Volta’s ink spills its secrets

In their original manuscripts, it’s not just through their words that writers reveal themselves. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is handwritten in a meticulous script with very few revisions or deletions, but his writing gets ever smaller as the pages pile up: indications of the clear-eyed urgency with which he compiled his masterpiece. George Orwell’s manuscript for 1984, meanwhile, is a mess. Part handwritten and part typed, it is so littered with corrections that it’s barely readable, testifying to how he polished, distilled and refined his prose to achieve his trademark no-frills concision. 

But there’s something else revealed in one of Orwell’s most obscure manuscripts, a letter he penned from his cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, to the editor of the Soviet journal Foreign Literature on 2 July 1937. Orwell had just returned from his exploits in the Spanish Civil War, the subject of Homage to Catalonia, published the following year. In Spain, Orwell, fighting for the Republican army, had been shot in the neck by a sniper and was treated in a hospital in Barcelona. It was very probably there that he contracted the tuberculosis that was only diagnosed when he fell seriously ill in 1947; he died in January 1950 after the disease caused an artery to burst in his lungs.