GEORGE ORWELL AT HOME (and among the anarchists): Essays and Photographs

In April 1949, when George Orwell was very ill with tuberculosis, he planned to go to Switzerland for the sake of his health. He wrote from the sanatorium to his friend Vernon Richards 'to ask whether, among the prints of photos that you have of me, there are any that are sufficiently full-face to do for passport photographs', and he added 'My passport has expired , & I have been meaning for a long time to get it renewed, but have never been anywhere near a photographer ... I suppose I could get someone to come & take one here in bed, but it would be an awful nuisance.'

In the event, however, he never renewed his passpot or went abroad, or even got out of bed, but went to hospital and died nine months later. On the day after his death, the Observer published a tribute illustrated by one of Vernon Richards' photographs. Five years later, after the broadcast of a television version of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Picture Post published a feature on himillustrated by several more of them. And for nearly half a century they have been a familiar accompaniment to hundreds of articles and scores of books on Orwell all over the world.

Here for the first time is a full collection of the photographs, which were taken by Vernon Richards and his companion Marie Louise Berneri in 1946, showing George Orwell at home, in unexpectedly informal settings, on his own or with his adopted son, and giving an unusually intimate view of a very private man.

George Orwell had an ambiguous relationship with the anarchist movement, of which Richards and Berneri were leading members, and the photographs are accompanied by a series of essays on Orwell from the anarchist perspective. There are the obituary which Vernon Richards himself wrote in 1950, a series of articles on anarchism which Colin Ward wrote in 1955, and a long account by Nicolas Walter of Orwell's relations with anarchism and the anarchists taking into account the the material published in The Complete Works of George Orwell in 1998.