Fifty Orwell Essays Read online

boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff

  that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very

  large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including

  many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with

  it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as

  hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.

  All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into

  them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist,

  that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that

  foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort

  of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these

  papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the

  twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER

  and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press,

  which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more

  than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are

  closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This

  in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were

  not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically

  vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in

  which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy

  doesn't?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to

  people like Lord Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the

  whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this

  level no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such

  thing as a left-wing boys' paper?

  At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so

  horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if

  it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing

  round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I

  received was of the question-and-answer kind:

  Q. 'Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?'

  A. 'No, Comrade.'

  Q. 'Why, Comrade?'

  A. 'Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is

  the symbol of tyranny and oppression,' etc., etc.

  Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper

  deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that

  the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I have quoted

  above, but does anyone doubt that they would be SOMETHING like it?

  Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it

  would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet

  Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow

  literature apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as

  it is at all vigorously 'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist

  paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the

  DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At

  this moment, therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time

  likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something

  almost beyond hoping for.

  But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason

  why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up with

  snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in the

  HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts; they are merely

  adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine

  the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a

  paper as thrilling and lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and

  'ideology' a little more up to date. It is even possible (though this

  raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same

  literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of

  story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-class

  life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the

  last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of

  left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.

  Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their

  social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no

  doubt copies would still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they

  were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their

  inspiration was 'left'. If, for instance, a story described police

  pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of

  view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is

  the Soviet film CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in

  London. Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,

  CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar

  Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one

  thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by

  the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one)--a

  performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise

  the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there--heroic

  fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses,

  love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,

  except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the Russian

  Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the

  Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a

  lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the

  other.

  Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature

  is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely

  pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is

  a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. ALL fiction from

  the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the

  interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the

  blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or

  other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only

  unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no

  impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe

  nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.

  CHARLES DICKENS (1940)

  I

  Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the

  burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you

  come to think of it.

  When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of

  Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with

  his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a

  Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn
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br />   Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as

  'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and

  both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as

  Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in

  her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin

  went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found

  Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out

  in the middle of a scene.

  Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by

  it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and

  Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in

  this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him

  unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the

  general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts

  published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS

  SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the

  most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents

  which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,

  and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed

  invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a

  writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his

  private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was

  just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him

  appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite

  different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends

  than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was

  a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might

  truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt

  this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was

  anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in

  Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to

  deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens

  attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been

  approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,

  more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so

  completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its

  attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like

  the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful

  tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my

  throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong

  resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that

  lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite

  in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking

  everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder

  whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

  Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As

  usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding

  what he was NOT.

  In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to

  imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the

  proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of

  novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in

  fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This

  statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to

  see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly

  good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about

  criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class

  intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make

  the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do

  find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as

  objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's

  stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If

  one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter

  is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,

  clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no

  portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in

  HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are

  probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for

  instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not

  successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader

  which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he

  is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A

  burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative

  cross-section of the English working class.

  Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a

  'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.

  Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner

  soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will

  be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is

  worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much

  better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.

  He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a

  series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,

  and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but

  important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the

  existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon

  this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it

  before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.

  Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting

  them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that

  society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'

  that one begins to grasp his position.

  The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively

  moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in

  his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational

  system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in

  their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,

  or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that

  Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear

  sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he

  believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in

  reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be
/>   difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the

  economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make

  any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like

  OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with

  living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to

  suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of

  course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again

  from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and

  indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of

  LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It

  is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved

  of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word

  'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian

  meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is

  not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,

  its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is

  that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be

  rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been

  morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well

  enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social

  criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,

  unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is

  one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would

  behave decently the world would be decent.

  Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of

  authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens

  figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's

  early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not

  necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a

  superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising

  his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out

  of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a

  pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or

  Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who

  was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the

  first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it

  is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this

  character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier

  books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same

  figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.

  Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the

  middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one

  who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT

  EXPECTATIONS--GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on

  patronage--and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by

  Gradgrind after his reformation. The character reappears in a rather

  different form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK

  HOUSE--one might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in

  these books the good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a

  RENTIER. This is significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class,

  he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for

  him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the

  Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's wages.

  The seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens

  wrote in the fifties is that by that time he had grasped the

  helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society.

  Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published