GETTING ESTABLISHED

Orwell claimed in 1946 that he had wanted to be a writer from an early age: “I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’—a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger.’”¹

On his eighth birthday, Eric Blair received from his mother a copy of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Swift would become a significant influence, particularly upon the writing of Animal Farm. Other favorite writers included William Makepeace Thackeray, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells.

While at his preparatory school, St. Cyprian's, the eleven-year-old Blair published his first poem in a local newspaper. At his secondary school, Eton College, he started a short-lived magazine, Election Times, which included his poetry and stories. He also wrote meaningful lines to Jacintha Buddicom, the object of his youthful infatuation.

There was no immediate success. While in Burma with the Indian Imperial Police, Blair started a couple of novels, one of which would provide some material for Burmese Days. He also wrote some poems, the two most striking concerning encounters with prostitutes. In Paris, Blair's attempts at journalism led to a few articles, in French and in English, but not enough to make ends meet. It was only in 1932, at the age of twenty-nine, that Blair converted his French experiences and his experiments with the “down and out” lifestyle in the East End of London and the fields of Kent into a breakthrough work, Down and Out in Paris and London, published the following year under the pseudonym George Orwell.

Even then, Orwell would struggle to make an impact as a novelist. Throughout the 1930s he was insecure about his ability. Typical of his opinions was a letter of 1934: “Everything is going badly. My novel about Burma made me spew when I saw it in print, & I would have rewritten large chunks of it, only that costs money and means delay as well. As for the novel I am now completing, it makes me spew even worse, & yet there are some decent passages in it.”² Orwell's fear of failure might have driven him to even greater efforts to publish, but his success was due as much to a favorable set of circumstances as it was to his ability and perseverance.

RICHARD REES AND THE LITERARY CULTURE OF LONDON

Throughout the 1930s Orwell raged at alleged cliques, caricaturing the “typical literary man” as “an eager-minded schoolboy with a leaning towards Communism” and claiming “nearly all the younger writers fit easily into the public-school-university-Bloomsbury pattern.”³ The necessary irony is that it was precisely this “cliquish” environment that propelled Orwell to his initial prominence as a writer. Far from being open to only a few privileged Oxford and Cambridge graduates, the London literary scene in the 1930s was fluid, covering a breadth of political, social, and aesthetic perspectives.

In 1929 Orwell presented himself to the offices of The New Adelphi, describing “himself as a Tory anarchist but admitt[ing] the Adelphi's socialist case on moral grounds.”⁴ (The Adelphi was called The New Adelphi from September 1927 to August 1930, then reverted to its original name). One of the co-editors was Sir Richard Rees, a painter, author, and critic whose chief talent lay not in these areas but in spotting new writers, whom he supported from his family's not inconsiderable income.

Rees was instrumental in publishing Orwell's first book reviews and early essays, such as “The Spike” and “A Hanging,” but his support went far beyond this. He commended the young writer's first manuscript, “A Scullion's Diary,” to T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, lent money to Orwell, and introduced him to other writers and publishers. When Orwell traveled for the research on The Road to Wigan Pier, he carried letters of introduction from Rees to political and social activists. Although Orwell's contributions to The Adelphi tapered off as he worked increasingly with Victor Gollancz and with journals such as The New English Weekly, Rees continued to be influential in his friend's political development. It was at an Adelphi summer school that Orwell proclaimed his conversion to socialism, and it was through Rees that he made the initial connections that would take him to fight in Spain.

Orwell's returns for this support were not altogether positive. Rees was the model for the pathetic Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the millionaire who plays at being a socialist: “he was softer-hearted than an editor ought to be, and consequently was at the mercy of his contributors.”⁵ Unlike others, however, Rees never incurred Orwell's wrath for wrong-headed politics in real life, and their friendship continued until the author's death. Orwell's adopted son was named Richard, not after Richard Blair, Orwell's father, but after Rees, his first literary benefactor.

VICTOR GOLLANCZ

Gollancz, the son of a prosperous London jeweller, was ten years older than Orwell. He first became a schoolmaster after graduation from Oxford but, after service on a committee planning the reconstruction of England after World War I, joined the publishers Benn Brothers. He produced a series of art books that eventually generated £250,000 a year and recruited novelists such as Wells.

In 1927 Gollancz left to form his own company. Nine years later he joined the Labour parliamentarian, John Strachey, and Harold Laski, the prominent political scientist, to form the Left Book Club. The club, designed to spread the ideas of socialism and resistance to fascism to a mass audience, had fifty thousand members by 1939.

It was Gollancz who first saw Down and Out in Paris and London as “an extraordinary and important book”⁶ and who persisted in publishing Orwell's novels even though sales were disappointing. Gollancz had the idea for The Road to Wigan Pier, commissioning Orwell for the project and then suggesting that it become one of the Left Book Club's first selections.

Gollancz's support would soon be overshadowed, however, by the political rift that began with Orwell's denunciation of fellow Socialists in The Road to Wigan Pier. Even before his return to England after his participation in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was preparing to move to another publisher since he contended that Gollancz, “distressed” at his connection with the “independent” Marxists who were in conflict with the Communist Party and the Spanish Republican Government, had turned down the proposal for Homage to Catalonia sight unseen.⁷

This rejection did not lead Gollancz to drop Orwell or lead the author to ask for release from his contract to write further novels for the publisher. Coming Up for Air was published by Gollancz in 1939. Moreover, their shared distress over the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (23 August 1939) brought a temporary reunion of publisher and writer, as Orwell contributed two essays for Gollancz's 1941 volume The Betrayal of the Left: An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy. The final break came only with Animal Farm in 1945, as Orwell guessed, rightly, that Gollancz would not bring out a book that so blatantly attacked the Soviet Union, still allied with England in the war effort.

ERIC BLAIR BECOMES GEORGE ORWELL

In April 1932 Eric Blair asked his agent Leonard Moore to “see that [Down and Out in Paris and London] is published pseudonymously, as I am not proud of it.”⁸ Seven months later Blair set out his preferences: “A name I always use when tramping etc. is P. S. Burton but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favour George Orwell.”⁹ Orwell was the name of a river south of his parents' home in Southwold, Essex; there is no explanation for the name George, other than that the author hated his first name, complaining, “It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric.”¹⁰ Gollancz, who had previously suggested the less-than-imaginative “X,” agreed immediately with the choice.

