[Eton: 1918-21] - Large sheet of thick sugar paper, recto with 12 mounted monochrome photographic portraits, each signed and (but for one) dated between 1918 and 1921, verso with 22 photographic prints, a collage of Godfrey Meynell childhood and family photographs. Paper mount a little creased and frayed, two closed tears to right edge, one or two photos trimmed effecting the signatures (not the Orwell). Excellent. An exceptionally rare signed photograph of George Orwell (signed "Eric A. Blair, '21"), presented as one of 12 signed photographs of his Eton College friends, collectively making up one side of a two-sided photo-collage assembled by (?the family of) Godfrey Maynall MC VC (1904-35), one of the twelve. The boys are: James Arthur Walker Gibson (later Lincoln's Inn barrister), Denis Sigmund Dannreuther (Captain of School, later Baliol Scholar, Fellow of All Souls, and barrister engaged in drafting Parliamentary legislation), Ralph Mirrielees Cazalet (later Kings College, then to Egypt for Shell Oil), Robert Paton Longden (later Oxford classicist and Master of Wellington), Roger Aubrey Baskerville Mynors (later Oxford Professor of Latin), Godfrey Meynell (more of him below), Maurice Gordon Whittome (later Corpus Cambridge, barrister, and Sir), Hugh St. Denys King-Farlowe (editor of The Chronicle, the wit of the year, and the prettiest of the bunch), Cyril Connolly himself (author of Enemies of Promise, 1938, the canonical chronicle of the post-War generation at Eton), Eric Arthur Blair (a.k.a. "George Orwell"), and an unidentified "Ronnie" and "Peter". All these (with the exception of Connolly, Meynell and the unidentified two) are Eton scholars from the "Election" of 1916. Connolly and Meynell were scholars from the 1917 Election, the year below, though evidently friends with their seniors. The signatures are dated between 1918 and 1921 (which was the final year of the 1916 Election). Gibson, Dannreuther, Cazalet, Longden, and Mynors are remembered by Cyril Connoly as "the Caucus", the "moral leaders" of the year, "scholar-athletes" with grand reputations who were notable for attempting to renovate the illiberal mores of Eton College in the wake of World War I. The existence of this collection of more-or-less uniform signed photographic portraits of these Eton contemporaries is explained by knowledge of an Eton tradition: boys would have their portrait taken (there was a local portrait photographer advertised in the Eton magazine), sign them, and gift them to their close friends. The tradition may seem somewhat perculiar now, even a little amorous (as sometimes of course it was), but it was at the time so common as to have been called a "fashion" by Connolly, who makes amusing mention of the practice in Enemies of Promise: "It was the fashion to have photographs of friends signed and put on the mantelpiece. I had sent Nigel mine. He refused to give me his. I took one, and he said I had stolen it. I collected photos after that like an old hostess collecting celebrities. I cultivated anyone who was a rarity, or who had not been taken, persuading them to get done for me, and rushing off with the scalp." This photo-collage derives from the family of Godfrey Meynell, and as such Meynell can be understood to have been friendly with (or at least admired, and at most loved) each of the boys here presented, Orwell included. Eric Blair (who adopted the pen-name George Orwell in the early 1930s), though certainly far from working-class and not even really milddle-class, was not ostensibly "one of" the usual Eton sort. His parents had little money, and he had to win scholaships to get himself through public school. His own pronounced sense of isolation and difference (and the potent observational perspective thus afforded) typifies a significant portion of Orwell's character as a writer. He notably had a horrible time at his prep-school St Cyprians (as related in his sardonically-titled "Such, Such Were the Joys", though he did first meet Cyril Conn
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