It has sometimes been suggested that Ampleforth, ‘the hairy-eared poet’ (9, 142) in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, is most likely modelled on real-life poet and literary critic William Empson. John Sutherland, for instance, claims that ‘Empson is the too-clever-for-his-own good Newspeak linguistician Ampleforth in Nineteen Eighty-Four’.1 This actually sounds more like a description of Syme than of Ampleforth, and in fact W. J. West, whom Sutherland seems to be drawing on, claims Empson served as model for the former: ‘Empson talking on in the basement canteen of the Overseas Broadcasting Department about Basic English or his other linguistic theories can be seen as an exact model of Syme in Nineteen-Eighty Four’.2 Empson, of course, may well have inspired both characters: as West notes in an earlier book, in the original manuscript of the novel, the author Ampleforth has been editing was not Kipling, but Wordsworth. Commenting on this circumstance in a footnote to his discussion of Orwell’s time at the BBC, West remarks: ‘Whether this change indicates that the first part of Nineteen Eighty-Four was first thought of as a roman-à-clef or not, it is clear that if “Wordsworth” had been allowed to stand in the text it could have been taken as a direct reference to Empson’.3 Certainly descriptions like Fyvel’s of how Orwell at the BBC ‘had that famous critic and wit, William Empson, as his neighbour in the next cubicle’, can bring to mind how just ‘a few cubicles away’ from Winston in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, ‘a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies’.