Letters to the Editor
Investigating Orwell T. R. Fyvet Against Churchmanship Rev, Roy Herbert Cranwell Week A Cranwell Parent Chesterton Brian F. Glanville Courage and the Countryside Enid Airy
Deification and Clarification Rev. John W. Kennedy INVESTIGATING ORWELL
Sut,—In the course of his perceptive essay on Orwell (Spectator, August 31), Mr. Kingsley Atnis says: 'In a brilliant article published in The New Yorker for January 28, 1956, Mr. Anthony West argues that Airstrip One, the setting for Nineteen Eighty-Four, was actually a paranoiac version of Orwell's preparatory school.' A similar comparison between some aspects of Nineteen Eighty-Four and prep school dormitory talk was actually already made, not too solemnly, by Malcolm Muggeridge and myself in a BBC discussion back in 1949 when the novel was first pub- lished, I mention this only because Orwell himself, who had listened, admitted that the point had made him laugh and that there was perhaps something in it.
He always maintained. that people in this country had, from their own experience, no clue what life within a totalitarian society meant for the odd man out. It was an idea of his that the situation of an unhappy boy at a preparatory boarding school might perhaps hear some psychological resemblance to it. The notion may be exaggerated, even for English preparatory schools before 1914, but perhaps there is just 'something in it' and one can leave it at that, without suggesting that 'Orwell's unconscious purpose was to send everybody in England to an enormous Cross- gates to be as miserable as he had been,' and. more strongly, 'This is the kind of perception about Orwell that needs investigating.' Investigating?—Yours faithfully,
London, NWT
T. R. FYVEL
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