Category: Culture

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was born in Surrey, attended Eton and Oxford and was a gifted, articulate student. His writing career began in 1921, with the publication of ‘Crome Yellow’. It is his fifth book, ‘Brave New World’, published in 1932, for which he is best known.

The title is taken from a Shakespeare play and the theme has been likened to the foretelling of the ‘New World Order’ attributed to the elite ‘secret societies’. People are brainwashed from birth (in a test tube), genetically modified, cloned, denied family connections, euthanised at age sixty and coerced into dependency on their  ‘happy pills’ (hallucinogenic drugs). Huxley took such drugs himself, even on his death-bed.

Huxley was influenced by the anti-establishment D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and by seeing the typical lifestyle in the USA and by a period he spent working at a chemical plant in England.  He believed that the population could be unwittingly guided into slavery to a world-state if there were aspects of that slavery that they enjoyed. In his time, television became the mesmerising sweetener, and today it is the smartphone. His friend, George Orwell, took the scenario further, with ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’. Huxley turned down as inappropriate an offer of a knighthood in 1959.

 (Image: Thierry Ehrmann at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

“He was not of an age, but for all time”… so wrote Shakespeare’s friend, Ben Jonson, in the preface to the First Folio, a collection of William Shakespeare‘s plays after his death at age 52 in 1616. Thanks to two other friends and fellow actors ~ John Heminge and Henry Condell ~ thirty-six of his plays were saved for posterity in this publication, to be studied and dramatised with unceasing admiration and the highest esteem ever since. Shakespeare is undoubtedly the most famous and celebrated British writer.

He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the third of eight children, was married to a pregnant Anne Hathaway in 1582, then made his way to London as an actor and writer of plays, poems and sonnets. One rival called him an “upstart crow”; another a “Johnny do-it-all”. Nevertheless, his acting company was very successful, playing to royalty many times, and Shakespeare became a wealthy property owner. He was able to retire back to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1613.

Samuel Johnson quoted Shakespeare thousands of times in his Dictionary. Shakespeare gave us hundreds of words, idioms and insightful sayings that enrich our language and understanding of ourselves. We often quote him without even realising it..

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George Orwell was the pen-name of Eric Blair (1903-50), who died of tuberculosis shortly after the publication of his 1949 anti-communist novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’, describing an extreme society with ‘thought-police’, ‘Big Brother’ and no privacy or free will. He also wrote ‘Animal Farm’, published in 1945, which was another dark exposé of man’s inhumanity and the injustice of the class system.

Prior to this, Orwell had purposely placed himself in conditions of poverty and physical hardship, even joining the republican militia in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 until he was shot in the neck. Coming from a middle-class family, his drive for social and political reform put him out of sync with those around him. Once he started writing full-time in 1933 he decided to use a pen-name because he did not want to cause embarrassment to his family.

Always an outsider in his lifetime, George Orwell has since been at the centre of any debate on the future of our society, with the description ‘Orwellian’ being one that crops up more and more in modern times.

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In the UK, surnames are passed down the generations and are the last part of a person’s name, e.g.  ‘Miss Patricia Eleanor Hunter‘. When two people marry, the woman may legally take her husband’s surname, but this is entirely her own choice. Anyone can change their given names by deed poll at any time after the age of 16.

British surnames, since they came into being in the Middle Ages, are a creative product of the need to correctly record and distinguish between individuals in a growing population. That is why there are tens of thousands of British surnames, some of them differing by just one letter from another, e.g. Davis and Davies, though this is also explained by the wayward spelling of poorly educated people and by regional differences.

Many British surnames derive from places (e.g. Marston), geographical features (e.g. Hill) or occupations (e.g. Cooper). Others denote family relationships (e.g. Johnson), nicknames (e.g. Short), or are adaptations through the generations. The BBC gives lots of examples on this webpage.

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