our forefather who art in heaven

Those of us who like to think of our blogs as political diaries get a morale boost from this project, in which George Orwell’s diaries are being reprinted in real time 70 years after he wrote them. What a great idea!

The NYT reports:

The scholars behind the project say they are trying to get more attention for Orwell online and to make him more relevant to a younger generation he would have wanted to speak to.

“I think he would have been a blogger,” said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize and thought up the idea of the blog. …

Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.” [e.a.]

Serializing it in a replay of real time is pure genius as a means of drawing people into the diaries, because one of the most enticing aspects of any drama is that you don’t know how things will turn out:

Professor Seaton said the material was full of tension.

“You do know how this story is going to end,” she said, “but one of the brilliant things is that Orwell doesn’t know how it is going to end.”

A most excellent way to tell the story of part of the twentieth century to a new generation: with hyperlinks!

Bravo!