Partisan Review, January 1949; S.E.; O.R.; C.E.
Notes
1. Until the publication in 1964 of the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London), it was very difficult to get an overview of Orwell’s essays, mostly buried in long-dead, small magazines. (Even the C.E. had significant omissions.) A small number appeared in Critical Essays (1946) and Shooting an Elephant (1950), prepared in his lifetime; more appeared posthumously in England Your England (1953) and, incorporating many of these, the misnamed selection, Collected Essays (1961). In the many obituaries and evaluations that followed his death in 1950, writers and critics committed themselves to influential interpretations; but with no chance of reading the main body of his work, they concentrated on the famous two last satires – as did most early scholarly works on Orwell, especially in the United States. Therefore most opinions were fixed before a full range of the essays could be read, so these were received as an appendage to his main achievement, rather than (as I suspect) as his best work. (See Robert Klitzke, ‘Orwell and His Critics: an enquiry into the reception of and critical debate about George Orwell’s political works’, Ph.D. thesis, London University, 1977.)
2. See my Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, (Penguin Harmonds-worth, 1982).
3. I thank Dr Peter Marks of the University of Hull for this important and sobering point, among others. His Ph.D. thesis, ‘Orwell’s Essays’ (Edinburgh University, 1982), is the only sustained critical work on the subject. It deserves a wide readership.
4. The ILP was a small formation of left-wing ‘English socialists’, a fusion or alliance (less common in Scotland or Wales) of non-Marxist secular moralists, Christian socialists and independent Marxists (with some sympathies with Trotsky on international relations), united by both fierce egalitarianism and libertarianism, also by a common hatred of the Communist Party. See ‘Orwell and English Socialism’ in my Essays on Politics and Literature (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1989).
5. Anthony Burgess, 1985, Hutchinson, London, 1978, p. 20.
6. In my critical and annotated edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), I put the case for reading the book as specifically Swiftian satire. See also Frank Winter, ‘Was Orwell a Secret Optimist? The Narrative Function of the ‘Appendix’ to Nineteen Eighty-Four’, in Benoit J. Suykerbuyk (ed.), Essays From Oceania and Eurasia: George Orwell and 1984 (Progressef, Antwerp, 1984), pp. 79–90.
7. Hugh Kenner, ‘The Politics of the Plain Style’, in Robert Mulvihill (ed.), Reflection on America, 1984: an Orwell Symposium (University of Georgia Press, Athens, Ga., 1966), pp. 58–65.
8. Not David Lodge who, in his Modes of Modern Writing (Edward Arnold, London, 1977, pp. 9–17) shows that ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’ work well as ‘symbolic structures’, works of art, irrespective of whether they are fact, fiction or a bit of both. See also the Introduction to my George Orwell: A Life (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, third edition, pp. 29–39); unhappily, if honestly, in that edition I had to relate new evidence that Orwell did shoot an elephant (pp. 586–9). But Lodge’s point still stands.
9. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, 1939, section 4. The sentence ‘Where are the English coarse fish now?’ contains a once-powerful historical echo and political parallel. Every English schoolboy used to know that the brave Protestant, Bishop Hugh Latimer, came out of prison and preached a sermon in front of Henry VIII against the new, economically efficient, privatized enclosures taken from the old common lands, favoured by the king’s courtiers: ‘the sheep are eating up the land … Where are the English yeomen now?’
10. H. G. Wells, The History of Mr Polly, chapter IX, section 3.
Bibliographical Note
The note at the end of each essay gives the original journal and year of publication. The initials that follow stand for the volumes of selected essays in which it was reprinted, whether in Britain or the USA. Sometimes the same collection has a different title in the two countries, but some of the collections were different. C.E. is Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (4 vols.); Cr.E. is Critical Essays; D.D. is Dickens, Dali and Others; E.Y.E. is England Your England; I.T.W. is Inside the Whale; O.R. is the Orwell Reader; S.E. is Shooting an Elephant; and S.J. is Such, Such Were the Joys.
This volume of essays follows the 1968 text of Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell but will in time be changed to follow the completely re-edited text of Dr Peter Davison’s The Complete Works of George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, 1986–). All recent reissues of Orwell’s books in Penguin have followed Davison’s text although his masterly notes and commentaries are in the Secker & Warburg edition.
Also Parts I and II wer reworked as a book, The English People (1947).
Horizon, September 1941; Cr.E., D.D.; O.R.; C.E.
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The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1968
Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1945, 1952, 1953, 1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Peng
uin Books 1970
Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1958
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4
first published by Martin Secker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968
This volume published as The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, 1984
Reprinted with an Introduction 1994
Reprinted under the current title in Penguin Classics 2000
Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1984
Introduction copyright © Bernard Crick, 1994
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-118306-0
1. Why I Write
1. This poem first appeared in the Adelphi, December 1936.
7. Charles Dickens
1. Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical by T. A. Jackson, 1937.
