Search Results for: a hanging

• George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
• George Orwell: Beggars in London (Le Progrès Civique, 1929)

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First, what is a tramp?[1]

A tramp is a native English species.  These are his distinguishing characteristics:  he has no money, he is dressed in rags, he walks about twenty kilometres a day and never sleeps two nights together in the same place.

In short, he is a wanderer, living on charity, roaming around on foot day after day for years, crossing England from end to end many times in his wanderings.

He has no job, home or family, no possessions in the world apart from the rags covering his poor body; he lives at the expense of the community.

No one knows how many individuals make up the tramp population.

Thirty thousand?  Fifty thousand?  Perhaps a hundred thousand in England and Wales when unemployment is particularly bad.

The tramp does not wander for his own amusement, or because he has inherited the nomadic instincts of his ancestors; he is trying first and foremost to avoid starving to death.

It is not difficult to see why; the tramp is unemployed as a result of the state of the English economy.  So, to exist, he must have recourse to public or private charity.  To assist him, the authorities have created asiles (workhouses) where the destitute can find food and shelter.

These places are about twenty kilometres apart, and no-one can stay in any one spike more than once a month.  Hence the endless pilgrimages of tramps who, if they want to eat and sleep with a roof over their heads, must seek a new resting-place every night.

That is the explanation for the existence of tramps.  Now let us see what sort of life they lead.  It will be sufficient to look at just one day, for the days are all the same for these unfortunate inhabitants of one of the richest countries in the world.

*

Let us take one of them as he comes out of the spike at about ten in the morning.

He is about twenty kilometres from the next workhouse.  He will probably take five hours to walk that distance, and will arrive at his destination at about three in the afternoon.

He will not rest much on the way, because the police, who look on tramps with a suspicious eye, will make quick work of sending him packing from any town or village where he might try to stop.  That is why our man will not tarry on the way.

It is, as we have said, around three o’clock in the afternoon when he turns up at the spike.  But the spike does not open until six in the evening.  Three weary hours to kill in the company of other the other tramps who are already waiting.  The herd of human beings, haggard, unshaven, filthy and tattered, grows from minute to minute.  Soon there are a hundred unemployed men representing nearly every trade.

Miners and cotton-spinners, victims of the unemployment which is raging in the North of England, form the majority but all trades are represented, skilled or not.

Their age?  From sixteen to seventy.

Their sex?  There are around two women for every fifty tramps.

Here and there, an imbecile jabbers meaningless words.  Some men are so weak and decrepit that one wonders how they could possibly walk twenty kilometres.

Their clothes strike you as grotesque, tattered and revoltingly filthy.

Their faces make you think of the face of some wild animal, not perhaps a dangerous one, but one which has become at once savage and timorous through lack of rest and care.

*

There they wait, lying on the grass or squatting in the dust.  The bravest prowl around the butcher’s or the baker’s, hoping to glean some scrap of food.  But this is dangerous, because begging is against the law in England, so for the most part they are content to remain idle, exchanging vague words in a strange slang, the tramps’ special language, full of bizarre and picturesque words and phrases which cannot be found in any dictionary.

They have come from all four corners of England and Wales, and tell each other their adventures, discussing without much hope the likelihood of finding work on the way.

Many have met before in some spike at the other end of the country for their tracks cross again and again in their ceaseless wanderings.

These workhouses are miserable and sordid caravanserais where the miserable English pilgrims assemble for a few hours before scattering again in all directions.

All the tramps smoke.  As smoking is forbidden inside the spike, they make the most of their waiting hours.  Their tobacco consists mainly of cigarette-ends which they pick up in the street.  They roll it in paper or stuff it into old pipes.

When a tramp does come by some money, which he has worked for or begged on the way, his first thought is to buy tobacco, but mostly he has to make do with cigarette-ends picked up from the pavement or road.  The spike only gives him his board:  for the rest, clothes, tobacco etc. he has to shift for himself.

*

But it is nearly time for the gates of the spike to open.  The tramps have got up, and are queuing by the wall of the huge building, a vile yellow cube of brick, built in some distant suburb, and which might be mistaken for a prison.[2]

A few more minutes and the heavy gates swing open and the herd of human beings enters.

The resemblance between one of these spikes and a prison is even more striking once you are through the gates.  In the middle of an empty yard, surrounded by high brick walls, stands the main building containing bare-walled cells, a bathroom, the administrative offices, and a tiny room furnished with plain deal benches which serves as a dining-room.  Everything is as ugly and as sinister as you care to imagine.

The prison atmosphere can be found everywhere.  Uniformed officials bully the tramps and push them about, never neglecting to remind them that in coming into the workhouse they have given up all their rights and all their freedom.

The tramp’s name and trade are written in a register.  Then he is made to have a bath, and his clothes and personal possessions are taken away.  Then he is given a coarse cotton workhouse shirt for the night.

If he should happen to have any money, it is confiscated, but if he admits to more than two francs [fourpence] he will not be allowed into the spike and will have to find a bed somewhere else.

As a result those tramps – there are not many of them – who have more than two francs have taken pains to hide their money in the toes of their boots, making sure they are not observed, for this fraud could be punished with imprisonment.

After his bath, the tramp, whose clothes have now been taken away, receives his supper:  half a pound of bread with a little margarine and a half-litre of tea.

The bread made specially for tramps is terrible.  It is grey, always stale, and has as disagreeable taste which makes one think that the flour it is made from comes from tainted grain.

Even the tea is as bad as it can be, but the tramps drink it gladly, as it warms and comforts them after the exhaustion of the day.

This unappetising meal is gulped down in five minutes.  After that, the tramps are ordered into the cells where they will spend the night.

These cells, real prison cells of brick or stone, are about twelve feet by six.  There is no artificial light – the only source of light is a narrow barred window very high up in the wall and a spyhole in the door which allows the guards to keep an eye on the inmates.

Sometimes the cell contains a bed, but normally the tramps have to sleep on the floor with only three blankets for bedding.

There are often no pillows, and for this reason the unfortunate inmates are allowed to keep their coats to roll into a sort of cushion for their heads.

Usually the room is terribly cold, and as a result of long use the blankets have become so thin that they offer no protection at all against the severity of the cold.

As soon as the tramps have entered their cells, the doors are firmly bolted on the outside: they will not open until seven o’clock next morning.

Usually there are two inmates in each cell.  Walled up in their little prison for twelve weary hours with nothing to keep out the cold but a cotton shirt and three thin blankets, the poor wretches suffer cruelly from the cold and the lack of the most elementary comfort.

The places are nearly always bug-infested, and the tramp, a prey to vermin, his limbs worn out, spends hours and hours tossing and turning in a vain wait for sleep.

If he does manage to fall asleep for a few minutes, the discomfort of sleeping on a hard floor soon wakes him up again.

The wily old tramps who have been living like this for fifteen or twenty years, and have become philosophical as a result, spend their nights talking.  They will rest for an hour or two next day in a field, under some hedge which they find more welcoming than the spike.  But the younger ones, not yet hardened by familiarity with the routine, struggle and groan in the darkness, waiting impatiently for the morning to bring their release.

And yet, when the sunlight finally shines into their prison, they consider with gloom and desperation the prospect of another day exactly like the one before.

Finally, the cells are unlocked.  It is time for the doctor’s visit – indeed, the tramps will not be released until this formality is completed.

The doctor is usually late, and the tramps have to wait for this inspection, lined up half-naked in a passage.  Then one can get an idea of their physical condition.

What bodies and what faces!

Many of them have congenital malformations.  Several suffer from hernias, and wear trusses.  Almost everyone has deformed feet covered in sores as a result of lengthy tramping in ill-fitting boots.  The old men are nothing but skin and bone.  All have sagging muscles, and the wretched look of men who do not get a square meal from one end of the year to the other.

Their emaciated features, premature wrinkles, unshaven beards, everything about them tells of insufficient food and lack of sleep.

But here comes the doctor.  His inspection is as rapid as it is cursory.  It is designed, after all, merely to detect whether any of the tramps are showing the symptoms of smallpox.

The doctor glances at each of the tramps in turn rapidly up and down, front and back.

Now most of them are suffering from some disease or other.  Some of them, almost complete imbeciles, are hardly capable of taking care of themselves.  Nevertheless they will be released as long as they are free from the dreaded marks of smallpox.

The authorities do not care whether they are in good or bad health, as long as they are not suffering from an infectious disease.

After the doctor’s inspection, the tramps get dressed again.  Then, in the cold light of day, you can really get a good look at the clothes the poor devils wear to protect themselves against the ravages of the English climate.

These disparate articles of clothing – mostly begged from door to door – are hardly fit for the dustbin.  Grotesque, ill-fitting, too long, too short, too big or too small, their quaintness would make you laugh in any other circumstances.  Here, you feel enormous pity at the sight of them.

They have been repaired as far as possible, with all kinds of patches.  String does duty for missing buttons.  Underclothes are nothing but filthy tatters, holes held together by dirt.

Some of them have no underclothes.  Many do not even have socks; after binding their toes in rags, they slide their bare feet into boots whose leather, hardened by sun and rain, has lost all suppleness.

It is a fearful sight watching tramps get ready.

Once they are dressed, the tramps receive their breakfast, identical to the previous night’s supper.

Then they are lined up like soldiers in the yard of the spike, where the guards set them to work.

Some will wash the floor, others will chop wood, break coal, do a variety of jobs until ten o’clock, when the signal to leave is given.

They are given back any personal property confiscated the previous evening.  To this is added half a pound of bread and a piece of cheese for their midday meal, or sometimes, but less often, a ticket which can be exchanged at specified cafés along the way for bread and tea to the value of three francs [sixpence].

A little after ten o’clock, the gates of the spike swing open to let loose a crowd of wretched and filthy destitute men who scatter over the countryside.

Each one is making for a fresh spike where he will be treated in exactly the same way.

And for months, years, decades perhaps, the tramps will know no other existence.

*

In conclusion, we should note that the food for each tramp consists, all in all, around 750 grammes [2 pounds] of bread with a little margarine and cheese, and a pint of tea a day; this is clearly an insufficient diet for a man who must cover twenty kilometres a day on foot.

To supplement his diet, to obtain clothing, tobacco and the thousand other things he might need, the tramp must beg when he cannot find work (and he hardly every finds work) – beg or steal.

Now begging is against the law in England, and many a tramp has become acquainted with His Majesty’s prisons because of it.

It is a vicious circle; if he does not beg, he dies of starvation; if he begs, he is breaking the law.

The life of these tramps is degrading and demoralising.  In a very short time it can make an active man unemployable and a sponger.

Moreover it is desperately monotonous.  The only pleasure for tramps is coming by a few shillings unexpectedly; this gives them the chance to eat their fill for once or to go on a drinking spree.

The tramp is cut off from women.  Few women become tramps.  For their more fortunate sisters the tramp is an object of contempt.  So homosexuality is a vice which is not unknown to these eternal wanderers.

Finally the tramp, who has not committed any crime, and who is, when all is said and done, simply a victim of unemployment, is condemned to live more wretchedly than the worst criminal.  He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.

When we reflect upon his miserable destiny, which is shared by thousands of men in England, the obvious conclusion is that society would be treating him more kindly by shutting him up for the remainder of his days in prison, where he would at least enjoy relative comfort.

E. A. BLAIR[3]

First published by Le Progrès Civique, 5 January 1929. Translated from the French by Janet Percival and Ian Willison.

Notes

[1] This article is one of three from ‘An Inquiry into “Civic Progress” in England: The Plight of the British Workers’, published by Le Progrès Civique in 1928 and 1929. For each, Orwell was paid 225 francs (about £1.80 – some £70 at today’s values). He also wrote articles on John Galsworthy, the exploitation of the Burmese people, and on censorship in England, for French journals. They, with an article on ‘A Farthing Newspaper’ published in England, are an epitome of the interests he would pursue as an essayist: social and political issues, literature, popular culture and imperialism. The very short paragraphs are not typical of Orwell. Orwell wrote in English (in a version that has not survived), and the French translator, Raoul Nicole, is almost certainly responsible for breaking Orwell’s prose into short bites. It is possible that the divisions marked by asterisks represent Orwell’s original paragraphing. For later reworkings of the experiences described here, see ‘The Clink’, published by The Adelphi, April 1931 (CW X, 104), and chapters 27 and 35 of Down and Out in Paris and London. There were once about 750 spikes (casual wards or workhouses); a government order closed the last (at Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow) in 1996. The French text has asile for workhouse and usually prints tramp(s) in italic but occasionally translates it as vagabond(s). The square brackets are Orwell’s.

[2] Ironically, some former workhouses are now being converted into luxurious apartments, for example, at Marlborough.

[3] The pen-name ‘George Orwell’ was first used in January 1933 for Down and Out in Paris and London. It was not regularly used for reviews and articles until December 1936. For much of his time at the BBC (1941-3) Orwell was known as Eric Blair. In correspondence, he tended to sign himself, and be addressed, as Eric or George depending on whether the correspondent originally knew him as Eric or George. Occasionally, if a secretary typed a letter for him, he would sign Eric Blair over a typed George Orwell.

Peter Davison, adapted from Orwell’s England.

POPULATION Given in 1935 as 86,186. In 1931 census report as 85,356. Excess of births over deaths about, 5[1] per thousand per year, so there has not been much loss by migration. In 1931 report, males 41,313. Females 44,044. Excess of females over males 2731. Population over 14 given (1931) as 64,871, of which males 31,097, females 33,774. ie. number of children equals 20,485, and excess of females is almost entirely in adult population.

HEALTH See Health Officer’s report. But note: Birth rate 17.42, death rate 12.4. Birth rate for whole of England 14.8, death rate 11.8. Wigan has second highest birth rate for Lancs. and about 7th highest death rate. Highest death rate in Wigan (Victoria Ward) 17.07. St. Patrick and St. Thomas Wards (said to be poorest quarters) 15.05 and 13.86. Lowest in town (West Pemberton – better class residential) 7.48, ie. about half St. Patrick’s.

General health in Wigan appears fairly good. Physique a little sturdier than in London. Struck by the badness of everyone’s teeth – have hardly seen a working class person with good teeth. Even teeth of the very young have a curiously frail look and are of the wrong colour (semi-translucent.) In the Hornbys’ household (average age about 36) none except Joe (aged 15) had any teeth of their own. Was told here as elsewhere that as you could get false teeth from your health insurance it was considered an economy to do so. General opinion seems to be that it is best to “get shut of” your teeth as soon as possible. Deformities on the other hand not common.

Number of pubs in Wigan proper, 160. Equal to about 1 to 540 of population. Drunkenness nevertheless not common. Large proportion of pubs are beer houses and the smaller ones constantly changing hands. Few free houses.

Number of (retail) sweetshops 147, equal to about 1 to 590 of population. This apparently does not include tobacconists etc. who sell sweets. Struck by immense number of cut-price sweetshops, much cheaper and nastier than London.

Local bread mostly very bad. Immense sales of cheap readymade meat pies. Fruit and vegetables nowhere very good. Favourite local dishes tripe (eaten cold with vinegar) and cowheel. Less teashops than in southern towns. Unemployed are said to eat very largely tinned meat.

