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3. From "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon." Orwell is probably quoting from
memory and the quotation is not quite accurate. Eliot's text reads:
This went on for a couple of months
Nobody came
And nobody went
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent.
Raffles and Miss Blandish
1. No Orchids for Miss Blandish was James Hadley Chase's first book and was written
when he was working for a book wholesaler. It was published in May 1939, and by the time Orwell
wrote his essay had sold over a million copies. Chase's real name was René Brabazon Raymond
(1906–1985); he wrote some eighty books, using various pseudonyms.
2. Charles Peace (1832–1879), petty criminal and murderer. In 1876 he killed Police
Constable Cook, but another man was charged and found guilty of murder. In 1878 he murdered
Alfred Dyson. Arrested in the act of burglary, he was tried for Dyson's murder and found guilty. He
confessed to having killed Cook, and the man originally charged, William Habron, was given a free
pardon. Peace was executed in 1879. His exploits entered popular myth and he was the subject of an
early silent film.
3. Zingari ] properly, I Zingari (Italian, the Gypsies); an exclusive English cricket club
founded in 1845 that has no home ground and so travels away to all its matches.
4. The two lines, from Barrack-room Ballads (1892 or 1893), should be printed as a
single line as "Yes, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,"—no exclamation point. "
[C]ohorts of the damned" is quoted from Gentleman Rankers.
5. M.C.C.] Marylebone Cricket Club, then the ruling body of English and international
cricket, responsible for the rules of the game and situated at Lord's Cricket Ground, the "headquarters
of cricket." Membership is restricted.
Politics and the English Language
1. "rift within the lute" is given after "fishing in troubled waters" in Orwell's list of
metaphors in his notes. Not all the metaphors in this list are in the essay, but in his next sentence
Orwell asks "what is a 'rift,' for instance?" He must have intended to include this metaphor, since his
question does not make sense without it; it has therefore been added here in square brackets. The line
comes from Tennyson's Idylls of the King, "Merlin and Vivien." Vivien sings to Merlin a song she
heard Sir Launcelot once sing. It includes these two stanzas, which make the meaning plain:
It [want of faith] is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all. [Lines 388–93]