George Orwell : A Literary Companion [1 ed.] 9781476634548, 9781476666778

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George Orwell

McFarland literary cOMpaniOns by

Mary ellen snOdGrass

1. August Wilson (2004) 2. Barbara Kingsolver (2004) 3. Amy Tan (2004) 4. Walter Dean Myers (2006) 5. Kaye Gibbons (2007) 6. Jamaica Kincaid (2008) 8. Peter Carey (2010) 10. Leslie Marmon Silko (2011) 13. Isabel Allende (2012) 15. Brian Friel (2017) by

phyllis t. dircks

7. Edward Albee (2010) by

erik haGe

9. Cormac McCarthy (2010) by

rOcky WOOd

11. Stephen King (2011) by

tOM henthOrne

12. William Gibson (2011) by

Mark cOnnelly

14. Saul Bellow (2016) 18. George Orwell (2018) by

laurence W. MazzenO

16. James Lee Burke (2017) by JaMes

F. brOderick

17. James Joyce (2018)

George Orwell A Literary Companion Mark cOnnelly McFarland literary companions, 18

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina

alsO by Mark cOnnelly and FrOM McFarland Saul Bellow: A Literary Companion (2016) The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927–1979: A Cultural and Literary History (2008; paperback 2012) The IRA on Film and Television: A History (2012)

library OF cOnGress catalOGuinG-in-publicatiOn data

names: connelly, Mark, 1951– author. title: George Orwell : a literary companion / Mark connelly. description: Jefferson, north carolina : McFarland & company, inc., publishers, 2018 | series: McFarland literary companions ; 18 | includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2018041808 | isbn 9781476666778 (softcover : acid free paper) subjects: lcsh: Orwell, George, 1903–1950—criticism and interpretation. classification: lcc pr6029.r8 z6263 2018 | ddc 828/.91209—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041808

♾

british library catalOGuinG data are available

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6677-8 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-3454-8 © 2018 Mark connelly. all rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image © 2018 shutterstock printed in the united states of america

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

to Michele Gloede

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Table of Contents 1

Preface

3

Introduction

Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works

the companion

5

29

Appendix A: On Literature, Language, Politics and Life Appendix B: Writing and Research Topics Bibliography Index

vii

190

199

187

181

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Preface regarded as one of the greatest writers in the english language, George Orwell developed an international reputation with the publication of his last two novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. although he died at 46, Orwell left behind a rich legacy of novels, articles, and commentaries that have influenced social and political thinkers throughout the world. his essays are considered models of excellent writing and are widely anthologized in college textbooks. his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the most-read books in the english-speaking world, hitting american best-seller lists in 2017. translated into more than 60 languages, the novel has inspired a number of motion pictures, television programs, an opera, and a broadway play. George Orwell: A Literary Companion is designed to provide students, instructors, researchers, and general readers with both factual and critical material to help them better understand and evaluate Orwell’s work and cultural contributions. the literary companion contains five sections: a chronology of Orwell’s life and career; more than 175 entries about his works, literary characters, and figures in his life; famous quotations; suggestions for research, writing, and further study; and an extensive bibliography. First, the chronology provides an in-depth biographical overview of George Orwell’s life, literary career, and professional accomplishments that traces the people and events that influenced much of his thinking and many of his novels. the chronology chronicles Orwell’s career, including his time fighting in the spanish civil War and his wartime work with the bbc. it also documents his critical reception and discusses controversies in his life and career. this chronology provides valuable details for Orwell’s readers because he drew heavily upon personal experiences to create fictional characters and analyze political events in his essays. the main text, “the companion,” provides analytical summaries of his works, descriptions of major characters, and entries about significant figures in his life and career. Major entries include lists of relevant sources for further reading. the third section is an appendix consisting of statements Orwell made throughout his life about literature, language, life, and politics. these entries are dated to reflect Orwell’s intellectual development. the fourth section contains writing and research topics designed to assist both instructors and students. these questions can enhance critical reading, stimulate class discussion, direct students in writing analytical papers, and guide them in conducting research.

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Preface a full bibliography of books, essays, and articles provides sources for research and study. these materials include both primary and secondary sources and are selected based on their value and readability. Finally, a comprehensive index allows readers to quickly locate titles, characters, and subjects relevant to the study of George Orwell and his works.

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Introduction George Orwell, born eric blair (1903–1950), was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. his observations and comments about society, language, politics, government, and culture remain relevant in the 21st century. his last two books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have been translated into scores of foreign languages and have stayed in print since their publication in the late 1940s. both are widely-read in high schools and colleges throughout the english-speaking world and have inspired numerous stage and film versions. Orwell’s 80-year-old essays “a hanging” and “shooting an elephant” are taught in university composition classes and are widely anthologized. Orwell lived a life of contradiction. he graduated from eton but did not attend university. he joined the indian imperial police but resigned to become a critic of imperialism. a dedicated socialist, he was a harsh critic of the left. he decried slums but criticized the housing developments rising to take their place. an anti–nazi, he opposed war crimes trials. a non-believer, he requested a church burial in his will. above all, Orwell stood for honesty and individual liberty. he explored life first-hand, joining homeless men tramping from shelter to shelter, sleeping in open fields with hop pickers, touring coal mines, living in crowded rooming houses in the north of england, and shivering in squalid trenches during the spanish civil War. he also experienced the ugly brutality of power politics. Wounded by a Fascist sniper, he had to flee spain to avoid arrest by communists. Orwell was keenly sensitive to cant and hypocrisy. he criticized the british tory who advocated self-determination in eastern europe but opposed it in india and the british leftist who was “perfectly ready to accept the products of empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the empire together.” Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris and London recorded his experiences washing dishes in paris and tramping in england. living with the poor, he appreciated the sheer exhaustion of their lives and observed how misguided social reforms made their plight worse. years later he explored the lives of miners and the unemployed in the north of england to write The Road to Wigan Pier. after documenting the harsh and dangerous conditions faced by colliers, he reminded his readers that everyone in britain owed their lives “to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, digging their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.” although a committed socialist by that point, Orwell ended his book criticizing the advocates of socialism he derided as “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded

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Introduction fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like blue-bottles to a dead cat.” in 1936 Orwell went to spain to fight Fascism. the organization he joined was poorly equipped and badly led. he spent weeks at a time enduring cold and hunger in the mountains. in barcelona he saw a genuine revolution being suppressed by the republican government and documented the cynical strategies used by communists to serve stalin. in his memoir Homage to Catalonia, Orwell commented that objective records of the spanish civil War did not exist, its narrative driven by party propaganda and lies printed in the press. these observations inspired the invention and revision of history dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four. in his essays Orwell called for honesty in both thought and expression, attacking the way political language was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable” so that bombing villages, burning homes, and machine-gunning cattle could be called “pacification” and executions without trial labeled the “elimination of unreliable elements.” Orwell believed that to remain honest, writers should work for a political party by canvassing voters and delivering speeches—but never writing for it. literature, he asserted, demands freedom of thought. “imagination, like certain wild animals,” he insisted, “will not breed in captivity,” and any writer “who denies that fact … is, in effect, demanding his own destruction.” Orwell’s novels depict individuals fighting forces beyond their control. in Burmese Days John Flory is driven to suicide from loneliness and despair. in the depression-era novels A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell’s protagonists attempt to rebel against their circumstances only to return to their old lives. although she has lost her faith in God, dorothy hare sees no other option but to return to her rector father and a life of sterile servitude. Gordon comstock abandons his literary career to resume his old job and embrace the life of the little man he once ridiculed. in Coming Up for Air George bowling considers life in britain in 1938, dreading not the looming war with hitler but what he calls the “after-war” with “the food-queues and the secret police and loudspeakers telling you what to think.” Orwell achieved international fame with his last two novels. his fable Animal Farm became an immediate best seller with its tale of a farmyard rebellion that promises freedom and abundance but quickly descends into corruption and tyranny. dying of tuberculosis, Orwell labored to complete his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a grim dystopian tract against totalitarianism with its chilling vision of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” seventy years after its publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four remains one of the most popular novels in the english language, its sales surging in an era of enhanced surveillance, media manipulation, and compromised elections.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works June 25, 1903 eric arthur blair (later George Orwell) was born in Motihari, bengal (now bihari), india. his father richard blair worked in the Opium department of the indian civil service, which he joined in 1875 at the age of 18. Opium was both legal and widely available in india. the british government operated a monopoly, producing thousands of tons of opium annually in bengal for the chinese market. exports were highly profitable, generating one-sixth of india’s revenue. at the age of 39 blair married 21-year-old ida limouzin. the daughter of a Frenchman and englishwoman, ida was born near london but spent most of her life in Moulmein, burma, where her father worked as a boat builder and teak merchant. after 35 years of service, richard blair retired and later returned to england on a pension of £438 a year. a steadfast supporter of the british empire, blair was dismissive of his son’s literary career, disappointed that he did not continue his government service. 1904 ida blair moved to britain with eric and his older sister Marjorie, settling in henleyon-thames in Oxfordshire. richard blair remained in india for another seven years, visiting his family only once during a three-month leave in 1907. Orwell’s memories of life in henley were largely positive and provided the background for scenes in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air. 1911 eric blair received a scholarship and in september enrolled in st. cyprian’s, a public school in sussex, 60 miles from london. as a scholarship student, he endured teasing from wealthier classmates who peppered less affluent pupils with questions about their parents’ incomes, the size of their houses, and the number of their servants. at st. cyprian’s blair befriended cyril connolly, who later became his editor. blair read thackeray, kipling, and h. G. Wells and began writing poems, often critiqued by connolly. With the outbreak of the First World War, a patriotic spirit swept through st. cyprian’s, with students performing volunteer work. blair wrote a patriotic poem that was published in the Henley Standard, a local newspaper, and read to the entire school. On holidays he returned home and became friends with Jacintha buddicom, who wrote about their relationship in Eric & Us, published in 1974. during these years blair began to experience respiratory maladies that would plague him through-

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works out the rest of his life. Orwell captured his distaste for st. cyprian’s in his essay “such, such Were the Joys” published two years after his death. 1917 blair received a king’s scholarship to eton. he continued to write short stories and poems, some of which appeared in school publications. in addition, he worked as the business manager for Election Times, the school magazine, and edited another publication, College Times. blair briefly studied with aldous huxley, then a substitute French teacher. a year after blair entered eton, his former classmate from st. cyprian’s, cyril connolly arrived, though they did not collaborate on literary works. the blair family relocated to london. at age 60, richard blair came out of retirement and joined the british army. he was sent to France, where he oversaw a stable of mules at a military depot in the port city of Marseilles. ida blair and her daughter took jobs related to the war effort. eric blair, like many of his eton classmates, would later recall feeling guilty for being too young to serve his country. 1919–1920 blair continued his studies at eton, focusing on French, latin, history, shakespeare, and geography, but remained at the bottom of his class. reading Galsworthy, Wells, Jack london, and shaw on his own, he later declared that at 18 he was “both a snob and a revolutionary.” cyril connolly stated that blair kept his distance from fellow students, preferring to read on his own and engage in solitary pastimes such as swimming and fishing. at six foot three, blair was sought after to participate in sports but was hampered by chronic lung problems. at eton he began smoking, purchasing loose tobacco and rolling his own cigarettes. despite recurring respiratory ailments, he continued to smoke heavily for the rest of his life. in the summer of 1920 blair attended a training camp for officers. Missing a railway connection and lacking money for a room, blair spent a night sleeping in a farm field. this accidental introduction into tramping led blair to write a friend about the incident. although he stated he probably would not wish to repeat the experience, blair later became fascinated with the lives of the homeless men who lived outdoors or slept in shelters known as “spikes.” 1921 blair left eton in december, the same month his family moved to southwold, a modest seaside resort town in suffolk. unlike most etonians, blair did not attend cambridge or Oxford. despite his literary inclinations, blair failed to distinguish himself academically and did not earn grades high enough to secure a university scholarship. living on a fixed income, richard blair was unwilling or unable to bear the costs of a university education on his own and urged his son to seek a career in government service. etonian classmates stated that eric blair had long expressed interest in serving in the Far east. 1922 in June Orwell completed the week-long entrance examinations required to apply to the indian imperial police. he took tests in latin, Greek, and drawing, placing seventh out of 26 (the class having shrunk). his standing dropped to 21 out of 23 after his performance in a riding test. Orwell listed his choice of postings as burma, bombay, united provinces, Madras, and the punjab, stating that he had relatives living in burma and that his father had worked in united provinces. On October 27 Orwell boarded the S.S. Herefordshire bound for rangoon. When the ship docked in ceylon, Orwell observed an english police sergeant brutally kick

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works an asian coolie struggling with a heavy piece of luggage, an event he regarded as his introduction to the racist nature of british imperialism. arriving in burma in late november, blair attended the police training academy in Mandalay, where he studied legal procedures, criminal law, and the burmese language. as in eton, blair kept apart from his peers, earning a reputation as an eccentric loner. at the time burma was known for its high crime rate, especially homicide. Gangs called dacoits robbed merchants and terrorized villages. nationalism was growing, along with calls for burmese independence. buddhist priests organized demonstrations and urged the burmese to boycott british imports. little documentary evidence about blair’s burmese experiences survives. although he wrote letters home to britain, none were preserved. in addition, many government records were destroyed during the Japanese occupation of burma during the second World War. 1924 in January blair completed his training and was sent to his first posting, a small village called Myaungmya. as an assistant police superintendent, blair’s work was essentially administrative, supervising burmese and indian patrolmen, observing interrogations, and testifying in court. later in the year, blair was sent to twante, a small settlement with only a handful of europeans. here blair moved from substation to substation, settling minor disputes among the burmese. From twante, he was sent to syriam to guard an oil refinery. though polluted by fumes and industrial waste, syriam was 20 miles from rangoon. blair was able to visit the city to dine in restaurants and purchase books. in rangoon he met fellow etonian christopher hollis who was on his way back to britain following a trip to australia and new zealand. 1925–1926 in september 1925 blair was sent to insein, site of a large prison. this may have been the location where blair reportedly witnessed an execution that inspired his essay “a hanging.” in april 1926 blair was posted to Moulmein, a larger city with a significant european community, which he used as the setting for his essay “shooting an elephant.” blair’s maternal grandmother lived in Moulmein with her husband, a senior official in the Forestry service. in december blair was transferred to katha in upper burma, the setting for his first novel Burmese Days. 1927 While stationed in katha, blair became seriously ill with dengue fever and was likely treated by an indian physician who may have provided the model for the character of dr. veraswami in Burmese Days. Weakened by fever, blair contemplated his future and decided to leave imperial police service to become a writer. he applied for a medical leave that would allow him to return home to recover. Granted an eightmonth leave, blair left burma on July 14 to return to britain. after his ship docked in Marseilles in august, blair disembarked and encountered a demonstration of leftists protesting on behalf of sacco and vanzetti. he traveled north to tour paris then crossed the channel to inform his parents that he had decided to resign his commission to become a writer. richard blair was greatly disappointed with his son, who was abandoning a secure position paying £660 a year. that fall eric blair sent his resignation letter to the inspector-General of police in rangoon. he stipulated that his resignation take place on January 1, 1928, even though it would mean forgoing two months’ salary remaining on his sick leave. later in the year he moved to an unheated room on the portobello road in london to launch a writing career. inspired