EMPLOYMENT 1931 census report gives local industries as follow: Mining 7,708 (118 females.) Textiles (not dress) and cellulose, 5,386, mainly women. Manufacture of machinery 2,139. Manufacture of clothing (not knitted) 2,438, mainly women. Transport and communication, 1,966. In business 5,133, about a quarter women. Also minor industries: pottery, woodworking, paper-making etc. In building trade 1,124, almost all men. Unoccupied and retired given as 22,665 (only 2,482 of these men: ie. the others are wives and daughters of those in work.) Unemployed given as 7,708.

Labour exchange for this time of year is 10,000 wholly unemployed and “temporarily stopped.” This includes those on P.A.C. but not workhouse paupers. Rough figures are:

Men wholly unemployed………………………………    8300.
Temporarily stopped……………………………………    3 to 400.
Women both classes……………………………………    1500.
About 10,000

Total insured population is about 26,000 men, 10,000 women. Therefore at this time of year about 1 in 3.6 of the insured population is out of work. In the summer (when the pits are producing less coal) proportion rises to about 1 in 3. These figures however do not take account of dependents of unemployed. They should probably be multiplied by something between 3 and 4 to allow for wives and children of registered unemployed. Therefore at any moment at least 30,000 people (rather more than 1 in 3 of population) are drawing or living on the dole. According to officers at Labour Exchange, there has been a “steady core” of about 4,500 miners unemployed for the last 7 years.

Rates of benefit are as follow:
1. “Full benefit” (ie. until stamps are exhausted):
Single man………………………………………………….    17/- per week.
Wife…………………………………………………………..    9/-.
Each child below 14………………………………….    3/-.
(Therefore in typical family of parents and 3 children of whom 1 is above 14, total income would be 32/- per week, plus anything brought in by eldest child. Rent for family of this size would seldom [2] be less than 7/6 per week.)

2. U.A.B. (Unemployment Assistance Board, for those who have exhausted their stamps and are on transitional benefit before being turned over to the parish):
Single man………………………………………………….    15/- per week.
Man and wife……………………………………………..    24/-.
Children 14-18………………………………………….    6/-.
ditto 11-14………………………………………………..    4/6.
ditto 8-11………………………………………………….    4/-.
ditto 5-11………………………………………………….    3/6.
ditto 3-5…………………………………………………..    3/-.
(Apparently no allowance for infants. NB. that a quarter of this is regarded as rent with minimum of 7/6 per week. ie. if a man is paying less than a quarter of his dole as rent, or less than 7/6 of his income is 30/- or below, a corresponding amount is deducted from his benefit. In the typical family considered above, total income might be 31/6 plus eldest child’s wages if in work, or 37/6 if not in work. A quarter of this would have to be paid as rent.)

3. P.A.C. (Public Assistance Board – local rates aided by central fund.)
Single man…………………………………………………..    12/6 per week.
Man and wife………………………………………………    23/-.
Eldest child………………………………………………….    4/-.
Any other child…………………………………………..    3/-.
(Therefore in the typical family above, total income would be 33/- a week, or 29/- plus anything brought in by the eldest child if in work. In addition to the above, coal allowance of 1/6 a week (rather less than price of 1 hundredweight) is granted for six weeks before and six weeks after Christmas. P.A.C. rates were recently lower, I think only 19/- for man and wife, but have been raised owing to a struggle by the N.U.W.M. – or so the latter claim.)

Means-test enforcement is said to be strict and question of rent carefully investigated. There is said to be much spying and tale-bearing, when, for instance, somebody is taking in a lodger, in which case a deduction would be made from his benefit if it were known. Meade told me of a case where a deduction was made because a room used to be rented to a travelling dentist one night a week for 3/-. One of the men at the “caravans” told me that he was seen feeding a neighbour’s chickens and it was reported that he was drawing wages for this and he had difficulty in refuting it [*].

It may be taken that the average family in which there is no one in work is living on an income of round about 30/-, of which a quarter goes on rent. This is to say that the average person has to be fed, clothed, warmed and otherwise cared for for about 6 or 7 shillings a week.

Evidently there are cases of abuse of the dole. Sometimes young unmarried men who are in reality living at home get an accommodation address in order that they may represent themselves as independent and draw 17/- or 15/- as the case may be.

Of single unemployed men, some live in lodging houses. There are 10 common lodging houses in town housing 400-500 people. Most men of this kind live in a rented room for which they pay 5/- or 6/- a week and see to their own food. Of course in lodgings of this kind they are not encouraged to stay indoors, hence large numbers of them always hanging about the streets. They are not however very much in evidence because the police move them on if they congregate in large bunches. Their chief haunts are, 1. the Public Library newspaper room, where there are never less than 50 men, sometimes much more. 2. Several free billiards halls. 3. (for members) the N.U.W.M. shelter. 4. (above all) the movies. These are extraordinarily cheap and unemployed men avowedly go there to keep warm. You can always get a seat for 4d and at matinees at many picture houses for 2d.

Besides the above classes there is a fairly large number of disabled miners living on “compensation” pensions from the mines. “Compensation” usually seems to be something under 30/- a week, but some are paid a lump sum down. If their compensation falls below a certain sum (I think about 15/-) they can draw the dole. Also the usual old people living on the old age pension, eg. in the house I am in now there is an old man living solely on his 10/- a week pension[**]. He is more or less bedridden and only goes out once a week to draw his pension. He hands his 10/- weekly over to Mrs F. And she “does for” him. I see his meals going up and he does not get much beyond bread and butter, tea and an occasional cake.

On the whole, there is not so much overt poverty in Wigan as one might expect. The most obvious sign of poverty is the poorness of the shops and the extraordinary number of shops that are derelict – in some streets about 1 in 3. Everyone is badly dressed but few noticeably ragged; clogs very common but no bare feet. Less obviously down-and-out people than in London. It is said that no one here spends the night in the streets and there is no derelict and as it were unaccounted-for population, except the casual paupers passing through. There are however a few people squatting in abandoned ruinous houses, for which they pay no rent, near the coal pits. In the time I have been here (a fortnight) I have not seen a beggar, though there are said to be a few. Few if any prostitutes. Last year there were 7 or 8 prosecutions for this during the whole year. In effect what you have here is a population living on the dole and getting to take it for granted. The people have now grasped that it is not their fault they are unemployed (this is markedly different from 8 years ago) and are coming to look on drawing the dole as the same as having a job.

HOUSING In the census report of 1931, total number of occupied houses given as 18,573, or 82,704 rooms. Equals average of a little over 4 people per house or just over 1 per room. Taking half or even two thirds of these to be bedrooms, it is clear very few people here sleep in a room of their own. At date of census the number of families was given as (NB. almost certainly understated) 1,617 in excess of number of dwellings. Present number of houses not exactly procurable, but since 1931 990 houses are given as having been built and perhaps 100 demolished. Excess of families over houses should now therefore be somewhere in neighbourhood of 700 or 800 plus the number in caravans (see below.) Number of houses built during 1934 was 589, 284 by private enterprise and 304 by the Corporation. Great numbers of houses are condemned and theoretically the people from these houses are given Corporation houses instead, but there are never enough of these and the condemned houses remain standing. Probably in the whole town there are several thousand families (not individuals) who cannot get a livable house because there is not such a thing to be had.

Some typical houses I inspected were the following [***]:

In Wallgate Quarter. Rows of “one up, one down” houses. This means one room upstairs and one room downstairs. Under the stairs there is an alcove measuring about 5 feet by 5 feet and serving for larder, scullery and coalhole. Kitchen measures about 12 feet by 10, and room upstairs corresponds to it. Open fireplace with oven at the side (all houses in Wigan have this) in kitchen. Tiny yard and outside lavatory at back. Rent 4/9, rates 2/6 – total 7/3. Rows of others as above, but instead of the alcove there was a recess about 2 feet deep containing the sink – no room for larder etc. Lavatories are common to several houses [****] and are in little sheds on the alley behind. These houses have no back doors. To go to the lavatory you have to go out by the front door and round the end of the block – 50 or 100 yards if you live on the middle of the street. Rent 3/2, rates 2/- – total 5/2.

Rows of others with no alcove at all, merely a sink in the kitchen just inside the front door. No back door. Rent 3/9, rates 3- – total 6/9.

I was told these conditions are typical all over Wigan. One result of having no back doors is that the women habitually throw refuse out into the gutters in front. Most of the houses I inspected were in fairly good repair, but some I have passed without going inside are almost falling to pieces. A great many houses in the town have sunk owing to subsidence of old mining workings below. Many windows are as much as 20 degrees out of true, and, of course, it is impossible to open them. This taken for granted locally and looked upon as a joke. Out of 20 or 30 houses I have inspected, only 1 (the one I am in now, which is a 7-room house) has a bathroom. No hot water laid on in any of the houses, though when building them it would have been simple to instal a boiler behind the fireplace. People who have a house of any description cling to it however inconvenient it is, and some I spoke to had been in their houses 20 or 30 years. I notice they do not as a rule complain of their landlords but say they are quite well treated.

The worse˚ feature here are the colonies of caravans. The number of these is given in the Health Report as 180, and I visited colonies of them amounting to about 100. They are batches of old gypsy caravans, tramcars, buses etc dumped on pieces of waste ground and each inhabited by a family. Interior measurements vary between 6’ by 5’ by 6’ high and about 15’ by 6’ by 6’ high. Some fo them are not even constructed of wood but are simply old wagons with semi-circular slats on top over which canvas is stretched, so that you have only canvas between you and the outer air. All have a tiny cottage kitchener inside. As for water, there is a hydrant common to the whole colony. In some I inspected the inhabitants had to walk 150 yards to fetch water. There are no sanitary arrangements at all. The people make what arrangements they can (most of them construct little huts in the tiny patch of ground surrounding their caravan) and once a week dig a deep hole in which they bury their refuse. Some I suppose are inhabited by a single individual, but I did not see one in which there were less than 2 people, and most of the families were fairly large. One, measuring about 12 or 15 feet long, had 7 people living in it. Conditions inside these places have to be seen to be grasped. It is almost literally impossible to turn round, and all the people, especially the children, are unspeakably dirty. All the caravan-dwellers said that in winter they had to keep their fires alight all night to keep warm, and the damp, of course, soaks up through the floor. I was shown mattresses (this was about 11 am.) which were wringing wet. There is never room for more than one or at most two beds, and with families of almost-adult children this raises fresh problems. In one caravan there were a mother, a father, a son and a daughter, the two last around 18 years old. The mother slept with the daughter and the son with the father – they were plainly afraid of incest. A question I would have liked to ask, but had not the nerve, was what happens in these places when anyone dies. Rents, according to size of caravan, vary from 5/- a week to 8/- including water.

This state of affairs is not due to poverty but to housing shortage, since these rents are about the same as for houses; only the houses are not available. The Health Report only mentions them on a very discreet manner and the Census Report makes what is evidently a deliberate falsification with regard to them. “Structurally separate dwellings of 1 room” occupied by 1 family are given as only 25. But the Health Report now admits 180, and in 1931 there were presumably more, since this business has admittedly been going on since 1919 and some effort has been made to get the people out into houses. The importance of this lies in the fact that there are said to be caravan-colonies in all the Lancashire towns. By ommitting˚ mention of these the census report enormously understates the number of families living in one room.

There are not many “back to back” houses in Wigan. I have only seen one row of them.

One mitigation of bad housing conditions is that fuel is cheap. Coal is 1/11 a hundredweight for “best” (2/7d in London) and I think you can get coal of sorts for 1/6. There is also immense and constant thieving of coal from the “dirt-trains.” (See diary.) I gather that several tons of coal and “cannel” a day are stolen by the unemployed. Coal cannot be stolen directly from the pits by the working miners, but they steal short lengths of pit-props for kindling wood and to some extent collaborate with the men who rob the “dirt-trains” by allowing as much coal as possible to remain among the dirt.

RELIGION No exact figures obtainable. Number of churches and chapels of all denominations in Wigan proper seems to be about 40 with about 60 clergy – the numbers are possibly a very little above this. This means allowing about 1 church or chapel to about 2000 or 2500 of the population. Even allowing for the fact that the Catholic churches have a number of successive Masses on Sundays, it is clear that not half the population make any kind of observance. As to numbers of the different denominations, the Anglicans have about 12 churches with 22 clergy, the Catholics about 6 with 17 clergy, the rest belong to various sects. Nonconformity however is said not to be preponderant here. The biggest community are the Catholics with the Anglicans a fairly good second. Large numbers of the population are of Irish descent and Irish names are common though they all speak with the Lancashire accent.

[*] See over page. [which reads] As usual, there is extraordinary variation in the different cases. eg. in this house alone: old Jack, superannuated miner aged 75, lives on his old age pension of 10/- plus 2/6 from the parish. He has a home, ie. a married son or daughter not certain which) & used to live there till the Means Test came in. But now, under the Means Test, they would get less dole if it were known they had a paying lodger, so he has to turn out into lodgings.

On the other hand: Mr F., who keeps this place, has the tripe-shop, which presumably brings in profit, & also takes in lodgers up to the number of about 9, paying varying amounts from 25/- a week downwards. Also sells teas, casual meals, cigarettes etc. etc. On top of this he has the impertinence to draw the dole & has never been found out.’
[**] Two of these in this house. But they also receive 2/6 a week from the parish. In Manchester & Salford 5/-.
[***]See also additional notes on housing
[****]Great majority of houses have their own lavatory

Additional notes

Melbourne Street (Wallgate quarter.)
2 up 2 down. Living room 12-14 ft. by 9 ft. Boiler. No gas stove. No cellar. Coal hole. Windows will open but not very well. Chimneys bad. Floor of W.C. frequently flooded, either by leaking roof or overflow of cistern. Landlord refuses repairs. When I came in, husband was scrubbing floor, wife, in poor health, sitting in rocking chair, very down in the mouth and rather dirty. 3 persons (parents and son) in house, all adults. Father is on Means Test, ditto son, the latter only receiving 12/6 as he lives at home. ie. total income of family 36/6 a week. Father worked 42 years in pit. Has lost middle finger of right hand but for some reason got no compensation. Rent 4/1½, rates 2/2. Have been in this house over 30 years. Asked whether would like corporation house; no, because too far out of town. “These houses’d be all right only he (landlord) won’t do nothing to ‘em.” House is very dark.

Victoria Street, fronting on Melbourne Street (further down from above.) Back to back. 2 up 2 down. Living room 12 ft by 10 ft. No coal hole, only small recess in kitchen. Boiler. Gas stove. No cellar. Windows refuse to open. Chimney smokes. Landlord refuses repairs. 6 people in house, two parents, 4 children, of whom 2 are aged 25 and 15. Clean decent people and not despondent. Rent 5/-, rates 2/6. The Victoria Street side of these back to back houses a filthy miry alley. Some people have to walk about 50 yards to reach lavatory.