Blair told his younger sister that he was taking a pseudonym so that the published book would not shock their parents; she replied that their parents were not so easily upset. Blair's initial explanation to Moore rings truer: “George Orwell” offered protection if the book proved a flop. The first good review of Down and Out in Paris and London settled the issue. George Orwell was a success.

A WRITER IN MANY GENRES

NOVELIST: Orwell's initial ambition was to become a great literary writer. While he might produce works of nonfiction to make a living, he believed that lasting stature could only come through the novel. From 1934 to 1939 Orwell published four novels, none of them more than moderately successful at the time in sales and critical reception. While some of them have been held in higher regard since his death, notably Coming Up for Air, Orwell's long-term reputation has never rested upon these books.

DOCUMENTARIAN: Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell's first book, established him not as a novelist but as an observer and commentator on the specifics of lower-class life. The Road to Wigan Pier, the book that brought him his prewar prominence, was in the same vein. Orwell reached many times more people with The Road to Wigan Pier and its distribution through the Left Book Club than he did with all of his 1930s novels. Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of his participation in the Spanish Civil War, was an immediate disappointment in sales; however, it was acclaimed by many critics.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITIC: Orwell was a prolific reviewer of books, more for the steady revenue this provided than for enjoyment; as he wrote in a viciously funny 1946 essay, the reviewer “is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” By 1940 he had established a serious reputation for his critiques of the past and current literature of both “high” and “low” culture. He made his mark with critiques, for journals such as The New English Weekly, of writers such as Kipling and the sixpence paperbacks of Penguin, but it was his 1940 collection Inside the Whale, and Other Essays, with its lengthy analyses on such diverse topics as Henry Miller, Charles Dickens, and boys' weekly magazines, that placed him at the forefront of literary criticism. Orwell never confined his evaluation to the text under consideration but placed it within broader political, social, and cultural contexts, foreshadowing schools of academic criticism that were to come years later. Q. D. Leavis, who was herself a prominent literary critic, commented, “He has a special kind of honesty; he corrects any astigmatic tendency in himself because in literature as in politics he has taken up a stand which gives him freedom.”¹¹

ESSAYIST: Arguably, Orwell was most at ease with the essay genre. His earliest publications were a sharp criticism of censorship in Britain and of the right-wing French press, and Down and Out in Paris and London was an extension of pieces such as “The Spike.” Orwell's most notable essays before the war, such as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” were observational, but he used concise, emotive description to make powerful political and social commentaries on topics such as the nature of and response to British imperialism. In contrast, his most influential postwar essays are polemics centered on the defense of political and literary freedom against totalitarian threats.

COLUMNIST: From December 1943 to February 1945 and then from November 1946 to March 1947, Orwell wrote a weekly column for The Tribune, the newspaper connected with the British Labour Party. The column, “As I Please,” was the ideal forum for him to mix political comment with passing consideration of everyday life. Consisting of Orwell's thoughts on two or three varied topics, the nature of the column encouraged him to be concise and direct in his observations. He could put into practice the admonition for simple but powerful expression that he offered in essays such as “Politics and the English Language.”

BROADCASTER: Orwell was featured by the BBC in a 1940 discussion of proletarian literature, and for much of World War II, he worked for the same organization as a producer of broadcasts for the Eastern Service, mainly directed to India. Orwell's scripts are not among his better work. He never made the transition from writing for the print medium to writing for the spoken medium; the scripts were often rushed, and the material was far above the heads of a mass audience. Particular topics, however, were a valuable complement to Orwell's other work, such as a talk on Leo Tolstoy and William Shakespeare, which became the basis for an extended essay, and a discussion of literature and totalitarianism.

ORWELL THE NOVELIST

THE “IMPERIAL” NOVELIST: Burmese Days is both a social novel in its depiction of the British expatriate community in Burma and a melodrama about the doomed love of John Flory for Elizabeth Lackersteen. It is primarily, however, a novel of empire, both of the British rulers and of their colonial subjects. Orwell's novel is thus in the tradition of Kipling, whom Orwell admired as a writer of “good bad” prose, and E. M. Forster.

THE ENGLISH SOCIAL NOVELIST: Orwell's other novels of the 1930s, with varying success, are observations and critiques of contemporary English society. While the settings vary between countryside, the city, and the suburbs, the novels all offer a realistic portrait of society through the circumstances, conflicts, and pessimism of the protagonists and through the vivid, sometimes harsh, descriptions of the environment. It can be argued that, in social and political outlook, the works are in the tradition of Dickens, one of Orwell's favorite writers. Others have noted the influence of George Gissing, the Victorian author of such novels as The Odd Women (1893), whom Orwell greatly admired and who was the subject of his last piece of literary criticism.

THE ALLEGORY: The effectiveness of the allegorical Animal Farm is based on its rendering of a “simple” animal story. This allows for a distinctive satire of the Russian Revolution, both through the black comedy of the villainous and deceitful pigs and through empathy with the hard-working, naive, hopeful animals that are the Revolution's victims. Critics compared the work with the satires of Swift.

THE FUTURIST NOVEL: Orwell, supposedly influenced by the Soviet novelist Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1924), decided to stage his next political allegory in a near-future of technological advance and systematic state oppression. The outcome, Nineteen Eighty-four, while a less specific representation of the Soviet experience, allowed a greater complexity both in themes and in political interpretation. The work fits into a trend of futurist writing, albeit one of differing perspectives on the positive or negative aspects of “progress,” that includes Wells (an author read avidly by Orwell in his youth) and Aldous Huxley.

