“There are lots of people with lots of money who’d like a trophy. But you then lose track of them and they disappear, until they pop up on the market again.”
Prof Jean
Seaton
‘I hope I
shall get the chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff
appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies, more I
can’t say, owing to the censorship.’ –
George
Orwell, May 1937
All animals
are equal, but some are more equal than others
Animal
Farm-George Orwell
“The
horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a
part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within
thirty seconds, any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear
and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer,
seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current,
turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And
yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be
switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.
1984
About 160 historically
important George Orwell papers have been acquired by University College London.
The Gollancz Papers, as they were known were at risk of being sold to the
highest bidder at auction.
The papers
contain Orwell’s correspondence, contracts and readers’ reports relating to his
earliest novels, dating from 1934 to 1937. The papers relate to four of his
earliest published works – A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
The Road to Wigan Pier and Inside the Whale . His analysis of the politics of
1930s Europe, shaped his world viewpoint. The newly acquired papers contain
manuscript notebooks, personal papers and the first handwritten notes of some
of Orwell’s most famous words and phrases, such as “Two Minutes Hate”,
“Newspeak”, and “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”.
The
collection acquired by UCL had originally belonged to Orwell’s publisher,
Victor Gollancz, who founded one of the 20th century’s most important left-wing
publishing houses. Publishing several of Orwell’s early novels. However he refused
to publish three of Orwell’s major political books, Homage to Catalonia, Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Gollancz was
particularly hostile to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Gollancz thought Orwell
was a Trotskyist and was hostile to Stalinism. Although no Trotskyist, Orwell
was hostile to Stalinism. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an important written by
a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth.
“Written in
1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the
Spanish people against fascism and for socialism. Above all, it provides
irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by
the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish revolution.
Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon
Trotsky and the International Left Opposition of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose
policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[1]
A spokesman
for University College London (UCL) said the papers were “a valuable piece of
Britain’s cultural heritage”. UCL already has the world’s most comprehensive research
material relating to Orwell. The purchase by UCL was done with the help of the
National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Friends of the Nations' Libraries to
stop the collection falling into the hands of a few money-grabbing collectors. Anger
was also expressed at the condition of the papers, which had been “languishing
in dozens of rusty, dusty filing cabinets”.
The Orwell
papers were owned by the Orion Group, which was in turn owned by Hachette.
Hachette had no interest in the cultural value of the papers. Their decision to
sell to the highest bidder because they were closing down the warehouse where
the papers were stored had been condemned as an act of “Cultural vandalism”.
According to Rick Gekoski in his 2021 book, Guarded by Dragons, “No one on the
Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”[2]
How Orion
came to get the papers was explained by Richard Young, who writes, “Gollancz
continued as an independent publishing house even after the death of Victor
Gollancz in 1967, under the guidance of his daughter Livia. In the late 1980s,
however, the business was sold to new owners and went through several changes
of ownership in the 1990s, ending up under the Orion Group. In 2012, Orion was
faced with a problem, in that the archive of Gollancz was by then housed in a
warehouse on the south coast, along with archives from several other publishing
houses. The warehouse provider planned to close the facility in the coming
years, and so faced with this, Orion took the opportunity to put the archive up
for sale.
So, what
exactly is a publishing house archive? Essentially, it consists of two main
elements: so-called file or archive copies of the books published by the firm,
and secondly, the correspondence or publishing files relating to each of the
published works. Gekoski did his best to place the entire correspondence
archive with an institution. Those tapped included the British Library, as
well as Universities in the UK and the US. The price tag of 1 million pounds,
which Orion was seeking, proved to be a stumbling block, however, and all
negotiations to sell the archive (which included significant George Orwell
correspondence) in its entirety fell through.[3]
The
capitalist speculators of the Orion company stands in stark contrast to the “extraordinary
generosity” of Orwell’s only son of Richard Blair, who with his own money purchased
50 letters to donate them to UCL’s Orwell Archive, to stop them being gobbled
up by vampire collectors and according to him “Then they’re never seen again.
Orwell’s
biographer D J Taylor concurred with Blair, saying, “This is a fantastic
treasure trove from the point of view of Orwell and publishing history …
Literary manuscripts have a terrible habit of disappearing”.
