The Collected Non-Fiction: Essays, Articles, Diaries and Letters, 1903-1950

by George Orwell, Peter Davison (Editor)

The twelve edited volumes of Orwell's non-fiction, collected for the first time in one invaluable ebook.

A rich treasure trove of material, this unique collection includes Orwell's reviews, broadcasts, notebooks, wartime diaries, articles on socialism and censorship, correspondence with luminaries such as Arthur Koestler, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and famous essays such as 'Politics and the English Language', 'Why I Write' and 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.

Edited by Professor Peter Davison, the collection encompasses twelve annotated volumes and ranges across the whole of Orwell's writing life, from 1903 to 1950. As well as providing an unparalleled insight into Orwell's life and works, the volume offers a wonderful overview of the social, literary and political events of the thirties and forties. It will be an invaluable resource for fans, students and scholars alike.

Contents:
A Kind of Compulsion (1903-36)
Facing Unpleasant Facts (1937-39)
A Patriot After All (1940-41)
All Propaganda is Lies (1941-42)
Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (1942-43)
Two Wasted Years (1943)
I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (1943-44)
I Belong to the Left (1945)
Smothered Under Journalism (1946)
It is What I Think (1947-48)
Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living (1949-50)
The Lost Orwell

ebook

Published March 9, 2017

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Reviews

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Azért valljuk meg, akad ebben írás, amit megcsócsált az idő vasfoga. Az "Így halnak meg a szegények" például üt, mert kábé pontosan leírja a mai magyar állami egészségügyet. "A politika és az angol nyelv" viszont megkopott - a semmit sem jelentő klisék elharapódzását a politikai retorika szemére vetni jogos ugyan, de egy olyan országból nézve, ahol az ellenzéket épp most poloskázták le, kicsit erőtlen. Ide nekem a '40-es évek brit közbeszédét!

Azt hiszem, a szórványos elavulás paradox módon pont abból fakad, ami a legszimpatikusabb Orwellben: hogy egyszerre tud a szocializmus elkötelezett híve és legalább ilyen elkötelezett kritikusa lenni. Feltűnő, ebben a kötetben milyen kevés szó esik a fasizmusról. Ami nyilván nem véletlen - Orwell szerint ugyanis a fasizmus ellen harcolni kell, de bírálni elvesztegetett idő, hisz érveink úgysem jutnak el azokhoz, akiket illetnek. Viszont saját közösségünk hibáinak és bűneinek konstruktív kritikája szükséges - mondhatni, a szeretet jele, mert azt célozza, hogy jobbá tegye, mint amilyen. Aminek következtében, mi tagadás, egyes szövegek olyasmit próbálnak megjavítani, ami akkoriban ugyan zenitjén volt, de manapság már ebben a formában kihaltnak tekinthető, akár a dodómadár.

Ezzel együtt van valami lélekemelő a kötetben. Az egy dolog, hogy Orwell remek stilliszta - lényegesebb, hogy sosem fél vizsgálat alá vetni a saját kétségeit. A kritikai szellem legszebb hagyományából ad ízelítőt - abból, ami elsősorban saját nézeteink helytálló voltáról tesz fel kérdéseket, és csak másodsorban foglalkoztatja az, amit ellenfélként azonosít. Értitek, ma egy miniszterelnök olyan metaforával élt, amiben honfitársainak egy része poloskaként jelent meg. Egy jobb világban az ilyen szónoklat után saját hallgatósága fogja meg, és hajítja bele abba a dögkútba, ahol az ordas politikai eszmék oszladoznak. De nem. Ez a hallgatóság csak hallgat, mert világában ami az ő száján jön ki, az a priori IGAZ. Akkor is, ha nem, sőt: akkor leginkább, ha nem. Ilyen körülmények között jó volt kicsit megmártózni az orwelli kritikai látásmódban.

Ja, és hogy miért ír Orwell? Mert nem tehet mást.

[DeterminedStupor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the complete works of an author might not be worth the effort – they lived in a different time that it is often hard to understand their references to contemporary events. There is a certain danger as well, as one could be completely taken in and think that the author’s point of view is the only correct one. An editor of a collected works, then, have the enormous task of situating an author in the present context, which include providing historical background, correcting the author’s factual errors, and pointing out the connections between their many works. (These, on top of tracing the scattered writings in the first place.) Peter Davison has managed to achieve all these in editing George Orwell’s Collected Non-Fiction – a massive e-book containing 12 volumes and some 3,800 chapters. It contains practically all of Orwell’s surviving letters, diaries, reviews, essays, as well as the correspondences regarding his published works and of the people close to him. It is an impressive work of scholarship, and at the price of ₤30, it is also a great value for money.