2. The History of the Fairchild Family by May M. Sherwood, 3 parts, 1818–47.
3. Hard Times was published as a serial in Household Words and Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round. Forster says that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it ‘much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each’. Dickens himself complained of the lack of ‘elbow-room’. In other words, he had to stick more closely to the story. [Author’s footnote.]
4. Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part. But any action by such a character would seem incongruous. [Author’s footnote.]
5. Messrs John Player & Sons issued two series of cigarette cards entitled ‘Characters from Dickens’ in 1913; they reissued them as a single series in 1923.
6. Frank Fairleigh by F. E. Smedley, 1850; The Adventurers of Mr Verdant Green by Cuthbert Bede (pseud. of Edward Bradley), 1853; Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures by Douglas Jerrold (reprinted from Punch, 1846).
7. From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): ‘You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it … Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.’ [Author’s footnote.]
8. Boys’ Weeklies
1. This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’, who are one and the same person! See articles in Horizon, May 1940, and Summer Pie, summer 1944. [Author’s footnote 1945]
2. There are several corresponding girls’ papers. The Schoolgirl is companion-paper to the Magnet and has stories by ‘Hilda Richards’. The characters are interchangeable to some extent. Bessie Bunter, Billy Burner’s sister, figures in the Schoolgirl. [Author’s footnote.]
3. This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper. [Author’s footnote.]
9. Inside the Whale
1. Published in 1932. [Authors footnote.]
2. This is in fact the first line of Poem No. 10 in Cecil Day Lewis’s early volume of poetry The Magnetic Mountain.
3. Inside the Whale.
10. My Country Right or Left
1. On 21 August 1939 Ribbentrop was invited to Moscow and on 23 August he and Molotov signed the Russo-German Pact.
11. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius
1. For example:
‘I don’t want to join the bloody Army,
I don’t want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam,
I’d rather stay at home,
Living on the earnings of a whore.’
But it was not in that spirit that they fought. [Author’s footnote.]
2. It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money. Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal five per cent of the turnover of the football pools during the same period. [Author’s footnote.]
3. Written before the outbreak of the war in Greece. [Authors footnote.]
4. It is interesting to notice that Mr Kennedy, U.S.A. Ambassador in London, remarked on his return to New York in October 1940 that as a result of the war ‘democracy is finished’. By ‘democracy’, of course, he meant private capitalism. [Author’s footnote.]
13. The Art of Donald McGill
1. Reviewing Applesauce, a variety show, in Time and Tide, 7 September 1940, Orwell wrote: ‘Anyone wanting to see something really vulgar should visit the Holborn Empire, where you can get quite a good matinée seat for three shillings. Max Miller, of course, is the main attraction.
‘Max Miller, who looks more like a Middlesex Street hawker than ever when he is wearing a tail coat and shiny top hat, is one of a long line of English comedians who have specialized in the Sancho Panza side of life, in real lowness. To do this probably needs more talent than to express nobility. Little Tich was a master at it. There was a music-hall farce which Little Tich used to act in, in which he was supposed to be factotum to a crook solicitor. The solicitor is giving him his instructions:
’‘Now, our client who’s coming this morning is a widow with a good figure. Are you following me?’
‘Little Tich: ‘I’m ahead of you.’
‘As it happens, I have seen this farce acted several times with other people in the same part, but I have never seen anyone who could approach the utter baseness that Little Tich could get into these simple words. There is a touch of the same quality in Max Miller. Quite apart from the laughs they give one, it is important that such comedians should exist. They express something which is valuable in our civilization and which might drop out of it in certain circumstances. To begin with, their genius is entirely masculine. A woman cannot be low without being disgusting, whereas a good male comedian can give the impression of something irredeemable and yet innocent, like a sparrow. Again, they are intensely national. They remind one how closely knit the civilization of England is, and how much it resembles a family, in spite of its out-of-date class distinctions. The startling obscenities which occur in Applesauce are only possible because they are expressed in ‘doubles entendres which imply a common background in the audience. Anyone who had not been brought up on the Pink ‘Un would miss the point of them. So long as comedians like Max Miller are on the stage and the comic coloured postcards which express approximately the same view of life are in the stationers’ windows, one knows that the popular culture of England is surviving …’
14. Rudyard Kipling
1. A Choke of Kipling’s Verse made by T.S. Eliot.
2. Published in a volume of collected essays, The Wound and the Bow. [Author’s footnote 1945.]
3. On the first page of his recent book, Adam and Eve, Mr Middleton Murry quotes the well-known lines:
Essays Page 67