Clayton Street. 2 up 2 down. Living room 14 ft by 10 ft. Gas stove. Boiler. Coal hole. Walls let in damp. 2 parents and 1 child in house. Husband on dole, wife works 9 hours a day in spinning mill. Net wages 21/- a week. House very dark – scullery dark enough to need lamp all day. Landlord not too good. Rent 5/4, rates 3/6. Some similar houses in this row are rent 6/-.

In the houses opposite, walls bulging to an extent one would hardly believe. Some have recently been re-faced, but begin bulging anew. Doors and windows hanging at strange angles.

York Street. 3 up and 2 down. Living room about 14 ft. each way. Boiler. Coal hole under stairs. House very dark, but dry. Windows will open. Good landlord. 3 persons in house, of decent type and cheerful. Husband gets dole of 24/-, son, aged about 18, works down pit, for net wage (after stoppages and bus fares) of about 25/-. Miners who work at this pit [*] are obliged to buy their coal from the company – ie. to take out part of their wages to in coal – at 1/6 a bag. Said to be very bad coal. Rent of house 5/4, rates ¾. They are in arrears with rent and paying off arrears at rate of 2d a week. Landlord has never been known to evict. This appropos˚ of an old woman down a neighbouring street who kept a little fish shop, was evicted and sold up for her rent and has now disappeared none knows where.

The “Unemployed Leader”, October 1935, states:

Great majority of houses in Wigan have no baths.
502 families of 1-10 occupy only 1 room.
2,284 families occupy two rooms per family. (540 of these families consist of 5-12 persons.)
2,699 families occupy 3 rooms per family. (322 of these families consist of 7-15 persons.)
Number of persons living in overcrowded conditions in Wigan is 10,000.
Number of houses needed to relieve overcrowding is 1143.
Number of caravan-dwellers (ie. families) 188 as against 80 in 1932.
Number of back to back houses 160.
Number of houses “scheduled” (not stated whom by) as unfit for human habitation, 2,099.
Infant mortality rate 110 per thousand.
Maternal mortality rate 9 per thousand.

NB. to check as far as possible with figures in health report.

Additional note

CORPORATION HOUSES: Great disagreement about these. Jerry Kennan’s house in the Beech Hill Estate is as follows:
Downstairs: Large living room with kitchener fireplace (oven at side), boiler behind fire, cupboards and fixed dresser, composition floor. Small hallway. Largish kitchen.
Upstairs: 2 largish bedrooms, 1 small (suitable for boxroom or bedroom at pinch.) Bathroom-W.C. with hot and cold water.
In the kitchen up-to-date electric cooker, hired from Corporation at much the same rate as gas-cooker. Electric laundering machine (automatic wringer in aluminium tank and automatic mangle) csting about £20, purchasable on hire-purchase at 2/3 per week. This company is financially backed by the Corporation. Electricity is fairly cheap.
Smallish garden. These vary, but mostly a little smaller than an allottment˚.
Rent 11/3 inclusive. Bus fare into town 2d.
Houses appear well-built and convenient and are quite agreeable to look at. Various restrictions. eg. Not to keep poultry or pigeons, take in lodgers, sublet or start any kind of business, without permission of Corporation. Gather that this is easily accorded in the case of lodgers but would be refused in the case of keeping poultry or keeping shop. Kennan is very satisfied with house and proud of it. Houses are well kept. Corporation are good about repairs but keep tenants up to the mark with regard to keeping place tidy etc.

On the other hand, Welly Estate Corporation houses:
Downstairs: Living room, about 14’ by 10’. Kitchen a good deal smaller than this. Tony larder under stairs. Small but fairly good bathroom. (Did not see W.C. – probably outside.) Gas stove. Electric light.[3] Upstairs: Best bedroom about 12 by 10 with tiny fireplace. Another same size without fireplace. Another tiny one – 7’ by 6’. Best bedroom has small wardrobe let into wall.
Small garden – about 20 yards by 10.
Number in family 6. Parents, son aged 19, daughter 22, daughter 13, son 8. Catholics. None in work except eldest son. For those on P.A.C., as here, when rent is over ¼ income allowance is made.

Rent 10/3 inclusive. Rather more than a mile from town – no bus, I think. People are very discontented with house. Complaints are as follow:
House is cold, draughty and damp. Fireplace in living room gives out no heat and makes room very dusty – attributed to its being set too low. Fireplace in best bedroom so tiny as to be useless. Smallest bedroom practically useless as such. Walls upstairs cracking already (Verified this myself.) Middle bedroom and living room very dark. Doors do not fit well. Owing to uselessness of small bedroom, 5 are sleeping in 1 bedroom (2 beds), 1 (the son, I suppose) in the other. Notice that these people were previously in filthy house in town which I inspected recently and made every effort to get out of it. Now want to get back. Gather from their and others’ remarks that the Corporation houses seem chilly and unhomelike, partly because they are far from town, partly because this lot are set on top of a windy hill. This lot certainly are jerry-built but it is probably the proximity and stuffiness that these people miss more than anything, especially in winter. Gardens here all neglected.
NB. Nearly all the people living in this estate are unemployed.[4]

MINERS. 8 or 10 coal mines in and about Wigan. The deepest about 1000 yards. The most up-to-date said to be the Maypole and Rose Bridge, which I have not seen. The only one I have seen hitherto is Crippen’s, which is old-fashioned but said not to be worse than the generality. Depth of Crippen’s about 300 yards (more to the deepest working, I think), and distance from cage to present coal face about three quarters of a mile. This last is apparently an average distance. In some mines it is 3 miles. The important thing here is that at any rate in an old-fashioned mine this distance from the cage to the coal face has got for the most part to be covered bending double, sometimes crawling. 3 miles would take quite an hour and a half to do this way. Miens vary greatly in temperature. Crippen’s is dry and rather hot – I judged the temperatures in the hottest place to be about 100 degrees. Some are much hotter than this, some very cold, some very wet. Miners are all used to walking doubled up and can do it very fast without apparent fatigue, but don’t pretend to like it. They almost always work lying down or at best kneeling, but prefer this because they say that a “high face” is usually unsafe. (See diary for account of Crippen’s pit.)

Present rate of wages are:

Coal-getter… 10/11d a day.
Dataller… 8/9d a day.

Rates for piece-work not exactly obtainable, but said to average about ¼ a ton. It is only in a few pits that the coal-getters are paid on piece-work. The dataller (man who attends to the roofing) would of course always get a fixed wage. Working full time, therefore, a coal-getter’s wage would be at most £3-5-6, a dataller’s £2-12-6, a boy’s wage round about £1 a week. Stoppages amount to about 5/-, thus:

Hire of lamp……………………………………………………………… 6d
Insurance (unemployment and health)…………………………. 1/5
Pick-sharpening………………………………………………………… -/6
Check-weighman……………………………………………………….. -/9
Infirmary…………………………………………………………………. -/2
Hospital…………………………………………………………………… -/1
Benevolent fund………………………………………………………… -/6
Union fees………………………………………………………………… -/6
Total……………………………………………………………………….. 4/5d

But on top of this there are bus fares. The mines are all on the outskirts of Wigan but owing to the housing shortage the miners have to live wherever they can and there are few cottages near the mines. Nearly all the men live in Wigan. The buses (owned by the corporation) are neither very good nor very cheap. (No such thing as a 1d fare in Wigan – the least is 1½d.) An average week’s payment for bus-fares would be 2/-. Therefore there is about 6/6d to come off a miner’s wage each week. When on part-time he pays the same stoppages except perhaps the check-weighman (man paid by the miners themselves to see that weighing is fairly done) which is sometimes remitted for those on part-time.

The time of one shift is 7½ hours. The important thing to notice that this is time spent at the coal face, ie. the time spent in getting there has to be added on. It is nothing out of the way for this to take 3 hours, so  that the usual time spent at work is round about 10 hours. Add to this the time spent in getting to and from home, and it is about 11 hours.

Cannot yet obtain at all exactly the amount of coal extracted by 1 miner in a year. According to the Samuel Commission a miner in 1913 was only producing about 300 tons a year. Not stated whether this referred to actual coal-getters or to all concerned (datallers, electricians, men who work the cage etc.) but presumably the latter. At present it seems that a team of 35 men working one of the big machines, given good coal, may turn out 450 tons of coal in a day. But one has got to add onto these the datallers etc., bringing the number up to about 60-65. Of course this average would not be kept up, owing to the variation in coal and the fact that many mines run part-time in summer. But it is clear that the average output per man might be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1000 tons per year. NB. to get more exact figures.

Number of miners killed 1927-1934 given as 7839. ie. 1118.4 per year.
Number of injuries for same period given as 1,200,042. ie. 121,434.5 per year. Number of miners actually at work about 750,000. (NB. to get more exact figure.) Therefore about 1 miner in 700 [**] is killed every year and about 1 in 7 [***] injured. But have not hitherto succeeded in discovering how many of these injuries are serious. Injuries means injuries reported and the miners are instructed to report all injuries, even minor ones. The causes of accidents are 1. Falls of stone. These are very frequent and the reason why they do not lead to more injuries is that experienced miners can generally tell by tapping whether the roof is safe. Also the pit-props give warning by creaking. In Crippen’s mine we saw here and there “pot-holes” – circular holes in the roof from which a lump of stone, usually big enough to kill a man, had suddenly shot out. 2. Explosions, due to gas. The gas is said to be ignited by a pick striking sparks from stone, or by fusing of electric wires, or by “gob fires.” These are fires that break out spontaneously in damp coal dust, which apparently gets hot in the same manner as a hot-bed. When they break out they are stifled with sand or bricked over, but are always liable to break out afresh. 3. Heavy falls of stone which cut off isolated parties of men. 4. Falls due to carelessness in blasting. Blasting is only supposed to be done when there is no one working, eg. on Sundays, but in order to same time is often done at other times. It is only done to loosen the coal but may on occasion bring the roof down. The charges are touched off by an electric wire at a distance, but have been known to go off prematurely. 5. Accidents to the cage. The distance to be descended is anything from 100 to 1000 yards. The one I went down in did 300 yards in about ½ a minute, ie. an average speed of about 12 mph.,[5] but it slowed down greatly towards the end and was probably touching 30 or 40 in the middle. Some in the deeper mines are said to touch 60 mph. or even more. The man working the cage has an indicator which shows him how fast it is working, but it is possible for him to make a mistake and there have been many deaths in this way. Apart from accidents miners are said to be healthy, except for those who start off with a tendency to tuberculosis, in which case the dust they are constantly breathing does for them. Their lungs are said to be quite black. Many miners suffer from rheumatism, owing to violent changes of temperature and working in a cramped position. It is noticeable that the rate of accidents do˚ not decrease although the number of men engaged decreases – ie, proportionately there are more accidents. All miners concur in saying that this is due to speeding-up and that much of the new machinery is unsafe, at any rate with the Lancashire coal. For example, with the new coal cutters they have to cut 6 feet into the face before re-propping, and they say this is too far for safety. All say also that the steel girders now largely used are less safe than the wooden props. The latter creak when they are giving way but the steel girders are liable to fly out without warning.
Baths Only 2 of the local mines have baths at the pit-head. In the miners’ cottages there is probably not 1 in 50 that has a bath.

Additional notes on houses

(All in Scholes quarter.)
Street of 5-room houses, 3 up 2 down, rent and rates 9/1.
2 up 2 down, with tiny scullery. Paper etc. in very bad repair. 1 cellar. No back door or yard. Landlord refuses repairs. Rent 6/6, rates 3/9.
2 up 2 down, front room fairly large – about 16 by 10. Six houses share back yard with one lavatory each. Very bad repair. Terribly bare interiors upstairs. Bare floors, rickety iron bedsteads covered only with old overcoats and other rags. Rent 4/1, rates 2/9.
2 up 1 down. Hole under stairs for coal. Back door but no back yard. No scullery. Sink in living room. Very bad repair. Floor (of stone) sinking and uneven. Windows will only open a few inches. No boiler. Rent 4/-, rates 2/6.
Condemned. 2 up 2 down. Gas stove. No boiler. Rooms about 12 by 10. Very bad repair and landlord refuses repairs. Tenant has been in this house 38 years. Opposite these a shocking little row of back to back houses which I did not succeed in entering. Almost all windows patched either with paper or boards. Horrible miry alley about 8 feet wide and tumbledown W.Cs. Landlords apparently always refuse repairs when house is condemned.
Condemned. 1 up 1 down. Rooms about 15 by 15. No scullery. Coal hole under stairs. Boiler. Floor going lopsided and no windows will open. Decently dry. Good landlord. Rent 3/8, rates 2/6.
2 up 2 down and pantry as well. Share a yard with a number of other houses. Gas boiler. Rooms about 14 by 12. Dry. No windows will open. Rent 10/-, rates 3/6.
2 up 1 down and coal hole. Terribly squalid interior. Old woman at first got it into hr˚ head that we were from the Corporation and intended to bully her about overcrowding etc., and gave us tremendous ticking off.[6] “I don’t want you buggers nosing round ‘ere. I’ve lived in this ‘ouse and I’ll be buried from it. I’m not going to let no bugger turn me out,” etc. Presently relented and gave us the information we wanted. Four generations living in this house. Catholics. The woman’s mother, aged 97, evidently wrong in the head, sat looking on with expressionsless face. Furniture falling to pieces and everything very dirty. Rent 3/4½, rates 2/1.
2 up 2 down. Backyard. Coal hole. Walls are falling absolutely to pieces. Water comes into upstairs rooms in quantities. Downstairs windows will not open. Floor lopsided. Bad landlord. Rent 6/-, rates 3/6.
Greenough’s Row. Uncertain whether these houses are condemned or not. Some tenants say yes, some no. Hey were inspected a few days ago. 1 up 1 down and kitchen. Front room 13 by 8. Walls coming away and water comes in. Back windows will not open, front windows will. Landlord has not done repairs for a long time past. 10 in family – 8 children very near together in age. The people have recently been warned that they will be evicted for overcrowding, but the Council have got to find them another house first. Catholics (all in this row seem to be Catholics.) Landlord has not done repairs for a long time past. Rent 4/-, rates 2/3.
Next door. Same arrangement but smaller front room. Water comes in upstairs. Windows will open but are loose. One blew out recently. Catholics but “Religion won’t feed you.” Landlord refuses repairs. Rent 4/6, rates 2/3.
Further up street. 2 up 1 down. Walls good. 4/- rent, 2/6 rates.
Next door. 2 up 1 down. Share backyard with 4 others. Windows will open. Back kitchen lets in water when it rains. Asked landlord for repairs and “’e larfed at me.” Rent 4/2, rates 2/6.
Next door. Same arrangement. 6 in family. No complaints except some defect in chimney. Also the common lavatories are a few feet behind the back door, and in front just across the street (15 feet wide) are lavatories of next row of houses, so you have them behind[7] you and in front of you. Rent 5/-, rates 2/6.
Next door. End house. The end houses have rooms a little bigger so are a bit higher in rent. No complaints here – people actually enthusiastic about this house (in good repair except back bedroom which lets in damp) because they have recently escaped into it from the first house in the row, in which they had lived for years. This house is said not only to let in quantities of water but to be sinking rapidly and kitchen floor so askew that you could hardly stand up straight. The woman’s father is now living alone in that house. “I couldn’t bear to live with him no longer. He’s got like a cancer in his mouth and it was a-punishing me to live with him.” These people very bitter about the idea of condemning houses and putting the tenants into Council houses which are 3/- or 4/- a week more. Rent here 5/-, rates 2/6.
Owing to the cramped back yards, all the people in this row throw refuse into the street, which is littered with tealeaves, bread etc.

