Coming Up for Air (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: George Orwell
- First Published: 1939
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Social realism
- Time of Work: The early 1900’s and 1938
- Setting: A London suburb and a rural English town
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism
- Subjects: Culture, Villages, 1930’s, England or English people, City life, London, World War I, Progress, Totalitarianism, Modernization, Fishing or fishermen, Nostalgia, Insurance
- Locales: London, England
Characters Discussed
George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance representative. Fat and sentimental, with a mouth full of false teeth, George is in every way the lower-middle-class Englishman, even to his love of reading and his nostalgia for an Edwardian, pre-World War I past that can no longer be found, except perhaps in memory. In order to escape the increasingly bland routine in his London suburban home, as well as his complaining wife and children, George fantasizes about taking a trip to his childhood home of Lower Binfield, a small town in rural Oxfordshire. He...
[The entire page is 512 words long]
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