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Mr. Charrington's junk shop: T.S. Eliot and modernist poetics in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' (character in book by author George Orwell)

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From: Twentieth Century Literature
Date: 19970622
Author:Rae, Patricia

Mr. Charrington is the most intriguing minor character in author George Orwell's book 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' Charrington is the proprietor of the protagonist's favorite junk shop who plays a pivotal role in a sting operation that leads to the hero's arrest. It is proposed that Charrington portrays the poet T. S. Eliot, who engaged Orwell in an analogous experience of attraction and betrayal in real life through Eliot's modernist poetics.

The most intriguing minor character in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is also the most underexamined: the proprietor of Winston Smith's favorite ...

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