[*] ditto with most pits. I don’t know whether they can enforce this, though
[**] 900 (J. Jones)
[***] 6 (J. Jones). [Orwell’s calculations are incorrect. He takes 1927-34 as seven years. That means 1,119.86 killed per year and 171,434.6 injured. Of 750,000 miners, that is 1 in 670 killed per year and 1 in 4.37 injured. Were this an eight-year period it would be 1 in 765 killed and 1 in 5 injured per year. Peter Davison]

Notes

The ˚ sign is used to denote Orwell’s mistakes.

Peter Davison

Orwell’s notes on Wigan after research at Wigan library. From the Complete Works, X, 346, p. 531

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It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct – on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law – Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word – Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light That Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flag-waver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read Blackwood’s. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems, especially Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final ‘g’s’ carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a wedding):

So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me!
And it’s finish up your swipes and follow me!
Oh, hark to the big drum calling,
Follow me – follow me home!

and again:

Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding – Give them one cheer more!
Grey gun-horses in the lando,
And a rogue is married to a whore!

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overridden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled – for ‘follow me ‘ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they quote him.

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading Barrack-Room Ballads and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my England?’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with ‘What has England done for me?’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away:

I ‘eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,
Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t stop to see,
Till I ‘eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ‘e ran,
An’ I thought I knew the voice an’ – it was me!

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust,
An’ no one wants to face ’em, but every beggar must;
So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go,
They moves ’em off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismayed?
No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to publish [1], I was struck by the number of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American. But from the body of Kipling’s early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army – the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they will be able to learn something of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling’s opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy’s minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling’s gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.
The white man’s burden.
What do they know of England who only England know?
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Somewhere East of Suez.
Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many years. The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’ for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld?[2] The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (‘palm and pine’ – ‘east of Suez’ – ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man’s burden’ instantly conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to ‘black man’s burden’. One may disagree to the middle of one’s bones with the political attitude implied in ‘The Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is ‘great verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems – I am deliberately choosing diverse ones – are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet – not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions, poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worthwhile to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form – for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things – some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry ‘Turn again!’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested – his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

Orwell’s notes

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as a ‘Freudian error.’ A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling – i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him.

Published in Horizon, September 1941

Further reading:

• Douglas Kerr: Orwell, Kipling and Empire
• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling (video)

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica — a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press. Milton’s famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.

There were four speakers on the platform. One of them delivered a speech which did deal with the freedom of the press, but only in relation to India; another said, hesitantly, and in very general terms, that liberty was a good thing; a third delivered an attack on the laws relating to obscenity in literature. The fourth devoted most of his speech to a defense of the Russian purges. Of the speeches from the body of the hall, some reverted to the question of obscenity and the laws that deal with it, others were simply eulogies of Soviet Russia. Moral liberty — the liberty to discuss sex questions frankly in print — seemed to be generally approved, but political liberty was not mentioned. Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose. Significantly, no speaker quoted from the pamphlet which was ostensibly being commemorated. Nor was there any mention of the various books which have been ‘killed’ in England and the United States during the war. In its net effect the meeting was a demonstration in favour of censorship.

There was nothing particularly surprising in this. In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side; that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right. In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic — political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:

Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known

To bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. ‘Daring to stand alone’ is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous. The independence of the writer and the artist is eaten away by vague economic forces, and at the same time it is undermined by those who should be its defenders. It is with the second process that I am concerned here.

Freedom of thought and of the press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about. Anyone who has experience of lecturing and debating knows them off backwards. Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness. Although other aspects of the question are usually in the foreground, the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying this I may seem to be saying that straightforward ‘reportage’ is the only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same issue arises in more or less subtilized forms. Meanwhile, it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly claims that ‘the truth’ has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of ‘the truth’ and merely resists it out of selfish motives. In Communist literature the attack on intellectual liberty is usually masked by oratory about ‘petty-bourgeois individualism’, ‘the illusions of nineteenth-century liberalism’, etc., and backed up by words of abuse such as ‘romantic’ and ‘sentimental’, which, since they do not have any agreed meaning, are difficult to answer. In this way the controversy is maneuvered away from its real issue. One can accept, and most enlightened people would accept, the Communist thesis that pure freedom will only exist in a classless society, and that one is most nearly free when one is working to bring such a society about. But slipped in with this is the quite unfounded claim that the Communist Party is itself aiming at the establishment of the classless society, and that in the U.S.S.R. this aim is actually on the way to being realized. If the first claim is allowed to entail the second, there is almost no assault on common sense and common decency that cannot be justified. But meanwhile, the real point has been dodged. Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings. The familiar tirades against ‘escapism’ and ‘individualism’, ‘romanticism’, and so forth, are merely a forensic device, the aim of which is to make the perversion of history seem respectable.

Fifteen years ago, when one defended the freedom of the intellect, one had to defend it against Conservatives, against Catholics, and to some extent — for they were not of great importance in England — against Fascists. Today one has to defend it against Communists and ‘fellow-travelers’. One ought not to exaggerate the direct influence of the small English Communist Party, but there can be no question about the poisonous effect of the Russian mythos on English intellectual life. Because of it known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written. Let me give just one instance out of the hundreds that could be cited. When Germany collapsed, it was found that very large numbers of Soviet Russians — mostly, no doubt, from non-political motives — had changed sides and were fighting for the Germans. Also, a small but not negligible portion of the Russian prisoners and displaced persons refused to go back to the U.S.S.R., and some of them, at least, were repatriated against their will. These facts, known to many journalists on the spot, went almost unmentioned in the British press, while at the same time Russophile publicists in England continued to justify the purges and deportations of 1936-38 by claiming that the U.S.S.R. ‘had no quislings’. The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues. I have before me what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev, Kamenev, and others. What could be the attitude of even the most intellectually scrupulous Communist towards such a pamphlet? At best, the obscurantist attitude of saying that it is an undesirable document and better suppressed. And if for some reason it were decided to issue a garbled version of the pamphlet, denigrating Trotsky and inserting references to Stalin, no Communist who remained faithful to his party could protest. Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books.

The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary. Among intelligent Communists there is an underground legend to the effect that although the Russian government is obliged now to deal in lying propaganda, frame-up trials, and so forth, it is secretly recording the true facts and will publish them at some future time. We can, I believe, be quite certain that this is not the case, because the mentality implied by such an action is that of a liberal historian who believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or on the other hand, that modern physics has proven that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectual. The exact sciences are not, at this date, menaced to anything like the same extent. This partly accounts for the fact that in all countries it is easier for the scientists than for the writers to line up behind their respective governments.

To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. It may seem that all this time I have been talking about the effects of censorship, not on literature as a whole, but merely on one department of political journalism. Granted that Soviet Russia constitutes a sort of forbidden area in the British press, granted that issues like Poland, the Spanish civil war, the Russo-German pact, and so forth, are debarred from serious discussion, and that if you possess information that conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy you are expected to either distort it or keep quiet about it — granted all this, why should literature in the wider sense be affected? Is every writer a politician, and is every book necessarily a work of straightforward ‘reportage’? Even under the tightest dictatorship, cannot the individual writer remain free inside his own mind and distill or disguise his unorthodox ideas in such a way that the authorities will be too stupid to recognize them? And in any case, if the writer himself is in agreement with the prevailing orthodoxy, why should it have a cramping effect on him? Is not literature, or any of the arts, likeliest to flourish in societies in which there are no major conflicts of opinion and no sharp distinction between the artist and his audience? Does one have to assume that every writer is a rebel, or even that a writer as such is an exceptional person?

Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how — one should perhaps say why — it comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most ‘unpolitical’ imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though a poet, at any rate a lyric poet, might possibly find it breathable. And in any totalitarian society that survives for more than a couple of generations, it is probable that prose literature, of the kind that has existed during the past four hundred years, must actually come to an end.

Literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but, as has often been pointed out, the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian. Their repressive apparatus was always inefficient, their ruling classes were usually either corrupt or apathetic or half-liberal in outlook, and the prevailing religious doctrines usually worked against perfectionism and the notion of human infallibility. Even so it is broadly true that prose literature has reached its highest levels in periods of democracy and free speculation. What is new in totalitarianism is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice. Consider, for example, the various attitudes, completely incompatible with one another, which an English Communist or ‘fellow-traveler’ has had to adopt toward the war between Britain and Germany. For years before September, 1939, he was expected to be in a continuous stew about ‘the horrors of Nazism’ and to twist everything he wrote into a denunciation of Hitler: after September, 1939, for twenty months, he had to believe that Germany was more sinned against than sinning, and the word ‘Nazi’, at least as far as print went, had to drop right out of his vocabulary. Immediately after hearing the 8 o’clock news bulletin on the morning of June 22, 1941, he had to start believing once again that Nazism was the most hideous evil the world had ever seen. Now, it is easy for the politician to make such changes: for a writer the case is somewhat different. If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo. Not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem to stiffen under his touch. Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. It might be otherwise in an ‘age of faith’, when the prevailing orthodoxy has long been established and is not taken too seriously. In that case it would be possible, or might be possible, for large areas of one’s mind to remain unaffected by what one officially believed. Even so, it is worth noticing that prose literature almost disappeared during the only age of faith that Europe has ever enjoyed. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages there was almost no imaginative prose literature and very little in the way of historical writing; and the intellectual leaders of society expressed their most serious thoughts in a dead language which barley altered during a thousand years.

Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society. To begin with, bureaucrats and other ‘practical’ men usually despise the poet too deeply to be much interested in what he is saying. Secondly, what the poet is saying — that is, what his poem ‘means’ if translated into prose — is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies; and even when he does utter them, they may escape notice. But above all, good verse, unlike good prose, is not necessarily and individual product. Certain kinds of poems, such as ballads, or, on the other hand, very artificial verse forms, can be composed co-operatively by groups of people. Whether the ancient English and Scottish ballads were originally produced by individuals, or by the people at large, is disputed; but at any rate they are non-individual in the sense that they constantly change in passing from mouth to mouth. Even in print no two versions of a ballad are ever quite the same. Many primitive peoples compose verse communally. Someone begins to improvise, probably accompanying himself on a musical instrument, somebody else chips in with a line or a rhyme when the first singer breaks down, and so the process continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no identifiable author.

In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible. Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds of versification. Verse — and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though it would not be the highest kind — might survive under even the most inquisitorial regime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality had been extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost disappeared during the Hitler regime, and the case was not much better in Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism, again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms, especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.

Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.

It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.

It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large, rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the writer as such — his freedom of expression — is taken away from him. Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: ‘Writers are persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer.’ They do not see that any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.

For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole, offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically falsified.

But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting and architecture, it is — as I have tried to show — certain that literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes ossified. At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.

Polemic, January 1946.

Among the biographers who have applied themselves to relating and explaining the life and times of George Orwell, who was once Eric Blair, there will be few who, having delved and dug into this short but momentous life, are capable of letting it rest there. With the richness and depth of the literature he left us, it is easy to forget that even though he lived for forty-seven years, only half that time were serious writing years. He was a straightforward man, Eric Blair, given to good manners and plain speaking. Having purged some of his own demons (Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days) and then morphed into George Orwell, he went in search of other people’s devils and did his best to present them as he found them (The Road to Wigan Pier and Animal Farm). In the process maybe he came to understand himself better, as is liable to happen when any problem is deliberately examined under the public and defining microscope of the written word.

No one appears to have enjoyed this sharing of his conceptions and misconceptions more than he himself did. His novels explored aspects of contemporary 20th century life which are relevant socio-political documents today. Despite the high profile of his last two novels, his articles, reviews and essays in various journals such as Horizon and Tribune are where one might be forgiven for feeling closest to George Orwell, to his likes and dislikes, and to those subjects closest to his heart. It is the magic of constant discovery within these works that the irresistibility of the plain man’s words will quietly entwine themselves round you and ensure that you never again quite escape the fascination of interpreting and then re-interpreting George Orwell.

Were you to settle down with some of the essays (Penguin published a miscellany of over 40 of them in 2000, with an introduction by Sir Bernard Crick) the often cheerful, matter-of-fact subjects tumble onto the page, a kaleidoscope of passion and pessimism, humour and humility impossible to resist. The everyday making of a good cup of tea becomes a strangely intimate exercise and sides are taken when it is discovered that, unlike some, Orwell belongs to the brigade which puts the tea in the cup first and adds the milk afterwards. After only mentioning one quite trivial subject, there are already questions to be asked and opinions to be exchanged. That is where he grabs you because every line he writes is liable to be encrypted and contains a wealth of possibilities; the more you read and read again, the more enlightenment you find.

The same changing angles and unexpected layers of perception apply to the Orwell poems. The other day a friend and I were discussing his poem ‘Romance’ and my friend thought it showed all the bitterness and cynicism of a young man simply making use of the facilities in the Burma of 1922-27 when the British Raj did as it pleased. My interpretation was completely the reverse, for in it I saw the pleasure in the girl’s youth and beauty, his relief, after abortive efforts in England, at finally parting with his virginity, and the quirky little last line in which he laughs with wry indulgence at the girl’s awareness of her own value, knowing that they know that she will be the winner and, what’s more, that he’ll visit her again.

Romance

When I was young and had no sense,
In far off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said “For twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me.”

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

One wonders whether Orwell considered that his life was really dull and colourless because his novels seem to reflect a tired kind of depression and seediness that is not present in the essays. To be constantly short of money will make life extremely grey and ‘featureless’ because it takes a certain amount of liquidity to inject the colour of incident into each day and without it, the eking-out of meagre funds tends to make life very ‘dull’ indeed. But George had his own ways of gingering things up. To be sent off to the other side of the World for five years, having left behind The Girl Most Desired ‘with all hope denied’ (Page 154, Eric & Us) was clearly enough to start off his Burmese idyll on the wrong foot and, judging by the gloom – even the rage – with which he described those years, it appears to have introduced a sullen mood of inward despair. This youthful angst grew even darker on returning to England with his unsuccessful attempt to re-establish his boyhood romance. The disappointment of what he saw as rejection evolved into a determination to sink himself down to the bilges of life in order to allow himself the recognition that others were suffering a great deal more all around him (Down and Out in Paris & London, 1935; Burmese Days, 1936; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937). It certainly affected, and at times depressed, the way he wrote his novels which is why the essays are such bran tubs of lucky dips and all so much more satisfying in many ways.

The interesting thing about applying oneself to debating the content of George Orwell’s work is that he quite generously expects you to disagree with him now and then. The ‘puckish’ side of his nature positively entices his reader to cross swords with such remarks as:

‘Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.’
‘Politics and The English Language’, Horizon, April 1946

In occasional bullish mood he will fling out remarks to make your blood pressure rise, such as an essay called ‘The Prevention of Literature’ where Orwell deliberately provokes with:

‘Here I am not trying to deal with the familiar claim that freedom is an illusion, or with the claim that there is more freedom in totalitarian countries than in democratic ones, but with the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of antisocial selfishness.’