When writing his 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984, Dorian Lynskey had to read Orwell’s entire published writings – about “two million words” in total – and found him to be such a “good company”. I agree with him. The reward of The Collected Non-Fiction is to find that much of Orwell’s output is still worth reading. This is even apparent in essays that he knew were not going to be published in his lifetime – for example, the classic “Such, Such Were the Joys”. In his diaries, also, with their careful chronicles and observations, one can find many worthwhile passages. Commenting on Orwell’s research for The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, Christopher Hitchens observed that his diary “would not have disgraced Friedrich Engels”. [1] Indeed, it is not hard to feel the echo of The Condition of the Working Class in England in this passage:

[W]hat I had not expected [down in the coal mine], and what for me was the most important feature all through, was the lowness of the roof. ... [T]here were very few places where you could stand upright. In general the roof was about 4 ft. or 4ft. 6 ins high, sometimes much lower, with every now and again a beam larger than the others under which you had to duck especially low. ...

After a few hundred yards of walking doubled up and once or twice having to crawl, I began to feel the effects in a violent pain all down my thighs. One also gets a bad crick in the neck, because though stooping one has to look up for fear of knocking into the beams, but the pain in the thighs is the worst. ...

When we crawled in under the roof to the coal face we could at best kneel, and then not kneel upright, and I fancy the men must do most of their work lying on their bellies. The heat also was frightful – round about 100 degrees F. so far as I could judge. The crew keep burrowing into the coal face, cutting a semi-circular track, periodically hauling the machine forward and propping as they go. ... [T]o drag the thing forward as the seam advances must be a frightful labour, seeing that the men have to do it practically lying down. [2]

Unlike Engels, though, Orwell was much more phlegmatic in his observations. It is in fact Orwell’s signature style to relate his experiences objectively, without undue sensationalism.

One thing that Orwell was consistent about in his writing career is his opposition to imperialism. Years prior to the more famous “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”, Orwell’s criticism of British imperialism was published in a French journal named Le Progrès Civique. In it, he wrote that

The government of all the Indian provinces under the control of the British Empire is of necessity despotic, because only the threat of force can subdue a population of several million subjects.
But this despotism is latent. It hides behind a mask of democracy.

He never stopped writing about British rule in India and Burma. One of his preoccupations during World War II was observing Indian public opinion, as he feared it was for good reasons that Indian people supported Japan against Britain. In 1942, he wrote:

We cannot [win the enthusiasm of the peoples of India] by promises, nor by resounding phrases about liberty and democracy; we can only do it by some concrete unmistakable act of generosity, by giving something away that cannot afterwards be taken back. ... [L]et India be given immediate Dominion status, with the right to secede after the war, if she so desires. [3]

He continued even after the war ended. During the 1945 General Election, he felt that the Labour Party (which he supported) did not pay enough attention to India:

Once or twice, at Labour meetings, I tried the experiment of asking a question about India, to get an answer which sounded something like this: “The Labour Party is, of course, in fullest sympathy with the aspiration of the Indian people towards independence, next question, please.” And there the matter dropped, with not a flicker of interest on the part of the audience. [4]

He ultimately thought that “Britain ought to stop ruling India as early as possible” [5], yet also felt that Britons had to be realistic about a possible decline in their standard of living as a result, saying that the failure to talk openly about it would, in the end, “perpetuate imperialism”. Despite all this, he never could support people who displayed “tourist-like gush about the superiority of Indian civilization” as compared to Britain, who thought that “the East is Good and the West is Bad” [6]. (Orwell was also critical of Gandhi – see Abha Sharma Rodrigues’s excellent study “George Orwell, The B. B. C. And India”, especially ch. 5, for a further discussion.) Indeed, Orwell never romanticized the class of people whom he thought was oppressed, and he was typically weary of a bad argument even when offered for a worthy cause.

Unlike his views on imperialism, however, Orwell was often not consistent in other matters. This is why any reader should be careful when quoting Orwell – it is possible that he had changed his mind afterward. Fortunately, with The Collected Non-Fiction, it is easier to trace Orwell’s opinions throughout his career. To take an example: one of Orwell’s most famous sayings is what he wrote in 1942: “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” This quotation is liked by hundreds of people on Goodreads, yet I hope none will take it as an irrefutable argument. For Orwell himself, 2 years later, would come to reject this kind of argument:

[A]lmost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters so long as you can score a neat debating point. ... I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit – disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively.”

