Peter Davison’s response to Douglas Kerr’s essay
We have received the following message from Peter Davison, in response to Douglas Kerr’s new essay:
George Orwell had a gift for ‘opening lines’ to reviews, books and chapters and Professor Kerr’s brilliant opening to his contribution on Orwell and Kipling is perfectly in tune with Orwell’s gift. Can I offer two very minor additions? The first is that amongst Orwell’s books when he died there were 389 that were certainly Orwell’s and possibly up to 134 more – were nine by Kipling. These included the selection of Kipling’s verse with T.S. Eliot’s introduction, and, of the early printings (up to 1905), Captains Courageous, The Day’s Work, The Seven Seas, Soldiers Three, and Traffics and Discoveries. He also had a copy of Something of Myself (XX, 293). Secondly, Professor Kerr quotes in the piece Orwell wrote just after Kipling died, the passage, ‘I worshipped [him] at thirteen etc’. This tribute can be taken a little further. Despite the bitterly cold weather, on his trail to Wigan, Orwell made a detour in order to visit the lake after which Kipling was named. As Dr Robert Fyson has shown, the reason for Orwell’s detour can be traced back to 1863 when Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald had a picnic party at Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire. They married and in 1865 their first child was born and was christened Rudyard. When Orwell went north, Kipling had recently died (on 18th January 1936) and, in addition to that appreciation of him, he made this detour as a sort of act of homage.
The hostel in which Orwell stayed overlooking Lake Rudyard on 3 February 1936.
It was a youth hostel from 1933-69 and could accommodate 46 men and 20 women.
It was built about 1811 and is now a private house, Cliffe Park Hall.