Such provocation is entirely deliberate from one who likes nothing better than dropping a stone into the pond of discussion and watching the ripples as they spread across the whole surface. And yet… and yet, in another mood entirely, this plain-speaking man is riveted by small wonders. In his essay ‘Some Thoughts on The Common Toad’ (Tribune, April 1946) his perfection of the art of plain speaking cannot be bettered than in a single sentence:

‘… after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict
Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.’

In a line and a half you have the whole picture, complete with sly sparkle of humour and a total economy of words. Ah, that may be what he wrote but is that what he meant? The plain-speaking man has, with his lifelong habit of ‘double-speak’, planted doubt in the mind of his reader. Is anything the way it seems to be?

* * * * * * * * * *

It is extraordinary that George Orwell appears to be more often appreciated by men than women. Could this be because of that previously mentioned tendency to dusty greyness which permeates his novels and which may well appeal less to women? It would be a good subject for debate because there are to be found such riches of colour and style, intellect and humour in the essays, written in that practical, un-flowery way of his which express his genius without drama or decoration. There are also so many subtle references back to that childhood which he chose to present as having been far from happy (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’). Much has been made of this essay and its assertions over the years, but was firmly refuted by Jacintha Buddicom (Eric & Us, 1974/2006) who should know, after all, since Eric Blair spent most of them with her and her family until he went to Burma in 1922. That Orwell also, in his heart, would have agreed with her comes over quite strongly all over his work if you look for it.

There is a long, three paragraph reflection on the happiness of childhood past in an essay called ‘Riding Down To Bangor’ which he wrote for Tribune in November 1946. By then several heart-wrenching things had happened to him in that he and his wife Eileen had adopted a baby boy in wartime 1944 and, within months, Eileen had died while Orwell, by then an official War correspondent, was away in recently liberated Paris. He returned to assume fatherhood and to take care of Richard with the help of family and then a nanny. By the time he wrote ‘Riding Down to Bangor’ Richard was nearly two and Orwell was deeply involved with all things domestic, a state which he clearly thoroughly enjoyed. His own childhood may well have been in his mind when he wrote:

It is hard not to feel that it was a better kind of society than that which arose from the sudden industrialization of the later part of the century. The people… may be mildly ridiculous but they were uncorrupted. They have something that is best described as integrity, or good morale, founded partly on an unthinking piety.

George Orwell was a loving and devoted father, bringing Richard back to London to live with him as soon as he possibly could. He took his turn with the practical aspects of parenthood as well as quickly recognising how fast a child’s mind will absorb learning of every kind. Animal Farm with all its intriguing sub-texts, had been published and become a resounding success by this period, money was coming in and it was at last possible to consider the future. Despite his declining health and increasing demands by various journals which kept a regular income coming in, it was decided to lease a property in Scotland on the island of Jura so that Richard could progress in health and freedom and George could write his last, and deeply complicated novel, Nineteen Eighty Four. The fact that both ideals were achieved despite his health gradually descending into terminal illness says so much for his strength and determination. The plain-spoken man with the no-nonsense approach to his genius left behind him such a wealth of literature that it takes time and endless re-reading to recognize within the phrases the truth of who he was, and the source of where his often battered happiness lay. One of his most pared-down but revealing sentences may be considered especially illuminating. Sandwiched between a contemplation of the quality of love between children and adults, and his supposed crush on an older girl called Elsie (Mallinson?) in ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’ one discovers:

Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young.

Given that he was recalling his early youth, and that at the time of writing this essay he was forty four, with many affairs in his life, a brief but ‘open’ marriage, and an occasional eye for the girls when opportunity knocked, one wonders whether there were, in Orwell’s short life, just two completely ‘unqualified’ and selfless loves. Consider Eric Blair’s absolute eight-year commitment to Jacintha Buddicom, and the even briefer period of complete devotion to his son Richard. Orwell’s deceptively uncluttered essays tend to raise these sort of questions to those who read them; causing repeated reads while the true message is searched for. This was, after all, the way that he and his Muse wrote to each other from their earliest youth and one wonders whether it became so ingrained in them that this was the way they continued to write for the rest of their lives.

Dione Venables runs Finlay Publisher, who publish a new essay by a leading Orwell scholar every two months. Dione contributed a revealing postscript to the 2006 edition of Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric & Us, a memoir of her childhood with her close friend, Eric Blair (later George Orwell). The three Buddicoms in Eric & Us were the children of Dione’s aunt Laura Finlay. Dione is the author of seven historical novels, and a sometime BBC broadcaster and miniaturist.

I have always felt as if I lived in Orwell’s England. Like every English child born at the end of the Second World War, I grew up in it. My first memories are American – colourful, plentiful and warm. My first English memories are of London in 1948. By contrast, they are grey and sepia, like a backdrop to Nineteen Eighty-Four. I recall a city of bombsites and soot-covered, pock-marked buildings, of gas firs turned low to save fuel and curtains lined with blackout material to keep in the warmth, of sweets on ration, cod-liver oil capsules and undrinkable National Health orange juice. Germany had been beaten, the Soviet Union was the next enemy, capitalism was on the slide and everybody looked to the state as the provider.

As it happens, I also grew up in Orwell’s England in a more personal way. From a very early age, I was aware of a connection with the writer which was no less evocative for being remote. One of my childhood treasures was a christening mug given by my godmother, Gwen O’Shaughnessy, sister-in-law of Orwell’s first wife Eileen. George Orwell died of tuberculosis in January 1950, at the age of forty-six. In the mid-1950s, my elder sister and I used to stay with Gwen and her half-sister Doreen Kopp in Norfolk, where Gwen continued to practise as a doctor, and where the two of them brought up a pooled brood of five children. Gwen and Doreen were both widows. It was a happy household, but one that was full of the echoes of dead men.

I remember George as a ghostly presence: a difficult, often exasperating, yet beloved spectre, whose name conjured up muddy boots and dirty finger-nails, adventures in foreign parts, and a stubbornly masculine failure to be practical. For me, Orwell’s stern whimsicality has ever since been bound up with a pre-affluent world that no longer exists – of long-faced, heavy-smoking, New Statesman & Nation-reading men (and a few women), who treated the well-to-do with tolerant condescension, and regarded a commitment to history, literature and the public service as taken-for-granted attributes of any civilized human being.

Today – in my mind, at least, but also I think more widely – Orwell’s England still conveys a sense of time and place: in particular, the atmosphere of a capital city traumatized by two world wars, London during the threadbare 1930s and the austere 1940s. Sometimes the metropolis is in the foreground. For example, few things Orwell wrote are more grainily evocative of austerity London than The English People, a text written during the Second World War as semi-propaganda, though not published until 1947. At other times, what the author writes about seems to have nothing to do with London. But London is there, nonetheless: The Road to Wigan Pier is as much about the mentality of the capital, as it is about the North. Thus, the rootedness of Orwell, the precision of his social comment, make it tempting to see his work as a kind of old-fashioned art movie. England, after all, no longer has coal-mines: and there are probably more wine bars than tripe shops in Wigan.

Yet there is a paradox. On the one hand, Orwell is quintessentially an English writer, carrying into his work many English qualities (suspicion of theory, for example), and his work will always be cited for its representative Englishness. On the other hand – like Boswell’s Samuel Johnson, another firmly based Englishman, whom in some ways he resembles – Orwell is the reverse of parochial. Indeed, by one reading, Orwell’s England is not a place at all. It is a state of mind. That is why the writings in this volume will continue to be appreciated by people who have only the haziest knowledge of, and only the most limited interest in, the national context in which they were written.

As well as a paradox, there is an irony. Somebody who pitted his satirical talent against the mid-twentieth-century obsession with utopias, appears today – more than fifty years after his death – as one of the most persuasively utopian writers who ever put pen to paper. If Orwell continues to nibble and gnaw at the reader’s moral conscience, it is because of the conviction infusing all his work that a satisfactory way of living with neighbours is attainable. Orwell was a socialist – the point needs underlining, for there have been many who have preferred to ignore this fundamental aspect of his life and work. His attacks on other socialists derived, not from a rejection of their goal, but from his own assessment of the vanities and humbug of many of those who self-consciously adopted the label.

Abolishing cant was his aim. What gives him his unique moral appeal is a passion for honesty which acknowledges that nobody is ever completely honest. If he had a universal message, it was this: a better life can be achieved, not by the repetition of stock phrases, but by examining the actual world we inhabit.

George Orwell was a socialist. Was he also a hero, even a martyr? It is important to get things into perspective. One obstacle to a proper understanding of his work is the posthumous cult that grew up in the years after his death, and especially (another irony) after the publication of Bernard Crick’s masterly and not at all reverential biography. The cult focused on the life, presenting the writer as a Christ or John the Baptist, and conveniently dividing the narrative into New Testament segments: youthful promise, followed by retreat into the wilderness and period of obscurity; self-examination in the company of outcasts and the needy; brief, brilliant and controversial ministry; even briefer period of celebrity; early death. The cult apparently solved the problem of Orwell’s refusal to be categorized: morally perfect and above reproach, the writer became the property of everybody. As a result, his work is nowadays quoted as scripture, often by people to whom he would not have given the time of day (and, no doubt, vice versa).

Orwell would laugh at this, and so should we. The passage of time ought to enable us to see him today as altogether fallible, struggling for most of his adult life to find a voice and earn his crust. To regard him in this light does not diminish his work but, on the contrary, makes it more remarkable: it helps us to appreciate that author, social inquirer and human being are of a piece. In place of the god or prophet, we discover a ‘degenerate modern semi-intellectual’ (his self-description) trembling on the edge of failure. We see writing that stems not from a master plan, but from a series of false starts. Indeed, so far from being structured, Orwell’s actual life was chaotic. The Orwell we encounter at the beginning of this book is Eric Blair, the Old Etonian drop-out and insecure drifter, more or less on his beam ends. If England is his topic, this is faute de mieux – it has less to do with a fascinated interest in his native country, than because it is the material most readily at hand.

By the mid-1930s, the scene has changed. With three published books under his belt and another on the way, he has acquired a literary persona (as well as a name). Yet he remains an eccentric, if by now well-directed, outsider – eking out a meagre existence on the margins of London journalistic and political life. We see an ambitious author who rather pettishly resents the success of his better-organized contemporaries. We see a rebel whose rebellion is more against the caste of left-wing fellow-writers, than against the shabby-genteel stratum which he identifies as his own. We see a vocal critic of social snobbery, whose access to publishing houses and literary journals owes more to doors opened through old-boy connections with people like Cyril Connolly, than he is ever prepared to admit. In such a context, Orwell’s famously savage indictment of brutality and conditioning at his prep school (‘Such, Such Were the Joys’) appears almost ungrateful.

Yet if Orwell in this pre-war period is an aspirant writer like any other, seizing at every opportunity to climb the greasy pole, he stands out from the rest – because of his relationship to his subject. He observes, and he chews at his observations, like a dog with a bone. Orwell is a classic documentary writer, not because experts say he is – stylistically he breaks practically every rule – but because of his story-teller’s instinct for conveying the emotions of a social traveller. Orwell’s skill is in convincing his audience that his own non-conventional feelings are actually the same as theirs would be, if they had shared his experience. He is not just a voyeur, peering at the dirty linen and messy lives of people the world prefers not to know about. He is a collusive, seductive voyeur. His achievement is to abolish (or appear to abolish) self-censorship, and to provide in his account an almost embarrassing intimacy: the reader is told to peer into the writer’s psyche and see the unpleasant things, as well as the good ones.

In this he differs from many of the philosophers and agitators among his contemporaries who saw themselves as messengers for a higher cause, interpreting or relaying points of view derived from Continental theories. For such people, documentary was political ammunition in a war with set battle-lines. By contrast, Orwell sniffs orthodoxy at a hundred yards: and, having sniffed, seeks to upset its adherents. Nobody was ever more politically incorrect than Orwell – or, on occasion, more illiberal: so far from being a model for twenty-first century progressives, he reveals attitudes (towards ‘Nancy poets’ of the literary establishment, for example, and ‘birth controllers’) which, if expressed for the first time today, would get him thrown out of the faculty of an American university. However, he does not claim superior virtue. He admits that many of his own attributes are undesirable. He self-flagellates as much as he flagellates.

The core of this volume is provided by Orwell’s most important non-fiction work. The Road to Wigan Pier is a sequel to Down and Out in Paris and London, the author’s first book, which established his distinctive style, and also himself as a social investigator of a particular, Jack London, type. At the same time, it is transitional, marking the writer’s move from amateur to professional status. Wigan Pier was commissioned by his publisher, Victor Gollancz, in January 1936, just after Orwell had finished the manuscript of his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Hitherto, he had lived hand to mouth. The commission marked a step forward in his standing as a writer, and signalled a new confidence.

Orwell’s brief was to write about the condition of the unemployed in the North of England, much as he had previously written about tramps and social outcasts. Though non-fiction, it contains a literary convention that is fictional. The portrayal of the author as an impecunious scribbler not far removed from those he is observing (‘Economically, I belong to the working class’), is unduly modest. Every other aspect of the book, however, is essentially truthful – as the meticulous ‘Road to Wigan Pier Diary’, included in this volume, shows. Orwell treated the project with the utmost seriousness. For Down and Out he himself became a tramp, to find out what it felt like. For Wigan Pier he travelled North as a burgeoning writer, armed with letters of introduction from journalists and political activists, making no pretence of joining the ranks of those he sought to observe. At the same time, he was concerned to write as sensitive a description as he could, in the time available.

The book was based on two months (February and March, 1936) with working people and their families in Manchester, Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield, together with a spell with his sister and her husband in Leeds, and a visit to Liverpool docks. The author did not seek to be like the people he visited. However, he tried to be more than a typical journalist: he avoided staying in ordinary hotels, adopting instead the style of an anthropologist. After taking a train to Coventry, he made his way to Manchester by bus and on foot through some of the grimmest industrial areas, sleeping in lodging houses and on one occasion in a doss-house. In Manchester, he stayed for four days with a trade union official and his wife, and was directed on to Wigan, a town particularly hard hit by cotton-mill and coal-mine closures. There he lived at a variety of addresses (as his Diary entries record), including lodgings over a tripe shop. He visited homes, attended political meetings, and went down a pit. The fruit of his efforts is a work that combines detailed observation, a matter-of-fact tone, human feeling and political passion. At the same time, the author uses his account of proletarian life as a peg on which to hang what really interested him: not just the lives of working-class people as such, but his own inner dialogue about how middle-class people like himself did and should relate to them.

The Road to Wigan Pier is about class, and its effects. It is not about industry, or the economy. ‘I know nothing whatever about the technical side of mining,’ the author is at pains to point out. ‘I am merely describing what I have seen… I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one.’ The book is about the English as they really were, and possibly still are. It is about contrasts, hypocrisy, and convenient amnesia. Thus, the author drives home the unwelcome truth that, whoever you happen to be, the luxury to do what you do depends on hard, physical work done by others. ‘In order that Hitler may march the goose-step’, he writes, ‘that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord’s, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming.’ Middle-class Southerners are a particular target. There may be, he suggests, ‘at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards’, who know little about the manual labour they require to be performed.