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works in part by Jack london, who explored the city’s shabby east end to conduct research for his 1903 book The People of the Abyss, blair ventured into the slums, often disguising himself as a tramp. sleeping in rooming houses in the city and “spikes” in the countryside, blair sought to live among the poor and observe them at close range. Fearing his etonian accent and manners would betray him as an outsider, blair was surprised when he was he was readily accepted as homeless by the poor. 1928 interested in exploring other avenues of the down and out, blair moved to paris, finding a tenement room at no. 6 rue du pot de Fer in a working class neighborhood. although pursuing a literary career, blair met none of the famous writers associated with paris in the twenties. intent on studying the lives of the poor, he avoided the bars and cafes popular with artists, students, and tourists. blair did visit his aunt nellie limouzin, who had moved to paris a few years before to live with her companion, eugene adam, an advocate of esperanto. nellie limouzin provided her unemployed nephew with occasional meals and small sums of money. blair managed to publish a few articles in paris newspapers, but was unable to interest editors in his fiction. On October 6 blair’s first article “la censure en angleterre” appeared in Monde. a French newspaper Le Progrès Civique published four blair articles about the british unemployed, london beggars, burma, and tramps in French translation. in december his first article in english, “a Farthing newspaper,” appeared in G. K.’s Weekly. these articles, however, brought blair little money, and he was frustrated by the universal rejection of his attempts at fiction. 1929 While living in paris blair suffered a bout of bronchitis and coughed blood. Weak and feverish, he was admitted to the hôpital cochin, where he stayed in a public ward for three weeks. treated by uncaring doctors who handled him like a specimen, blair endured a treatment known as “cupping.” his experiences provided the background for his essay “how the poor die,” published in the 1940s. at one point during his paris stay, a girlfriend blair called “a little trollop” named suzanne robbed his room of his cash and luggage. after pawning items to purchase food, blair was forced to look for a job and spent ten weeks working as a dishwasher or plongeur at an expensive hotel. here he was able to study the lives of restaurant personnel, taking note of the hierarchy of chefs, cooks, waiters, and dishwashers. in december blair returned to england. Adelphi, edited by Max plowman, had accepted one of his articles, the first of many to appear in the magazine. 1930–1931 blair stayed at his parents’ home in southwold, venturing out to tramp throughout southern england or explore life among london’s poor. he sometimes slept in open fields and washed in public fountains. to support his writing career, he tutored students. in addition to writing, blair took up painting, completing several watercolors. When asked to name a profession during his stays in spikes, he described himself as a painter rather than a writer. by the end of 1930 he completed a draft of his memoir called Days in London and Paris. blair published reviews and articles in Adelphi, including a review of lewis Mumford’s biography of herman Melville. in 1931 the magazine printed “a hanging” and “the spike,” which catalogued his experiences among the homeless. he also published short pieces in New English Weekly and New Statesman and Nation. blair announced his intention to friends to record

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works his experiences hop picking. From august to september he worked in kent, maintaining a journal that included a lexicon of terms he learned from working in the fields. leaving kent, he moved to london. he began work on his first novel Burmese Days and wrote two short stories for Modern Youth, a new magazine that failed to appear, having gone bankrupt before its initial issue could be released. in december 1931 blair deliberately became “tolerably drunk” in order to be arrested. disappointed that he was released after two days, blair repeated his experiment, showing up drunk at a spike hoping to be arrested for violating the vagrancy act. When this attempt failed, he begged in full view of a police officer, only to be ignored. blair, nevertheless, documented his experiences in a short essay “clink.” the filth he endured in a crowded jail cell inspired a scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1932 blair submitted versions of his memoir Days in London and Paris to two publishers without success. in april he took a teaching job at the hawthorns, a private boys’ school in Middlesex, a place he soon ridiculed as a “foul place.” nevertheless, he took an interest in the students’ education, writing and staging a school play called King Charles II at a local church. that summer he revised his memoir and sent it to victor Gollancz, who accepted the book for publication in august, offering blair an advance of £40. Gollancz favored changing the title to The Confessions of a Down and Out. blair objected to being labeled a “down and out” and preferred The Confessions of a Dishwasher. Gollancz finally settled on revising blair’s original title to Down and Out in Paris and London. blair spent his summer off from teaching in southwold working on Burmese Days. in southwold he dated eleanor Jaques, whose parents had retired to southwold. lacking money for hotel rooms, blair and eleanor engaged in open air trysts in the country, experiences he would recreate in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. in the fall blair returned to teaching and revising Down and Out in Paris and London, following victor Gollancz’s concerns about objectionable language. 1933 On January 9 Down and Out in Paris and London was published under the name George Orwell. eric blair had requested Gollancz use a pseudonym because he was not “proud” of the book and sent him several options, including kenneth Miles, h. lewis allways, George Orwell, and the name he used when tramping, p. s. burton. blair noted that he preferred George Orwell, which consisted of a standard british christian name “George” and “Orwell,” the name of an english river. although blair would be known as George Orwell to his readers and new acquaintances, he continued to be called eric by long term friends and colleagues, answering to both names depending on who addressed him. blair did not exclusively use his new pen name, signing reviews and poems appearing in Adelphi as eric blair or e.a.b. Orwell never officially changed his name, using eric blair to sign checks, contracts, leases, and legal documents. Down and Out in Paris and London received favorable reviews in the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. both W. h. davies, writing in New Statesman and Nation, and c. day lewis, writing in Adelphi, gave the book favorable notices. in June the book appeared in the united states, published by harper and brothers. J. b. priestly’s and

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works compton Mackenzie’s reviews supplied quotations that appeared on the american dust jacket. James Farrell provided a positive review in New Republic in October 1933. the initial printing of 1,500 copies sold well enough to justify two additional printings for a total of 3,000 copies. sales, however, soon tapered off. the harper’s edition of 1,750 copies sold fewer than 1,400 copies after a year. a French edition appeared in 1935 and sold modestly, as did a czech translation published the same year. in 1940 penguin printed 55,000 six-penny paperbacks. income from the book during its first two years was not significant enough for Orwell to abandon teaching. the reviews, however, bolstered Orwell’s confidence in his writing ability, and he focused on the burma novel. in september Orwell started teaching at a private school in Middlesex. by december he was completing the final version of Burmese Days. late in the year he was hospitalized with pneumonia. 1934 in January Orwell returned to live with his parents in southwold, where he began his second novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. victor Gollancz would not accept Burmese Days, concerned about its reception in burma and india and possible libel charges. Orwell approached other british publishers without success. the american publisher harper and brothers, however, accepted the novel and released it on October 25. a week later Fred t. Marsh reviewed the book for the New York Times, calling it “a superior novel” that “tells an absorbing story” with “vividly real” characters and settings. Orwell hoped to sell 4,000 copies in the united states but fewer than a thousand copies were purchased. earlier that month Orwell had completed A Clergyman’s Daughter, submitting it to leonard Moore, a literary agent. Orwell’s comments about his new novel were apologetic, admitting that he had “made a muck” of a good idea. the book, he admitted, was “very disconnected” and “rather unreal” but it was the best he could produce. in november Orwell obtained a job at booklovers’ corner, a bookshop in hampstead owned by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. Orwell lived above the shop in the owners’ flat, along with Jon kimche, who also worked for the Westropes. kimche later became the editor of the Tribune that published many of Orwell’s reviews and articles. Working in a store catering to a largely middle-class customer base, Orwell became familiar with popular culture and the non-literary best sellers. the job required that Orwell work in the shop in the afternoons and sometimes assist Francis Westrope in purchasing books. the position paid little but supplied Orwell with a free room and time to continue his writing. his experiences selling books formed the basis of his 1936 essay “bookshop Memories” and provided the background for his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. 1935 in February Orwell began working on his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. that same month he was asked to make last minute changes to A Clergyman’s Daughter to avoid potential libel claims. victor Gollancz published it in March. the reviews, though reserved, were more positive than Orwell anticipated. in March Orwell met eileen Maud O’shaughnessy, a 30-year-old graduate student in educational psychology. descended from irish immigrants, she had taught in a

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works girls’ boarding school for a year before acquiring a small secretarial firm. she also worked at times as a secretary to her brother laurence, a noted chest specialist and surgeon who had been elected a Fellow of the royal college of surgeons. the coauthor of a book on tuberculosis, laurence O’shaughnessy would play an important role in Orwell’s later life. Orwell considered eileen a good match and by the fall was discussing marriage plans, although he confided to friends that he could only afford a Woolworth’s wedding ring. eileen shared many of Orwell’s interests and tastes but resisted his proposals. delayed because of concerns about possible libel suits, Burmese Days was published in britain on June 24 with revisions made to the text that had appeared in america. the name lackersteen, for example, was changed to the more common latimore. the first printing of 2,500 copies sold out, and a smaller second printing was ordered. the book received fewer reviews than Down and Out in Paris and London. cyril connolly, however, gave the book a highly favorable review, calling it “an admirable novel.” learning that his old eton classmate was now writing under the name Orwell, connolly had asked his editor at the New Statesman for permission to review his friend’s book. Orwell responded to the review with a letter, and the two men met for dinner. in 1940 connolly founded the magazine Horizon with peter Watson. Working as its editor, connolly published many of Orwell’s most famous essays. One of connolly’s assistants sonia brownell became Orwell’s second wife in 1949 just months before his death. in august Orwell began contributing book reviews to The New English Weekly, founded three years earlier by alfred Orage. the job paid little but provided him with free review copies of new books. On October 16 Orwell presented a lecture “confessions of a down and Out” to some 500 people who attended the south Woodford literary society in essex. Orwell’s talk about his tramping experiences was well-received and mentioned a few days later in a local newspaper article. the experience boosted Orwell’s confidence as a writer. that year Down and Out in Paris and London was published in France under the title La Vache enragée. in an introduction to the French edition, Orwell assured readers that he did not “exaggerate” his observations but admitted that, like other writers, he was “selective.” he assured French readers that his subject was universal poverty and that he did not intend to malign paris. “i would be hurt,” he stated, “if they believed i feel the least hostility toward a city that is very dear to me.” 1936 in January Orwell completed Keep the Aspidistra Flying. concerned about potential libel issues, he made substantial changes to the book before submitting it to victor Gollancz, who published it that april. the book received unfavorable reviews, even from Orwell’s friend cyril connolly who found the book inferior to Burmese Days. the book sold 2,194 copies in its first printing of 3,000. in late January Orwell left his job at the bookstore to begin work on his next book. Gollancz had commissioned him to investigate unemployment in northern england. With an advance of £500, Orwell traveled to Wigan, a town in Greater Manchester. he conducted research in local libraries to obtain data about deaths and accidents

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works involving coal miners, calculating that 8,000 workers had died in the mines in the previous seven years. Orwell visited the mines and was shocked by the conditions he discovered. Few of the tunnels allowed miners to stand upright, so they often had to crawl miles to get to the coal face to start work. Miners were not paid for the time they spent “traveling” underground, so that their seven-and-a-half-hour shift often meant spending ten hours a day in the pits. the damp air and coal dust aggravated Orwell’s chronic breathing problems. during his tour of one mine, Orwell failed to duck in time and hit a girder, which knocked him flat. his underground trips left him so ill and exhausted that he was bedridden for a full day. as with his previous tramping experiences, Orwell lived among the poor, sharing cramped quarters in rooming houses with unemployed men, pensioners, and commercial travelers. in February Orwell toured liverpool’s slums and dockyards. in March he attended a communist meeting in south yorkshire. the gathering was subdued with uninspiring speakers and a small, inattentive crowd. in contrast, Orwell witnessed that a british union of Fascists rally featuring its leader Oswald Mosley was lively and wellattended. Mosley told the crowd of 700 that their plight was caused by Jewish financiers who, among other things, funded the labour party. at the end of March Orwell returned to london. unwilling to search for a job or a flat, he traveled to Wallington, a village 35 miles north of the city, to rent an inexpensive cottage where he hoped he and eileen could live cheaply enough for him to devote himself to writing. he selected a stone cottage without electricity or running water. the previous owner had operated a post office and a grocery store out of the front room. Orwell reopened the shop on May 11, selling bacon, flour, and sugar to his neighbors. Much of his income came from selling candy to local children. Orwell found operating the shop preferable to working in a book store. unlike book readers, people shopping for staples or chocolate did not linger to browse or ask questions. they made quick purchases, leaving Orwell with time to read and write while still holding down a job. that spring Orwell worked on his book about the north of england he called The Road to Wigan Pier. the book contained two sections. the first documented the living conditions of miners and unemployed industrial workers. the second part consisted of Orwell’s observations about the poor, government welfare programs, and socialism. Orwell’s experiences in the north of england led him to embrace socialism and view Fascism as a genuine threat to britain. in his view, the left, associated with elitists and cultists, was failing to connect with the socially-conservative working class who found Fascism appealing with its promises of order and stability. though attracted to socialism, Orwell retained a sense of individuality, concerned that a classless society with a managed economy would reduce personal identity and freedom. Orwell married eileen O’shaughnessy using his legal name eric blair on June 9 at st. Mary’s church in Wallington, hertfordshire. eileen had left the university without completing her master’s degree. she and Orwell maintained the grocery store in their small cottage, managing to earn a small profit even during the slowest of times. that summer harper’s published an american edition of A Clergyman’s Daughter, which sold fewer than a thousand copies. based on the book’s poor sales, harper’s declined

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works to publish Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which did not appear in the united states until 1956. On december 15 Orwell submitted The Road to Wigan Pier to victor Gollancz, who offered to publish it as a standard trade book. Orwell had been following events in spain, where a military coup in Morocco sparked a civil war between rightwing nationalists and the leftist republican government in Madrid. he was anxious to witness the war and perhaps join the fighting against Fascist insurgents. believing that he might be denied entry into spain without leftist credentials, Orwell first met with harry pollitt, head of the british communist party. pollitt was hostile and dismissive, cutting their interview short and refusing to help Orwell. the independent labour party, however, was willing to vouch for Orwell and provided him with a letter of introduction to the organization’s spanish representative, John Mcnair. Orwell returned to paris, where he met henry Miller who attempted to dissuade him from going to spain. although he admired Miller’s writing, Orwell considered his apoliticism to be a selfish denial of reality. unable to change Orwell’s mind, Miller gave him a corduroy jacket as his contribution to the cause, not revealing that he would have given him the jacket no matter which side he fought for. plagued with chronic respiratory problems, Orwell doubted if he was suited for active military service. arriving in spain, Orwell noticed that many of the leftist troops were poorly trained teenagers. Given his prior police experience, he sensed he was better equipped than other recruits to fight Fascism. in barcelona Orwell met John Mcnair, who had read Burmese Days and Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell noted the revolutionary spirit of barcelona. class distinctions had evaporated. Most citizens dressed in working clothes, people greeted one another like equals, and waiters refused to take tips. Mcnair took Orwell to the lenin barracks where, using the name eric blair, he joined the military unit of the p.O.u.M. (Workers’ party of Marxist unification). Orwell spent a week drilling fellow volunteers who were disorganized and poorly armed. the republicans received weapons from the soviet union, but stalin distrusted leftist organizations that did not adhere to his policies and refused to support them. the p.O.u.M. was especially suspect because its newspaper had previously condemned stalin’s purge trials. in retaliation, kremlin representatives spread false rumors to discredit the p.O.u.M., claiming they were trotskyists and in league with the Fascists. 1937 in January Orwell’s unit was sent to the front, where he served for four months. at first he was ordered to defend a hillside position in aragon. it was a generally quiet sector with only occasional exchanges of sniper and artillery fire. Many of the early casualties resulted from accidental shootings by ill-trained soldiers. the greatest challenge facing the volunteers living in trenches and rough dugouts was the weather. Orwell suffered greatly in the cold, especially on sentry duty. the detachment was later transferred to another hillside near huesca where p.O.u.M. forces were attacking the town. this position exposed Orwell to greater shellfire. in February victor Gollancz informed eileen blair that he had decided to make The Road to Wigan Pier a left book club selection. Gollancz, stafford cripps, and John strachey had founded the book club in 1936 with the goal of mobilizing the