ORWELL AS A POLITICAL WRITER

Because of the variety of Orwell's writing, scholars have debated the relative literary and political merits of his work. For some, he was a writer who made a mark only with his “political” output. Keith Alldritt has argued, for example, that “[w]ith the possible exception of Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell created no valuable work of literary art; rather his contribution was to literary culture.”¹² Bernard Crick, Orwell's most prominent champion, contends that some of his novels are underrated but that his praise rests primarily on his position as “a supreme political writer.”¹³ Others contend that Orwell was a good, if not great, literary author who happened to address political concerns. Peter Davison, the most comprehensive chronicler of the author, concludes that “Orwell may not be a novelist of the first rank, although even the potboilers he himself dismissed have a curious capacity for touching the readers' sensibilities and causing them to see the world, especially the dispossessed, in a new and sympathetic light.”¹⁴

SUBJECTS AND THEMES

SUBJECT MATTER: With the possible exception of A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell's novels, as well as his nonfiction works, take on broad topics, such as British imperialism, a money-oriented society, and the threats of war and totalitarianism. He always drew from his personal experiences and beliefs, giving the impression (except in Animal Farm) that the protagonists represented Orwell himself. In Burmese Days John Flory not only provides Orwell's perspective on both the English and native societies in Burma but also embodies the author's uncertainty and pessimism, particularly his discomfort in his relationships with women. One section of A Clergyman's Daughter is a reworking of Orwell's factual accounts of living in the streets of London, tramping through Kent, and working in the hop fields; another section, on the horrors of a “third-rate public school,” was written as he was suffering in a teaching post. Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is Orwell the struggling writer, complete with unattractive characteristics, brought to fictional life. There is bitterness arising from poverty, antagonism toward those writers who have already succeeded, sneering at naive socialists, and ambivalence towards sex, marriage, and a middle-class existence.

Perhaps the most complex embodiment of Orwell is George Bowling in Coming Up for Air. Orwell wrote the novel while on extended vacation in Morocco, but the outcome was, according to Crick, “the most English of all his novels.”¹⁵ While Bowling is the physical antithesis of Orwell, his mental conception of the world—past, present, and future—is so bound up with Orwell's own vision that the novel often slips between the protagonist's and author's voice. Orwell's distaste for the suburbs, fueled by his schoolteacher's life in the outer-London district of Hayes. His nostalgia for an idyllic countryside came not only from childhood but also from his recent move to the village of Wallington in Hertfordshire. Bowling is also an outlet for Orwell's short-lived but strident pacifism on the eve of World War II.

Even the futurist Nineteen Eighty-four and its protagonist, Winston Smith, are drawn extensively from Orwell's immediate experience. His fight against the Fascist and Japanese enemies in World War II and the emerging menace of Soviet Communism provided the obvious models for the super-states of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, but other elements in the novel emphasize Orwell's reverence for the countryside, reinforced by his life on the Scottish island of Jura from 1946, and for the “lost” England of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Winston is another extension of Orwell. The author's work at the BBC generating propaganda is the basis for Winston's service at the Ministry of Truth, albeit in this case for an evil system. Orwell's lifelong tensions in his relationships with women, eased by his marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy but returning forcefully after her death in 1945, are the basis not only for Winston's fluctuating courtship of Julia but also for the emerging memory of Winston's betrayal of his mother and sister.

PROTAGONISTS: Orwell's human protagonists differ in age, gender, and family situation, but all share certain characteristics, especially in their relationship to their environment. All are part of families or even communities in decline. John Flory (Burmese Days) is part of the stagnant British Empire; Dorothy Hare (A Clergyman's Daughter) is the daughter of an impoverished vicar in a mundane village; the ancestors of Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) have squandered the benefits of minor aristocracy; George Bowling (Coming Up for Air) lives in mediocre suburbia with a burdensome wife and children and an unrewarding job; and Winston Smith is the orphan of a family taken away by the state.

All of the protagonists are flawed, primarily by hesitancy and passivity, but all are redeemed in some way. Flory has his friendship with Dr. Veraswami and pursues genuine love rather than his exploitative relationship with his Burmese mistress. Hare is long-suffering in part because of her caring and forgiving nature. The thoughts of Bowling are the epitome of common sense. Even Comstock, in the end, does the right thing and marries his girlfriend, Rosemary, rather than having her undergo an abortion.

Through his protagonists Orwell promotes decency. The excesses of any ideology, be it fascist or communist, are countered by a practical approach to politics and society. That approach does not necessarily bring happiness. Flory commits suicide, Winston Smith's individualism is crushed by the state, and the others return to or take on the mediocrity of their lives. At the end of Animal Farm, the animals are witnesses to the final betrayal of the revolution as their leaders consort with the capitalist enemy.

In an important sense, Orwell's pessimism about the oppressions of modern society prevails. At the same time, in his portrayal of his protagonists, he promotes the courage of resisting or standing apart, at least in one's thoughts and beliefs, from these oppressions. For a few days Bowling escapes his suburban life, even if the venture ends in disappointment. Winston's rebellion is crushed, but at least he has rebelled.

GENDER: One can make the argument that there is not a single positive female character in Orwell's fiction. Even Dorothy Hare, his only female protagonist, and Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the most fully and sympathetically portrayed supporting character, provoke mixed reactions in the end. Dorothy passively accepts her fate, and one might conclude that Rosemary has trapped Gordon Comstock into marrying her. Other women are more obviously targets of Orwell's dislike: Hilda Bowling (Coming Up for Air) is no more than a shrewish, nagging housewife, and Elizabeth Lackersteen (Burmese Days) is a fickle, conniving social climber whose foolish mother has dabbled with women's suffrage and higher thought while shirking her household duties. Most provocative are Orwell's depictions of women in Nineteen Eighty-four through their sexuality or lack of it. Julia is “only a rebel from the waist downwards”;¹⁶ her revolt against the Party consists solely of her physical affair with Winston, and she has no interest in politics. The “prole” washerwoman has no political power, although she does have “powerful, mare-like buttocks.”¹⁷ Winston's former wife, Katharine, is notable for her frigidity.