The first part of Wigan Pier (buttressed by photos and simple bits of arithmetic which, alas, the passage of time has rendered quaint, rather than shocking) is a Baedeker’s guide to the slums, damp, dirt, disease, accident rates and high mortality that are the consequences of poor wages and bad working conditions. Repeatedly, the author stresses how difficult it is for a middle-class observer to take in what is going on. The conditions of the English proletariat, he indicates, are a foreign country. ‘Even when I am on the verge of starvation’, he points out, ‘I have certain rights attaching to my bourgeois status.’ The working class are not so lucky. Juxtaposed are the tragedies of squalid lives (‘on the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table, I decided to leave’); and the confessional, as the author seeks to explain why, to middle-class eyes and nostrils, working-class conditions are repugnant as well as tragic. It is a shattering book, yet surprisingly not a despairing one. It ends on a positive note: the reader is left with a sense that the task of breaking down social barriers is almost impossible – but not quite. The solution, Orwell argues, is for middle-class wage-earners in Southern England to accept that their future lies in alliance with, not in fearful opposition to, the Northern proletariat. The message is uncompromisingly political. If Socialism becomes something ‘large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about’, he declares, then ‘the class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable.’

Such an upbeat conclusion may have owed something to the author’s concern – in view of his heavy criticisms of socialists early in the book – to make clear which side he is on. The Left-Right struggle was intensifying, and it was not a time for ambiguity. It may also have something to do with an event in the author’s private life. In June 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaugnessy. Orwell’s friend Geoffrey Gorer once remarked that the only time he ever saw Orwell really happy was in the first year of his marriage. It also happened to be the period when the author was writing up his Wigan Pier notes. Whether or not this was a factor, the reader comes away from The Road to Wigan Pier horrified by what it describes, but also with a sense of the dignity of those described in it, and of a challenge.

The challenge went beyond England. Orwell wrote Wigan Pier just as the attention of radicals at home was moving away from domestic problems to European ones. In March 1936, German troops entered the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno. In July, Franco’s rebellion against the Republican Government in Spain precipitated a civil war. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was published, its topic had become unfashionable: everybody on the Left was talking about Spain, and Orwell himself had taken time off from writing to arrange to join the Independent Labour Party’s expeditionary unit. If the book can be seen as a follow-up to Down and Out, it is also a prequel to Homage to Catalonia – the final section, on the need to resist creeping fascism, was written against the background of the growing Spanish conflict.

Spain impinged in another way as well. A week after Franco’s return to the mainland, Gollancz launched his pioneering Left Book Club, whose monthly ‘choices’ – selected by a triumvirate of Gollancz himself, John Strachey and Harold Laski – were guaranteed not only a wide but an enthusiastic and committed readership. The Club was a movement as well as a publishing venture. Its primary aim was to whip up support for the Spanish Republican cause and for a pro-Communist, anti-fascist popular front. Most of the ‘choices’ were by Communists or fellow-travellers. The Road to Wigan Pier, with its open scorn for middle-class Marxists, scarcely fitted the Club’s mould. Gollancz’s publishing instincts, however, were even stronger than his political ones, and as soon as he had read the manuscript he offered the author a place on the LBC list. The book was duly published by the Club in March 1937 – albeit with a preface by the publisher, distancing himself from Orwell’s anti-Communist opinions. By then, Orwell was in Spain, and received his copy in the trenches before Huesca. The first edition sold over 47,000 copies.

It is easy to see why Wigan Pier made Gollancz both excited and nervous. On the one hand, the descriptions of poverty were grist to the Marxist and ‘popular front’ mill. On the other, Orwell’s attack in the second half of the book on actually existing socialists (which Gollancz urged him to drop), was disconcertingly persuasive. Modern readers may also have difficulty with parts of the book, but for different reasons. Some may be more amused than outraged by the famous passage in which the author provocatively lumps together the many varieties of people he regards as cranks (‘One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England’). Harder to take, however, is Orwell’s blush-making description of working-class life at its best:

Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat – it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

Such passages have been used to lampoon Orwell as a naïve and patronizing sentimentalist. Fortunately there are few of them: and they do little to detract from the author’s powerful account of a country morally crippled by class, by a bourgeois urge to keep up appearances, and by ignorance of the working and housing conditions of those whose downtrodden lives support the comforts of the better off.

There is a need for people to know. ‘It is a kind of duty’, he insists, ‘to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist.’ Smell plays a critical part. Orwell reminds the reader, self-analytically, that people like him – precariously ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ – were brought up to believe that ‘the lower classes smell’. Things may have changed since his own childhood before and during the Great War, he acknowledges. But he doubts if they have changed much.

Wigan Pier presents one picture of Orwell’s England. It is refined, but seldom contradicted, elsewhere in the author’s writings. A pattern emerges: England (not Ireland or Scotland or Wales – none of which greatly interests him) is a country where social divisions cause the poor unnecessary suffering; and also where the middle and upper classes are maimed by their upbringing and education. It is an England where, because of class, those on the margins of a particular layer attach themselves desperately, and pathetically, to the values of the one above them. There is a lace-curtain, ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion’ aspect. There is also militarism. ‘Most of the English middle class are trained for war from the cradle onwards’, the author observes, and asks, ‘how is it that England, with one of the smallest armies in the world, has so many retired colonels?’

People of moderate disposition who imagine that Orwell’s England may offer them consolation will have to look elsewhere: the author is uncompromising. In Wigan Pier, he writes of a need for an ‘effective Socialist party… with genuinely revolutionary intentions’, in order to resist an English form of fascism. The Second World War radicalizes him still further. Who can be relied on? Not the English police, ‘the very people who would go over to Hitler once they were certain he had won’. In his wartime essay, ‘My Country Right or Left’, Orwell does not mince his words. ‘Only revolution can save England’, he concludes, ‘that has been obvious for ten years. I dare say London gutters will have to run with blood.’ But if Orwell’s England is a country on the brink, its weaknesses can also be saving graces. Thus, the English ‘training for war’ and public-school system may even have advantages: turning out stiff-upper-lip idealists of the John Cornford type, splendidly equipped for leadership roles as revolutionaries. Meanwhile if England gets into serious trouble, the loyalty of anybody who has experienced ‘the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through’ can be relied upon to rally round, regardless of political opinions.

In sum, the England that emerges from this book is a country (and an idea) which Orwell regards with a kind of weary affection and matured respect, even against his own better judgement: an England whose manifold injustices should not obscure its blessings. It is an England of tramps on the way down (‘homosexuality is a vice which is not unknown to these eternal wanderers’), trade union officials on the way up (‘as soon as a working-man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he wish or no’), of schools like Roedean (‘I could feel waves of snobbishness pouring out’), and a socialist bourgeoisie ‘most of whom give me the creeps’; an England where red pillar-boxes and suet puddings enter your soul, an England of privacy, an England which is also ‘the most class-ridden country under the sun’; an irreligious yet vaguely theistic England that maintains an unusual tradition of people ‘not killing one another’; a philistine, xenophobic England of compromises, bad teeth, lack of artistic talent or ability at languages. The English are ‘not intellectual’, the author tells us, approvingly – a dig at the ‘Nancy poets’ and other members of the intelligentsia who ‘take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow’.

Like the writer himself (and, implicitly, the readers he takes into his confidence) Orwell’s England is a territory of contradictions – in need of new management, but neither negligible, nor to be disregarded. Orwell indicts the double-standards, lack of warmth and pomposity of the English. No author dissects his fellow countrymen so pitilessly. But he also refuses to scorn English qualities of common sense, empiricism and toleration.

The books, essays, reviews, articles and jottings contained within this volume do not provide a comprehensive picture of the nation in Orwell’s head. What they do capture, however, is a sense of the author’s changing world view, with England as his point of reference. Orwell’s England displays a writer and his subject-matter in varying moods – of depression, fear, doggedness, bereavement, make-do-and-mend. It also provides, for the first time, a gathering impression of an outlook that is questioning, affectionate, critical and hopeful: a non-topographical, abstract Albion.

Will a modern young person – a black or brown Briton, born in Wilson’s England or Thatcher’s – feel any affinity towards it? Would Eric Blair recognize Tony Blair’s England? In some respects he would find it unimaginably different, in others only superficially so. Some characteristic features of Orwell’s sepia England have undoubtedly faded. The great work-forces of miners, dockers, metal-workers, ship-builders that dominated mid-century proletarian England no longer exist, and blue-collar workers are now supposedly in a minority. In place of slum-dwelling and the Means Test, problems to do with schooling, crime and family breakup dominate the contemporary social agenda. Among the middle class, stiff upper lips are less in evidence and social distinctions, though still harshly divisive, have blurred at the edges. Yet there are elements of bourgeois culture that remain stubbornly recognizable, down the generations:

‘How much a year has your father got?’

I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundred pounds to make it sound better…

‘My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours’, he announced with a sort of amused contempt.

That was in 1915… I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at preparatory schools now?

Do they still? It is conceivable. It is equally conceivable that there are people inhabiting what nowadays we call Middle England (not to mention up-market London boroughs where millionaires and beggars live cheek by jowl), who have a small understanding of those below the poverty line – and as small a wish to know – at the start of the twenty-first century as their counterparts had, at the beginning of the twentieth.

Orwell’s account of England endures partly because the modern bourgeoisie, complacent and blinkered as ever, still define the essence of Englishness the world sees; and partly because the poor (now called the socially excluded), who constitute the invisible England, are ever with us. It endures as an idea because, in our better moments, many of the most bourgeois of us continue to support Orwell’s dream – of an England and a world without barriers of any description; and because everything Orwell ever wrote is part of an extended polemic in favour of seeing truth, however ugly, in ourselves.

Professor Ben Pimlott was a leading historian and political biographer of post-war Britain. His works include lives of Hugh Dalton (1985, winner of the Whitbread Prize for biography), Harold Wilson (1992), and a study of Queen Elizabeth II (1996). His other books include Labour And The Left In The 1930s (1977), The Trade Unions In British Politics (with Chris Cook, 1982), Fabian Essays In Socialist Thought (1984), The Alternative (with Tony Wright and Tony Flower, 1990), Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994) and Governing London (with Nirmala Rao, 2002).

He wrote about Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in the 1970s (work which drew comparisons with Orwell in Catalonia), and during the 1980s he was a prolific essayist and book reviewer for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. He was also a political commentator at times for The Sunday Times, The Times and the New Statesman, where he was political editor in 1987-88. Chairman of the Fabian Society in 1993, he joined the politics and sociology department at Birkbeck College in 1981, and was Warden of Goldsmiths College until shortly before his death in 2004.

This essay – an introduction to a collection of Orwell’s works on England and the English, including The Road to Wigan Pier – is reproduced by kind permission of Jean Seaton, his wife.

• Julio Etchart: Burmese Days Revisited (PDF)
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U Tue Mg displays an amiable smile when he offers me a seat and a cup of sweet lapaye tea. But he is naturally nervous, as I am. We can’t exchange more than half a dozen words, between my non-existent Burmese and his most basic English. But this gentle elderly man understands the purpose of my visit to this remote corner of his country, and he proves to be an excellent host, like most of his fellow compatriots.

Mr. Mg is the secretary of the District 3 Agricultural Co-op in the town of Katha, a long train ride, or up to two days upstream by boat, from the venerable city of Mandalay, immortalized by Kipling’s famous poem. The enterprise’s large warehouse, where peanut oil and other produce are processed and stored, lies across the yard from our shady verandah. Accommodation is thrown in with the job, so he is the sole inhabitant and caretaker of the building, which used to be the headquarters of the British Club, the old colonial enclave which was the centre of the local Anglo-Indian expatriate community at the time of the Raj.

Burma had become part of the British Empire during the nineteenth century as a province of British India, and George Orwell (né Eric Blair) spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in what is now Myanmar.

It was his experience in this isolated outpost that inspired him to write his first novel, Burmese Days, first published 75 years ago. It is a story about the waning days of the Raj before World War II and one of the greatest denunciations of imperialism ever written, and a powerful critique of the colonial mindset that underpinned the system.

‘They arrive now’, Mr. Mg reported, interrupting my tour of the old building, still in excellent condition, despite its age. He had invited me to attend the afternoon remedial Math session for the local schoolchildren. The classroom was downstairs, in what it used to be the old billiards room, then out of bounds to ‘non-Europeans’.

A group of about thirty kids started to take their places and listened to the explanations of the tutors, hired by the local education authority to help them to catch up with their school curriculum.

It was a surreal scene, trying to imagine Orwell and his workmates playing snooker in the evenings and toasting the King with a glass of gin and tonic or Indian Pale Ale. It had been transformed to a couple of dozen tables full of eager youth and a teacher pointing to a big blackboard with Burmese numerals, drowned by the cacophony of young voices reciting their tables.

‘Tennis there’… my host rescues me from the smiles of the diligent kids to steer me out of the house to point me in the direction of the outbuildings and the tennis court, also featured in the novel and still in use, as a free facility, by the neighbours. I thanked him and head off, after taking a few shots of a middle age couple doing warming up exercises before their match. The court and the changing rooms are well maintained, though the surface betrays a few cracks.

I am both confused and impressed. I had come to Burma to follow the thread of a novel by one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century. My pre-conceived narrative was fairly simple: Orwell condemned in this book and all his later work the twin evils of imperialism and thought control. I was going to put his exposition in the context of the realities of modern day Myanmar. The Raj is long gone – the country achieved its independence in 1947 – but it has been subsequently substituted by one of the most vicious dictatorships on earth, in the name of Socialism.

The destruction of the rain forest, started by the British and inferred in the novel, since some of the expatriates traded in timber, carries on at an alarming rate, though nowadays the main consumer is China, whose insatiable demand for raw materials fuels the deforestation of the countryside. I witness this at the harbour of ancient Mandalay, the second city in the country and the economic hub of upper Myanmar, where I went to photograph the constant loading of huge beams of teak unto boats of all sizes. The precious cargo is heading up north, towards the Chinese border, before reaching its final destination inside Yunnan province on the Mekong River. A fat hardwood tycoon comes out of a fancy four wheel drive and challenges me: ‘Why some many pictures; you like my trees?’

‘Very nice trees’, I retorted, in total honesty. And, trying to buy time to get away without further trouble: ‘They will make beautiful houses’. ‘Oh, yes’, said the boss, evidently pleased with my compliment …’and look, more coming’. I turned to see another five lorries, weighed down with trunks, negotiating the dusty access to the terminal to wait for the next ship to dispose of their valuable haul.

China also controls the mining industry and is blighting the cities with hotels and shopping malls of the most dubious architectural taste. More importantly, the powerful neighbour is giving the ruling junta the political support they so desperately need, as they become increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

The average Burmese continues to suffer from the greed of a neo-colonialist power; so little has changed in the last three quarters of a century.