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works british left to struggle against war and Fascism. Members received a newsletter and a monthly book selected by Gollancz, strachey, and harold laski. book club titles, both fiction and non-fiction, had a clear political slant. the writers published in 1936 and 1937 included clement attlee, andré Malraux, arthur koestler, and clifford Odets. For Orwell, it meant that his book would reach a substantially larger audience. the trade edition of The Road to Wigan Pier was limited to 2,000 copies. by 1937 the left book club had 44,000 members, all of whom received The Road to Wigan Pier as the March 1937 selection. this made the book Orwell’s most widely published work and placed it in the hands of committed leftists throughout britain, elevating his literary and political stature. the selection of Orwell’s book was not without controversy. although he designated the book a left book club title, Gollancz insisted on writing a foreword that distanced himself and the club from Orwell’s conclusions. First, he announced that the club in no way endorsed Orwell’s book. he praised the opening chapters that graphically documented conditions faced by the poor in northern england but sharply criticized the second part of the book, dismissing Orwell as a middle-class “snob.” Gollancz claimed that he had “marked” more than a hundred passages where he disagreed with Orwell’s comments. specifically, he was offended by Orwell’s characterization of socialists as a tribe of “eccentrics” espousing nudism, vegetarianism, and feminism. Gollancz wondered how Orwell, who decried the problems faced by women burdened by miscarriages and numerous children, could label birth control advocates “cranks.” in addition, he objected to Orwell’s characterization of soviet commissars as “half-gramophones, half gangsters,” viewing this “curious indiscretion” as evidence of an unacceptable anti–russian bias. nevertheless, the broad dissemination of Orwell’s book enhanced his status and influence. that same month eileen accepted a job as a secretary for John Mcnair’s office in barcelona. in March she traveled to visit her husband at the front, where she posed with Orwell standing next to a machine gun. she stayed at the front in trenches and dugouts and witnessed several Fascist bombardments and machine gun fire attacks. later that month Orwell cut his hand, which became seriously infected. he stayed ten days at a hospital in Monflorite behind the lines. the hospital was filthy, and attendants robbed Orwell of many valuables, including his camera. he sent his remaining photographs to eileen for safe keeping. returning to the front, Orwell saw the heaviest fighting of his time in spain. Fifteen english volunteers, joined by an equal number of spanish fighters, conducted a raid against a Fascist position. after cutting through barbed wire, they attacked enemy emplacements with grenades. coming under heavy counter attack, they fell back, returning to their own lines covered in mud. the abortive attack provided diversionary cover for a larger assault by anarchist troops farther down the line. in april Orwell left the front and returned to barcelona. Wishing to participate in more meaningful attacks against the Fascists, he considered joining the international brigade fighting on the Madrid front. Orwell was distressed by the inefficiency and disorganization of leftist forces that he characterized as a “kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions” with so many abbreviations that spain appeared to be “suffering from a plague of initials.” in May the p.O.u.M. was attacked by both anarchists

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works and communists, and Orwell spent several tense days guarding the organization’s headquarters from the rooftop of a nearby movie house. Orwell decided not to join the international brigade, not wishing to belong to any communist-dominated organization. Orwell stayed loyal to the p.O.u.M. promoted to lieutenant, he returned to the front. early on the morning of May 20 Orwell went to relieve an american sentry and was shot in the throat by a Fascist sniper. Fortunately, the bullet missed his carotid artery. initially taken to the Monflorite hospital, he was transferred to another facility in sietamo. two days later he was taken to a larger, better-equipped hospital in lerida. he was driven in a car to barcelona, arriving on May 29. Orwell recovered quickly, though his voice remained hoarse for several weeks. While Orwell recuperated, the p.O.u.M. came under greater attack from the republican government, which denounced it as a Franco Fifth column organization. the party’s newspaper was banned, and in mid–June the p.O.u.M. itself was outlawed. eileen’s room was searched by policemen who confiscated books and papers. With his colleagues being arrested, Orwell had to go into hiding. republican government officials were seeking both the blairs and John Mcnair who had eluded capture. Orwell, eileen, and Mcnair managed to leave barcelona on June 23 by train posing as british tourists. returning to england at the end of June, Orwell submitted an article to the New Statesman reporting on his spanish experiences. his assertion that the republican government in Madrid had Fascist tendencies led the editor kingsley Martin to reject the article because it would antagonize british leftists who believed the struggling republic was a victim of Fascism. Martin, however, did suggest that Orwell write a book review about the spanish civil War. Orwell’s article about Franz borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit was also rejected but did appear in Time and Tide in July. Orwell wanted to write a book about his war experiences but learned that victor Gollancz was loath to publish anything critical of communist ambitions in spain, believing that it would harm the fight against Fascism. Orwell was contacted by Frederic Warburg, the director of secker & Warburg, who asked if he wanted to write a book about the spanish civil War. in august he attended an independent labour party school where he met several veterans he had served with. Orwell was increasingly dismayed by infighting among leftist groups. Men who had fought against Fascism were being maligned and harassed because they did not adhere to the strict policies of the communist party. Orwell believed the communist party was waging “a campaign of organized libel” against him after seeing three articles in the Daily Worker accusing him of stating that the working classes “smell” in The Road to Wigan Pier. harry pollitt’s stinging book review labeled Orwell “a disillusioned little middleclass boy” and “a late imperialist policeman” who should resolve “never to write again on any subject that he does not understand.” Orwell wrote Gollancz to set the record straight, stating that he actually said that middle-class people were raised to assume that lower class people “smell.” Orwell realized the Daily Worker was characterizing him as a middle-class snob so that anything he wrote about his spanish experiences would be suspect. he asked Gollancz to use his influence to stop the attacks. Gollancz did show Orwell’s letter to harry pollitt, and the articles stopped.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works Orwell began writing his book about spain titled Homage to Catalonia that summer, completing a rough draft in december. 1938 Orwell completed Homage to Catalonia in January. the book consisted of a memoir of his experiences in spain along with commentary about the political situation, especially the leftist infighting. Orwell briefly considered taking a job with a progressive newspaper based in india. the editor desmond young, who admired Orwell’s writing, wanted him to be his assistant editor and writer. Orwell wanted the job to gain newspaper experience and conduct research on current conditions in india. young asked his friend a. h. Joyce in the india Office to speak with Orwell. Joyce shared his impressions with young, stating that Orwell could prove to be a difficult choice. his political writing might trouble the indian government. in addition, Joyce noticed that the 35-year-old Orwell seemed ill and weak. in March Orwell suffered a severe cold and coughed blood. eileen’s brother examined Orwell and arranged for him to be admitted to preston hall, a sanitarium, where doctors observed abnormalities in his chest X rays. tests for tuberculosis were inconclusive, but Orwell exhibited many of the disease’s symptoms. he was weak, drawn, and underweight. at 6'3" he weighed only 159 pounds. laurence O’shaughnessy, a consultant to preston hall, examined his brother-in-law regularly. treatment consisted of bed rest and injections of minerals and vitamins. Orwell rallied. he gained ten pounds, and with the coming of warmer weather was able to walk about the grounds. in april Homage to Catalonia was published. Orwell, who received a modest £150 advance, expected his book to be controversial and was surprised by the number of highly favorable reviews he received. Most notably, the Observer’s desmond Flower called Orwell a “giant” and “a great writer.” he praised Orwell’s honesty, humanity, and clarity. Other critics were highly negative, focusing on the questionable nature of the p.O.u.M. Orwell hoped the book would sell 3,000 or 4,000 copies, but after four months only 700 copies had been sold. secker & Warburg maintained remainder copies of the initial printing until 1951. Homage to Catalonia was not published in the united states until 1952, two years after Orwell’s death. Orwell’s doctors advised him to recuperate in a warmer climate for several months, and he considered renting a small house in the south of France. his doctors, however, suggested that Morocco would be both drier and warmer. in addition, north africa would be cheaper than europe. Orwell had little money for an extended trip, later telling friends that his prewar income from writing averaged £150 a year. the novelist l. h. Myers, who had befriended Orwell, provided him with an anonymous gift of £300. Orwell accepted the money through an intermediary but insisted that it be considered a loan. (Orwell would repay the loan in 1946 after the publication of Animal Farm). On september 1 the blairs landed in Morocco and arrived in Marrakech three days later. after staying in the city for a month they moved to a nearby villa. the warm dry climate did not appear to improve Orwell’s health, and he was bored and troubled by the desert landscape and dismal poverty of the local inhabitants. Orwell recorded his observations in a diary, noting the desperate conditions faced by the arabs.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works throughout October and november the blairs suffered digestive ailments from the villa’s tainted water. in december Orwell was bedridden with headaches and fever. that month John lehman wrote to Orwell, inviting him to contribute to New Writing. Orwell decided to write about what he witnessed in north africa. his essay “Marrakech” appeared in New Writing the following december. by the end of the year Orwell had completed the draft of his next novel Coming Up for Air. 1939 in January the blairs visited the atlas Mountains, where Orwell felt refreshed by the cool air and the sight of ravines rushing with melted snow. back in Marrakech on January 27, however, he fell ill again and was indisposed for most of February. On March 30 the blairs returned to england aboard a Japanese ocean liner. Orwell visited southwold and discovered that his father was dying of cancer. Orwell became ill himself, suffering from a high fever. On april 11, the blairs moved to their home in Wallington. Orwell devoted his time to writing and gardening. he later spent three weeks in Greenwich staying with his brother-in-law laurence O’shaughnessy. in May Orwell began working on a collection of essays called Inside the Whale. On June 12 victor Gollancz published Coming Up for Air, which, in part, captured the anxiety of pre-war britain. the novel received favorable reviews, notably in the Sunday Times. some critics, however, questioned Orwell’s decision to write a firstperson narrative. sales were modest, though a second printing was ordered. a total of 3,000 copies were sold. On June 28 Orwell’s father richard blair died at 82, shortly after Orwell read him a review of Coming Up for Air. in august two police detectives searched Orwell’s cottage, confiscating books published by Obelisk press in paris. a local post office had traced letters he had written Obelisk, which had published works by cyril connolly and henry Miller. british authorities considered many Obelisk titles to be pornographic. Orwell was given a letter of warning from a prosecutor threatening legal action if he continued to import objectionable material. after examining the books, the prosecutor returned them to Orwell with a note stating it was understandable that as a writer he had a legitimate reason to possess “illegal” books. On august 23 the nazi-soviet pact was signed in Moscow. communist parties and their leftist supporters around the world abandoned their attacks on Fascism and took a pacifist stance. the abrupt change in party policy confirmed Orwell’s view of doctrinaire orthodoxies involved in party politics. On september 3 britain declared war on Germany. Orwell, then 36, attempted to enlist but was rejected for health reasons. he was troubled by his inability to secure any meaningful wartime role. in contrast, laurence O’shaughnessy entered the royal army Medical corps, and eileen took a job with the government’s censorship office to supplement her husband’s dwindling income. still weakened from his bouts of illness, Orwell managed to produce only five brief reviews in four months. near the end of 1939 Orwell decided to leave the independent liberal party. his leftist colleagues, who took a staunch pacifistic stance, questioned his support for the war. Orwell insisted that embracing his nation in a time of war did not mean he was abandoning leftist principles. Orwell outlined his views in an essay “My country right or left,” which was published a year later. in december he completed Inside the Whale.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works 1940 Orwell was ill for much of the first month of the year and stayed at the O’shaughnessy home in Greenwich. Orwell’s first collection of essays Inside the Whale was published in March. Orwell took W. h. auden to task for using the phrase “necessary murder” in his poem “spain,” arguing that the poet’s “amoralism” was typical of leftists who were “always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.” some of the thousand copies of Inside the Whale were destroyed in an air raid. that month his essay “boys’ Weeklies” appeared in Horizon, the first of many pieces that would appear in the magazine established by stephen spender and Orwell’s former classmate cyril connolly. later that month his first book review for the Tribune was published. in the spring Orwell contemplated writing a fictional trilogy but was unable to focus on a long novel. he was troubled by financial instability and disappointed that he was still unable to obtain any meaningful wartime job. he did find work writing play and film reviews for Time and Tide, the first of which appeared in May. Orwell disliked american films, considering them crude and violent. he wrote a scathing review of High Sierra, viewing the film as a celebration of sadism. he did praise charlie chaplin’s anti– hitler satire The Great Dictator, suggesting the british government subsidize its distribution to reach a wider audience. although rejected for military service, Orwell managed to join the local defence volunteers, serving as a sergeant in the home Guard. With britain fearing a German invasion, Orwell, a spanish civil War veteran, advocated distributing shotguns and hand grenades to the civilian population in anticipation of possible street fighting. Fredric Warburg, who had published Homage to Catalonia two years before, served in Orwell’s unit as a corporal. Orwell shared the views of fellow home Guard writer hugh slater who believed that the organization, in addition to resisting a potential nazi invasion, could serve as a revolutionary people’s army. the needs of the war, he proposed, could be used to enact structural social change, eliminating the class system and introducing a planned economy. years later Orwell would report his disappointment that beyond some labour party reforms about wages, hours, and healthcare, little had changed in capitalist britain. although eileen urged him to consider moving to canada because of the blitz, Orwell insisted on remaining in london. he spent nights in crowded air raid shelters and took great pride in the tenacity of londoners, noting that when the air raid sirens sounded during the performance of a play he was reviewing, no one in the audience left the theater. eileen was visiting her brother’s house when the neighborhood came under attack. speaking to his wife on the telephone, Orwell heard a loud explosion in the background, and eileen calmly explained the noise came from the windows shattering. eileen remained in her brother’s home to provide company to her sisterin-law while her husband was in the military and to work for the censorship department to supplement Orwell’s limited income. in June, laurence O’shaughnessy was killed hours before he was to be evacuated from dunkirk. his death devastated eileen who fell into a year-long depression, which was exacerbated by the death of her mother the following year. during the summer Orwell began writing The Lion and the Unicorn for searchlight books, a series of booklets addressing britain’s wartime policies. in december the american magazine Partisan Review, edited by William phillips and philip rahv, invited Orwell to contribute a “london letter” to inform readers about british polit-

