ABSTRACT
The variations in George Orwell's reputation in the educational community are perhaps most striking. The multiformity in Orwell's reputation has arisen at least partly because his readership, unlike most, spans the continuing, probably widening, split among "highbrow," "middlebrow," and "lowbrow" audiences. Orwell's untimely death from tuberculosis in January 1950, just seven months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, made the book seem to many people the parting testament of a dying man in despair, and it further confused Orwell's legacy. The perversion of Orwell's own name not only reflects the ransacking of his legacy but also has had important, and neglected, consequences in its own right for the making and claiming of his reputation. A brief historiography will help make better sense of the Orwell "paradox" by positioning Orwell's history in a wider temporal frame: the sixty-year transfiguration from Blair to Orwell to 'St. George'.
