Sinister Street

The novel had several sequels, which continue until Michael Fane's marriage: The book was turned into the 1922 silent film Sinister Street, directed by George Beranger.

"[3] Orwell's biographer Gordon Bowker suggests:[4] It was not surprising that Sinister Street should so rivet young Eric.

Its hero, Michael Fane, is studying Classics at a prep school, and moves with his mother from the countryside to Kensington (close to where Orwell's Aunt Nellie lived).

Fane envies a wild looking, unkempt boy he sees wandering down Kensington High Street and longs to be "a raggle-taggle wanderer".Connolly also wrote critically of the book in the first section of Enemies of Promise, stating:[5] Nineteen fourteen was also the year of an important bad book Sinister Street.

What Mackenzie has miraculously done is to make you feel what each term was like.Frank Swinnerton, a literary critic, described it thus: It is the picture of the development of a very precocious boy into a sophisticated young man of the nineteen-tens, and the picture is painted with a detail and wealth of reference unattempted by other authors of Mackenzie's experience.