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works ical and cultural trends. that month Orwell appeared as a guest on the bbc home service program “Writer in the Witness box.” interviewed by desmond hawkins, Orwell discussed proletarian literature. a transcript of the interview was subsequently published in the Listener. Orwell made five additional radio broadcasts on literary topics, discussing modern short stories with hawkins and v. s. pritchett as well as reading his own works. 1941 On January 3 Partisan Review published Orwell’s first “london letter” about the political situation in britain. Orwell commented that hopes of combining anti–hitlerism and anti-capitalism were unfounded, with britons adopting a traditional king and country patriotism. the left had few adherents among those under 35, especially those serving in the military. the communist party, tarnished by its support for the nazi-soviet pact, was an irrelevant player in british politics. the Fascists, however, were able to make inroads with public opinion, blaming the war and the bombings on the Jews. in discussing the blitz, Orwell was surprised by the british people’s tenacity and willingness to allow things to slip back into “the familiar pattern” when a crisis passed. the war, he sensed, was not going to herald a new era or bring socialism any closer to the united kingdom. Orwell continued to write for Partisan Review until 1946, contributing over a dozen articles. his wartime “london letters” were censored by the Ministry of information. in his second letter a reference to German airmen being lynched after bailing out over britain was deleted by censors before the article was sent to editors in new york. The Lion and the Unicorn appeared in February. the book, which outlined Orwell’s position on democratic socialism, brought him attention as a commentator on current political events. a month later victor Gollancz released The Betrayal of the Left: An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy, which included two chapters by George Orwell. On May 23 Orwell delivered a lecture titled “literature and totalitarianism” before a joint meeting of the Oxford university english club and the democratic socialist club. his talk was well received, and several students later remarked that their political thinking was greatly influenced by Orwell’s comments. On august 18 Orwell accepted a full-time job to work for the indian section of the bbc’s empire service. the job paid £640 a year, providing Orwell with a modest steady income. india had a two-million-man army, an essential component of the british war effort. Fearful that nazi propaganda would further incite indian nationalism, the british government sought to emphasize cultural ties between india and britain. the bbc hosted prominent indian speakers who addressed indian issues, but most of the programs were about english society and culture. Orwell’s work was largely administrative and editorial, lining up speakers and writing invitation letters to potential guests. broadcasts were censored, and Orwell occasionally found himself in conflict with his superiors. part of Orwell’s work was to write a weekly news summary, the text of which would be read mostly by indians, creating the impression that the commentaries were the observations of the broadcaster speaking to his or her fellow countrymen. in his scripts Orwell repeatedly used the words “we” and “us” when referring to the indian people. the major goal of the news commentaries was to counter axis propaganda arguments

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works that britain and america were imperialist powers seeking to exploit asians. Orwell pointed out if the Japanese claims of freeing asians from foreign imperialism were genuine, they would first liberate korea, Manchuria, Formosa, and the regions of china they occupied in 1937. For those indians who might be susceptible to Japan’s promise to free india of british rule, Orwell left them with three highlighted words: “lOOk at china.” When Orwell delivered his own broadcasts, he favored using the name eric blair to distance his own literary career from his government work. Orwell’s first news summary was broadcast on december 20, 1941. a month earlier he gave a lecture before the Fabian society titled “culture and democracy.” 1942 Writing weekly radio news commentaries for the bbc, Orwell often was compelled to write statements that departed from his own political views. in February he complimented stalin for his lack of “vindictiveness” and his “wise and large-minded” insistence on distinguishing between the German people and the nazis. stalin, Orwell commented, had successfully refuted nazi propaganda claims that russia sought to impose communism on its neighbors. Orwell appeared to be willing to write propaganda because it constituted a contribution to the war effort. he was later disappointed when he realized how little effect his indian broadcasts actually had. an intelligence officer informed Orwell that there were only 150,000 shortwave radios in a country of 300 million people, and few bothered to listen to the bbc except for brief news bulletins. even more discouraging to Orwell were the results of a survey of the small pool of loyal indian listeners. asked to select their favorite radio personality on the indian broadcasts, Orwell learned that he had some of the lowest ratings. Orwell became frustrated, sensing that he was doing meaningless work because “much of the stuff ” broadcast by the bbc was being “shot into the stratosphere … not to be listened to by anybody.” Orwell found more significant outlets for his ideas on the war. cyril connolly introduced him to david astor, editor of the Observer, who invited Orwell to contribute articles to one of britain’s major newspapers. Writing on his own rather than for the government, Orwell felt less constrained and free to express his views. david astor, however, did not fully control the paper, and on occasion Orwell clashed with other editors who disagreed with his stances. eileen blair also began working in broadcasting. in the spring she took a position overseeing the production of a radio program called The Kitchen Front which aired on bbc home service. each morning a five-minute program offered innovative recipes working within wartime rationing restrictions. the work and contact with new friends and colleagues helped eileen counter the depression she experienced following the deaths of her brother and mother. 1943 as the war progressed, Orwell shared the frustration of many leftists. the tense days of 1940 when the prospect of invasion appeared to be the harbinger of revolutionary reform had passed. despite conscription, rationing, and greater government services, there was little evidence that britain would see a massive change in its political or economic structure. class differences had diminished but were not eliminated. in March Orwell’s mother ida died at 67. Orwell edited a collection of radio scripts titled Talking to India: A Selection of

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works English Language Broadcasts in India that was published by allen & unwin on november 18. Orwell resigned from the home Guard for medical reasons. a day later he resigned from the bbc. a week later he became the literary editor of the Tribune, a post he would hold for 15 months. a leftwing newspaper, the Tribune offered Orwell a better platform to express his views. that month Orwell began to write Animal Farm. he had originally thought of the book after returning from spain in 1937. he wanted to write a refutation of communism, exposing it as an enemy of true socialism. however, by 1943 british attitudes toward stalin had changed. stories about the purges of the 1930s and the nazi-soviet pact were supplanted by wartime propaganda images of stalin as the leader who had rallied his nation following a devastating nazi invasion. stalin was now a member of the big three, an ally of churchill. his armies were pummeling the Wehrmacht, chewing up men and resources that could have countered the british in north africa. stretched thin by the demands of the eastern Front, the luftwaffee could no longer wage major attacks in the West after the invasion of the soviet union. after June 1941 london would experience no major air attacks until the introduction of the v-1 in June 1944. in december Orwell’s first “as i please” column appeared in the Tribune. Orwell would publish these articles until 1947, commenting on current events, politics, and a stream of issues, including conspiracy theories, road safety campaigns, dogs, american comic books, and zionism. 1944 in February Orwell completed Animal Farm. his contract with victor Gollancz gave the publisher the right of first refusal to any of Orwell’s fiction. Orwell expected that Gollancz, now a supporter of the soviet union, would be unsympathetic to his animal satire of the russian revolution. Gollancz rejected the novel, later stating that he could not publish such a book while the soviets were fighting the nazis. Orwell sent Animal Farm to Jonathan cape who, after showing initial interest, turned it down because his fable too closely paralleled the history of the soviet union. depicting the ruling animals as pigs, he wrote Orwell’s agent, would offend the russians. both Orwell and eileen had long considered having a child. although he never submitted to the tests he considered disagreeable, Orwell believed that he was sterile. eileen was initially reluctant to have a child because she did not feel strong enough. after the deaths in her family, her attitude changed. her brother’s widow Gwen O’shaughnessy was a physician who assisted in the adoption of a child. unwanted pregnancies were common during the war, and there were a number of babies available for adoption. she located a two-month-old boy for the blairs, whom they adopted and named richard horatio blair. at 41 Orwell became a father. a friend recalled that Orwell’s dearest wish was that his new son have a white and gold pram and attend eton. three weeks later on June 28 their london flat on Mortimer crescent was bombed, and Orwell’s typescript of Animal Farm was nearly lost. he located the papers in the rubble, damaged but still readable. the blairs stayed in a friend’s residence until October when they moved into an apartment in islington. Orwell submitted his crumpled typescript of Animal Farm to t. s. eliot at Faber and Faber. eliot, who had rejected a version of Down and Out in Paris and London, also refused to accept Orwell’s current book. Orwell then sent the book to Frederic

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works Warburg who had published Homage to Catalonia and The Lion and the Unicorn. Warburg accepted Animal Farm, informing Orwell that publication would be delayed because of the wartime shortage of paper. he offered Orwell an advance of £45. 1945 in February Orwell left the staff of the Tribune and went to France as a war correspondent for the Observer. visiting paris for the first time since 1937, he stayed at the hotel scribe, one of the few buildings in the city with heat and electricity. according to some accounts Orwell had a famous, albeit brief, meeting with ernest hemingway in paris. noticing hemingway’s name on a hotel register, Orwell reportedly went to his room and knocked on the door. introducing himself as eric blair, he was greeted brusquely, until he revealed his pen name. hemingway’s demeanor instantly changed, and he offered his fellow war correspondent a drink. although their encounter was short, hemingway recalled the event three years later in a letter to cyril connolly. With no record of the meeting in Orwell’s diaries, some historians and biographers believe the encounter may have been invented. While in paris Orwell submitted a weekly article to the Observer and additional pieces to the Manchester Evening News. in late March, eileen sent Orwell a long letter explaining that her doctor had discovered several uterine tumors and recommended that she undergo a hysterectomy. Orwell left paris and headed to Germany to cover the last days of the second World War as the allies pressed deeper into the reich. in cologne Orwell fell ill and was briefly hospitalized. While recovering, he received a telegram informing him that eileen had died on March 29. before being wheeled into surgery, eileen had written her husband a breezy, reassuring letter. While being administered ether and chloroform, eileen suffered a severe reaction to the anesthetic, and her heart stopped. resuscitation efforts failed, and eileen was pronounced dead before the surgeon could begin the operation. she was 39 years old. receiving the news, Orwell immediately discharged himself from the hospital and flew home to britain to attend his wife’s funeral four days later. Writing a friend, Orwell called eileen’s death “a dreadful shock and a very cruel thing to happen.” he drew consolation from the fact that she died while anesthetized and did not suffer. the nature of eileen’s illness was never clearly disclosed, though some friends suspected she had cancer. Orwell, who had questioned the cost and need for the surgery, may have felt guilt or distress at his wife’s death. Writing a woman he proposed to a year after eileen’s death, Orwell admitted that he had been unfaithful and “treated her very badly” at times but that, despite these lapses, they had enjoyed a “real marriage” because they had struggled together and she understood his literary ambitions. after making childcare arrangements for his son richard, Orwell returned to the continent to report from the ruined cities of the shattered reich. Orwell was deeply moved by the piles of rubble, the lines of distressed refugees, the unburied corpses of German soldiers killed in the last days of the war. the scope of civilian suffering led Orwell to argue against punishing Germany for war crimes because retribution would not reverse the effects of the war and demean the morality of the allies. Observing the postwar occupation of Germany, Orwell detected the growing fissure between the soviets and the Western allies.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works returning to england, Orwell searched for a nurse-housekeeper to care for richard and hired susan Watson in July. Orwell offered her £5 a week with room and board. that summer Orwell agreed to become the vice-chairman of the Freedom defense committee, an organization dedicated to free speech. Orwell contributed to the group, spoke on its behalf, and wrote an article called “Freedom of the park,” which appeared in the Tribune that december. in the months following ve-day, Orwell contemplated the status of britain. While nations on the continent had endured war, occupation, and major structural transformation, little change had taken place in the united kingdom. six years of war and national effort had led to only modest social and economic reforms. victorious at the polls, the labour party promised shorter work hours and free health coverage but did not challenge the prevailing class system or capitalism. there was no support for revolutionary change or a move toward a planned economy. socialism remained unpopular and misunderstood. On august 17 Animal Farm was released. the publication delay meant that the book appeared after the collapse of the third reich, when britons were no longer reliant on soviet armies and less forgiving of stalin’s policies. initial reviews were largely favorable. Writing in the Evening Standard, Graham Greene celebrated Orwell’s willingness to abandon appeasement and relate a “sad fable” that revealed his “fine talent.” despite the novel’s reception, Orwell was disturbed when he found the book placed in the children’s section in several bookstores. the first printing of 4,500 copies sold out in two weeks. the book became an instant sensation. princess elizabeth sent a messenger to obtain a copy, who eventually found one in an anarchist bookshop. in november another 10,000 copies were printed, and the book has remained in print ever since. Animal Farm sold a total of 25,000 hardcover copies by the time of Orwell’s death in britain alone. royalties from Animal Farm eased Orwell’s long-standing economic insecurities, giving him funds to care for richard and allowing enough money to donate to the Freedom defense committee. Orwell’s agent, however, had difficulty finding an american publisher. viking, knopf, and harpers rejected the novel because it was too short. visiting britain, Frank Morley read the sole remaining copy in a cambridge book store and purchased the american rights for harcourt. in december Orwell was invited to spend christmas with arthur and Mamaine koestler who were living in a farmhouse in Wales. during this stay Orwell met Mamaine’s twin sister, 29-year-old celia kirwan, who had left her husband and was seeking a divorce. attractive and elegant, celia was also very literary. she was an editorial assistant for Polemic, a journal that already published some of Orwell’s work. thirteen years older, widowed with a small son, and very aware of his scruffy personal appearance, Orwell began to court celia. they took long walks, and Orwell soon proposed, telling her he believed himself to be sterile and would likely be dead within a decade. celia declined marriage or an affair but did remain a lifelong friend, calling Orwell the day he died to arrange a visit. late in 1945 Orwell met his future wife sonia brownell at a dinner party arranged by cyril connolly. the vivacious secretary was initially unimpressed with the standoffish writer 15 years her senior.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works 1946 in the year following his wife’s death, Orwell devoted himself to writing, producing more than a hundred articles for the Tribune, Polemic, Horizon, and other publications. he also continued to date and propose to younger women. in March he met anne popham, a young woman he proposed to after an initial meeting. Orwell later wrote her an apologetic letter, stating he had not known that her boyfriend had been killed in the war and thought she was both “lovely” and “lonely.” in late april Orwell took a hiatus from journalism. On May 3 his older sister Marjorie dakin died of a kidney ailment at 48. three weeks later he traveled to Jura, an island off the west coast of scotland. Orwell’s editor and friend david astor once suggested that he might enjoy a holiday on the island, but Orwell decided to lease barnhill, a large farmhouse overlooking a bay. Much larger than the cottage in Wallington, the home featured five bedrooms and a spacious kitchen. but like the cottage in england, it had no electricity or telephone. in addition, it was extremely remote. the island was a two-day bus and train trip from london. the only shop on Jura was 25 miles from his home. Orwell, who wanted his young son to grow up in the country, considered the location ideal. the sparsely populated island would remain Orwell’s primary residence for four years. though 500 miles north of london, the island was temperate because of the Gulf stream, and Orwell enjoyed gardening and boating. Once establishing himself at barnhill, Orwell traveled to london in July to collect richard and susan Watson, who briefly served as housekeeper and nanny. after her departure, Orwell’s sister avril came to Jura to help with the housework and care for young richard. in august, a year after its british publication, Animal Farm was released in the united states by harcourt, receiving both critical praise and high sales. it was a bookof-the-Month club selection. With the cold War starting, the united states government saw a valuable anti–communist tract in Orwell’s parable and distributed copies in foreign countries. by the time of Orwell’s death american sales surpassed half a million copies. For the first time in his writing career, he was freed of financial concerns. that month Orwell began working on his last novel tentatively titled The Last Man in Europe. Working on the novel, Orwell suspended other writing. he terminated his column in the Manchester Evening News in november and suspended his “as i please” column in the Observer until april 1947. by October when he left Jura to return to london he had completed several sections of the novel. 1947 in January the bbc produced a radio play of Animal Farm. a dutch version was broadcast in april. suffering from worsening tuberculosis, Orwell continued working on his last novel. Orwell, like other londoners that winter, endured chronic fuel shortages, burning peat when coal was unavailable. struggling to keep warm, Orwell became ill. in late March victor Gollancz, who had rejected Animal Farm, agreed to Orwell’s request to release him from his contract. in april Orwell returned to Jura to work on his novel. Orwell made many revisions and created a new language, “newspeak,” for his futuristic novel. the summer of 1947 was extremely mild on Jura, and Orwell overexerted himself exploring the island. in november he fell ill again, and he began coughing

