George Orwell and families – welcome to episode 105!
Rachel is busy this month, so I put a shout-out on our Patreon page to see if anybody would be willing to step in and take her place. I was delighted that Arwen said yes, and I think you’ll enjoy the chat we had. In the first half, we talk about big vs small families in literature – and in the second half, we compare Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm by George Orwell. Rachel will be back next time, to do the books we previously advertised.
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Do get in touch at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com if you’d like to suggest or ask anything. You can find our podcast at Apple podcasts, Spotify, your podcast app of choice, or the audio file above.
The books and authors we mention in this episode are:
E.F. Benson
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Philip K Dick
Iain M Banks
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett
Literary Taste by Arnold Bennett
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Diary of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Foe by J.M. Coetzee
Pamela by Samuel Richardson
The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn
Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras
Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto
Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker
Autobiography by Anthony Trollope
Anita Brookner
The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson
Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Famous Five series by Enid Blyton
Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl
A Change for the Better by Susan Hill
The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Moomin series by Tove Jansson
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Hunky Parker’s Watching You by Gillian Cross
The Demon Headmaster by Gillian Cross
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Grand Canyon by Vita Sackville-West
I don’t think I could choose between 1984 and Animal Farm- but I just love all Orwell!
I have read Lab Girl and found it disappointing as there was too much boasting about her misbehavior as a student and scientist. What a delightful episode and well done, Arwen!
The discussion about families was very interesting (I am another only child…)
A trilogy of children’s books about a family that I especially love is The Family From One End Street, Further Adventures of the Family From One End Street, and The Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn, by Eve Garnett. The books are set in the 1930s, and are about a working class family – Mr Ruggles (dustman), Mrs Ruggles (laundrywoman) and their seven children, of whom my favourite will always be the bookish dreamer Kate. Can’t imagine why…
The Ruggles are (usually) happy, but they are poor, and Garnett doesn’t shy away from what that means.
The family lives in Otwell-on-the-Ouse, a fictionalised version of Lewes in Sussex, and the books are about their day to day adventures (the adults’ as well as the children’s.) Garnett was an artist; she was commissioned to illustrate Evelyn Sharp’s The London Child (1927) and was horrified by the child poverty she observed in the course of the work. She painted a 40 feet long mural for The Children’s House, a nursery in Bow run by two sisters who were radical social reformers. Eventually she wrote the first FFOES book; it beat The Hobbit to win the 1937 Carnegie Medal. In 2019 the author Jacqueline Wilson named it as ‘the book that made me’ – she said it was the first time she had seen children like her (she grew up in a council flat) in print, rather than the standard boarding school/posh house/big garden scenario.
Sorry to go on, as you can see I find Garnett and her work fascinating (in fact I wrote about it in a blog post.)
You also mentioned books featuring adults who are only children. The two I can think of are firstly, Brideshead revisited – isn’t Charles Ryder one? And isn’t that at least part of what attracts him to the Flytes? And secondly Elizabeth White in Maeve Binchy’s Light A Penny Candle. Elizabeth is an only child living with her mother in London; when the Blitz begins, her mother sends her to rural Ireland to stay with the large farming family of a childhood friend. There she becomes friends with one of the daughters, Aisling, and the story follows both girls from the ages of 10 to 30
This is another story that resonated with me, as I too grew up in London (though not in the Blitz!) and have a friend who is the oldest of seven children from a farm in County Waterford. Every time I visited them I loved feeling part of a ‘proper’ family.
I liked the idea one of you had about what I believe is now termed ‘found family’ in Tales of the City, another favourite book (and TV adapation.) Having Anna Madrigal as your ‘found’ mother would be wonderful!
I haven’t yet listened to the rest of the podcast, so I can’t comment on the Orwell bit. I don’t think I’d like either of those books very much. Too depressing for me these days.
Thanks for another great episode.
Thank you for the details about Eve Garnett! I have read just the first book, but this has encouraged me to keep going with the books. (They’re harder to find where I live in the U.S. sadly!)
Good thought about Charles Ryder being an only child and his attraction to the Flytes because of that.
I’ve been thinking on it for a while and Anne Shirley in an only child. I think Digory Kirke in The Magician’s Nephew is also an only child, which makes his attachment to his sick mother all the more poignant.
Orwell wrote 1984 when dying of tuberculosis … it was published in 1949 & he died the next year …