STEVEN MARCUS
43
bearing of witness conveys the ineffaceable sense that his was an exem–
plary life, that its forty-seven years were compounded of experiences in
which representative phases of the cultural and political history of the
twentieth century were both compressed and registered with exceptional
clarity, complexity, and saliency - and that in significant measure these
qualities, which seem to carry also a special moral and pedagogical grav–
ity, still endure in Orwell's writing.
That life actually began at the tail end of Victorian Britain, and part
of the continuing interest of Orwell's experiences is that they dramatize
from one set of representative perspectives the transition from the nine–
teenth to the twentieth century, from late Victorian culture and society
to modernity, modernism, and the modern. English literature seems pe–
culiarly rich in figures who embody and negotiate these transitions in dif–
ferent ways, but no writer, I think, surpasses Orwell in the poignancy
with which he felt and articulated those changes, or in the centrality
they occupy in his larger preoccupations.
Orwell's father was born in 1857
(Little Dorrit,
for example, was still
coming out in monthly installments); he made a career in the Civil
Service in India, promoting the profitable opium trade. Orwell himself
was born in 1903, and his childhood was in almost every way character–
istic of a certain marginal segment of the life and culture of upper mid–
dle-class Edwardian Britain. Despite its social standing, the family was
never affluent, and the obviously clever young Eric Blair (Orwell came
later as part of his writer's identity) was taken on, at the age of seven, as
a scholarship student at one of those private boarding and preparatory
schools that flourished particularly during this period. In such institutions
several generations of middle-class British male youth experienced much
of their childhood and virtually all of adolescence as, in significant de–
gree, abandonment, orphanage, and reorientation in an essentially ho–
mosexual and hierarchical communal universe. Although the experience
was internally a terrible one for Blair, he nonetheless continued to de–
velop cognitively. He was prompt enough at performing and parroting
what was required on written examinations to win an extremely coveted
scholarship to Eton, which he entered at the age of fourteen.
Situated at the top of the educational-social pyramid, the youthful
Blair was at the same time in a condition of adolescent rebellion, self–
deprecation and self-dislike, and something that seemed very close to de–
pression. Although he read widely and voraciously, he had also decided
not to achieve or complete much of the required work, and he slid
steadily and permanently toward the bottom of his class. Since there was
no family money to send him on to Oxford or Cambridge, and since his
inferior academic performance had put further scholarship corn:petition