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works blood. On december 24 Orwell entered a hospital in Glasgow for an extended course of treatment. he reported to friends that he lost 20 pounds. doctors discovered a large tubercular cavity in his left lung and pumped air into his diaphragm to shift the position of the damaged organ. Orwell endured air “refills” every few days, which were painful and tiring. confined to bed, Orwell wrote to his sister-in-law stating that he was too ill and fatigued to do more than write brief book reviews. 1948 Orwell’s friend david astor arranged to have supplies of the newly discovered american drug streptomycin shipped to the hospital. perhaps over-medicated, Orwell suffered uncomfortable side-effects, including hair loss and skin irritation. subsequent tests came back negative, suggesting the drug was working. hospitalized for seven months, Orwell had little contact with his young son richard, for fear of infecting him with tuberculosis. the frustrations over his health were eased by the financial and critical success of Animal Farm. For the first time in his two-decade writing career, Orwell enjoyed popularity and substantial royalties. his medical bills, however, taxed his new-found affluence, and he was concerned about caring for his son. in July he was discharged from the hospital. although advised not to return to Jura, he went back to the island to work on his novel. his sister avril and visiting friend richard rees worried that the recuperating Orwell was taxing himself trying to meet his goal of completing the book by the end of the year. in november Orwell finished the novel but faced the exhausting task of producing a final typescript. unable to locate a typist, he took on the task himself, often lying down with the typewriter perched on his lap. the effects of streptomycin wore off, and Orwell began wheezing and coughing. in three weeks Orwell completed the final draft of the book he titled The Last Man in Europe. 1949 Gwen O’shaughnessy arranged to have Orwell admitted to a sanitarium in Gloucestershire. he was treated with another new drug but showed no improvement. he was given more streptomycin, which had little effect and was stopped after a single dose. While recovering, Orwell compiled a list of politicians, writers, and celebrities he considered “crypto-communists” who apologized for stalin’s excesses. his list included Orson Welles, paul robeson, sean O’casey, John steinbeck, and George bernard shaw. in January Frederic Warburg visited Orwell to discuss the novel, which he hoped to have in galleys by March. he was unsure about the title, and Orwell agreed with him that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a better choice, at least for the british edition. harcourt brace had agreed to publish the book in the united states but questioned the choice of a numerical title. the american book-of-the-Month club reported it would only consider the novel if Orwell deleted his appendix describing newspeak, the language of the futuristic society. Orwell insisted on keeping it, even though Warburg told him it might mean a loss of £40,000. the club eventually relented and accepted the book unchanged. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in britain and america in June, receiving transatlantic praise. the New York Times reported in July that 90 percent of the 60 american book reviews were positive. the book became Orwell’s most celebrated and most successful work. More than 20,000 copies were purchased in the first month

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works after its release. Within the first year harcourt sold 170,000 copies in the united states. the book-of-the-Month club edition sold an additional 190,000 copies. in britain the novel sold 50,000 copies. Orwell, however, was troubled by the interpretation of his novel. an american labor leader wrote Orwell that the book was being praised by rightwing publications in the united states. Orwell responded that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not an attack on socialism, nor was it a prediction of the future. he also rejected the charge that the book was meant to be an attack on the labour party. sonia brownell had visited Orwell in the hospital in the spring and accepted his proposal for marriage in July. in september he was transferred to london’s university college hospital on Gower street, where he was treated by a lung specialist. the hospital was not far from sonia brownell’s residence, so she could make more frequent visits. On October 13 eric blair and sonia brownell married in Orwell’s hospital room, with david astor serving as best man. bedridden, Orwell wore a smoking jacket for the occasion. Over the next months sonia visited daily and handled her husband’s literary and financial affairs. steadily declining, Orwell lost weight and had less energy. newly married, Orwell, however, felt a new purpose in life and chartered a plane to fly to a sanitarium in switzerland. 1950 Friends and colleagues, including stephen spender, Julian symons, and Malcolm Muggeridge, visited Orwell in the hospital. Muggeridge noted that Orwell kept a fishing rod at the foot of his bed in anticipation of his recovery in the swiss mountains. though in good spirits, Orwell prepared his will on January 18. he named his wife and richard rees as his literary executors and made sonia his sole beneficiary. he directed that his insurance money be used for his son’s education and named his sister avril richard’s official guardian. in the event of his death, Orwell requested to be buried in the “nearest convenient” church of england cemetery with a plain monument bearing the name eric arthur blair with his birth and death dates. the following day in the united states harcourt brace released new editions of three of his books: Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, and Coming Up for Air. On the night of January 21 George Orwell suffered a severe lung hemorrhage and died before sonia could reach the hospital. the following morning bbc radio announced his death. in its obituary published the following day, the New York Times repeated charles poore’s assessment made days before, declaring that “Orwell stands out as the leading english novelist of the day.” honoring the terms of his will caused his mourners some challenges. Orwell was not a member of any church of england congregation and was not known by any clergyman. anthony powell and Malcolm Muggeridge arranged to have Orwell’s funeral held at christ church in london. a traditional church service was followed by a graveside ceremony at all saints church in sutton courteney in Oxfordshire. Orwell was buried not far from the tomb of herbert asquith, who served as britain’s prime Minister from 1908 to 1916. as stipulated in his will, Orwell’s grave was marked by a simple headstone bearing the name eric blair. his friend and editor david astor purchased two plots next to Orwell’s and was buried near the writer he admired in 2001.

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Chronology of Orwell’s Life and Works • Further Reading agathocleous, tanya. George Orwell: Battling Big Brother. Oxford university press, 2000. angus, ian. “appendix i-iv: chronology.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. i–iv, ed. sonia Orwell and ian angus. harcourt brace Jovanovich, 1968. astor, david. “david astor and The Observer.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 184–192. collings, dennis. “southwold days.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 76–83. cooper, lettice. “eileen blair.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 161–166. crick, bernard. George Orwell: A Life. little, brown, 1980. dunn, William. “Working at and on Jura.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 231–235. empson, William. “William empson and Orwell at the bbc.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 177–183. “George Orwell.” New York Times, 22 Jan. 1950, p. 128. Johnson, paul. “setting the record straight about George Orwell’s list of soviet stooges.” The Spectator, vol. 280, no. 8864, 27 June 1998, p. 21. kennan, Joe. “With the Wigan Miners.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 130–133. kopp, George. “bullet in the neck.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 158–161. lewis, peter. Orwell: The Road to 1984. harcourt brace Jovanovich, 1981. Marsh, Fred t. “sahibs in burma.” New York Times, 28 Oct. 1934. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Orwell and the experience of France.” The World and I, vol. 18, no. 11, nov. 2003, pp. 274+. Muggeridge, Malcolm. “in Muggeridge’s diaries.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 266–271. Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. harcourt, brace & World, 1952. _____. “introduction” to La Vache enragée. La Vache enragée. Gallimard, 1935, pp. 7–9. _____. Orwell: The War Commentaries, ed. W. J. West. schocken, 1985. perlès, alfred. “a Meeting with henry Miller.” Orwell Remembered, ed. audrey coppard and bernard crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 143–146. rodden, John. Understanding animal Farm: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Greenwood, 1999. _____, and John p. rossi. “the Mysterious (un)meeting of George Orwell and ernest hemingway.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 2009, pp. 56+. sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. harpercollins, 1991. spurling, hilary. The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. counterpoint, 2003. stansky, peter, and William abrahams. Orwell: The Transformation. alfred a. knopf, 1980. Wilson, edmund. “George Orwell’s ‘animal Farm’—albert cossery’s ‘Men God Forgot.’” The New Yorker, 7 sept. 1946, pp. 97–98. Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit. schocken, 1984, pp. 111–123.

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The Companion Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford were senior members of the Party in Oceania. Rutherford had been a noted cartoonist, whose savage depictions of capitalists appeared in newspapers before and during the Revolution. Later the three men fell out of favor with Big Brother and were arrested and placed on trial during the purges of the 1960s. They confessed to a multitude of crimes and were executed in 1968. After their show trials, Winston Smith encountered them in a café. Noting that two of the men had broken noses, Smith realized the confessions had been extracted under duress. In 1973 Smith discovered a newspaper photograph of the three men attending a Party function in New York which proved their innocence and their confessions false. At their trial the three claimed to have been in Eurasia on that date conspiring with the enemy. Smith destroyed the photograph but retained it in his memory. Eleven years later, while being tortured in the Ministry of Love, his interrogator O’Brien shows him another copy of the photograph then destroys it, claiming it never existed. The image of the three men becomes part of the debate between Smith and O’Brien, with Winston insisting the photograph was real and is preserved in his memory. O’Brien, believing in the mutability of the past, maintains that history is what the Party says it is, rejecting the existence of historical documents and objective facts.

Ampleforth (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) After his arrest, Winston Smith shares a cell with Ampleforth, a poet in the Ministry of Truth. Asked if he is guilty, Ampleforth assumes he is. Racking his brain, the poet can only think of one “indiscretion” that could have led to his arrest. In preparing an edition of Kipling’s poems, he allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. “The rhyme was ‘rod,’” he explains to Smith. The English language only has 12 rhymes for the word “rod.” After wrestling with the problem for days, Ampleforth could find no alternative and allowed the line to remain unchanged.

Animal Farm (novel, 1945) After returning from Spain in 1937, Orwell wanted to write a book that would refute Communism, but he did not begin working on Animal Farm until 1943. In 1937 British

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Animal political and public opinion was generally anti–Soviet in the wake of Stalin’s brutal purges and show trials. However, during the Second World War, with the Soviets bearing the bulk of the war effort in Europe, Stalin’s image had changed. Now part of the Big Three and fighting the common enemy Hitler, Stalin was widely portrayed as an invaluable ally. Orwell completed his satire in 1944 but found publishers disinclined to accept a title that might offend the Soviet Union. Victor Gollancz, who had the right of first refusal of Orwell’s fiction, stated he would not publish the book while the Russians were fighting the Nazis. Jonathan Cape showed some interest in the book but rejected it, stating that depicting the ruling animals as pigs would offend the Russians. Orwell’s typescript was nearly lost when his London flat was bombed in late June. He retrieved his damaged but still readable manuscript and submitted it to Frederic Warburg, who agreed to accept it. Warburg delayed publication until the end of the war, citing the shortage of paper. The novel appeared the following August, 11 days after the Hiroshima bombing. Orwell’s 29,000-word fable is generally viewed as a satire attacking Communism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Stalinist regime that followed. Some elements and characters also reflect references to the Third Reich and leading Nazis. Much like Gulliver’s Travels, it can be read on two levels. The animals on an English farm stage a revolt, drive out their human master, and create a government promising freedom and abundance that descends into totalitarianism. Orwell’s story takes place on Manor Farm, an English farmstead. One evening after the owner Mr. Jones goes to bed, the animals gather in the barn to hear Old Major, a 12year-old boar, relate a dream he had had the night before. Addressing his fellow animals as “comrades,” Old Major states he wishes to pass on what he has learned before he dies. Animals, he states, only know a life of misery and death because of Man. Given only enough food to sustain themselves, they are worked to exhaustion then slaughtered. Man, he asserts, is “the only creature that consumes without producing,” being too weak to pull a plow, too slow to catch rabbits, and unable to lay eggs (7). England has enough land to supply animals with decent food and working conditions. Without Man, animals would be immediately “rich and free.” He urges the animals to rebel against their common enemy, Man. To inspire them he sings a song called “Beasts of England” (see “Beasts of England”) that he claims came to him in a dream. The animals sing their new anthem, causing such a ruckus that Mr. Jones wakes up and fires his shotgun fearing a fox was raiding the barn. Old Major dies three days later, and the animals begin to conspire against Mr. Jones. The pigs Napoleon, Snowball, and Squealer meet in secret to discuss Old Major’s teachings, establishing the tenets of their revolutionary ideology they call Animalism. In trying to persuade other animals to accept their views, they encounter obstacles. Some animals remain loyal to Mr. Jones, whom they still call Master. Told that the predicted Rebellion is an historical inevitability, other animals question why they have to work for it. The pigs also have to overcome distractions peddled by Jones’ tame raven Moses who tells the animals stories about a special place called Sugarcandy Mountain where animals go after death. On Sugarcandy Mountain it is summer year-round and every day is Sunday. The fields are full of clover, and sugar lumps grow on hedges. The pigs work hard to dissuade their comrades from believing in Moses’ tales of a glorious afterlife. The actual Rebellion comes quickly and is won easily. On Midsummer’s Eve, Jones gets drunk, forgets to feed his animals, and falls asleep. The hungry animals revolt, chasing

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Animal and butting Jones and his men from Manor Farm. Triumphant, the animals race around their newly liberated property to assure no humans remain on the farm, then destroy the nose-rings, chains, and whips used to torture them. After timidly inspecting Jones’ farmhouse, the animals declare that it should be preserved as a museum and that no animal should ever dwell in it. Snowball paints over the name Manor Farm, rebranding their new home Animal Farm. The pigs then reveal that during their three months of planning, they learned to read and write. Snowball climbs a ladder and paints The Seven Commandments (see The Seven Commandments) on the barn wall that summarize the tenets of Animalism. Having not been milked in 24 hours, the cows begin to low, and the pigs manage to milk them, producing five buckets of creamy milk. When the animals ask what will happen to the milk, Napoleon orders them to forget about the milk and start to harvest the hay. That evening when the animals return from work, they notice the milk has vanished. In the early days after the Rebellion the animals work hard with relish because they are free of human exploitation so that all the food they harvest will be theirs alone. The work goes “like clockwork” with everyone working “to his ability.” Boxer, the farm’s largest horse, works harder than anyone else, and soon his promise “I will work harder!” becomes a personal motto. The birds join in, gleaning every last grain, so that the harvest is the largest ever produced on the farm. Snowball and Napoleon hold meetings but soon disagree on nearly every issue. Snowball launches a number of projects imitating Soviet Five-Year Plans, such as the Egg Production Committee for hens and the Whiter Wool Movement for sheep. Education programs have limited success, as many animals are unable to learn to read. Boxer, for instance, can only master four letters of the alphabet. Because many of the animals are unable to memorize The Seven Commandments, Snowball summarizes their essence in a one-sentence maxim: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” Napoleon takes nine newly-weaned puppies aside, placing them in a loft where he promises their mothers he will educate them. When apples begin falling from the trees, the pigs order that they be collected and brought to them alone. Squealer explains that pigs are brainworkers and need special nutrition. They actually don’t like milk and apples, Squealer insists, but are required to consume them in order to perform their duties. If the pigs fail in their roles, Jones might come back, he argues. The animals now realize what happened to the missing buckets of milk but accept that milk and apples “should be reserved for the pigs alone” (31). When Mr. Jones, backed by other humans, attempts a counter-revolution to reclaim his commandeered farm, the animals rally and rout the invaders, declaring victory in the action they call the Battle of the Cowshed. Snowball, who was wounded, and Boxer are named Animal Hero, First Class in honor of their bravery. The division between Snowball and Boxer intensifies. The ever-inventive Snowball makes plans for an elaborate windmill that he promises will generate electricity to provide the animals with lighted and heated stalls and numerous labor-saving devices. Napoleon is dismissive of these schemes, announcing they will never work or that the animals will starve if they forgo farming for construction. Their rivalry is also stoked by a question of defense. To ward off another potential attack by humans Napoleon asserts they should form an army and obtain weapons. Snowball

