91Èȱ¬

'Quintessentially English'

A writer can sometimes have more influence on the mentality of political activists than the most reasonable of politicians. Orwell once said, '...above all I wanted to make political writing into an art'. That he did and his provocations, sometimes perverse and extreme, were always deliberately intended to challenge his readers - to make them think, or even to think twice.

He was an English Socialist of the classic kind, in the same mould as Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan - left-wing, but also libertarian, egalitarian and hostile to the Communist Party. In addition he was quite un-theoretical, almost anti-theoretical. He maintained that no person or party was above criticism: when he was a member of the old left-wing Independent Labour Party he wrote that 'no writer can be a loyal member of a political party'.

Orwell was quintessentially English in his love of the countryside and in his Protestant conscience, which made him angry at injustice and concerned for the plight of the poor, even if he was a firm rationalist and unbeliever. And he was English in his forthright outspokenness - 'liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear'.

The writer's Englishness was not, however, that of the upper classes; it belonged to the radical tradition of Cobbett, Blake, Bunyan and the Levellers. His mastery of the plain style of writing and personal unconcern for anything other than a plain style of living was all of a piece with the ordinary people whom he wished to reach in his writing, in the tradition of Wells and Dickens rather than modern and now post-modern novelists.

Orwell's was an Englishness far removed from what was called by his contemporary, the Christian socialist Richard Tawney, 'the acquisitive society' (today's 'consumer society'). In other words he was one of the 'awkward squad', an Etonian who despised the establishment; he might have been happier in Cromwell's New Model Army of 1646 than he was in the 91Èȱ¬ Guard of 1941.

Down and out in Burma, Paris and London

The canal in Wigan, inspiration for Orwell's 1936 novel  © This 'awkward squad' member's real name was Eric Blair, and he was born in India in 1903, son of an official in the Opium Service; he was brought to England by his mother at the age of three. His family was what he called sardonically, 'lower-upper middle class', that is 'upper-middle class without money'. He was crammed for a scholarship to Eton, but did little work there, already being something of an odd man out 'agin the system'. Most of his school friends went on to Cambridge, but he entered the Burma Police, a satisfyingly second-class part of the Imperial Civil Service. He stuck it for five years, but resigned in 1927, having come to hate the social pretentiousness of the British in Burma, especially their indifference to Burmese culture.

All this poured out in Orwell's first published novel, Burmese Days (1935). The work is often taken to be socialist, because it is anti-imperialist and because we know from his Down and Out in Paris and London that the author spent time among tramps and down-and-outs - in order to see at first hand, not from books or reports, if the British treated their poor as they did the Burmese and the Indians. He thought, on the whole, they did, although later he admitted that he was mistaken in seeing tramps as the extreme of working-class poverty, rather than as a highly differentiated sub-class.

Between 1927 and 1934, when asked where he stood politically, Orwell would often reply simply, 'I'm a Tory anarchist'. He was an individualist who resented one man or one culture imposing its values on another; and though familiar with socialist arguments about economic exploitation, he did not consider himself a socialist until 1935.

A year later he published The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), a clinical but moving account of living among the unemployed of the real working class. To this he added an eccentric and provocative final section, simultaneously announcing his conversion to socialism and his scorn for many socialist intellectuals, whom he described as so bemused by 'the myth of Soviet power' and Marxist ideology that they had lost their traditional care for freedom and had failed to understand the nature of working people. Orwell's adoption of a plain and colloquial style of writing then became an attempt, highly unsuccessful at first, to reach all those whose only education beyond the age of 14 was the free public library.

War

Poster from the Spanish civil war: 'Peasants! The revolution is as necessary as the shoots on the vine'  © Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republic, without intending to report or to write, but nonetheless his non-fiction account Homage to Catalonia (1938) resulted. It sold badly at the time but is now seen as a classic, honest description of war, and one of the shrewdest polemics against the Stalinist attempt to dominate both the Spanish Republic and the whole of the international left-wing movement. For a brief period, until 1939, he was militantly anti-war, close to pacifism. He remained a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and was often mistakenly called Trotskyite because of his strong left-wing views - he regarded traditional Labour party members as milk-and-water compromisers. Meanwhile, he scraped a thin living as a novelist and reviewer.

With the outbreak of World War Two, Orwell left the ILP, which he considered tainted by pacifism. Moved by hatred of Fascism and Hitlerism, he wrote a great polemic, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), where he argued with fervid optimism that a social revolution was taking place in the ranks of the British army. He set out to rescue patriotism from nationalism, trying to show that the roots of English patriotism could be seen as radical rather than Conservative.