Yet it is not easy to discover the ‘real’ Myanmar. I am travelling independently and have no official minders attached to me, though my whereabouts are obviously known to the authorities, since you are ‘logged-into’ the system from the time you buy a train ticket or book into a guest house.

But this is not necessarily the preamble to paranoia. On the contrary, wherever you go there is this warm sense of following a series of small serendipities, of being led to places and people who seem to have adjusted to the to and fro of history with peace and resignation.

Katha has a dreamlike air about it. The small town does not seem to have changed much since Orwell lived here. It has a fantastic setting high on a bank on a bend of the mighty Ayeyarwady – formerly Irrawaddy – River, Myanmar’s main artery, with views of distant mountain ranges.

A number of Buddhist temples adorn the riverfront and I am moved to visit one of them on the far side of the main promenade. It turns out to be a monastery and the head monk greets me warmly and invites me to share their only meal of the day, taken around noon -heaps of rice and vegetables prepared by local people who take it in turns to cook for the monks -. We talk in French, which he learned in Laos during a long stay in the holy city of Luang Prabang. He is happy that the novices here don’t have the same temptations than the ones he mentored back there. There is no Internet in Katha, so no chance for his young charges to get polluted with Google and Facebook, a favourite pastime for religious probationers in the rest of SE Asia, as I have witnessed on my visits to cyber-cafes in the region. The World Wide Web in Myanmar is confined to the main cities and even then, severely monitored by the authorities, with only selected websites made accessible. Since the monks have been at the forefront of the recent anti-government protests, I try to extract some comment on my host’s political views. But, alas, his remarks are oblique: “Rien ça change ici en Katha…” which could be interpreted as a universal statement on the fate of any backwater, or as a profound analysis on the future of his troubled country, where the rulers won’t allow any dissent to flourish.

Satisfied with the rice and the blessings, I take a meandering path through a grove of fir trees to the site of another religious faith – St Paul’s Anglican church, which is one of only two Christian places of worship in town; the other is a catholic chapel. Although St Paul’s has been extensively rebuilt, it stands on the location where a crucial scene in Orwell’s book takes place. After a Sunday sermon, Flory, the central British character, is humiliated in front of the woman he loves, as part of an elaborate plot by a corrupt local magistrate to discredit him. As a result, she rejects him and he eventually commits suicide.

Through John Flory, a timber merchant who appreciates Burmese culture and becomes disillusioned with the Empire, Orwell portrays the first stages of his own personal transformation from a colonial policeman to a radical thinker.

It took me 15 hours of a very bumpy train journey to reach Katha from Mandalay.
I shared my sleeper compartment with three boisterous off-duty army officers who insisted in measuring out their ample supplies of food and local whisky with me. Unable to get any sleep, I joined them in an all night game of poker, ‘Las Vegas’ style, as they called it. Which meant, I ended up losing some 5,000 kyat – about 5 US Dollars – but I guessed that paid for the roast chicken and the liquor. The only one of them who spoke any English, a captain in what he described as a ‘tactical unit’, told me about his exploits quashing the Karen insurgents, who have been fighting the central government in the east of the country, along the Thai border for more than three decades. “I shot many enemies”, he boasted, emboldened by the firewater, “…and now we have peace in the Union of Myanmar”. It was a sobering moment and a reminder of the ruthlessness of a system that has consistently crushed the cry for autonomy or independence of the many ethnic minorities within its borders.

The company I kept on the train back to Mandalay could not have been more different: I was sharing a carriage with monks on their way to the capital, Yangon, as well as with a young family. It was inspiriting to see the monks playing with the children and exchanging jokes with their parents. Members of Buddhist orders are venerated and deeply respected throughout Burma and ordinary people who come to help clean the buildings and feed their occupants visit their temples on a daily basis.

I wondered whether my fellow travelers had been involved in the protests of last year that were brutally put down by the government. Human rights in Myanmar are a long-standing concern for the international community, and there is a consensus that the military junta is one of the world’s most repressive and abusive regimes. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi continues under house arrest and there are no signs of political liberalization.

I visited many enchanting pagodas around the country. In the visitors centre of the main ones you always find photos of the ruling generals praying and paying their respects at the altars. Buddhists believe that you can partly expiate your sins by building or restoring temples. It reminds me of U PO Kyin, the corrupt magistrate in Burmese Days, who plots against Flory to himself become a member of the exclusive British Club.

He, too, believes he can get away with his wicked ways by financing new sanctuaries, but shortly after the unhappy expatriate takes his own life, Kyin dies, unredeemed, before building a single shrine.

Maybe the mysterious laws of karma, apparently understood by Orwell, will finally vindicate the inhabitants of this alluring land.

Copyright © Julio Etchart 2009

Julio Etchart is a photo-journalist who has worked around the world for international media organisations, film and TV companies, and NGOs. A co-founder of Reportage Photos, he has also been awarded a World Press Photo First Prize.

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

Who does not know the ‘comics’ of the cheap stationers’ windows, the penny or twopenny coloured postcards with their endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow’s-egg tint and Post Office red?

This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many people seem to be unaware of the existence of these things, or else to have a vague notion that they are something to be found only at the seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock. Actually they are on sale everywhere – they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth’s, for example – and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other types of comic illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones dealing with puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, sub-pornographic ones which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a genre of their own, specializing in very ‘low’ humour, the mother-in-law, baby’s nappy, policemen’s boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other kinds by having no artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing houses issue them, though the people who draw them seem not to be numerous at any one time.

I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because he is not only the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post card artists, but also the most representative, the most perfect in the tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know. He is apparently a trade name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as ‘The Donald McGill Comics’, but he is also unquestionable a real person with a style of drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines his postcards in bulk will notice that many of them are not despicable even as drawings, but it would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they have any direct aesthetic value. A comic postcard is simply an illustration to a joke, invariably a ‘low’ joke, and it stands or falls by its ability to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only ‘ideological’ interest. McGill is a clever draughtsman with a real caricaturist’s touch in the drawing of faces, but the special value of his postcards is that they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the norm of the comic postcard. Without being in the least imitative, they are exactly what comic postcards have been any time these last forty years, and from them the meaning and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.

Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill’s – if you pick out from a pile the ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably find that most of them are McGill’s – and spread them out on a table. What do you see?

Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of the colours. They have an utter lowness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different postcards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the kind of joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:

‘I like seeing experienced girls home.’
‘But I’m not experienced!’
‘You’re not home yet!’

‘I’ve been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?’
‘I left off struggling.’

Judge: ‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?’
Co-respondent: ‘Not a wink, my lord!’

In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be said for McGill’s postcards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:

Sex. More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical captions: ‘Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby’s feeding-bottle?’ ‘She didn’t ask me to the christening, so I’m not going to the wedding.’ Also newlyweds, old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are ipso facto funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality.

Conventions of the sex joke:

a. Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried voluntarily.

b. Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and good-looking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for.

Home life. Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption: ‘Did they get an X-ray of your wife’s jaw at the hospital?’ – ‘No, they got a moving picture instead.’
Conventions:

a. There is no such thing as a happy marriage.

b. No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument.

Drunkenness. Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:

a. All drunken men have optical illusions.

b. Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women are never represented.

W.C. jokes. There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned ‘A Friend in Need’, shows a man’s hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies’ lavatory.

Inter-working-class snobbery. Much in these post cards suggests that they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type exchanging ‘unladylike’ abuse. Typical repartee: ‘I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!’ A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti-Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is regarded as laughable. The ‘swell’ is almost as automatically a figure of fun as the slum-dweller.

Stock figures. Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The ‘knut’ or ‘masher’ still appears, almost as in Edwardian days, in out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or even spats and a knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has reappeared, unchanged in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or Temperance fanatic. A feature of the last few years is the complete absence of anti-Jew post cards. The ‘Jew joke’, always somewhat more ill-natured than the ‘Scotch joke’, disappeared abruptly soon after the rise of Hitler.

Politics. Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic possibilities (for example, ‘free love’, feminism, A.R.P., nudism) rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards, but their general atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are not only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with jokes about ‘God save the King’, the Union Jack, etc. The European situation only began to reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and first did so through the comic aspects of A.R.P. Even at this date few post cards mention the war except in A.R.P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young woman undresses at window she has forgotten to black out, etc., etc.) A few express anti-Hitler sentiments of a not very vindictive kind. One, not McGill’s, shows Hitler with the usual hypertrophied backside, bending down to pick a flower. Caption: ‘What would you do, chums?’ This is about as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain. Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product of any great monopoly company, and evidently they are not regarded as having any importance in forming public opinion. There is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class.

Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic postcards – their obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them, and it is also central to their purpose, though not in a way that is immediately obvious.

A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even when the point of the joke has nothing to do with sex, the same female figure appears, a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure with the dress clinging to it as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no doubt that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression, natural enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim to the point of skimpiness. But at the same time the McGill post card – and this applies to all other post cards in this genre – is not intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the women are caricatures of the Englishman’s secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one examines McGill’s post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire, for instance, or La Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is always promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even ‘sophisticated’ society. The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for example, a young bridegroom is shown getting out of bed the morning after his wedding night. ‘The first morning in our own little home, darling!’ he is saying; ‘I’ll go and get the milk and paper and bring you up a cup of tea.’ Inset is a picture of the front doorstep; on it are four newspapers and four bottles of milk. This is obscene, if you like, but it is not immoral. Its implication – and this is just the implication the Esquire or the New Yorker would avoid at all costs – is that marriage is something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event in the average human being’s life. So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for granted. And bound up with this is something I noted earlier, the fact there are no pictures, or hardly any, of good-looking people beyond their first youth. There is the ‘spooning’ couple and the middle-aged, cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between. The liaison, the illicit but more or less decorous love-affair which used to be the stock joke of French comic papers, is not a post card subject. And this reflects, on a comic level, the working-class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure – almost, indeed, individual life – end with marriage. One of the few authentic class-differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working classes age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided that they survive their childhood, nor do they lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their youthful appearance. This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most easily verified by watching one of the higher age groups registering for military service; the middle- and upper-class members look, on average, ten years younger than the others. It is usual to attribute this to the harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is doubtful whether any such difference now exists as would account for it. More probably the truth is that the working classes reach middle age earlier because they accept it earlier. For to look young after, say, thirty is largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalization is less true of the better-paid workers, especially those who live in council houses and labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even of them to point to a difference of outlook. And in this, as usual, they are more traditional, more in accord with the Christian past than the well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means of physical-jerks, cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing. The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself. It will probably disappear again when our standard of living drops and our birth-rate rises. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure’ expresses the normal, traditional attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill and his colleagues are reflecting, no doubt unconsciously, when they allow for no transition stage between the honeymoon couple and those glamourless figures, Mum and Dad.

I have said that at least half of McGill’s post cards are sex jokes, and a proportion, perhaps ten per cent, are far more obscene than anything else that is now printed in England. Newsagents are occasionally prosecuted for selling them, and there would be many more prosecutions if the broadest jokes were not invariably protected by double meanings. A single example will be enough to show how this is done. In one post card, captioned ‘They didn’t believe her’, a young woman is demonstrating, with her hands held apart, something about two feet long to a couple of open-mouthed acquaintances. Behind her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a glass case, and beside that is a photograph of a nearly naked athlete. Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this could never be proved. Now, it is doubtful whether there is any paper in England that would print a joke of this kind, and certainly there is no paper that does so habitually. There is an immense amount of pornography of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in on women’s legs, but there is no popular literature specializing in the ‘vulgar’, farcical aspect of sex. On the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill’s are the ordinary small change of the revue and music-hall stage, and are also to be heard on the radio, at moments when the censor happens to be nodding. In England the gap between what can be said and what can be printed is rather exceptionally wide. Remarks and gestures which hardly anyone objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if any attempt were made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller’s stage patter with his weekly column in the Sunday Dispatch) The comic post cards are the only existing exception to this rule, the only medium in which really ‘low’ humour is considered to be printable. Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited. Remembering that, one sees what function these post cards, in their humble way, are performing.

What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as ‘extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement kitchens’. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a ‘pure’ state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles, noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with ‘voluptuous’ figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.

But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature, in real life, especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn’t matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuehrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of ‘higher’ influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm’s-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. For:

there is a just man that perished in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous overmuch; neither make thyself over wise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy time?

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.

Horizon, September 1941

I was born in Buckinghamshire in 1890. My father was an Indian civil servant, & met & married[1] my mother in 1882 in India, where she had gone to stay with an aunt for the cold weather. In ’83 my father was sent to Burma on some job or other, & there in ’84 my brother was born, & died, aged seven months. My eldest sister was born in ’85, & my second in ’88. In that year my mother went home, bringing her two daughters, aged two and a half, & four months. In ’89 my father came home on leave, & I was born early the next year. I saw my father twice in the next ten years, for about six months at a time. In 1903 he retired, & died very suddenly at the end of 1908.

Before 1900[2] I do not remember much except odd incident & patches of existence, some of which remain in my mind more clearly than what happened yesterday. After 1900 my recollections˚ become pretty continuous.

My father was rather like myself, only taller, thinner & with more colour in his face. He always had a rather harassed look, except when he was sitting in his library, where my mother seldom penetrated. The atmosphere of this room was quite unlike the˚ that of any other room in the house. There were perhaps a thousand books in it, many of them books about Hindu mythology, or about fishing, shooting or travelling in India. I cannot say that I ever read any of these books, but I remember oftening˚ turning over their pages & looking at strange pictures of people hanging upon hooks, or elephants composed of maidens in extraordinary postures, & wondering vaguely about them in my own mind. I never troubled to enquire their real significance, for the curiosity of children is not very intelligent.

My father used to sit reading these books, with his white shirt open at the neck smoking cigars from Dindigul. The chairs in the room were of wicker work, such as one finds in India, & there were two faded[3] tiger skins upon the floor. On the walls were old yellow photographs, & a few eastern weapons, among them one or two beautiful[4] dahs captured in the Burma war. I used to look at the handles & scabbards[5] of these dahs, bound with plaited fibres,[6] & speculate dully about the men who used them. The windows[7] were always open, & there was generally a fire in the grate, so that a current of air flowed through the room. And this wind, mingled with cigar smoke, seemed to me like a wind from another land, bearing with it the names of far off dusty places. When I came into the room, & stayed quiet for awhile, my father would talk to me sometimes, & tell me the simple stories of the rubbish that lay about here & there; empty cartridge cases, bad rupees, or dried up peacock feathers. My mother often threatened to “do out” this room, but refrained, probably from mere laziness.

My father & I might have been called friends. The reticence that lies between all blood relatives held us apart, & then I scarcely seen him till I was thirteen years old. Still, in the family

Notes

Peter Davison, from the Complete Works

Written 1926-1930?, CW 73. This sketch exists in two forms: handwritten in ink on the verso of Government of Burma paper, stock date 1 February 1925; and typed (not by Orwell?) on thin foolscap typing paper (13 by 8 inches) with the watermark BRITISH EMBLEM, a rose, and MADE IN ENGLAND. This watermark was first recorded in 1928. The handwritten version is printed here; the notes refer to this manuscript. The changes made in typing are slight. Preliminary sketch for Burmese Days

The Orwell Foundation was originally established as The Orwell Prize. The Prize was the brainchild of the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick, Orwell’s first biographer, who used the hardback royalties of his George Orwell: A Life (1980) to set up a fund designed to encourage the work of young writers and, later, to underwrite a series of lectures in Orwell’s memory.

