Essays

by George Orwell

Orwell once said that ‘a writer cannot be a loyal member of a political party’.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.

What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have written the book

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas – on the whole – the plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible.

The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral.

It is said that Macaulay refused to review Hard Times because he disapproved of its ‘sullen Socialism’.

There is not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed, its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is that capitalists ought to be kind, not that

His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

Of course Dickens is right in saying that a gifted child ought not to work ten hours a day pasting labels on bottles, but what he does not say is that no child ought to be condemned to such a fate, and there is no reason for inferring that he thinks it.

In Hard Times trade unionism is represented as something not much better than a racket, something that happens because employers are not sufficiently paternal.

Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open violence.

And Dickens is very sure that revolution is a monster. That is why everyone remembers the revolutionary scenes in A Tale of Two Cities; they have the quality of nightmare, and it is Dickens’s own nightmare.

All the way through Dickens insists upon the nightmare insecurity of a revolutionary period, and in this he shows a great deal of prescience.

The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a child.

In the woolly vagueness of this passage one can see Dickens’s utter lack of any educational theory. He can imagine the moral atmosphere of a good school, but nothing further.

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure.

Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charter’d street’ than in three quarters of Socialist literature.

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another.

Dickens’s attitude is easily intelligible to an Englishman, because it is part of the English puritan tradition, which is not dead even at this day.

But the point is that in the matter of Magwitch, Dickens identifies with Pip, and his attitude is at bottom snobbish.

But what is curious, in a nineteenth-century radical, is that when he wants to draw a sympathetic picture of a servant, he creates what is recognizably a feudal type. Sam Weller, Mark Tapley, Clara Peggotty are all of them feudal figures.

It is a city of consumers, of people who are deeply civilized but not primarily useful.

In England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport, especially field-sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled.

From Dickens’s point of view almost any kind of sport is at best a subject of satire. Consequently one side of nineteenth-century life – the boxing, racing, cock-fighting, badger-digging, poaching, rat-catching side of life, so wonderfully embalmed in Leech’s illustrations to Surtees – is outside his scope.

comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice. and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters.

No modern man could combine such purposelessness with so much vitality.

All art is propaganda.

Whether you approve of him or not, he is there like the Nelson Column.

It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world.

The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail.

He is all fragments, all details – rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles – and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

According to Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was ‘a gigantic dwarf, and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.

Why is it that Tolstoy’s grasp seems to be so much larger then Dickens’s – why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens’s are already finished and perfect.

Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier, Dickens’s can be portrayed on a cigarette card.5

The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness.

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.

Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc. owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of ‘Scientifiction’.

All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever.

The truly remarkable thing about Ulysses, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its material. Of course there is much more in Ulysses than this, because Joyce is a kind of poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar on to paper.

Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient bone-heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an epoch of fear, tyranny and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but those things among others.

For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Feu, A Farewell to Arms, Death of a Hero, Good-Bye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and A Subaltern on the Somme were written not by propagandists but by victims. They are saying in effect, ‘What the hell is all this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure.’

Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something worse than worthless but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that period felt it is a valuable document.

It would be absurd, for instance, to look on Ulysses as merely a show-up of the horror of modern life, the ‘dirty Daily Mail era’, as Pound put it.

People with empty bellies never despair of the universe, nor even think about the universe, for that matter.

The Communist movement in western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy.

The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on. This has happened at least three times during

The debunking of western civilization had reached its climax and ‘disillusionment’ was immensely widespread.