orwell’s wishes–for Senhouse did accept Orwell’s use of ‘onto’ as a single word despite the former’s ‘archaic horror’ of it being so printed. Because Orwell was so specific about the omission of semicolons, they have been left out of this edition.

Although Orwell checked the proofs for the Uniform Edition there is evidence to show that his preferences in spelling, followed in the first edition (e.g., ‘further’ rather than ‘farther’ and ‘today’ without a hyphen) were disregarded and that a house style of punctuation was imposed. In making such changes in 1948, Secker & Warburg were inconsistent. Thus, for example, ‘streamlined’ appears both as one word and hyphenated. This edition is based on that of 1939, which is, in general, closer to Orwell’s styling, but it takes into account the few changes deemed to be Orwell’s and his expressed wishes in the matter of semicolons and capitalisation.

PETER DAVISON
Albany, London

Part I

I

THE IDEA REALLY came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, same privets and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference–where there are no kids there’s no bare patch in the middle.

I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while the new ones were being made. I haven’t such a bad face, really. It’s one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes. I’ve never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I’ve got my teeth in I probably don’t look my age, which is forty-five.

Making a mental note to buy razor-blades, I got into the bath and started soaping. I soaped my arms (I’ve got those kind of pudgy arms that are freckled up to the elbow) and then took the back-brush and soaped my shoulder-blades, which in the ordinary way I can’t reach.