George Orwell

A first edition, first impression presentation copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, inscribed by George Owell.

• George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair] (British).
• London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.
• Octavo.
• Inscribed by the author on the front pastedown, “To Eleanor [Jacques], with much love Eric.”
• Bound in the original green cloth, housed in a custom black morocco-backed drop-back box and with supplied dust wrapper. 

A highly important presentation copy of Orwell’s last and most influential novel, inscribed to Eleanor Jacques, an early romantic attachment and lifelong correspondent, whose relationship with the author has often been linked to the emotional and physical template for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Inscribed copies of the novel are of the utmost rarity, and this example was almost certainly signed during Orwell’s final illness, either at Cranham Sanatorium or at University College Hospital, in the last months of his life.

Orwell met Eleanor Jacques in Southwold in the early 1930s while staying with his parents. The two formed an intimate and enduring friendship, preserved in correspondence until Orwell’s death in 1950. Their meetings, frequently arranged in the countryside and away from public view, have been thought to inform the clandestine encounters between Winston and Julia in the novel. In one surviving letter Orwell recalled, of a day spent together, “the deep beds of moss... I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss,” a passage that has often been compared to his description of Julia’s body “gleam[ing] white in the sun.” Jacques’s marriage in 1934 to Orwell’s friend Dennis Collings appears to have closed off any prospect of a fuller attachment, though the bond between them remained close.

Published in June 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared only months before Orwell’s health finally collapsed. By September he had been admitted to University College Hospital with advanced tuberculosis; he died on 21 January 1950. Presentation copies of the novel are therefore exceptionally uncommon. Only two inscribed copies appear to have surfaced at auction in the past sixty years, of which only one was a true first edition; both were signed “Geo. Orwell,” making the present inscription, signed with the deeply personal “Eric,” especially notable.