Some critics have contended that Orwell's portrayal of women is more complex than characters such as Julia or Rosemary suggest; others have argued that almost all prominent authors in the 1930s placed women at the margins of their works. The fact remains that Orwell, who always considered the potential for individual power, treated women as powerless. His documentaries bear out the point. Women are limited to cameos as grotesque landladies, as housewives trapped in drudgery, and, in a disturbing passage in Down and Out in Paris and London, as victims of rape. In an oft-quoted passage from The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell describes a woman, engaged in clearing a drainpipe, who has “the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty” with “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.”¹⁸

CLASS: Orwell's naturalism nominally elevates the unemployed and impoverished in their valiant struggle for existence against the oppression of industrial society. The tribute is only superficial, however. Orwell may pay homage to certain groups, notably coal miners, and to the abstract notion of the “common man,” but his depiction of specific members of the working class is less than flattering. The Road to Wigan Pier opens with the abominable Brookers, the wife “a soft mound of fat and self-pity,” the husband “chew[ing] … grievances like a cud,”¹⁹ and the proles in Nineteen Eighty-four are either objects of patronizing nostalgia (the washerwoman) or irrational creatures (the old man in the pub). Even the transformation in Animal Farm of the working class into the cart horses of revolution, hard-working but vulnerable to manipulative leadership, is indicative of a patronizing, even patriarchal, attitude. As Rees, long a friend and admirer of Orwell, confessed, “What is pathetic … in both Animal Farm and 1984 is the helpless, inert, and almost imbecile role which he attributes to the common man.”²⁰

THE EXOTIC NATIVE: As Raymond Williams noted of Orwell's time in Burma, “He was at once opposed to the dirty work of imperialism and involved in it.”²¹Burmese Days might be critical of the British system and attitudes, but Orwell also reproduces, through his own descriptions rather than the words of his characters, “imperial” stereotypes of the Burmese as exotic, venal, and scheming, capable of being led into mob activity by an unscrupulous local “leader.” The Road to Wigan Pier might be written to expose the true conditions of the working class but it falls into middle-class caricatures of that class as alternatively heroic (the coal miners), unclean and indolent (the landlords in the tripe shop), or comfortable and secure (the family in the parlor).

This tension over Orwell's portrayal of those who are supposedly oppressed is reinforced by his treatment of their environment. In Burmese Days the jungle and the Burmese people might be physically attractive, but they are little more than passive objects to excite Flory's admiration and Elizabeth's disgust. Only the villain, U Po Kyin, stands apart from this portrayal of a people who are oppressed or manipulated; nevertheless, he never meets or communicates directly with any of the English characters. The only Burmese in contact with the British are servants or Ma Hla May, Flory's discarded mistress, who becomes a pawn in U Po Kyin's schemes.

The exception that proves this rule of the “exotic other” is Dr. Veraswami, the good-hearted Indian friend of Flory. While the doctor is not as passive as the Burmese, it is clear that Veraswami, or “Very-slimy,” as he is called by a racist British character, will never be accepted by the colonizers. More significantly, Orwell's treatment of race and color also sets Veraswami apart as he is identified in part by his “darkness” in contrast with Flory's light skin. This stigma of color even extends to Flory, who has a “hideous,” dark-blue birthmark that discolors his whiteness.

ORWELL AS ANTI-INTELLECTUAL: Orwell, later commemorated as the “wintry conscience” of his generation,²² helped to create this image by positioning himself as the man of “common sense” standing against intellectuals obsessed with theory and subservient to foreign powers. His literary criticism offered a sinister portrayal of intellectuals from “the soft-boiled emancipated middle class … [who] can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”²³ During the war he insisted that “[t]he quisling intellectual is a phenomenon of the last two years.”²⁴ At the end of his life Orwell condemned “a whole literary generation, or at least the most prominent members of a generation, either pretending to be proletarians or indulging in public orgies of self-hatred because they were not proletarians.”²⁵

Orwell also vented his anger through his fiction. Perhaps the most vivid sustained attack is one found in Coming Up for Air. Early in the novel, George Bowling goes to a meeting of the Left Book Club, the organization that had fostered Orwell's fame and provided him with a secure income with its distribution of The Road to Wigan Pier. Bowling sees the lecturer as “a mean-looking chap … with a bald head which he'd tried rather unsuccessfully to cover up with wisps of hair.” The lecturer's speech on the Nazis and “Bestial atrocities. … Hideous outbursts of sadism. … Rubber truncheons. … Concentration camps. … Iniquitous persecution of the Jews” is diminished in Bowling's critique: “What's he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. Doing the damnedest to make you hate certain foreigners called Fascists.”²⁶ The scene, a forerunner of the “Two Minute Hate” in Nineteen Eighty-four, also foreshadows the intellectual menace of O'Brien in that novel.

Other intellectuals pose different threats. Leaving the Left Book Club meeting, Bowling looks up an old schoolmaster, only to find him detached from current affairs. Bowling ponders, “Funny, these public-school chaps. Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of Latin and Greek and poetry. … A curious thought struck me. He's dead. He's a ghost. All people like that are dead.”²⁷

Still another example occurs when Bowling travels to his childhood village to find his idyllic fishing pond reduced to a hole for garbage. Here he meets a well-read but eccentric old man who evokes images of “vegetarianism, simple life, poetry, nature-worship, roll in the dew before breakfast.” Once again, Bowling is the mouthpiece for Orwell's interjection: “Say what you like—call it silly, childish, anything—but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beechwoods used to be?”²⁸

ORWELL AND POLITICS: Most of the British political targets of Orwell's writing were not on the Right but on the Left. From 1936 he was writing of “so many” Socialists as “the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who goes about spreading sweetness and light.”²⁹ The second section of The Road to Wigan Pier is a sustained attack on the organized activism of Socialists: “Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out.” Middle-class socialists were “out of touch with common humanity” while “no genuine working man grasp[ed] the deeper implications of Socialism.”³⁰

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's subsequent documentary of the Spanish Civil War, furthered this hostility. He denounced “hack-journalists and the pansy Left” and labeled poets such as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender “parlour Bolsheviks.”³¹ World War II did nothing to lessen this animosity; indeed, it reinforced the sentiment. In The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius Orwell issued a prolonged denunciation of the intelligentsia and “their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion,” and their “emotional shallowness.” He concluded, “England [was] perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals [were] ashamed of their own nationality.”³²

