‘1984’ Started Earlier for George Orwell : Publishers to Restore Expurgated Sections

As a political satirist, George Orwell warned of a future society fraught with authoritarianism and severe restrictions on individual expression. Now it turns out that Orwell was himself so broadly censored that his British and American publishers have agreed to republish his complete works in an unexpurgated form.

Large portions of Orwell’s texts were apparently altered or omitted to conform to the social standards of the day, a British literary scholar working on the Orwell collection discovered. And, said Peter Davison, a retired professor of English at Kent University: “It is ironic. He was making social commentary and yet he was affected by the same social rules.”

Anniversary Collection

Davison was engaged five years ago by Secker & Warburg, the London house that now publishes Orwell’s works, when that firm decided to issue a special anniversary collection to coincide with the arrival of the title year of “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” “It was thought at first it would just be a matter of looking through these books to see if there were misprints,” Davison said. Instead, Davison found the “corruptions,” as he calls them, in Orwell’s copy.

“I’d like to make it quite plain,” Davison said in an interview from his home in London, “that it was not that his (original) publisher, Victor Gollancz, was unduly cautious. He was in fact quite an innovative publisher.”

But “in the 1930s in England, just as in the United States, standards were very different,” Davison said. Orwell’s outspokenness, his tendency to model characters after recognizable public figures and in some cases, his use of actual advertising or political slogans made his publisher uneasy, Davison said. There were “pressures” from these outside sources, Davison said, and, fearing lawsuits and prosecution, Orwell’s publisher demanded changes from the author. “It was simply that Gollancz couldn’t stand the cost of legal actions,” Davison said.

“I think it’s important to put it in perspective,” Julian P. Muller, administrative vice president at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the U.S. publisher of Orwell, said in New York. “It sounds as if the books were viciously censored, when in fact what happened was that the British publisher was dealing with it in terms of the problems that existed at the time of original publication, which is--what?--40, 50 years ago. In those days, the British law in connection with libel and obscenity was a great deal more stringent than it is now.

‘A Deep Impression’

“So some of these things were removed because of their concern of whether or not they’d be running into any legalities,” Muller said. “Obviously, this would have some kind of effect on the material, although obviously Orwell has made a deep impression as it is.”

Orwell’s books are ongoing and steady sellers in this country, Muller said. With most of its sales in paperback, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” for example, has sold more than 9 million copies in this country. “Animal Farm,” his next most popular book here, has sold more than 8 million copies.

Researching each punctuation point, every single syllable of Orwell’s original manuscripts, as well as journals, letters and other sources, Davison said he has often been able to restore the texts to their original versions. However in other instances, entire blocks of text may be missing, with no way to account for the absent passages.

“For example in ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter,’ ” Davison said, “it is possible to restore some things specifically, but others, in whole areas of about 30 pages, all I can say is ‘this passage was toned down’ and give the reason.”

In that tale, Davison said, “the heroine seems to suddenly lose her memory, and the reason is quite plain in the libel letters (between Orwell, his publisher and their lawyers). But in the original book as typed, it said that there was an attempted rape, which so upset her that she lost her memory.” Since rape was not commonly discussed at that time, “the publisher was fearful of saying that someone was raped, and so it was omitted.”

Particularly in regard to matters of sex and sexuality, the result was a kind of unofficial, but widely enforced, censorship, Davison said. “If you go back earlier, people like Florence Nightingale pointed out that if you didn’t speak certain words--and in this case, she meant prostitute-- they didn’t exist.”

So the rape scene was excluded from “Clergyman’s Daughter,” just as, Davison found, Orwell was forced to remove a sexually explicit scene from “Down and Out in London.” Yet another Orwell work, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” was in its final page-proof stage when Orwell had to take out certain actual advertising slogans.

In the forthcoming annotated Orwell texts, to be issued first in Great Britain in groups of three over the next two years, he said: “I have been able to restore the original slogans.”

In other cases, the changes were less political than grammatical. “For instance, he didn’t like commas very much between groups of adjectives,” Davison said. “In a phrase such as ‘a bright clear day,’ he would run it on, with no comma.”

And sometimes Orwell himself initiated certain alterations in his copy. “Sometimes there are factual errors that Orwell wanted corrected,” Davison said. Other times, Orwell was asked to engage in a little geographical revisionism.

“Very often in these books,” Davison said, “one method of censorship was to delocalize them.”

While agreeing to the changes, Orwell was far from enthusiastic about them.

“He was very cross, very angry, very upset about the changes, because he said it spoiled the point of what he was saying,” Davison said. On one occasion “he wrote to his literary agent saying ‘had I known this was going to happen I would have rewritten the whole chapter.’

“I can restore that now,” Davison said. “I’m sure he would be very pleased.”

Literary scholars, Davison said, also will welcome the revised editions of Orwell’s nine books. “In a sense the value to any scholar is the fact that one believes an author has the right to be presented as he wished to be presented,” he said. “For anyone concerned with language and meaning, it is valuable to have what was actually intended.”

“It’s not going to make the weak novels great,” Davison said. “But it is going to make it much clearer, the quality of Orwell as a craftsman--and also the way in which he rode on the borderline between fiction and reality--what now has gone downhill in terms of what we now call faction, the re-creation of a pseudo-actuality. Orwell was at the beginning of something that was exploring that sort of thing. It was very important in England at that time, and Orwell was very much on the forefront of that.”

The expanded and annotated volumes will help shed light on an entire literary movement at that time, as well as on Orwell himself, Davison said. “Orwell wasn’t a theorist in terms of this new mixture of genres,” Davison said, “but he was practicing doing it. It is impossible to say of any of Orwell’s nine books what genre it precisely falls into. It’s not quite autobiography, not quite fiction, not quite satire.”

As a consequence, he said, the restored accuracy becomes still more critical. “It makes it very important to get the facts right, and the facts have been covered over. It’s very important in terms of judging what he was doing.”

Even today, Julian Muller said, a quiet kind of censorship continues to prevail in the world of publishing. “Oh sure,” he said, “no publisher is going to publish a manuscript that is libelous, and I suppose to a certain extent, one has to be aware of the laws governing obscenity. They’re a lot less rigid than they used to be, but the matter of obscenity is still very much an arbitrary one.”

In Orwell’s time, Muller said, the author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was certainly not singled out for extensive rewriting. On the contrary, “It could have been anybody. What happened to Orwell was what happened to all authors at that time. Because the laws were more stringent at that time, certain elements were removed.”

Unusual Edition

Nonetheless, “it’s rare that a book is reissued in different form,” Muller said. “I’m sure that in certain of the complete editions of famous authors, there may have been restitutions of material for one reason or another. But I can’t think of any quite specifically.”

Along with Orwell’s nine books, Davison has spent the last four years poring over “eight volumes, 5,000 pages” of the author’s letters and essays. The total immersion in Orwelliana often makes Davison feel that the author, who died in 1950, is very much alive, very much a part of the process of reconstructing his work.

So does the picture of Orwell feeding his goat that hangs over Davison’s dining-room table--so much so that Davison and his wife often joke that Orwell actually lives with them.

“I think he’d be very pleased with these changes,” Davison said. “I hope he would.”