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George Orwell |
George Orwell revived – as a blogger
HE warned us of the death of capitalism and his fears of totalitarian communism.
And if he were around today George Orwell (pictured), creator of prophetic novels Animal Farm and 1984, would no doubt be having a field day as disasters daily hit the headlines.
But he is around. Orwell has become a modern-day blogger thanks to Professor Jean Seaton, who administers the annual Orwell writing prize, and has thought up the idea of raiding Orwell’s copious personal diaries to reproduce them 70 years after they were written.
The diaries are held in the Orwell Archive at University College Library, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, and if you want to know what Orwell was thinking this day long ago then log on to the site.
“I think he would have been a blogger,” says Professor Seaton, who is on the staff at the University of Westminster. And a prolific one at that given that Orwell’s collected writings fill some 2,000 volumes.
But Orwell, who died in University College Hospital in 1950, never had the opportunity that modern technology provides in expressing and publishing his thoughts on a daily basis.
The basic aim of the project is to bring Orwell alive for today’s younger generation in a way that is easily accessible, the material being reprinted with the permission of the Orwell estate.
And although the archive is open to view, “ordinary people won’t go to it,” she explains. “I thought, if you publish what he wrote as he wrote it in real time, then people would find that rather engaging.”
Professor Seaton adds: “The diary isn’t Orwell at his most polemic. It is Orwell at his most steady, most observant.”
See for yourself at: orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/
Gerald Isaaman |
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