George Orwell’s early novels illuminate his two great books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and George Orwell himself.

George Orwell was born in India and educated at Eton, after which he joined the Imperial Police in Burma where he served for six years, developing a disgust for imperialism which led him to resign. Burmese Days, based on these years, is a crisp, fierce, and almost boisterous attack on the Anglo-Indian (New Statesman). It is also the story of a sensitive lonely Englishman with an affection for the Burmese, and a longing for a particular young Englishwoman, who finds himself trapped by a dishonest system and oppressive society.

In A Clergyman’s Daughter, a weak-willed unhappy spinster, daughter of a disagreeable clergyman in a small East Anglian village, achieves a brief and accidental liberation from her mundane life. However, Orwell’s biographer D. J. Taylor, writes The great fascination of A Clergyman’s Daughter is that it is essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which doesn’t appear until fourteen years later. It’s about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. The last scene of A Clergyman’s Daughter has Dorothy back in her father’s rectory in Suffolk, still doing the mundane, routine tasks that she was doing at the start of the novel, having rebelled against the life she’s enmeshed in still. Just like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, she’s had to come to a kind of accommodation with it. It’s a very prophetic novel in terms of what came later in Orwell’s writing.

The Aspidistra is a plant that tenaciously survives forever on many British windowsills, without ever thriving. It is a metaphor for the life of the British lower-middle class. Keep the Apsidistra Flying is a pointed observation of the British class system which is based on the worship of the Money God:

And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money. (George Orwell, Keep the Apsidistra Flying).

Don’t you see that a man’s whole personality is bound up with his income? His personality is his income. (George Orwell, Keep the Apsidistra Flying).

Coming up for Air is remarkably prescient. It foresees the scourges of poverty and totalitarianism as well as the destruction of the environment, decades before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring:

What makes Coming Up for Air so peculiarly bitter to the taste is that, in addition to calling up the twin spectres of totalitarianism and workless poverty, it also declares the impossibility of ‘retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies’ - because it postulates a world in which these things are simply not there any more. (John Wain, In the Thirties: The World of George Orwell.)

This reasonably-priced volume will be a pleasure to anyone with an interest in Orwell.