The Lockdown Chronicles 30: Eric

Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, fled London’s smog for Jura on 10 April 1947 mostly for health reasons, where he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). During that period he would be diagnosed with tuberculosis (Taylor 2003) [Wikipedia entry]

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Text sources: Taylor, D.J. (2003) Orwell: The Life. Henry Holt and Company; Sabbagh, D., Perraudin, F., Stewart, H., and Walker, P. (20 May 2020) “UK plans for contact-tracing in doubt as app not ready until June”. The Guardian; Hawkins, R (20 May 2020) “Coronavirus: Serco apologises for sharing contact tracers’ email addresses”. BBC Radio 4 Today. BBC News;  Perraudin, F. (20 May 2020) “No one had any idea’: Contact tracers lack knowledge about Covid-19 job”. The Guardian; Culnane, C., and Teague, V. (19 May 2020) Security analysis of the NHS COVID-19 App, StateofIT.

Source image: photograph of George Orwell at the BBC, photographer unknown, 1940, via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. This comic strip CC-BY-NC-SA.

References

Taylor, D.J. (2003) Orwell: The Life. Henry Holt and Company

Orwell, G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, via Internet Archive, available at https://archive.org/details/Orwell1984preywo/mode/2up [Accessed 20 May 2020]

Culnane, C., and Teague, V. (19 May 2020) Security analysis of the NHS COVID-19 App, available via  https://www.stateofit.com/UKContactTracing/ [Accessed 20 May 2020]

Sabbagh, D., Perraudin, F., Stewart, H., and Walker, P. (20 May 2020) “UK plans for contact-tracing in doubt as app not ready until June”. The Guardian; available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/uk-plans-for-contact-tracing-in-doubt-as-app-not-ready-until-june [Accessed 20 May 2020]

Hawkins, R (20 May 2020) “Coronavirus: Serco apologises for sharing contact tracers’ email addresses”. BBC Radio 4 Today. BBC News; available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52732818# [Accessed 20 May 2020]

Perraudin, F. (20 May 2020) “No one had any idea’: Contact tracers lack knowledge about Covid-19 job”. The Guardian; available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/no-one-had-any-idea-contact-tracers-lack-knowledge-about-covid-19-job [Accessed 20 May 2020]

Photograph of George Orwell at the BBC, photographer unknown, 1940, via Wikimedia Commons, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#/media/File:George-orwell-BBC.jpg [Accessed 20 May 2020]

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The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.