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Animal is an “internationalist,” believing that security lies in spreading Animalism to surrounding farms by sending out emissaries to foment rebellion among neighboring animals still in bondage. The animals are inspired by Snowball’s visions of the future. Napoleon, who never proposes plans of his own, seizes power and drives Snowball into exile in a sudden coup. On command, the puppies he took aside to educate suddenly reappear, now nearly fullygrown, as a snarling pack and chase Snowball off the farm. The wolf-like dogs show total loyalty to their master Napoleon, wagging their tails in obedience to him the way other dogs once wagged their tails at Mr. Jones. Napoleon ends debates and discussions, telling the animals that from now on decisions will be made by a committee of pigs meeting in private. The propagandist Squealer tells the animals that loyalty to Napoleon is essential unless they want Jones back. He also convinces them that Napoleon was always for the windmill, and that, in fact, it had been his idea all along. Napoleon only pretended to object to Snowball’s plans for strategic purposes. Under Napoleon’s leadership, the animals work harder, but their lives do not personally improve. Napoleon extends their working hours, and they face continual shortages while working on the windmill. Completion of the project requires items that the animals cannot produce themselves, and Napoleon makes the startling statement that Animal Farm will begin trading with humans, using Mr. Whymper, a solicitor, as an intermediary. At this time the pigs move into the house, and Squealer begins referring to Napoleon as Leader instead of Comrade Napoleon. The pigs begin to resemble Stalin’s nomenklatura, an elite caste who enjoy special privileges previously associated with the Czarist ruling class. The Seven Commandments are altered one by one to justify the behavior of Napoleon’s inner circle. The Fourth Commandment, which banned animals from sleeping “in a bed,” is amended to read “in a bed with sheets” (57). Later, the commandment banning the consumption of alcohol is altered to prohibiting animals from drinking “to excess.” At this point in the fable the parallels between Napoleon and Stalin are sharply drawn. Like Stalin, Napoleon demands slavish obedience and builds a cult of personality so that his picture is displayed on the barn. There are public rallies in his honor, propaganda ploys to impress visiting humans with the farm’s abundance, show trials featuring public confessions of betrayal, purges, and ruthless executions. Shortcomings and failures are blamed on wreckers and agents of foreign powers. Snowball assumes the role of Trotsky, the exiled leader who is expunged from history and recast as an enemy of the Rebellion. When the windmill collapses during a windstorm, the disaster is blamed on Snowball. Napoleon insists that Snowball is secretly returning to the farm during the night to engage in sabotage. The animals are urged to work harder and accept reduced rations in order to rebuild the windmill. Napoleon, like Stalin selling oil to Germany, sells timber to a hostile neighbor who, like Hitler, betrays his trust. Mr. Frederick pays the pigs with forged banknotes. Later he and his men storm Animal Farm. Unlike the Battle of the Cowshed, the animals face men armed with guns instead of clubs, and they suffer great casualties. Frederick’s men are driven off the land but not before they use explosives to destroy the windmill. As time passes the animals experience an irony that parallels life in the Soviet Union. Animal Farm “had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer” (108).

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Animal Old Major had promised that without human masters, their lives would improve. Snowball had promised a windmill would provide comforts. A field had been set aside so that elderly animals could retire and graze with dignity and leisure. But under Napoleon the animals work longer hours and face reduced rations. Their living conditions remain unimproved, and many try to remember if their lives were any different when Mr. Jones ran the farm. Eventually, the animals complete the windmill, but it is used to grind meal, not provide electricity for lighting and heating the barn. The field once promised to retirees is used to grow barley to brew beer for the pigs. The pigs continually elevate themselves. When a pig walks down a path, all other animals are required to step aside. The pigs’ offspring attend a special school and are dissuaded from mingling with other young animals. After several animals are slain at Napoleon’s command, the mare Clover wonders if this is what they fought for when they rebelled against Jones, but she cannot articulate her emotions. The horse Boxer accepts the pigs’ leadership without question, adding a new personal maxim: “Napoleon is always right.” Despite his hard work and faithful devotion, Boxer is exploited and betrayed by the pigs. When he collapses and the pigs are unable to restore his health, he is sold to a knacker, a horse slaughterer. As he is being hauled away, some literate animals read the sign on the van and panic, urging Boxer to escape. Too weak to batter down the doors, Boxer is unable to flee and is never seen again. Squealer assures the distraught animals that their comrade was being taken to a hospital. A veterinary surgeon had recently purchased the vehicle from a knacker and had not yet changed the signage. Despite the best care, Boxer, he tells them, died peacefully. The animals notice, however, that the pigs have somehow acquired money to purchase a case of whisky. Years pass, and the pigs take on human form. Now wearing clothes and walking on two legs, the pigs, like Mr. Jones, begin carrying whips. They buy a radio, install a telephone in the farmhouse, and subscribe to human magazines and daily newspapers. The Seven Commandments are reduced to a single declaration: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The maxim “four legs good, two legs bad” is altered as well to “four legs good, two legs better!” Delegations of humans visit Animal Farm, congratulating Napoleon because his animals work longer hours and receive less food than their own. Napoleon announces that the name Animal Farm has been changed back to its original and proper name, Manor Farm. When a card game between the human farmers and the pigs erupts into a violent argument, the animals peer inside the farmhouse and are unable to distinguish the pigs from the men. Animal Farm was far more successful than many of Orwell’s earlier books. By the time of his death five years later, 25,000 copies had been sold in Britain. Reviewing the book for the Evening Standard, Graham Greene celebrated Orwell’s “fine talent” and “sad fable.” Other reviewers questioned Orwell’s motives and the accuracy of his satire. Kingsley Martin initially wondered why with Hitler dead, Orwell did not target American racism rather than Stalinism. He praised Orwell for “deftly” relating a fable that becomes “a rollicking caricature of the Russian Revolution!” but questioned the point of his satire. Having the pigs become indistinguishable from the humans they rebelled against was grossly unfair to the Soviet Union. “Though many traditional Russian characteristics survive in Russia,” he noted, “the new ruling class is really very different indeed from anything that Russia

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Animal has known before.” Animal Farm, he asserted, was entertaining and funny but ultimately “historically false and neglectful of the complex truth about Russia.” Orwell’s friend Cyril Connolly found the fable to be “one of the most enjoyable books since the war,” calling it “deliciously written.” Connolly admired the book, he stated, for three reasons: it broke the taboo about criticizing the Soviet Union, it restored the allegorical pamphlet “to its rightful place as a literary force,” and it showed that journalism had not seduced Orwell “from his true vocation, which is to write books.” The book was far more popular in the United States when it appeared in 1946, selling almost 600,000 copies in four years. Animal Farm was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Edmund Wilson’s review in The New Yorker praised the book, calling it “absolutely firstrate” and comparing Orwell to Swift and Voltaire. Other American reviewers, like their British counterparts, faulted the book as an inaccurate and unfair allegory of the Russian Revolution. The New Republic’s reviewer George Soule stated the satire lacked “clarity” and failed because Orwell based his fable on “stereotyped ideas about a country which he probably does not know very well” so “the allegory, which must have seemed a good one when he first thought of it, became mechanical in execution.” Similarly, Isaac Rosenfeld found Animal Farm both “disappointing” and “troublesome.” Orwell’s fable would have had value had it been more timely. “Coming as it does, in the wake of the event,” he argued, “it can only be called a backward work.” Animal Farm caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. Viewing the book as valuable anti–Communist propaganda, the agency directed Howard Hunt to secure the film rights from Sonia Orwell shortly after her husband’s death [see Animal Farm (animated motion picture, 1954)].

• Further Reading Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. Tauris, 2016. Carr, Craig L. Orwell, Politics, and Power. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Connolly, Cyril. “Animal Farm.” Horizon, Sept. 1945, pp. 215–16. Crick, Bernard. “The Making of Animal Farm.” Animal Farm—George Orwell. Chelsea House, 1997. Bloom’s Literature. Fergenson, Laraine. “George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Twentieth-Century Beast Fable.” Animal Farm—George Orwell. Chelsea House, 1997. Bloom’s Literature. Fowler, Roger. “On Animal Farm.” Animal Farm—George Orwell, New Edition. Chelsea House, 2009. Bloom’s Literature. Frye, Northrop. “Orwell and Marxism.” Animal Farm—George Orwell. Chelsea House, 1997. Bloom’s Literature. Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Orwell as Satirist.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 103–118. Greene, Graham. “Animal Farm.” Evening Standard, 10 Aug. 1945, p. 6. Leab, Daniel. Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. Penn State University Press, 2007. Letemendia, V. C. “Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell’s Neglected Commentary.” Animal Farm—George Orwell, New Edition. Chelsea House, 2009. Bloom’s Literature. Martin, Kingsley. “Animal Farm.” New Statesman and Nation, 8 Sept. 1945, pp. 165–166. Pearce, Robert. “Orwell, Tolstoy, and Animal Farm.” Animal Farm—George Orwell, New Edition. Chelsea House, 2009. Bloom’s Literature. Reed, John. Snowball’s Chance. Roof, 2002. Rosenfeld, Isaac. “Animal Farm.” The Nation, 7 Sept. 1946, pp. 273–274. Scruggs, Charles. “George Orwell and Jonathan Swift: A Literary Relationship.” South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 1977, pp. 177–189. Sedley, Stephen. “An Immodest Proposal: Animal Farm.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 155–162.

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Animal Sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 368–369. Smyer, Richard I. “Animal Farm: The Burden of Consciousness.” Animal Farm—George Orwell. Chelsea House, 1997. Bloom’s Literature. Solomon, Robert C. “Ant Farm: An Orwellian Allegory.” Animal Farm—George Orwell. Chelsea House, 1997. Bloom’s Literature. Soule, George. “Animal Farm.” The New Republic, 2 Sept. 1946. White, Richard. “George Orwell: Socialism and Utopia.” Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Winter 2008. Questia. Wilson, Edmund. “George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’—Albert Cossery’s ‘Men God Forgot.’” The New Yorker, 7 Sept. 1946, pp. 97–98. Zennure, Koseman. “Psychoanalytical Outlook for Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 15, no. 3, 2016, pp. 867–880. Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. Yale University Press, 1974. _____. “Orwell: Socialism vs. Pessimism.” New Review, vol. 1, no. 3, June 1974, pp. 5–17.

Animal Farm (animated motion picture, 1954) The popularity of Animal Farm attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency, which viewed the satire as a powerful anti–Communist tract. Shortly after Orwell’s death, Howard Hunt, then working for the CIA’s Psychological Warfare Workshop, was directed to obtain the film rights from Sonia Orwell. Hunt contacted Joseph Alsop’s brother Carleton, who worked at Paramount Studios. Alsop went to England with Finis Farr, a Los Angeles writer, to negotiate with Orwell’s widow. The CIA provided funds to Louis de Rochemont, who had produced the March of Times newsreels and the 1945 semidocumentary spy film The House on 92nd Street, which was made in close cooperation with the FBI. Louis de Rochemont hired the British film directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor, who had worked on several training and propaganda films, to create an animated cartoon version. Eighty animators took three years to complete the film, which was released in 1954. Maurice Denham provided the voices for all the animal characters. Filmed in color, Animal Farm became Britain’s first feature animated cartoon and received a BAFTA nomination in 1956 for Best Animated Film.

• Further Reading Chilton, Martin. “How the CIA Brought Animal Farm to the Screen.” The Telegraph, 21 Jan. 2016. Cohen, Karl. “The Cartoon That Came In from the Cold.” The Guardian, U.S. Edition, 6 Mar. 2003.

Animal Farm (dramatic adaptations) Several playwrights adapted Orwell’s novel for dramatic productions. Malcolm Keith’s Animal Farm was staged at the Hole in The Wall Theatre in Leederville, Washington, in 1976. Ian Woolridge wrote a dramatic version for the Newcastle Theatre in 1996. In 2005 Mike Kenny’s adaptation was performed at Mind the Gap Theatre in Bradford, England. Nathan Weinberger and Paata Tskurishvik’s play Animal Farm was staged at the Rosslyn Spectrum Theater in Rosslyn, Virginia, in 2007. The first Australian adaption of Animal Farm premiered at the Shake and Stir Theatre in Brisbane in 2011. In 2014 Laurence Wilson’s version was staged at the Tell Tale Theatre in Liverpool. That same year James Kenworth’s adaption, directed by James Martin and designed by Ian Teague, was performed at Newham City Farm, a London farm. In 2018 Ian Wooldridge’s adaptation was staged by theatre companies in Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Austin, St. Paul, Baltimore, and Salt Lake City.

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Animal

Animal Farm (musical adaptations) Peter Hall adapted Orwell’s novel to create a musical play with lyrics by Adrian Mitchell and music by Richard Peaslee. The songs included “Beasts of England,” “Sugarcandy Mountain,” and “The Seven Commandments.” The play had its premiere at London’s National Theatre in 1984. The University of South Carolina Theatre staged a production in April 2017 directed by Stan Brown.

Animal Farm (television movie, 1999) Filmed for Hallmark in Ireland, John Stephenson’s production of Animal Farm, written by Alan Janes and Martyn Burke, featured human actors, live animals, and animatronic special effects. Voices were supplied by Peter Ustinov (Old Major), Patrick Stewart (Napoleon), Paul Scofield (Boxer), Kelsey Grammer (Snowball), Ian Holm (Squealer), and Julia LouisDreyfus (Mollie). Féodor Atkine, Claire Nadeau, and Roger Carel provided voices for the French version. With a budget of $22 million, Animal Farm was one of the most expensive television movies ever produced.

Animalism (Animal Farm, 1945) The prize boar Old Major encourages the animals of Manor Farm to overthrow their human master so they can live in freedom and prosperity. In urging his comrades to rebel, he warns the farm animals never to adopt the sins of mankind, namely wearing clothes, sleeping in beds, consuming alcohol, or killing fellow animals. Old Major sings “Beasts of England” (see “Beasts of England”) to inspire the animals but never provides a name for his beliefs. After his death, two young boars, Napoleon and Snowball, meet in secret for months, learning to read and developing Old Major’s inspirations into a philosophy they call Animalism. The essential principle is that everything human is evil and should be shunned by animals. Its tenets are summarized and promulgated through the Seven Commandments (see The Seven Commandments) which are painted on the barn for all the animals to see. When some animals have problems reading and remembering the Commandments, Snowball summarizes their ideology with a single maxim: “Four legs good, two legs bad.” As the pigs become corrupted and exploit other animals to maintain their rising status of privilege and power, the Commandments are altered to justify their behavior. Eventually, the Seven Commandments are replaced by a single statement, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” and the maxim changed from “Four legs good, two legs bad” to “Four legs good, two legs better!” Like Communism in the Soviet Union, Animalism is shaped to rationalize its adherents’ behavior rather than guide it.

