In October 1934, after Orwell had spent nine months at his parents' home in Southwold, his aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant at Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. There are allusions to Burnham Beeches and walks in the country in Orwell's correspondence with Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jacques at this time. From there he visited Burnham Beeches and other places in the countryside. In 1932 Orwell took a job as a teacher in a small school in West London.

He appreciated Rees's editorial support at the Adelphi and sincerely enjoyed having him as a friend, but he could not have avoided feeling some degree of resentment toward a man who had no real job but who enjoyed an income four or five times greater than his.'

' In quoting this, Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden comments that 'One of these 'paupers' - at least in 1935 - was Orwell, who was lucky if he made £200 that year. Many of my socialist and intellectual friends were paupers compared to me. Before the war, this was wealth, especially for an unmarried man. Comstock speculates that Ravelston receives nearly two thousand pounds a year after tax - a very comfortable sum in those days - and Rees, in a volume of autobiography published in 1963, wrote: 'I have never had the spending of much less than £1,000 a year of unearned income, and sometimes considerably more. Ravelston is acutely self-conscious about his upper-class status and defensive about his unearned income. The character of Ravelston, the wealthy publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, has a lot in common with Rees. Orwell's early writings appeared in The Adelphi, a left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, a wealthy and idealistic baronet who made Orwell one of his protégés. Stone would prefer to prostitute his wife rather than prostitute his artistic integrity by writing advertising copy. At this time he wrote a fragment of a play in which the protagonist Stone needs money for a life-saving operation for his child. At the beginning of 1928 he lived in lodgings in Portobello Road from where he started his tramping expeditions, sleeping rough and roaming the poorer parts of London. Orwell wrote the book in 19, when he was living at various locations near Hampstead in London, and drew on his experiences in these and the preceding few years. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell.

Orwell keep the aspidistra flying