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus, pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis: and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. [7]

This brings us to another of Orwell’s admirable quality: his self-criticality. He often tried his best not to feel too sure of himself, and it is sobering that, for someone whose novels have been called “prophetic”, Orwell was not evasive when he had been wrong.

In much of his war-time diaries (written 1940-42), Orwell observed the outlook of London civilians towards the war and documented the latest news of the war, wondering how much of it was trustworthy. Writing just 4 days after the end of Dunkirk evacuation:

In the middle of a fearful battle in which, I suppose, thousands of men are being killed every day, one has the impression that there is no news. The evening papers are the same as the morning ones, the morning ones are the same as those of the night before, and the radio repeats what is in the papers. As to truthfulness of news, however, there is probably more suppression than downright lying. [8]

A rather mundane example that, I think, illustrates the value of studying Orwell: it is not to get the answer to the problems of today, but to know what it was like to live “inside” history. The mainstream view now accepts Orwell’s criticisms of imperialism and authoritarianism, yet it should not be forgotten that this consensus needed to be won through arduous debates and real acts of courage. After all, Orwell himself wrote,

For all I know, by the time this book [Animal Farm] is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance.

Orwell’s gift for future readers is simply his dedication to writing and to the truthful use of language. The publication of all his surviving works, far from being a material with which to lionize Orwell, is a great opportunity to scrutinize his arguments. For all his occasional silliness, it is true, as Christopher Hitchens put it, that “much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage”. [9]

-- 2 May 2022
(edited 5 May 2022 to correct the citations)

--------------------

[1] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters, (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 35.
[2] The Road to Wigan Pier Diary, 24 February 1936, ch. 285.
[3] “India Next”, 22 February 1942, ch. 981. Orwell also made a similar point about a year earlier in “The Lion and the Unicorn”.
[4] “Do Our Colonies Pay?”, 8 March 1946, ch. 2923.
[5] Review of Subject India by Henry Noel Brailsford, 20 November 1943, ch. 2365.
[6] “Gandhi in Mayfair”: Review of Beggar My Neighbor by Leonard Fielden, September 1943, ch. 2257. To Peter Davison’s credit, Leonard Fielden’s reply to Orwell’s hostile review is included in the succeeding chapter.
[7] “As I Please” 51, 8 December 1944, ch. 2590, emphases added.
[8] War-time Diary, 8 June 1940, ch. 637.
[9] From the introduction of George Orwell, Diaries, ed. Peter Davison (New York: Liveright, 2012), p. xvi.

[James Dempsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

My speed reading approach to this chronology emulates the attitude and style taken up by the contestants of Total Wipe Out, of those facing the big red balls. It is hopeful and it is messy and unfocused, and it is moreover highly unlikely that we will make it to end.

The youthful efforts of Orwell are rather dim and unedifying. It was only when the experience of life began to weigh on his person did his literary flower begin to flourish and floresce. I also need to read 1984. I began the first 10 pages or so. Winston smith. I laugh. Orwell chose his nom de plume because he said it sounded solidly English. So too is the name of that distopian protagonist.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is everything Orwell ever wrote on- fiction wise, so a bit indigestible as a complete whole. The Penguin Collected Essays etc. in four volumes is a better buy, but I wanted an e-book version so I could turn the print size up to reread stuff forty years on from my first read. Orwell's essays and writings are still fresh and full of insight.

[Dilek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dilin yapısı, soyut sözcüklerin edebiyattaki yeri, soyut sözcüklerin nasıl ortaya çıktığı ve edebiyatın nasıl yön verdiği gibi konular hem bir yazar hem de eleştirmen gözüyle ele alınıyor.

*"Dil ancak çiçekler gibi yavaş yavaş gelişebilir; makine parçaları gibi birbirine ekleyemezsiniz."

[Tibor Jánosi-Mózes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magyar fordítás nagyjából a tizede az eredeti válogatásnak, de ez is nagy lépés és örülök neki, hogy van. Döbbenetes, hogy ha Orwell papírra vetett nézetein, lecseréljük a dátumokat 2022-re, még erősebb formában öltene testet az a fenyegetés, ami műveiben visszaköszön.