Nineteen Eighty-Four. A Novel. by ORWELL, George - 1949

London: Secker & Warburg,, 1949. Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in red, top edge red. With the previously supplied green dust jacket. Housed in a custom black quarter morocco solander box. Spine toned and minimally rolled, cloth a little soiled, foxing to edges and very faintly to endpapers; a very good, bright copy; rubbed jacket with a few small chips and couple of creases to extremities. First edition, first impression. An intriguing association copy from the library of Orwell's close friends Eleanor and Dennis Collings, with their ownership inscription to the front pastedown, "Eleanor & Dennis Collings, Southwold". Orwell met Dennis Collings (1905-2002) in 1921 when the Blair family moved to Southwold; at which point Collings's father become the Blair's family doctor. The two men, with only two years between them in age, soon became close, and "from time to time Eric would show Dennis some of the things he'd written" (Wadhams, p. 38). Collings went on to study anthropology at Cambridge, before joining the Colonial Service, who appointed him assistant curator at the Raffles Museum in Singapore in 1934. In the same year he married his longterm girlfriend, and daughter of the Blair's Canadian neighbours in Southwold, Eleanor Jacques (1906-1962), with whom Orwell shared a passionate love affair in 1932. Their tryst is often credited as a source of inspiration for certain scenes featuring the character of Julia in this novel. In a love scene between Winston and Julia set in her wooded hideout, Orwell writes that Julia's body "gleamed white in the sun" (p. 126). This description mirrors a letter Orwell wrote to Eleanor in September 1932 recalling a visit they took to wood near Blythburgh Lodge, "I cannot remember when I have enjoyed any expeditions so much as I did those with you... I shall always remember that [day], & your nice white body in the dark green moss". Loosely inserted in this copy is a fitting a Greek Tourist Agency advert reading "Get Away From George Orwell", dated c. 1984. Close association copies such as this are uncommon.