Some have argued that socialism abandoned Orwell in 1936 or 1937 rather than the other way around; however, he had already used his novels to caricature the Left. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Gordon Comstock directs his ridicule at the naive millionaire “socialist” Ravelston. The Left Book Club is mocked in Coming Up for Air not only for its hate-mongering lecturer but also for its membership. The audience at the lecture includes a spinster who has “a vague yearning to do something she calls ‘developing her mind,’ only she doesn't quite know how to start”; “a little woman with red hair … knitting a jumper”; a teacher with “her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in”; “two old blokes from the local Labour Party”; and a Trotskyist arguing about “the dialectic of the dialectic” with the three members of the local branch of the Communist Party.³³

In both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell goes beyond socialism to the evils of Soviet Communism and totalitarianism, but even here there are disturbing remnants of his general stigmatizing of the Left. Notable is his choice of “Ingsoc” (English Socialism) to describe the political philosophy of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-four. In the United States mainstream publications such as Time and Life contended that the novel was a clear castigation of the socialism of the Labour government of England. The author might have protested that this was a misreading, but even his publisher, Fredric Warburg, had commented when he first read the manuscript, “This I take to be a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist parties generally.”³⁴

ORWELL AND “ENGLISHNESS”: Orwell's conception of a special “Englishness” became increasingly important in his career. The cultural essence of this Englishness was captured most famously in his columns. Some of his most influential work for present-day scholars and the English media are his short essays from The Tribune. Today, most references to Orwell in the British press are not to his Orwellian world but to his columns on English cooking, the perfect cup of tea, the consummate pub, and even virtues of the common toad.

Orwell's “England” was superficial at best. Not only did he exclude the rest of the British Isles, he railed against “the whisky-swilling Scottish drunks” who administered the Empire, sneered at “the delusion that Eire [Ireland], Scotland, or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection,” and reduced nationalism in these areas to “small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island.”³⁵ The residual “England” was not an England of the present but an England of the past or even an England that never was: Orwell's perfect pub did not exist. His portrait of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes [mailboxes]”³⁶ owed as much to British Council pamphlets of the 1930s, trying to convince foreigners of the qualities of the British Empire in an age of instability and dictatorships, as to his first-hand observations.

Orwell's early novels do not give an indication of this mythical England. Dorothy Hare and Gordon Comstock both struggle in the England of reality. Orwell as George Bowling tries to escape into the country of his childhood, only to find that this country is gone: “One thing, I thought as I drove down the hill, I'm finished with this notion of getting back into the past.”³⁷ World War II changed all this. Now the England of Orwell's time, with its potential for greatness in the virtues of the mythical man in the street, had to be exalted. As he wrote in 1944, “By the end of another decade it will be finally clear whether England is to survive as a great nation or not. And if the answer is to be ‘Yes,’ it is the common people who must make it so.”³⁸

TECHNIQUES AND STYLE

CLARITY OF LANGUAGE: Orwell placed great emphasis on simple, precise communication. In the essay “Why I Write” (1946) he argued that “Good prose is like a window pane.”³⁹ His aims were not only literary: he maintained that poor writing concealed and even prevented thought. Dying metaphors, excessive verbiage, pretentious diction, and meaningless words could easily be used by a state or political groups that wished to disseminate propaganda and block the emergence of the truth from other sources. As Orwell concluded in “Politics and the English Language,” “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”⁴⁰

THE ILLUSION OF AUTHENTICITY: While giving the impression of authenticity, Orwell was willing to alter events. Chronological order was transposed, composite or fictional characters created (such as the mysterious benefactor who rescues Orwell from France in Down and Out in Paris and London), and places were changed. Orwell annotated a first edition of Down and Out in Paris and London, “Succeeding chapters not actually autobiography, but drawn from what I have seen.” An American reviewer shrewdly guessed that Orwell's imagination had “colored the facts a little. … One reads on with a sort of horrid fascination, happy in the suspicion (eventually verified) that this existence in the gutter is but the temporary condition of a man who rather enjoys being down and out.”⁴¹

In real life Orwell had been living rough in the East End of London before he ventured to make his career in France; in Down and Out in Paris and London he starts in Paris and only begins his tramping in England when he finds the start of his job delayed for a month. Orwell's famous vision in The Road to Wigan Pier of an exhausted young woman poking a stick up a blocked drainpipe was altered for even more dramatic effect. In reality, he saw her in mid February as he walked past a side alley in Wigan; for effect, the book has him sitting on a train in a wintry March, taking him away “through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs.”⁴²

The artificial distinction between fact and fiction is also illustrated by the crossover of characters from essay to novel. The real-life characters in “Hop-Picking,” a 1931 essay based on Orwell's adventures that same year, reappeared in A Clergyman's Daughter four years later. “Young Ginger,” who “seemed rather a likely lad,”⁴³ became the ginger-haired Nobby in the novel. Orwell's starting point for his tramping, a night in Trafalgar Square, is transformed into the surreal setting for the third chapter of the novel.

REALISM: Orwell's early novels work in the tradition of the realistic novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He included Emile Zola in the list of “writers I care most about and never grow tired of.” One of Orwell's book reviews from 1936 pointed to elements of Zola that he admired: “The scenes of violence Zola describes in Germinal and La Débacle are supposed to symbolize capitalist corruption, but they are also scenes. At his best, Zola is not synthetic. He works under a sense of compulsion, and not like an amateur cook following the instructions on a packet of Crestona cake-flour.”⁴⁴

Orwell's depictions of street scenes in Paris or of British colonial life in Burma are methodical. The opening of Down and Out in Paris and London is typical: “The rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.”⁴⁵ In his later writing Orwell continued to emphasize the vivid description of the unusual and the commonplace, the exotic and the mundane. The realism may be a straightforward account of a circumstances, as in Homage to Catalonia, or it may take on a cynically humourous tone, as in Coming Up For Air. It may even verge on surrealism, as in some of the scenes in Nineteen Eighty-four, but Orwell still gives the reader the sense that the narrative depicts actual locations and events.

NATURALISM: It can be argued that Orwell, from the start of his career, went beyond realism into naturalism, or, as some critics have labeled it, “sordid realism.” Much of his descriptive writing turns upon a contrast between the drab—as in the leaden London of the present (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) or near-future (Nineteen Eighty-four)—and the vivid. Some critics have noted the influence of the poet A. E. Housman, including his celebration of the rural landscape, on Burmese Days; however, brightness and activity, as in Housman's poetry, are not necessarily positive. The Burmese jungle could bring dangers as well as release from the banal British club life.

