Tom Rosenthal: in tribute

Those who treasure the writings of George Orwell owe Tom Rosenthal – who died on 2 January 2014 aged 78 after a decade of illness – a great debt. Inevitably the obituaries have centred on Tom ‘the flamboyant publisher’ (The Daily Telegraph), on Tom as Private Eye’s Snipcock of Snipcock and Tweed (Publishers’ Weekly), of the Tom who donated his ‘extensive art library to Pembroke College’ (The Guardian), and, of course, to recording the many authors, from Bradbury and Lodge, to Eco and Calvino, to Michener and Bellow whom he published. I have not read all the obituaries but there is little or no reference to one of his most imaginative projects: the Complete Orwell together with the facsimile of the extant manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  The only reference to Orwell that stuck out from my reading was that in the Telegraph to his fending off ‘Sonia Orwell’s demand for the pulping of all 20,000 copies of Bernard Crick’s biography of her late husband’. But we owe Tom far more than that. Because I have described elsewhere the fortunes and misfortunes attendant on the production of The Complete Works I shall concentrate here on how Tom initiated this project   That, surely, is the least he is due.

On 8 September 1981 Tom telephoned me at Canterbury (where I was then teaching at the University of Kent) to say that he wished to celebrate the year 1984 by bringing out a de luxe edition of Orwell’s ‘nine books’. It was from an odd ‘anniversary’, indeed, hardly one at all. Tom had been told by Ian Willison and the late Barry Bloomfield that, much to his surprise, the books contained many errors and misprints. They recommended that he ask me to produce accurate texts.  Tom agreed to pay me £100 for each volume and a further £100 if I got all corrected copy to him by the end of June 1982, thus giving him time to publish the volumes in 1984.  De luxe editions of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier struck me then – and still – as a very strange concept, but corrected editions were instantly appealing.

Tom was delighted that I delivered all nine corrected volumes on time but surprised at the amount of correction required. He then asked me if I would go to Boston, Mass., to negotiate with Dan Siegel, then the owner of the extant remains of the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, for permission to reproduce it in facsimile, also in 1984. (Dan has since generously donated the original to Brown University.)  Tom was to be in Boston when I would be so I was puzzled why he did not do his own negotiating. I am not sure in this delicate age whether I should repeat Tom’s explanation but it has not published elsewhere so I risk it. Tom said that as he and Siegel were both Jewish there was a risk they would end up quarrelling over the arrangements whereas I, then an Honorary Steward at Westminster Abbey, would have no such entanglements. It struck me as odd at the time and still does. In the event Mr Siegel and I got on very well and he was charm itself. He was at first doubtful whether I would be able to read Orwell’s hand (which is not difficult) but I had expected that and had taken with me an illustrated article I had recently had published on the series of Jacobean manuscripts that led to the printing of James VI and I’s Book of Bounty  (1608).  These, mainly in Secretary Hand, were much corrected and far more difficult to transcribe than anything Orwell wrote. That convinced Dan – the seventeenth century coming to the aid of the twentieth – and once I could assure him that I had a huge fire-proof safe at Albany in Piccadilly (where I was working as Secretary to the Trustees after becoming redundant from Kent University), and that the British Government would not impound the manuscript as ‘a national treasure’, we came to a very amicable arrangement. Tom then conceived the idea of my amplifying the four volumes edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus to include all Orwell’s writings that were extant. It was thus that the publication of the 20-volume collection, together with the facsimile, was set in motion.

Alas, things did not pan out as Tom and those of us producing the edition – Ian Angus,  Sheila (my wife), and I – had planned. Whilst my editorial work assembling and annotating what would eventually become volumes ten to twenty progressed expeditiously, despite the intrusions of Albany’s financial and structural problems, production of the nine books and the facsimile went from bad to worse.

Proofs came intermittently and were full of errors – not helped because Secker’s very distinguished Literary Editor, the late John Blackwell, took it upon himself to rewrite Orwell when he didn’t agree with him – and without telling me. All nine books were due in the shops by July 1984.  Tom was worried but incredibly preoccupied with other publishing matters. He swore there would be ‘blood on the walls’ if the volumes were further delayed.

The text for the facsimile was taken from my typewritten transcription but the footnotes were to be set professionally. Alas – they were disastrous and although I had offered to type them in myself it was decided to have another go at professional setting, but that, of course, took time and more correction. Although the facsimile was got out at the very end of 1984 it was too late to be picked up by the US Book Clubs – as had been intended – and too late to gain much attention in England. Dan Siegel’s own press produced editions in fine bindings and he kindly sent me one quarter-bound in a heavy slip case.  German, Dutch, and Italian editions were also produced (the last with an introduction by one of Tom’s Secker authors, Umberto Eco), but the UK volumes were quickly remaindered at £4.00. (Incidentally only the original English edition is listed by Gillian Fenwick in her generally comprehensive bibliography of Orwell. Collectors note!)  Even more depressingly, 1984 ended with Tom’s departure from Poland Street when he joined André Deutsch.

The succeeding history of the edition has been told elsewhere. Suffice here to mention briefly the fate of the nine books. Activity in 1985 comprised solely in Secker’s abandoning the concept of a de luxe edition.  Then, in December I was summoned to Poland Street and asked why I had not returned corrected proofs. I had, of course and could demonstrate I had – and all on time. We searched the offices and found my proofs, covered in wine and coffee stains, with one set bearing Mr Blackwell’s skiing holiday schedule.  The proofs had lain there for upwards of two years. They had never been returned to the printer.  It was decided to bring out the nine books in three sets of three over eighteen months. Publication of the first set of three volumes took place in spring 1986, almost four years after I had delivered corrected copy. The event was celebrated at the Groucho Club, but as soon as I saw the first volumes I realised they were error-ridden. The printer imaginatively explained that setting had been disturbed by the radars of ships passing on the Tyne and by radios of local taxis. However, it transpired that the corrected texts had somehow been lost and the uncorrected copy substituted. Only one critic noticed the errors: D. J Enright. My wife and I had to start over and produce fresh corrected copy for all nine books although some, especially A Clergyman’s Daughter, have continued to be dogged by errors.

That was a sad outcome for what Tom Rosenthal had inspired and was far from what he had wished and hoped for. But, in the end, the edition, with its follow-up volume, The Lost Orwell, and the facsimile, do, I hope, justify Tom’s original vision. So Tom – our warmest gratitude and thanks.¹

Peter Davison

1: For a full account of the tortuous history of the publication of the edition, see my essays, ‘An Editorial Assessment of The Complete Works of George Orwell’,  The Culture of Collected Editions, ed. Andrew Nash (Palgrave, 2003), pp. 218-36; and ‘Impediments to Scholarship: Essays and studies in honour of Ian Willison’, The Commonwealth of Books (Monash University, 2007), pp. 120-135.