In the early 1990s, with financial support from Political Quarterly, Crick established the prizes in their original format: annual awards for books and journalism intended to ‘encourage writing in good English…of a kind aimed at or accessible to the reading public, not to specialised or academic audiences.’

From modest beginnings the prizes have, in the two and a half decades of its existence, grown into one of the most prestigious in the Anglophone world, respected both for their independence from the institutions whose achievements it rewards and their ability to respond to changes in the media landscape whose work they reflects. [Editor’s note: The Orwell Foundation, the registered charity which now oversees its operations, is currently responsible for the award of the two original prizes, two new prizes, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils (sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) and The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Unreported Britain project, a comprehensive website, annual lectures and a variety of events at schools, conferences and literary festivals. In 2014 the Orwell Youth Prize was set up under the auspices of the Orwell Prize. In 2017 the Prize became The Orwell Foundation, to better reflect the scope of its charitable activities.]

Bernard Crick and George Orwell: A Life

The history of the Orwell Prizes, and the many activities associated with them, goes back as least as far as the late 1960s. It was then that the question of whether there should be an authorised life of Orwell – by now nearly 20 years dead – and, if so, who might be commissioned to produce it, became a matter of absorbing interest to his widow, Sonia. Orwell had requested in his will that no biography should be written. This proscription had been loyally enforced, with what sometimes amounted to deviousness. In the late 1950s, for example, Sonia announced that she had appointed Orwell’s old friend Malcolm Muggeridge to undertake the work. But this was a smokescreen designed to conceal the fact that neither sponsor nor biographer wanted the book to be written: thereafter the project quietly lapsed. A decade later, on the other hand, several wedges had been driven under the door of outright prohibition. The most substantial was Peter Stansky and William Stansky’s unauthorised but impeccably researched The Unknown Orwell, which appeared in 1972. Worse, Stansky and Abrahams threatened a second volume. Deciding to choose her own candidate, and impressed by a piece about Orwell that he had contributed to Miriam Gross’s compilation The World of George Orwell (1971), Sonia settled on Bernard Crick.

At this point in a long and combative career, Crick (1929-2008), author of the best-selling In Defence of Politics (1962), was Professor of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London. On signing a contract with Orwell’s publishers, Secker & Warburg, in 1974 for what would eventually become George Orwell: A Life, Crick decided to grant the English hardback rights to Birkbeck and, with their aid, establish a fund that, as he put it at the time, would ‘help projects by young writers who would have interested Orwell himself had he lived.’ According to Crick’s associate Audrey Coppard, who worked closely with him during this period – the two were joint editors of Orwell Remembered (1984) – he was inspired to take this step by the memory of Orwell’s own determination to help up-and-coming writers, and in particular a vision of Orwell sitting at his desk at the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, for which he worked as literary editor between 1943-5 and wrote the celebrated ‘As I Please’ column, with a drawer full of IOUs received from impoverished members of the paper’s freelance reviewing staff.

George Orwell: A Life – a trail-blazing work, which all subsequent biographers have taken as their starting point – was published in the autumn of 1980. Shortly before this time Crick and Sonia, who had enjoyed long and convivial lunches in the early stages of the project, had fallen out. Sonia went to her death, shortly before the book’s publication, believing – on no grounds whatever – that she had betrayed her husband’s memory. Meanwhile, Crick’s scheme for a series of awards to encourage up-and-coming talent received a boost when David Astor, Orwell’s editor at the Observer and the facilitator of his long stay on the Inner Hebridean island of Jura in the late 1940s, agreed to match whatever funding Crick himself could raise. Further subventions came from Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair, whose involvement continues to this day, friends and admirers – these included the journalist Lord Ardwick (John Bevan), the philosopher Sir Alfred (A.J.) Ayer, the historian Sir Steven Runciman and the writer Julian Symons – and the three newspapers with which he was most closely associated, the Manchester Evening News, Tribune and the Observer.

The Prize Takes Shape

By mid-1982 Crick was hard at work approaching potential trustees. This process was not without its drawbacks, largely owing to the difficulty of establishing the values that Orwell might be supposed to represent and the kind of writers he might have wanted to encourage. ‘Bernard Crick wrote to me saying that he was donating the English rights of his Orwell biography to establish a fund for young writers, to which more would be added by contributors’ the novelist Anthony Powell wrote in his diary in May of that year. ‘The trustees of fund would be Crick himself, Barbara Hardy, Eric Hobsbawm, Karl Miller, Julian Symons, Arnold Wesker. He asked if I would allow my name to be used.’ Powell, a deep-dyed Conservative (and also one of Orwell’s closest friends) had his doubts, not only over the political stance of certain of the trustees (‘I am not at all confident that George Orwell would have approved of the antics of Hobsbawm or Wesker’) but as to who might be line for the money. Symons, petitioned for advice, replied that ‘undoubtedly the Orwell Prize would be given to just the sort of crackpot anarchist with whom poor old George would have got himself associated when alive – so there was no point whatever in worrying.’ Although ‘wholly agreeing’ with this analysis, Powell declined to become involved.

In fact, the problems Crick and his allies experienced were seldom attributable to the crackpot anarchists of Powell’s demonising. They were more to do with the age-old trouble experienced by arts world funding bodies in obtaining a quantifiable return on their investments. Submissions were considered and grants duly made, but as Crick delicately put it ‘projects were hard to evaluate and too many did not appear to result in discernible writing.’ Within three years, consequently, the funds were diverted to the endowment of annual memorial lectures at Birkbeck College and the University of Sheffield, where Crick had served as Professor of Political Theory and Political Institutions between 1965 and 1971. Although the Sheffield lectures were discontinued in the mid-2000s, their London equivalent continues, under the auspices of University College. But this change of tack was also problematic. Although both Crick and Richard Blair were generous in topping up the fund, the original capital began to diminish. Happily, Crick – never short of bright ideas – had a new scheme in mind.

This evolved out of his long association with Political Quarterly [PQ], whose joint editor he had been between 1966 and 1980 and for whom he later worked as literary editor. Backed by the magazine’s resources, he announced, in 1993, the foundation of an annual Orwell Prize. The stated aim was ‘to encourage writing in good English – while giving equal value to style and content, politics or public policy, whether political, economic, social or cultural – of a kind aimed at or accessible to the reading public, not to specialist or academic audiences.’ PQ continues to support the prize, offering not only a welcome source of subsidy but a sounding board for ideas and schemes for wider political and social engagement. The original plan had been for a single prize of £1,000, but the judges were unconvinced. Ultimately, it proved impossible to create what the dramatist Alan Plater, one of two trustees on the judging panel, called ‘a level playing field for Manchester United versus Glamorgan.’ The solution, Plater went on, was ‘to separate the categories of books and journalism and split the prize down the middle.’ With this modus operandi in place, the inaugural books prize was awarded to Anatol Lieven’s The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Path to Independence, and the journalism prize to Neil Ascherson for his work on the Independent on Sunday.

For the next ten years and more the prize was Crick’s private fiefdom. It was he – effectively – who appointed the judges, and he who chaired their deliberations, he who replenished the pool of trustees, he who maintained the fruitful and enduring relationship with PQ, he who secured additional sources of sponsorship and he, with maximum effectiveness, who arranged the annual awards ceremony. The 2003 event, some of which was captured on film by the South Bank Show, gives a good idea of what Orwell Prize evenings were like at this time: small-scale, attended by and audience largely made up of Orwell’s surviving friends and relatives and a cognoscenti of journalists, with Crick – Sir Bernard Crick, as he now was, after his 2002 knighthood for work on the Government’s citizenship programme – standing vigilantly by, orchestrating the proceedings and not scrupling to interfere if he suspected that anything was amiss.

All this had, by the early 2000s, given the Prize an enviable reputation – a standing in the world of literary prizes and benefactions marked by the arrival of Reuters as a sponsor in 2004 – and it was clear that even greater opportunities awaited. But for the Prize to expand it needed more personnel, a greater degree of administrative expertise and a great deal more money. Crick, too, had reached his mid-70s and, though outwardly as vigorous as ever, knew that a time would come when he had to step aside. In the event he was succeeded as Chair of the Orwell Trust by another of Orwell’s biographers, D.J. Taylor, shortly before his death in 2008.

The post-Crick Years

One essential step had already been taken. Crick had retired as chair of the Prize judges in 2006. In the following year Jean Seaton, Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, became Director of the Prize – a role that was thereafter separated from the judging process and had the effect of detaching the administration of the awards from the people distributing them. Seaton ascribed this appointment to her long-standing support for the prize on the PQ board and also to her recently being widowed – ‘They all thought I needed to be busy.’  This move coincided with the arrival of several new trustees – these included the writers Blake Morrison, Marina Warner and Andrew O’Hagan – and a clutch of high-profile lecturers, among them the novelist Hilary Mantel who, shortly after winning the Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall (2009), addressed a capacity crowd on the subject of ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Radical England.’ An even more significant step came in seven-year  partnership, with the Media Standards Trust (MST). The MST, which had been thinking of establishing its own journalism prize, was persuaded to join its lot with Orwell.

MST’s involvement, under the auspices of its founding Director, Martin Moore, transformed the prize. Not only did it offer a home, an office and, in the shape of Gavin Freeguard, a highly efficient administrator, but, while remaining detached from the decision-making process, it galvanised and professionalised the way in which it worked. As Seaton put it: ‘When I took over there were two judges and they made their way through the submitted entries in both the books and journalism categories over lunch at the Savile. Now we have three judges assigned to each prize and a whole variety of mechanisms and protocols designed to ensure that they meet more often and both preserve and extend the integrity of the judging process. With success naturally comes greater public scrutiny, but we try very hard to get a variety of political opinions and a variety of tastes represented. There are no proscriptions and prizes are quite as likely to be won by conservatives as by card-carrying radicals of the kind of whom Orwell might have been thought to approve.’

All this worked its effect. The profile of the prize increased year on year, necessitating a steady upgrade in the size of the venues where the awards ceremony could be held and what Seaton calls its ‘transformation from prize to project.’ Meanwhile, a series of initiatives was in in hand to support this front-of-house activity. Thus the launch of the 2008 prize coincided with the unveiling of a website aimed at giving Orwell Studies an online presence. A growing collection of works by or about Orwell and featuring the contributions of well-known Orwell scholars was supplemented, in the summer of 2008, by the ‘Orwell diaries blog’ which featured Orwell’s domestic and political journals from the period 1938-1942, each entry uploaded 70 years to the day since they were written. The site was nominated for a Webby Award in 2009 and attracted international media interest. There was already a tradition of launch and shortlist debates on matters of current interest, but under Seaton the Prize began to supply speakers and topics to literary festivals, notably the annual festivals at Edinburgh, Buxton and Oxford – where the number of Orwell-themed events rose to as many as a dozen. One highlight of Oxford 2009 was an interview with Richard Blair in which, for the first time, Orwell’s adopted son discussed his memories of Orwell and his early years on Jura. A dedicated ‘Orwell Festival’ was held in London in 2009.

The degree of administrative expertise demanded by this almost annual expansion in the activities associated with the prize, together with the growing number of sponsors, brought another organisational re-think, and in 2009 the Trust was subsumed into a larger body, known as the Council of the Orwell Prize, initially under the chairmanship of Sir David Bell. As well as enhancing the prestige of the existing prizes, the Council was determined both to adapt its awards to reflect the changing nature of the twenty-first century media and to bring Orwell and his writings to a new generation of readers. To this end, 2009 brought the establishment of a Special Prize for Blogs, awarded in that year to the pseudonymous police blogger ‘Jack Night’, later unmasked as Richard Horton following a celebrated High Court Case, ‘The Author of a Blog versus Times Newspapers.’ Popular amongst the blogging community, and in its inaugural year at least, highly controversial, the Blog Prize foundered only on the substantial amounts of judging time  – and legal advice – demanded by some of the entries, and was shelved after its second year.

Increasingly, the prize began to take on an international dimension. In 2011, for example, the Council decided to sponsor an annual lecture at the Emirates Literary Festival in Dubai, where speakers have included the Egyptian writer Nawal el-Sadaawi and the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen. Two years later, and almost eight decades after the first publication of Burmese Days (1934), a delegation went to Burma to take part in the Irrawaddy Literary Festival. Here the Director of the Prize, Jean Seaton, spoke on Orwell’s relationship with Burma and former winner Timothy Garton Ash delivered an Orwell Lecture. A further highlight was the distribution of hundreds of copies of Orwell’s books – titles included Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – which had previously been banned in the country. These were purchased by way of a ‘Book for Burma’ campaign administered by the Prize and with generous support from Penguin Books, Orwell’s long-term paperback publisher.

Domestically, the Prize has continued to expand its scope. Work in schools had begun as early as 2009, with an event at Norwich School featuring the historian David Kynaston. In 2013 a much more expansive project found the journalist Stephen Armstrong, author of The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited administering a series of writing workshops for young people in a Wigan community centre. This, too, offered a springboard for something yet more ambitious – the establishment, in 2014, of an Orwell Youth Prize, designed to encourage literary and political engagement among the young. In 2015-16, as well as awarding writing prizes in two separate age categories, the scheme administered 23 workshops in schools around the country and hosted a ‘Celebration Day’ in which all entrants can attend seminars and take the opportunity to look round an Oxford college. Feedback has been immensely positive, both from students and school staff: there are already plans to run major ‘hub’ workshops in Sheffield and Cambridge and a longer-term aim of working with university outreach departments. Among other highlights, the 2015 Celebration Day, held at Pembroke College, featured two of the Youth Prize’s patrons, Alan Johnson MP and Richard Blair in conversation with Jean Seaton. According to Vidya Ramesh, one of the winners in the upper age-group, ‘Entering the Orwell Youth Prize, receiving helpful feedback from the judges, and of course the Celebration Day itself, has given me the confidence to seriously pursue writing as a possible career.’

The Orwell Foundation today

The Foundation continues to re-position itself to meet the administrative and intellectual challenges of the twenty-first century. In 2014, for example, and with the generous sponsorship of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, it established a new category – The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils – designed to reward innovative reporting on social issues in the UK. Shortly after this, the Prize achieved a long-held aim of becoming an independently registered charity (number 116153) governed by a board of trustees. Meanwhile, the range of associated events continues to offer space to stimulating and forward-looking ideas, while remaining true to Orwell’s dictum that uncomfortable positions should be given a place. Launch debates, for example, have taken in immigration, no-platforming in universities and the Goddard Enquiry into child sexual abuse. Recent Orwell Lecturers include Ian Hislop, Ruth Davidson and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth.  The current chair is Ken Macdonald QC, Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and the board continues to bring together a wide range of scholarly and professional expertise in with the aim of both preserving Orwell’s legacy and extending its reach to the readers, writers and activists of the future.

                                                                                                              D.J. TAYLOR

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