“Antisemitism in Britain” (essay, 1945) Examining British attitudes toward Jews in 1945, Orwell detected several instances of anti–Semitism. Some 400,000 Jews were living in Britain, a population increased by thousands of Jewish refugees. Most lived in urban areas and were employed in food, clothing, and furniture businesses.

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Art After establishing the demographics of Britain’s Jews, Orwell listed seven anti–Semitic remarks he overheard in the past year. A middle-aged office worker takes the bus because too many of the “Chosen Race” ride the Underground. A tobacconist without matches recommends a Jewish shopkeeper because she always has matches, hinting that her religion has something to do with it. Two leftists express their distaste for Jews, while insisting they are not anti–Semitic. Orwell drew two conclusions from these comments. Many Britons made a distinction “between ‘antisemitism’ and ‘disliking Jews.’” The other was the irrationality of anti–Semitism. Jews suffered prejudice from a number of circumstances. Because Jews would benefit from an Allied victory, many labeled the conflict a “Jewish war.” Because publicizing the exploits of Jewish soldiers might antagonize Arab and South African members of the Empire, the subject was avoided. Because Jews often worked in or owned retail operations, they faced the daily ire of a public irritated by wartime rationing and shortages. Because Jewish neighborhoods were heavily bombed early in the war, it meant a disproportionate number of refugees crowding shelters were Jewish. Orwell stated that overall anti–Semitism had lessened in Britain. Thirty years before Jewish jokes were common fare in music halls and in comic post cards. Jews were unlikely to be accepted as officers in the navy or “smart” army regiments. Wealthy Jews adopted English or Scottish names and were reluctant to acknowledge their origins. Working class Jews expected to be beaten or jeered at if they entered the neighboring Gentile slums. The rise of Hitler made overt anti–Semitism unacceptable, and the Jew joke and the Jew cartoon vanished. Yet privately many intellectuals expressed anti–Semitic views, suggesting that Jews sowed discord and lowered morale. Orwell saw anti–Semitism as a problem worth studying but argued any objective study was difficult because any writer or researcher assumes in his own mind that he is immune to it. Orwell viewed it as stemming from the larger “disease” of nationalism, arguing that Zionists appeared to him as being “merely anti–Semites turned upside-down.” There is “some psychological vitamin” lacking in modern society that allows people to believe that whole races or nationalities are either “mysteriously good or mysteriously evil” (CEJL III, p. 340). Orwell doubted if the disease of anti–Semitism could be cured apart from the greater disease of nationalism.

“The Art of Donald McGill” (essay, 1941) Donald McGill was one of the most popular cartoonists and caricaturists of the Thirties and Forties, specializing in low-brow comic postcards sold in stationery shops that featured fat women in tight bathing suits, cheesecake blondes, and bloated drunks with funny faces. The comics were accompanied by saucy captions. One showed a woman holding her hands far apart as other women watched in shock. On the wall behind her is a fish trophy and a picture of a semi-nude male athlete. The caption “They didn’t believe her” leads viewers to assume she is not talking about the fish. Orwell catalogued the conventions of McGill’s joke cards, most of which were sexual in nature: Marriage only benefits women. Sex appeal vanishes at twenty-five. The amorous honeymooners become the grim embattled obese middle-aged couple overnight.

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Arthur Husbands are always henpecked, and all marriages are unhappy. Marriage is the central institution in life.

The crude, jokey cards about fat-bottomed women appeal to what Orwell calls “the Sancho Panza view of life,” a hedonistic selfish id-driven focus. It is vulgar and low but human: 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 toward safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with “voluptuous” figures…. 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 [CEJL II, p. 163].

These cards lead Orwell to observe that “whatever is funny is subversive” and that a dirty joke is a “rebellion” because all societies have to maintain sexual morality to instill order. The “little fat man” is offset by the Don Quixote within each person because “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 [CEJL II, p. 164].

“Arthur Koestler” (essay, 1944) Orwell viewed Arthur Koestler as one of many foreign writers who have dominated English literature, such as Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Conrad, and Henry James. For Koestler, the focus of his life and work was the failed Russian Revolution, the corruption of power, and the Moscow purge trials. Orwell reviewed five of his novels published in English, pointing out that the action of three of them takes place in prisons. Koestler’s Spanish Testament is based on his experience during the Spanish Civil War when he was imprisoned by the Fascists. “The sin of all left-wingers from 1933 onwards,” Orwell stated, “is that they have wanted to be anti–Fascist without being anti-totalitarian” (CEJL III, p. 236). Koestler, Orwell asserted, knew this but was unable to express it at the time. Orwell considered Koestler’s next novel The Gladiators “unsatisfactory.” In Koestler’s story the gladiator Spartacus leads a revolution. Roman slaves rebel in their hundreds of thousands in southern Italy, forge alliances with Mediterranean pirates, and establish the City of the Sun, where people are free of hunger, torture, and executions. But the revolutionary society soon is corrupted, and Spartacus crucifies 20 of his most loyal followers. The community collapses, and the remaining rebels are captured and subjected to mass executions. Orwell found Spartacus’ motives unclear, driven by “some obscure force he doesn’t understand.” The novel fails, in Orwell’s view, because the problem of judging ends and means in a revolution is not fully explored. For Orwell, Koestler’s most famous novel Darkness at Noon also avoids a full exploration of failed revolution because it is more psychological than political. The protagonist Rubashov is an Old Bolshevik who admits to committing imaginary crimes. Orwell listed three reasons that would lead people to confess: they were guilty, they were tortured or blackmailed, or they were loyal to the Party and too depressed to object. Orwell asserted in Rubashov’s case it is Party loyalty. Because “justice and objective truth have long ceased

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Battle to have any meaning for him,” Orwell argued, Rubashov eventually agrees to confess to serve the needs of the Party. Koestler’s autobiographical book Scum of the Earth draws the pessimistic conclusion Orwell cited as “Without education of the masses, no social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses” (CEJL III, p. 241). With this book, Koestler, in Orwell’s view, “ceases to idealise the common people.” Orwell considered Koestler’s next book Arrival and Departure disappointing because it is essentially a tract showing that “revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic impulses,” its protagonist guided by childhood guilt rather than ideology and an understanding of history. Orwell saw Arrival and Departure as Koestler’s most pessimistic book because he views all revolutions as failures. “All revolutions are failures,” Orwell agreed, “but they are not all the same failure.” The aim of Socialism is not “to make the world perfect but to make it better” (CEJL III, p. 244). In Orwell’s view, Koestler’s unwillingness to acknowledge that not all revolutions fail in the same way led him “into a blind alley” of cynicism about social change.

Aspidistra (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Native to Southern Asia, the aspidistra became a popular houseplant in British homes and boarding houses in the Victorian era. Able to survive with little light or water and able to withstand heat, cold, and polluted indoor air, it was nicknamed the “cast-iron plant.” Gordon Comstock, Orwell’s down-at-the-heels protagonist poet, views the aspidistra as a symbol of British conformity and bourgeois pretention. He expresses his cynical view of middle-class family life as “licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra” (104). Arguing with his girlfriend Rosemary, Comstock denounces marriage as a trap that ensnares men into semi-detached suburban villas “with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the window” (114) and accuses her of belonging to “the sex that cultivates them” (115). Comstock wages a “secret feud” with the aspidistra in his rooming house, “starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth” but the “beastly” thing refuses to die (28). Aspidistras haunt Comstock throughout the novel. At the lowest ebb of his selfdefeating war against money, Comstock lives in a squalid bug-infested slum room featuring an aspidistra provided by the landlady to make it more “homelike.” Deciding to abandon his writing career, Comstock shoves his manuscript of London Pleasures down a sewer grate as an aspidistra peeps at him from a nearby window. At the end of the novel Comstock ends his fruitless protest against money and conforms, going back to his old job, marrying his pregnant girlfriend, and embracing the aspidistra as “the tree of life.” Examining their new flat, Comstock sets his coffee cup on an occasional table, declaring it the perfect place to put their aspidistra, promising to clean it with a toothbrush to keep it from getting dusty.

Battle of the Cowshed (Animal Farm, 1945) The Battle of the Cowshed is the name the animals give to their victory over Farmer Jones and other humans who attempt to retake the farm. Brandishing a gun, Jones marches toward Animal Farm, followed by his workers and employees from neighboring farms

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Battle armed with sticks. Snowball, having studied the campaigns of Julius Caesar, outwits the humans. Jones fires his gun, wounding Snowball and killing a sheep. Snowball ploughs into Jones, knocking the gun from his hands. Jones and his fellow humans flee. Boxer is found distraught over having killed a stable boy with his heavy iron shoes. “War is war,” Snowball tells the horse, reminding him that humans are their enemies. Boxer remains remorseful, regretting taking even a human life. After the battle both Boxer and the wounded Snowball are given the honorary decoration “Animal Hero, First Class.” Jones’ gun is recovered and is fired annually on October 12, the anniversary of the battle, and Midsummer Day in honor of the Rebellion.

Battle of the Windmill (Animal Farm, 1945) After Napoleon announces that Animal Farm will engage in trade with human farmers, he agrees to sell timber to a neighbor. Mr. Frederick carts off the wood, paying for it in cash. When Napoleon learns that the banknotes are counterfeit, he pronounces a death sentence on Frederick, promising to boil him alive. Like the Nazis in World War II, Frederick, backed by 15 men armed with half a dozen guns, storms Animal Farm, inflicting great casualties and blowing up the windmill under construction. The humans are driven off Animal Farm, and Napoleon announces a great victory even though they only managed to reclaim what they had previously won.

“Beasts of England” (Animal Farm, 1945) “Beasts of England” is the revolutionary song taught by the boar Old Major to the animals of Manor Farm. It was a song he recalled his mother singing when he was young. She only knew the first three words. Old Major claims to have forgotten the song until it came back to him in a dream. He is certain the song was once sung by animals in the past but long forgotten. The “stirring tune” extolls the values later to be called Animalism: Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime Harken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time. Soon or late the day is coming Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown And the fruitful fields of England Shall be trod by beasts alone. Rings shall vanish from our noses, And the harness from our back, Bit and spur shall rust forever, Cruel whips no more shall crack. Riches more than mind can picture, Wheat and barley, oats and hay, Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels Shall be ours upon that day. Bright will shine the fields of England, Purer shall its waters be,

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Benefit Sweeter yet shall blow its breezes On the day that sets us free. For that day we all must labour, Though we die before it break; Cows and horses, geese and turkeys, All must toil for freedom’s sake. Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken well and spread my tidings Of the golden future time.

“Beasts of England” excites the animals, and after driving Mr. Jones from Manor Farm they sing it seven times to celebrate their victory. The song becomes the anthem of Animal Farm until Napoleon has the song abolished. The propagandist Squealer explains that “Beasts of England” was the song of the Rebellion, and now that victory has been achieved it no longer serves any purpose. A new song, written by the poet-pig Minimus, which begins “Animal Farm, Animal Farm/Never through me shalt thou come to harm!” takes its place, but few animals seem inspired. Many continue to hum “Beasts of England” to themselves.

“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” (essay, 1944) In reviewing Dali’s autobiography, Orwell found it incredibly “dishonest” because “some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticized,” and ordinary elements of life deleted. Whether the scenes Dali includes are real or imaginary, they reflect “the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” These scenes include kicking his three-year-old sister in the head at age six and feeling a rush of “delirious joy,” flinging a boy off a suspension bridge, and trampling a girl until she had to be torn from his clutches. He torments a girl by engaging in foreplay to the point of her arousal then stopping to savor her frustration, telling her he will do this for five years then dump her, which he does. He avoids the war in Spain, then flees the war in Europe, heading to America to find safe refuge. Now married, he indulges in painting works marked by perversity and necrophilia. “He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud,” Orwell argued, stating that he has “fifty times more talent” than most of his detractors. For Orwell, Dali brings up the role of the artist in society who is expected to be “exempt from the moral laws that are binding to ordinary people.” If you mention “the magic word ‘Art,’ and everything is O.K.” (CEJL III, p. 160). Hedonism, sadism, and cowardice are forgiven if “you can paint well enough to pass the test.” Orwell presumed that this license would not apply to common crimes. If Shakespeare returned to life and it were discovered that he liked “raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear” (CEJL III, p. 161). Orwell did not call for Dali’s work to be suppressed, but suggested that Dali “needs is diagnosis.” In part, Orwell suggested that Dali delves into aberration as way of “assuring himself that he is not commonplace” because a narcissist can always achieve notoriety by escaping “into wickedness” and “do the thing that will shock and wound people” (CEJL III, pp. 163–164). A larger question, Orwell posed, would be why his distorted paintings should appeal to “a sophisticated public.”

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Benjamin

Benjamin (Animal Farm, 1945) The oldest animal on Manor Farm, the donkey Benjamin is also the worst-tempered, given to cynical and often cryptic remarks. He states that God gave him a tail to keep away flies, but he would prefer to have no tail and no flies. Benjamin is known as the only animal on the farm who never laughs, stating that he never saw anything to laugh at. Though bitter and sarcastic, Benjamin is a devoted friend to the horse Boxer. The pair are often seen wordlessly grazing side by side. Benjamin is unchanged by the Rebellion, never voicing his opinions. He seems uninspired by the revolution, never volunteering to do extra work. Asked if he is happier now that Farmer Jones is gone, Benjamin answers cryptically that donkeys live a long time. After Boxer’s death, Benjamin appears more glum and taciturn.

Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Big Brother, the supreme leader of Oceania’s unnamed Party, is described as a ruggedly handsome man about 40 years old with a heavy black moustache. His image is everywhere in Winston Smith’s London, often displayed on posters with the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Adoring loyalists chant his initials in a ritual cadence of “B-B! … B-B! … B-B!” According to the renegade Emmanuel Goldstein (see the book), Big Brother is not a living person, but the embodiment of the Party. Big Brother, O’Brien tells Winston Smith under torture, will never die. Like Stalin, Big Brother is a remote figure. The novel does not describe him making public appearances. He is omnipresent in image only, his posters plastered on walls, his face appearing on telescreens to calm people after their emotional outbursts denouncing his enemy Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate demonstrations.

the book (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The revolutionary heretic and nemesis of Big Brother, Emmanuel Goldstein wrote a book attacking the totalitarian regime governing Oceania. Officially titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Goldstein’s book is often secretly referred to as simply the book. Winston Smith obtains a copy from O’Brien and reads the book, which Orwell reproduced in a “book-within-a-book” format. Goldstein’s book provides Smith with an alternative history that explains the truth of life in 1984. The world is divided into three superstates that are perpetually at war with each other, shifting alliances so that no two states are aligned against a single entity. Each state proclaims to follow a distinct ideology. Oceania, ruled by the Party headed by Big Brother, believes in INGSOC or English Socialism. Eurasia follows the principles of NeoBolshevism, and Eastasia practices a belief called Death-worship. Each superstate proclaims its hatred for the opposing ideologies, when, in fact, they have striking parallels. Each ideology demands rigorous loyalty that suppresses the individual. The superstates wage war not to defeat an enemy but to enslave their own peoples in the name of security. With their economies focused on war production rather than manufacturing civilian goods, the populace is kept in poverty, living on rationed food and clothing. Using the threat of annihilation by enemies, the rulers demand absolute loyalty to assure survival. During Winston’s interrogation at the end of the novel, O’Brien, his Inner Party tor-

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Boris mentor, reveals that he and other Party members helped write the book as a ruse to identify traitors.

