It is extraordinary that Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, the editors of the four volumes, should have found so little material from the first half of Orwell's life: one page up to the age of 25, as against nearly 2,000 pages from 25 to his death at the age of 46. The first letter is one written in 1929 from Paris to Max Plowman, editor of Adelphi, which published most of Orwell's early work. Apart from this, the first volume begins with Orwell's earliest professional publication in English, an article entitled “A Farthing Newspaper” which appeared in G. But only a solitary item, a schoolboy letter written to Steven Runciman when Orwell was still at Eton, belongs to the period before he broke with his pre-literary past. The four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell cover the thirty years from 1920 to his death in 1950. The latest-and possibly the last-books to be published under his writing name admirably document Orwell's literary career.
He lived as a tramp, picked hops in Kent, stayed among the miners in the north of England, all to gather material which he later turned into books even to Spain he went first with the intention of writing about it as a journalist, and in the end turned the whole bizarre experience of his involvement with the Communist power play into one of his best books and one of the best books about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. Having decided to become a writer, he related everything he did to that decision. Having made his choice, he found it impossible to live the kind of double existence which Trollope, for example, supported for so long. Orwell, however, became the complete author.
Other writers have published under noms de plume but have still lived private lives in their own names, feeling no particular need to allow literary personae to take over the rest of their lives. The second break came in 1932 when Blair published his first book, not under his real name, but under the newly coined nom de plume of George Orwell. The change began with the dramatic break in 1927, when at the age of 24 Eric Blair abandoned the role of a servant of the British Empire to which his family tradition of Indian officialdom had predisposed him, and decided, with a rather self-conscious enjoyment of the role, that henceforward he would be a writer: a writer, moreover, committed to becoming the prose laureate of the underdog. There have been few more striking examples of the transformation which takes place when a man becomes a dedicated writer (or painter or scientist for that matter) than George Orwell. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell.
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