In Down and Out in Paris and London, for example, Orwell opens with a graphic description of the Parisian quarter where he lives, including screaming concierges; small, noisy rooms; and bug-ridden wallpaper. At the heart of the book the naturalism is even more intense. Orwell places the reader in the hotel kitchen where he is working in the “stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar.”⁴⁶ While this hellish description is at the extreme of Orwell's portrayal, the reader is always reminded of such discomfort until Orwell is spirited away from Paris by the mysterious benefactor.

The narrative of Orwell's tramping in England is less intense in expression but just as descriptive; he takes the reader into his confidence as he descends into the lower classes. When he first swaps his clothes for some old rags, he shares his shock: “I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had—how is one to express it?—a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness.”⁴⁷ The change of pace and tone is deliberate and effective: whereas Orwell is an obvious “alien” in France, his alienation in England, where he is among his fellow countrymen, is portrayed as a surprising revelation. Conversely, his unlikely (given his own background) bonding with his fellow down-and-outers comes through measured descriptions of unusual settings, such as the tramps obtaining a cup of tea through the pretense of prayer in a tin-roofed mission (”we knelt down among the dirty teacups and began to mumble that we had left undone those things that we ought to have done, and done those things that we ought not to have done, and there was no health in us”⁴⁸).

In the end Orwell used naturalism to bring readers to empathize, as he had through his own experience, with the impoverished. He concludes his account, “I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.”⁴⁹

The naturalism in Burmese Days is of a far different character. The atmosphere is not as intense as the underworld of Paris or as ominous as life on the seamy side of London. There is also a general variation in description depending on whether Orwell is portraying the British world of the club and John Flory's house or the Burmese world of the jungle. The British space is described matter-of-factly as a “mildewed” or “sleeping” place; the Burmese space is portrayed as distasteful in the opening section but becomes lush, colorful, and vibrant.

On the surface, this division of space embodies Orwell's anti-imperialism, the decaying British system set against the emerging country. Yet, this is a simplification. Through the use of color, Burma is reduced to a symbolic counterpoint in the novel, marked out simply as “not British.” The reader's empathy is for a token representation of the Burmese world before returning to the core of the story, the doomed fate of Flory.

Elements of this naturalism are present in Orwell's writing up to the end of his career, most notably in the graphic portrayals in The Road to Wigan Pier of working-class life in northern England and in Homage of Catalonia of “the winter cold, the ragged uniforms of militiamen, the oval Spanish faces, the morse-like tapping of machine-guns, the smells of urine and rotting bread, the tinny taste of bean-stews wolfed hurriedly out of unclean pannikins.”⁵⁰ These elements were to be confined to Orwell's nonfiction. The title of Keep the Aspidistra Flying refers to the aspidistra plant, a common feature in middle-class living rooms. In the novel there are descriptions of the rooms of Gordon and his sister Julia, the police cells and the pubs, and, more pleasantly, the representation of the countryside. Coming Up for Air draws on the imagery of suburbia and of the village, both past and present. Nineteen Eighty-four contrasts drab settings, such as Victory Mansions, with the brightness of a location such as the Ministry of Love to put the mundane and the terrifying side-by-side. Yet, as early as 1934, Orwell was experimenting with literary techniques that went beyond naturalism.

POINT OF VIEW: Orwell's use of point of view is problematic, for the apparent division between the first-person account of his documentaries and the third-person representation of the protagonists in his novels collapses upon close reading. John Flory in Burmese Days, Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, and Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four are all manifestations of Orwell's personality and beliefs. Even Dorothy Hare in The Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell's only female protagonist, becomes a conduit for many of Orwell's impressions through their shared experiences of hop-picking, tramping, and teaching. At times, these characters risk being little more than an extension of Orwell the narrator. Occasionally, there is a shift in the point of view—in Burmese Days there are notable passages in which it is Elizabeth Lackersteen or Dr. Veraswami, rather than John Flory, who provides a narration of events.

MODERNISM: Orwell's conception of point of view became increasingly prominent from the mid 1930s as he adopted the techniques of modernism, in which the focus moved from description of characters' surroundings to the representation of their thoughts. While drafting A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell had become fascinated with James Joyce. He wrote after reading Ulysses, “When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.”⁵¹

The immediate effect of this influence was on the third section of A Clergyman's Daughter, the scene in which Dorothy Hare spends the night with the homeless in Trafalgar Square. The section is based on the “nighttown” episode in Ulysses, involving a surreal street scene of characters coming and going in the crowded, noisy street. In both works there is no single, focused viewpoint and thus no single, coherent narrative. Conversations occur simultaneously, but as they are overlapping and occur amidst stray remarks and fragments of songs, only the most diligent reader can piece them together.

Orwell refined the modernist techniques in his next two novels. Keep the Aspidistra Flying moves back and forth between the author's objective description and Gordon Comstock's thoughts to build up both the grimness of modern London and the frustration and futility of Gordon's life. The handling of this is far from perfect: there are annoying shifts when the point of view becomes Rosemary's or Ravelston's. Similarly, the reader is furnished with Gordon's family background through an awkward, chapter-long intervention by the narrator. Coming Up for Air is more consistent in its handling of the tension between the protagonist and the external world, primarily through George Bowling's use of the first person. His “flashbacks” are somewhat staged, conveniently taking a linear structure from earliest childhood through the decline of his marriage, but the point of view is always that of George's perception and commentary rather than the author's observation of him. More problematic is the relationship between protagonist and narrator: there are many passages in which George's ponderings are a vehicle for Orwell's beliefs and opinions rather than for development of the character.

