Eton Orwell Prof 2

ORWELL GREATEST ETONIAN OF ALL

LITERARY FIGURES
by Jeffery Branch,
(JJB), a teacher at Eton

     The 'big four' amongst Old Etonian literary figures are, I
would argue, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Eric Blair, aka George Orwell. All can lay claim
to pre-eminence not merely on the grounds of their writing
but for the contribution made to our cultural heritage.

     Fielding, a founding father of the English novel, initi-
ated a narrative tradition which looks forward to Dickens and
those who turn the incisiveness of comic prose upon the
moral and social abuses of their day. Gray, for all his reclu-
sive personal diffidence and unhappy adulthood, stands as a
key figure in the emergence of the romantic movement in
English poetry. The rebellious Shelley, an appealing role
model perhaps to many a radical young Etonian and an
instantly acknowledged planet in the romantic firmament, has
strong claims to precedence. George Orwell, our second rad-
ical, is seen as the champion of individual freedom against
duplicitous and tyrannous government.

     Who can claim precedence? For Fielding and Gray
the very classical education which inspired them now limits their
contemporary impact, whilst for many there is in Shelley's
poetry an excessive abstraction which hampers communica-
tion at the highest level. Orwell, then, it must surely be: his
literary works continue to provoke and challenge universally
in their attempt to probe the relationship between the individ-
ual and society. Animal Farm and 1984 are now so embedded
in our consciousness that George Orwell can indeed be con-
sidered The Greatest Old Etonian of them all.

~ published in the Eton College Chronicle