Orwell’s Political Pamphlet ‘Solar System’: A Network Interpretation of a British Library Collection

This article examines the network of publishers, authors and topics included in George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets at the British Library (shelfmark 1899.ss.1-49.), some of which were catalogued as part of a Ph.D. placement in 2019. It explores how the pamphlets came to be held at the British Library, what cataloguing of the pamphlets has previously taken place, and how the pamphlets offer an insight into the political print culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Most importantly, this article will argue that Orwell’s collection reveals the networks of political print culture of the early twentieth-century in Britain.