ABSTRACT
When Orwell sailed for Rangoon on the SS Herefordshire in October of 1922 he was little more than nineteen years old. He had left Eton, an environment about as different as one can imagine from the one he was going to, just over a year before. The ambiguity concerning Orwell’s motivation to go East has been touched on already and I have suggested that a mixture of motives was almost certainly involved. A friend at Eton, the future historian Sir Steven Runciman (Orwell’s collaborator in the experiment in the Black Arts), was convinced that Orwell had set his mind on going East fairly early. ‘He used to talk about the East a great deal, and I always had the impression he was longing to go back there. I mean it was a sort of romantic idea . . .’1