Being tubercular, he was not accepted for military service and wasted two years in the 91Èȱ¬'s Far Eastern Service before becoming literary editor of Tribune, where Aneurin Bevan was editor. He stayed in this wholly congenial post until the end of the war.

A warning

Nineteen Eighty-Four was dramatised for the screen  © Early in the war Orwell conceived a grand design for a three-volume novel of social analysis and warning, which would deal with the decay of the old order, the betrayal of the revolution and the consequences of English totalitarianism. This design never came to be, but the pre-war novels, like Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air, do have some such connection with his post-war masterpiece Animal Farm (1945) and with his most famous work Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Animal Farm is a story of how the revolution of a group of animals fighting for liberty and equality was betrayed by power-hungry (Stalinist) pigs. It is quite clear that with Animal Farm Orwell did not intend to write a parable of the impossibility of revolution; equally, Nineteen Eighty-Four was not a morbid prophecy of what was sure to happen in society, but a savage, Swiftian satiric warning of what could happen if power was pursued for its own sake. Many right-wing American critics, however, read him in a contrary sense, some mistakenly, others deliberately.

His values remained those of a left-wing socialist until his early death from tuberculosis in 1950, although his hope of seeing 'the Republic' emerge after 1945 had vanished by then. In these years, in the British press, he criticised the Attlee government for losing the chance to establish 'real socialism', although in American left-wing journals he was typically realistic about the difficulties of doing so in a virtually bankrupt post-war Britain. He also argued for a democratic socialist United States of Europe. And he was perhaps the first to use the phrase 'the cold war' and see how mutual possession of the atomic bomb would divide the world into two implacable hostile camps.

There is so much more to Orwell than just his books, impressive though they are. Some critics plausibly describe his genius as an essayist. 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' fall ambiguously between the genres of short-story and personal recollection, but both are moral writing of great stature. His polemical and discursive Tribune columns, 'As I Please', virtually invented mixed-column journalism. Sardonic humour is found throughout his journalism, as when he mocked the fiercely urban readers of Tribune, at the time of the battle for Stalingrad, by devoting his columns to the pleasure of watching toads mating and hares boxing - or to the glory of a six-penny Woolworth rose. When letters of protest rolled in he replied that in his idea of the classless society there would be more time, not less, for such pleasures.

Beyond his time

The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, Burmese Days, Shooting an Elephant  © Orwell wrote major essays on censorship, plain language, the social beliefs embodied in boys' magazines, and against pornography and violence: he believed passionately in liberty, but also in condemning harshly the morally and aesthetically bad. He wrote, like Dickens, Morris and Wells before him, for those whose only university was the free public library or the extra-mural class.

All in all he became the living embodiment of that old English socialism that was not anti-parliamentary but was always suspicious of what power - or the pursuit of it - could do to people whom he described as 'the backstairs crawlers and the arse-lickers of the Parliamentary Labour Party'. Of course, he voted Labour, although it is doubtful that he ever joined the party. Had he done so, he would have been a bundle of trouble. He was expert in rubbing his own cat's fur backwards.

Many writers and columnists try to imitate Orwell, but behind his writing was a unique and strange set of experiences that few now can - or would care to - emulate. He seems a figure born almost out of time, a figure from the English Civil War born into the early 20th century. However, his growing reputation, and the great sales of his writings after his death, perhaps show that we feel some loss of integrity, or of great causes to support, as we survey a troubled world while cocooned in a comfortable consumer society. The critic V.C. Pritchett called him 'the wintry conscience of a generation', but Orwell might have added that it was a 'long generation'.

Find out more

Books

All Orwell's major works are in Penguin, as are two collections of essays:

George Orwell: Essays with an introduction by Bernard Crick (2000)

Orwell's England with an introduction by Ben Pimlott (2001)

Biographies and studies:

Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens (2002)

Orwell's Politics by John Newsinger admirable (1999)

Orwell: the authorized biography by Michael Shelden (1991)

Orwell: a Life by Bernard Crick (1980)

The Crystal Spirit: a study of George Orwell by George Woodcock (1970)

About the author

Sir Bernard Crick, academic, essayist and journalist, is author George Orwell: A Life (Penguin Books), In Defence of Politics, Political Thoughts and Polemics, Essays on Politics and Literature, Essays on Citizenship and Crossing Borders: Political Essays. He is emeritus professor of politics at London University and a fellow of Birkbeck College. He has lived in Edinburgh since 1984 and was active in the devolution movement. In 1997 David Blunkett made him chair of the advisory group on the teaching of citizenship and democracy in English schools, and subsequently adviser on citizenship to the Department for Education.