Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Special Commissioned Entry on George Orwell, W. Scott Lucas - Orwell At Work

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ORWELL AT WORK

GETTING ESTABLISHED

Orwell claimed in 1946 that he had wanted to be a writer from an early age: “I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’—a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger.’”¹

On his eighth birthday, Eric Blair received from his mother a copy of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Swift would become a significant influence, particularly upon the writing of Animal Farm. Other favorite writers included William Makepeace Thackeray, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells.

While at his preparatory school, St. Cyprian's, the eleven-year-old Blair published his first poem in a local newspaper. At his secondary school, Eton College, he started a short-lived magazine, Election Times, which...

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1. Introduction
2. About George Orwell
3. Orwell At Work
4. Orwell's Era
5. Orwell's Works
6. Orwell On Orwell And Writing
7. Orwell As Studied
8. Copyright

1. George Orwell