Nineteen Eighty-four, for all the discussion of its political content, is Orwell's greatest modernist success, for it rests not on a comprehensive, naturalist representation of Winston Smith's world but on the modernist depiction of his interior thought. The novel is by far Orwell's most psychological work, turning upon the shifting moods and perceptions of Winston. This success in turn is founded upon Winston as an extension of Orwell, who was becoming more and more pessimistic about the fate of the postwar world. Like Gordon Comstock and George Bowling, Winston goes through phases of reverie as well as of frustration and anger; the difference is that whereas the two earlier protagonists find an accommodation with their world, however flawed it may be, there is no such hope for the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

ALLEGORY AND SATIRE: In many ways Animal Farm is exceptional in Orwell's writing. While he had critiqued Swift's work, notably in “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels” (1946), he had rarely employed satire in either his fiction or nonfiction, and his storytelling had been direct, relying upon the observations or thoughts of his human protagonists. There might have been black comedy in the travails and anger of Gordon Comstock and humor in the common-sense conclusions of George Bowling, but nothing approached the fantasy world of Gulliver.

Orwell had long clung to an image from his days in the small village of Wallington of a small boy leading a cart horse. Using animals as personifications both of his oppressed “common man” and of the corruption of revolutionary leadership, he could make his political argument through a fable rather than the direct, sometimes haranguing tone he had adopted in his columns and essays. At the same time, Orwell could concentrate on a narrative, far simpler than in his previous three novels, focusing on events rather than environment. His language was at its most basic, with precise, active words to “think more clearly” as “a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”⁵²

The achievement of Animal Farm is an ironic comment on Orwell's development as a novelist. From Burmese Days through Nineteen Eighty-four, he embraced and tried to develop naturalist and modernist approaches, both through language and point of view. For most critics, his high point would come with the short book that broke from these experiments and, instead, used the classical form of the fable.

WRITING HABITS

WORK ETHIC: Perhaps the most notable characteristic of Orwell the writer was his dedication to the task. He felt he had failed if he did not spend part of every day working on a text, be it a novel, essay, or book review.

Orwell was not a naturally gifted writer. Ruth Pitter, a friend from his earliest days in London, recalled, “He wrote so badly. He had to teach himself writing. He was like a cow with a musket. … He became a master of English, but it was sheer hard grind.” His efforts from this period were either stilted by literalism—Pitter noted, “We lent him an old oil-stove and he wrote a story about two young girls who lent an old man an oil stove”—or by awkward attempts at symbolism. In an attempt at a play about a man refusing to write advertising for the sake of his starving family, Orwell wrote the stage direction, “Everything goes dark, there is a sound like the roaring of waters. What actually happens is that the furniture is removed.” The protagonist “sits … reading a large book. He has a placard inscribed Deaf round his neck.”⁵³

Yet, through persistence, Orwell raised his work to publishable standard. His nonfiction brought him to the attention of a wide audience, and his prewar novels, while flawed, demonstrated the quality of his observations and the precision of some of his writing. By 1945 he was completing one novel and starting another, writing a weekly column for one newspaper and contributing regularly to three others, and publishing essays in a variety of journals. In 1946 alone, he published more than 130 articles and reviews.

CONSULTATION WITH OTHERS: In general, Orwell's work was the product of lone effort. He did not confer in detail with other writers. He did not draw upon the services of an editor, and his publishers were primarily concerned with revisions to avoid any possibility of libel or obscenity. Norman Collins, Gollancz's co-director, said in response to the firm's lawyer's offer of literary advice about the draft of A Clergyman's Daughter, “[Orwell's] reply to such suggestions would, I am convinced, be … a perfectly plain and unequivocal ‘Go to hell.’ I think then that it is up to us to publish the book, making a ballyhoo of the fact that in many respects this is perhaps the most remarkable novel that we have ever published, etc., etc.”⁵⁴

The striking exception to this rule was Orwell's reliance in the 1930s upon feedback from his friend Brenda Salkeld, a teacher of physical education. He began an intense correspondence with her that included musings on literature, as in his comment that George Bernard Shaw had “squandered what talent he may have had back in the '80s” and “suffer[ed] from an inferiority complex towards Shakespeare.”⁵⁵ Orwell's infatuation with the work of Joyce was set out in great detail to Salkeld, and he turned to her to read the manuscript of Burmese Days.

On another occasion Orwell sought extensive advice from his wife, Eileen. Up to 1943 she had complained to friends that he did not want her to read and criticize his drafts; then, for no apparent reason, he began reading aloud his day's work on Animal Farm as they lay in bed. Eileen's criticism and suggestions were welcomed, although it is unclear how they affected the final draft of the book.

With Nineteen Eighty-four Orwell returned to his lonely pattern of earlier novels. He showed the manuscript to no one and, even as he lay seriously ill, carried out the final revisions and typed the manuscript. The effort hastened his return to the sanatorium and probably contributed to his untimely death.

DRAFTING AND REVISIONS: While Orwell was a methodical writer, he was also an extremely quick one. Down and Out in Paris and London was the most protracted work in development, primarily because of the extensive changes suggested by publishers who rejected the first draft and partly because Orwell fretted over the project. After this early experience, once he embarked on a manuscript, he soon completed a draft, always meeting the strict deadlines he offered to his agent and publisher. The first hundred pages of Burmese Days may have taken many months before their completion in January 1933, but, encouraged by his agent “to get on with it,” the next hundred were finished in three months, and the complete manuscript was submitted in December.⁵⁶ Years later, the same pattern occurred with Nineteen Eighty-four. Only fifty pages had been completed when he went to the island of Jura in spring 1947; the first draft was finished seven months later.

Orwell's most significant revisions came not in the rewriting of a first draft but in the translation of factual material into documentary or fictional form. He may have learned this lesson of enhancing reality from his experience with Down and Out in Paris and London. The initial submission was criticized for being too tied to the format of a diary and too short and fragmentary to make an adequate book. Orwell expanded the book by moving to a narrative based on his experiences in both Paris and London. The revised documentary is still sketchy in places and the sections on the two cities sit together uneasily, but the outcome flows far more easily than the original series of entries.

With his fiction Orwell was far more likely to write a single draft, making only minor changes before publication. Burmese Days was altered in some places to meet the comments of Salkeld, but because of time and distance, she was not shown the draft of A Clergyman's Daughter. Instead, he rushed the disjointed manuscript to his agent. Orwell commented ominously, “The book does … contain an inherent fault of structure … [but] this could not be rectified in any way that I can think of.”⁵⁷

Similarly, the more promising but flawed Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published with little intervention from external readers, agent, or publisher. Orwell again blamed the need to survive for the rushed efforts, but it is questionable if he ever envisaged substantial redrafts. It was his own impatience and frustration with reworking the structure of his novels, not fear of starvation, that prompted his quick completion of the novels.

