By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Inside the Whale’ is a long essay by George Orwell (1903-50), published in 1940. The title of Orwell’s essay refers to the biblical Book of Jonah, in which the prophet Jonah is swallowed by a great fish (although, as Orwell notes, received wisdom tends to substitute ‘whale’ for ‘fish’).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous opening sentence of Orwell’s final novel
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Since those words were first published in 1949, they have joined the pantheon, the literary canon, of great opening lines. They are, without doubt, up there with Austen’s ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, Dickens’s ‘It was the best of times’, and Melville’s ‘Call me Ishmael’ (which aren’t technically the opening lines of Moby-Dick; but that’s a story for another Friday).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Why I Write’ is an essay by George Orwell, published in 1946 after the publication of his novella Animal Farm and before he wrote his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The essay is an insightful piece of memoir about Orwell’s early years and how he developed as a writer, from harbouring ambitions to write self-consciously literary works to developing, in the 1930s, into the author of sharp political commentary in both fiction and non-fiction.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ This is one of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The words are spoken by O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s novel.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Down the Mine’ is an essay by George Orwell (1903-50), originally published as the second chapter of his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier but later reprinted as a separate essay. In ‘Down the Mine’, Orwell describes his experience of going down an English coal mine to see the conditions of coal miners in the 1930s.