Records of the times: layers of creation in the George Orwell archive.

AUTHOR archives; ORWELL, George, 1903-1950; UNIVERSITY College, London; DIARY (Literary form); ARCHIVES

The Canadian archivist Jennifer Douglas has highlighted six layers of archival creation which she argues shape the ways in which a writer’s archive is formed, appraised, enhanced, arranged and interpreted over time. This article applies Douglas’s notion of the six layers of creation to the George Orwell archive, which is held at University College London, by showing the ways in which the archive has been shaped and interpreted over time by various contributors; it discusses not only the value of these contributions, but also how typical such contributions are. The article also discusses the challenge that collections like the Orwell archive pose to our understanding of the concept of the fonds. In agreement with Geoffrey Yeo’s recent writings on the subject, this article concludes that a collection such as the Orwell archive, which has been supplemented with additional material over time, is best understood as a collection of items that reflects the contributions of a number of different creators and custodians, something that is distinct from its main creator’s ‘conceptual’ fonds, which is dispersed across a number of collections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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