Indeed, the biggest obstacle to publication was the bureaucratic irritation of clearing Orwell's manuscripts for obscenity and libel. Down and Out in Paris and London was not significantly held up, as he removed hints of certain swearwords and altered names of people and places, but Burmese Days presented more serious difficulties. Orwell, from naiveté or a sense of mischief, had used the names of real people throughout the novel, and both Gollancz and Heinemann rejected the manuscript for fear of a lawsuit. Some alterations were made to bring out Burmese Days in the United States, and Gollancz eventually arranged British publication after other names were changed. Orwell was quicker in making accommodations over his next two novels, toning down the school scene in A Clergyman's Daughter and revising advertising slogans and products in Keep the Aspidistra Flying that were too close to real-life sources.

Orwell stood firm when it came to substantial changes in the content or theme of his books. Although he acted on the comment of Gollancz's lawyer that the relationship between Dorothy and Warburton in A Clergyman's Daughter stretched credulity, inserting a paragraph on “the hold that the blasphemer and evil-liver always has over the pious,” he told the publisher that if any other changes were demanded, he would withdraw the manuscript.⁵⁸ He refused the request of the editor in chief of Harper to delete the last pages of Burmese Days, detailing the fate of other characters after Flory's suicide, for publication in America. To Jonathan Cape's comment on Animal Farm—“It would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs”—he offered the succinct reaction, “Balls.”⁵⁹

Months before his death, Orwell took an important stand. The Book-of-the-Month Club, whose distribution would ensure widespread reception for Nineteen Eighty-four in the United States, indicated that it would accept the novel only if Emmanuel Goldstein's lengthy political treatise and the appendix on Newspeak were deleted. Orwell stood firm, and the Book-of-the-Month Club backed down.⁶⁰

The extent to which Orwell's speed in writing and his aversion to substantial revision affected his work is still debated. One could argue that Animal Farm, completed in less than four months, is his best work. While his early novels suffered greatly from haste in their completion, it is unclear whether Orwell, at this early stage in his career and with his uncomfortable commitment to being a literary writer, had the ability to make significant improvements. More intriguing is the question whether Nineteen Eighty-four would have been a stronger work if Orwell, seriously ill, had not rushed the completion of the final draft. Questions over characterization (notably that of Julia), the awkward inclusion of Goldstein's manifesto and the Newspeak appendix, and the representation of the proletariat might have been addressed. Then again, such weaknesses are found throughout Orwell's work and could have been beyond remedy.

Notes

1. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), volume 1, p. 1.

2. Orwell to Brenda Salkeld, undated (August or September 1934), in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 138.

3. Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in Inside the Whale, and Other Essays (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), p. 31.

4. Rayner Heppenstall, Four Absentees (London: Barrie & Rockcliff, 1960), p. 32.

5. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in The Complete Novels (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 627.

6. Victor Gollancz to Harold Rubinstein, 17 June 1932, reprinted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1982), p. 224.

7. Orwell to Geoffrey Gorer, 15 September 1937, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 285.

8. Orwell to Leonard Moore, 26 April 1932, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, pp. 77-78.

9. Orwell to Moore, 19 November 1932, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 106.

10. Orwell to Heppenstall, 16 April 1940, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 22.

11. Q. D. Leavis, “The Literary Life Respectable: Mr. George Orwell,” Scrutiny (September 1940): 176.

12. Keith Alldritt, The Making of George Orwell: An Essay in Literary History (London: Arnold, 1969), p. 2.

13. Crick, George Orwell, p. 18.

14. Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1996), p. 144.

15. Crick, George Orwell, p. 369.

16. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), p. 836.

17. Ibid., p. 170.

18. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962), pp. 16-17.

19. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

20. Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 88.

21. Raymond Williams, Orwell (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 9.

22. V. S. Pritchett, quoted in Audrey Coppard and Crick, Orwell Remembered (London: BBC, 1984), p. 275.

23. Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in Inside the Whale, and Other Essays, pp. 51-56.

24. Orwell, “London Letter,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 182.

25. Orwell, review of Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 443.

26. Orwell, Coming Up for Air (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959), p. 516.

27. Ibid., p. 525.

28. Ibid., pp. 559-560.

29. Orwell to Jack Common, undated (April 1936), in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 216.

30. See Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 149-162.

31. Orwell to the editor of The New English Weekly, 26 May 1938, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 332; Orwell to Stephen Spender, April 1938, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 313.

32. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 63-64.

33. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, pp. 149-151.

34. Fredric Warburg, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 567.

35. Orwell, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 263; Orwell, review of Sean O'Casey, Drums under the Windows, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, pp. 13-15; Orwell, “As I Please,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, pp. 284-285.

36. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 37.

37. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, p. 220.

38. Orwell, “The English People,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 3, p. 38.

39. Orwell, “Why I Write,” p. 7.

40. Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 139.

41. Quoted in Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation (London: Constable, 1979), pp. 23-24.

42. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 16.

43. Orwell, “Hop-Picking,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 55.

44. Orwell, review of Scholem Asch, The Calf of Paper, and Julian Green, Midnight, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 247.

45. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 5.

46. Ibid., p. 51.

47. Ibid., p. 115.

48. Ibid., p. 126.

49. Ibid., p. 189.

50. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 103.

51. Orwell to Salkeld, September 1934, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 139.

52. See Roger Fowler, The Language of George Orwell (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 159-180.

53. Orwell, quoted in Crick George Orwell, pp. 178-180.

54. Norman Collins, quoted in Crick George Orwell, p. 257.

55. Orwell to Brenda Salkeld, March 1933, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 119.

56. Orwell to Eleanor Jaques, 18 February 1933, quoted in Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 189.

57. Orwell to Moore, 14 November 1934, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, pp. 142-143.

58. Orwell, quoted in Shelden, Orwell, p. 221.

59. Jonathan Cape and Orwell, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 456.

60. Orwell to Rees, 8 April 1949, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, pp. 487-488.