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+--- Thread: Orwell's early dislike of England + Victorian cult of death (/thread-1966.html)
Orwell's early dislike of England + Victorian cult of death - C C - Feb 5, 2016
All aboard the George Orwell roller-coaster
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/all-aboard-the-george-orwell-roller-coaster/
EXCERPT: England was the land of Orwell' s paternal ancestry but not of his birth: that was India, where his father worked in the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother had grown up in Burma, with a French father. In some ways England was Orwell's adoptive parent, and it took decades for the son to come around to his new family.
[...] His deepest dislike of England came with his service, from 1922-27, as a police officer in Burma: Colls points out that to hold such a position was to spend one's daily life being hated by the public, which one technically served, and Orwell came to understand the reasons for that hatred. He came back to England filled with loathing for his own class. [...] He was looking for a justification of his political instincts, and that search drove him first to the dispossessed and then to the hardpressed industrial working class....
Charlotte’s stockings, Emily’s walking stick, Anne’s handkerchief
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1658255.ece
EXCERPT: For the most part, we don’t keep relics the way the Victorians did. It would be hard, now, to find a story about a widow squabbling with her husband’s best friend over who could keep the heart another friend had snatched from the fire where his body was being cremated. But for Mary Shelley this was not a peculiar thing to do, particularly as other friends were also cherishing Percy’s ashes, and even giving them away as presents. [...] "Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture" is more scholarly in tone. [Deborah] Lutz looks at the Victorian cult of death, analysing the intense and sensual way Victorians mourned. She works chronologically from Romantic remains (Shelley’s jaw, Keats’s hair, a square of the bed curtains that surrounded Byron’s miserable honeymoon bed) to the start of the twentieth century, when the rise of secularism and the advance of medicine came together to produce what Diana Fuss has called the death of death....