“Bookshop Memories” (essay, 1936) First published in the Fortnightly in November 1936, “Bookshop Memories” is a brief memoir recounting Orwell’s experiences working in a second-hand bookstore. He catalogued the customers as first-edition snobs, students haggling over cheap textbooks, and “vague-minded women” searching for birthday presents for nephews. In addition to books, the shop sold used typewriters, stamps, horoscopes, holiday cards, and calendars. The principal sideline was a “two-penny no-deposit” library consisting of 600 novels. Orwell noted that the lending library was an accurate barometer of public taste. The most popular writers were not Hemingway, Priestley, or Wodehouse but Ethel Dell and Warwick Deeping. Short stories, he observed, had fallen out of favor, along with American authors. Working in a bookshop Orwell lost his love of books, now that he had to haul, shelve, dust them, and pitch them to buyers. “Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time,” he recalled, “books were boring and even slightly sickening” (CEJL I, p. 246). Orwell’s depiction of the second-hand job formed the setting of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, where the struggling poet Gordon Comstock sells books and manages a lending library of shoddy novels, including works by Dell and Deeping, which he regards as “slabs of pudding.”

Boris (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) Boris was Orwell’s most significant companion during his stay in Paris. Possibly an invented or composite character, Boris is described as a 35-year-old Russian refugee, whose wealthy parents died during the Russian Revolution. A former captain in the Second Siberian Rifles, he continually longs for his army past, collecting books on military strategy. As a refugee, all Boris retains of his former life are medals and photographs. When Orwell meets Boris, the ex-soldier is ill and unable to work. Though often hungry and forced to pawn his clothes, Boris remains philosophical, stating, “I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters” (24). Boris accompanies Orwell on a three-week search for work in Paris. Pawning items to buy cheese and bread, they spend days traipsing from hotels, to restaurants, to hiring halls, to the circus in search of menial labor. Although wearing tattered clothes and going without a bath for months, Boris is full of schemes and dreams. Having worked as a waiter in good hotels and resorts, he believes he will eventually secure a job that will provide enough tips so he can save enough money to open a smart restaurant on the Right Bank. Boris serves as Orwell’s mentor, securing him work as a dishwasher and introducing him to a Russian restaurateur who promises to hire them in his new establishment. Through Boris, Orwell learns the intricate hierarchy of hotel and restaurant employees and various methods to obtain free food. Orwell uses the Boris character to demonstrate the eternal optimism of waiters who by serving the rich and handling cash every day assume that they, too, will be rich themselves.

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Bowling

George Bowling (Coming Up for Air, 1939) The protagonist of Orwell’s fourth novel, George Bowling is an Everyman figure reflecting life in Britain shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. A middle-aged middle-class insurance salesman and First World War veteran, Bowling lives in a ticky tack suburban home with a wife and two children. Bowling continually exhibits a selfdeprecating sense of humor, noting that given his weight no woman would look twice at him unless paid to. He cheerfully admits that on his good days he might pass for a publican or a bookie but be taken for a vacuum cleaner salesman on his worst. A solid “fiveto-ten-quid-a-week” man, he announces that he is vulgar, insensitive, and fits his environment. Though Bowling is emblematic of men of his income and generation, he feels a sense of estrangement. This alienation stems, in part, from his obesity. A fat man, he argues, “isn’t quite like other men” and goes through life on “a sort of light-comedy plane” (21). One can’t imagine a fat Hamlet, he reasons, or Oliver Hardy playing Romeo. In many ways Bowling resembles Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published a decade later. Like Smith, Bowling is both a part of his society and a detached social critic. Both men have a keen sense of nature and criticize the slick, streamlined artificiality of the modern world. Above all, Bowling sees himself knowingly trapped by the twin middle-class swindles of mortgage and marriage that enslave males. He feels bought and sold, killing himself to pay an inflated price for a “brick dolls’ house” that is too small for his family. Wanting to use the sole bathroom, the kids interrupt his morning shave. His wife Hilda is a pennypinching frump who only worries about avoiding pregnancy while enduring occasional and always joyless sex. To avoid seeing himself as a “tame dairy cow” tormented by a shrewish wife and bawling kids, Bowling rebels, engaging in adulterous larks when he can get away with it. Bowling never attended college but developed a fleeting interest in literature during the First World War. After being wounded in France, he was given a commission and assigned to command a “food dump” on the west coast of Cornwall that consisted of 11 tins of bully beef. With ample free time, Bowling began reading with an almost “physical thirst” (142). He devoured books by Wells, Kipling, Conrad, Galsworthy, and lists of authors forgotten 20 years later. By the end of his reading he learned “to distinguish tripe from nontripe” (142). His latent interest in literature leads him to attend a Left Book Club meeting with his wife where he listens to a lecture by a “well-known anti–Fascist.” Bowling continually thinks about the prospect of war, imagining planes bombing London, machine guns firing from bedroom windows, emaciated troops marching through a bomb-battered street, and a kind of Nineteen-Eighty-Four “after-war” marked by colored shirts, barbed wire, rubber truncheons, secret policemen, posters, and “crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him” (176). The past offers Bowling an escape from the stress and terror of modern life and fear of the future. While Winston Smith has only a dream of what he calls the Golden Country, Bowling recalls his boyhood town Lower Binfield in Oxfordshire near the Thames. Noting an RAF bomber flying overhead, Bowling dodges the prospect of another world war by

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Bowling reminiscing about his home town, where he spent his youth indulging in his favorite pastimes, fishing and reading boys’ weeklies. Bowling is not sentimental about his hometown itself, recalling the lack of plumbing and omnipresent flies in homes and shops. He tells readers he is not nostalgic about his childhood but the civilization his childhood was part of, a civilization he senses is being destroyed. He longs for the world “before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler” when people “hadn’t heard of machine guns … didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp” (87). Though he admits he is more interested in fishing than women, Bowling fondly remembers Elsie Waters, his first girlfriend, whom he has not seen since leaving for the army during the First World War. Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bowling’s most erotic moments occur in nature. He and Elsie “walk out” and venture into a lovers’ lane under the trees. Looking back on losing his virginity, Bowling boasts “we didn’t make such a mess of it as you might expect” (123). His relationship with Elsie was terminated when he went into the army a year later. Returning to Lower Binfield 24 years later he encounters a married middle-aged Elsie. The shapeless woman with a bulldog face does not recognize her former lover, making Bowling realize he cannot find escape in the past. Surviving an accidental bombing in his boyhood town, he also realizes he cannot escape the future. As a character, Bowling is much like Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman’s Daughter and Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. All three novels depict the protagonists briefly fleeing, protesting against, or attempting to escape their circumstances but in the end returning to their starting points. Dorothy’s spell of amnesia takes her through tramping, hop-picking, and teaching. Her world is expanded, and she loses her religious faith in the process. But at the end of the novel she returns to her clergyman father, finding refuge in her old life of self-denial, chores, and routine. Comstock stages a two-year money strike to protest middle-class conformity and launch a literary career to establish his independence. After getting his girlfriend pregnant, he retreats to his old job, gives up writing, and embraces the life of the five-to-ten-quid-a-weeker he once despised. Bowling tries to escape the looming war and “after-war” but ends up back home facing an irate wife suspecting him of adultery.

• Further Reading Annette, Federico. “Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2005. Questia. Eagleton, Terry. “Orwell and the Lower-Middle Class Novel.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 10–33. Fink, Howard. “Coming Up for Air: Orwell’s Ambiguous Satire on the Wellsian Utopia.” Studies in Literary Imagination, vol. vi, no. 2, Fall 1973, pp. 51–60. Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Orwell as Satirist.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 103–118. Ligda, Kenneth. “Orwellian Comedy.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 60, no. 4, Winter 2014. Questia. Rosenfeld, Isaac. “Decency and Death.” Partisan Review, May 1950, pp. 514–518. Tukacs, Tamás. “Jonah in the Whale: The Spatial Aspects of Nostalgia in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Eger Journal of English Studies, xiii, 2013, pp. 47–65. Van Dellen, Robert J. “George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air: The Politics of Powerlessness.” Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1975, pp. 57–68.

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Bowling

Hilda Bowling (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Hilda Bowling is the 39-year-old “hare-like” wife of George Bowling, the protagonist of Coming Up for Air. A homemaker and mother, she is characterized by her ongoing concerns about financial security. Bowling describes his wife as being in a continual “state of alarm and dismay” over rising butter prices and the condition of the children’s shoes. He senses that his wife’s true pleasure in life comes from foreseeing domestic disasters. Although Bowling contemplates the prospect of war and the threat of Hitler, Hilda appears content to brood over installment payments and the cost of groceries. Bowling met Hilda Vincent at a tennis club in Ealing. Small, slim, and timid with large eyes, she reminded the 30-year-old Bowling of a hare. She came from the “povertystricken-officer class” of soldiers, sailors, clergymen, and Anglo-Indian officials who struggled to maintain elitist pretentions on fixed incomes. The Vincent home was a jumble of spears, brass ornaments, animal heads, and other Asian relics that reeked of Trichinopoly cigars. Her retired parents rarely left home, having the mental and physical activity of “shellfish.” As lifelong civil servants wholly detached from the commercial world, they mistakenly saw George as a rising businessman and suitable son-in-law. Bowling regrets marrying Hilda, who though six years younger, quickly slumped into “a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump” in her 20s. What distinguishes Hilda, Bowling asserts, is her distinct lack of “any kind of joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake” (160). He claims she does everything for negative reasons, denying herself any pleasure. In baking a cake she thinks only of “how to save butter and eggs” and in having sex “all she thinks about is how not to have a baby” (161). Having grown up in a cashstrapped, penny-pinching household, she cannot see anything beyond next month’s bills. Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bowling fantasizes about killing his wife.

Joe Bowling (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Joe Bowling is the older brother of the protagonist George Bowling. In childhood he belonged to “gang” of farm lads who skipped school, went fishing, pulled pranks, and committed petty thefts. Two years older than George, he intimidated his younger brother, shooing him away from the gang as an immature kid. George grew up feeling inferior until he realized that he was judged the smarter brother. While he won prizes in arithmetic, his older brother Joe wallowed at the bottom of his class, an obvious “dunce.” George loved boys’ magazines. In contrast, Joe could barely read. “The sight of print him feel sick,” Bowling recalls. Their parents envisioned George going to college and becoming a teacher, hoping that the less qualified Joe would find work as an auctioneer. By 18, Joe became an “ugly ruffian” who loafed around the family shop, spending his free time chasing girls, drinking in pubs, and smoking. One night he pried open the shop till, stole £8, and ran off. Rumors circulated that he was fleeing a pregnant girlfriend. The Bowlings never heard from Joe again, leading them to speculate that he either emigrated to America or was killed in the Great War.

Samuel Bowling (Coming Up for Air, 1939) The father of the protagonist George Bowling, Samuel Bowling operated a seed store in Lower Binfield, Oxforshire before the Great War. A man with little formal education and

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Boxer limited business acumen, he tended his small shop that provided a marginal income for his family. As a business owner, he stood socially and economically higher than most of the townspeople. After Sarazin’s, a chain store, opened an outlet in Lower Binfield, Sam Bowling saw a steady loss of customers. “A small shopkeeper going down the hill is a dreadful thing to watch,” Bowling recounts (118). George vainly attempted to teach his father modern business methods, but Sam Bowling saw little reason to change. Fumbling along, his dwindling income offset by a small inheritance, he managed to stay afloat. Looking back, Bowling saw that his father’s life, like that of other small merchants, was “a race between death and bankruptcy” and thankfully death claimed him first (119). Samuel Bowling died in 1915 while his son George was serving in France. Reading his mother’s tearstained letter, Bowling was unmoved, accepting the news “in the sort of empty-headed apathetic way in which one accepted everything in the trenches” (132).

Boxer (Animal Farm, 1945) Boxer is an “enormous horse” some 18 hands high who is as strong as two horses. A white stripe down his nose gives him a “stupid appearance,” and he has little intelligence. While other animals learn to read or at least memorize the alphabet, Boxer never gets beyond the letter D. In trying to learn new letters he forgets the first four, so he settles on remembering A through D, telling himself he will master the rest of his letters when he retires. Though stupid, Boxer is highly respected for his strength, dedication, and loyalty. After the Rebellion, he unquestionably follows the rule of the pigs. He and the mare Clover are described as the pigs’ “most faithful disciples.” Both loyally attend the meetings held by the pigs and transmit what they have learned to the other animals. When Napoleon denounces all clothing as being human and that animals should go naked, Boxer fetches the straw hat he wore to keep the flies off in summer and tosses it into a rubbish fire. Though dedicated to Animalism, Boxer regrets killing a stable lad with his iron shoes when Mr. Jones and other humans attempt to retake Animal Farm. Snowball, however, argues that he should feel no remorse, telling him, “The only good human being is a dead one” (37). Boxer, his eyes full of tears, declares he had no wish to take even a human life. For his valor in the Battle of the Cowshed to save Animal Farm, Boxer is heralded as “Animal Hero, First Class.” When the pigs begin to claim special privileges and adopt the human vices Old Major warned them about, Boxer never questions the leadership of Napoleon, chauvinistically repeating that Napoleon is always right. Toiling harder than anyone else on the farm, his personal motto is “I will work harder!” Boxer’s willingness to work extra hours refers to the Stakhanovite movement promoted by Stalin after a coal miner named Aleksei G. Stakhanov reportedly mined more than a hundred tons of coal in a single shift, 14 times the average output. Boxer fights bravely in the Battle of Windmill when Mr. Frederick, a neighboring farmer, marches onto Animal Farm with 15 men, many of whom are armed. Surveying the wreckage of the windmill, he asks Napoleon why the battle can be called a victory when they simply reclaimed land they had previously won. That, Napoleon informs him, is the victory. Laboring to rebuild the windmill, the aging Boxer collapses. Squealer tells the other

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Boys’ animals that the pigs have arranged for Boxer to be treated by a veterinarian. Though distrustful of turning Boxer over to humans, they celebrate when a van arrives on the farm to transport him. The donkey Benjamin reads the sign on the van revealing that it belongs to “Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler.” Learning that Boxer is being taken to the knacker’s, the animals warn him. Clover chases after the van, urging Boxer to escape, but he is too weak to break down the doors. Squealer assures the animals that their fears were unfounded. The knacker’s van had been recently purchased by a veterinary surgeon who had not had time to repaint the vehicle. Boxer, he tells them, was given the best medical treatment possible but died three days later. Shortly after Boxer’s death, the pigs inexplicably come up with the money needed to purchase a case of whisky.

“Boys’ Weeklies” (essay, 1940) First published in Horizon in March 1940, “Boys’ Weeklies” sparked a brief and curious literary debate in early wartime Britain. Orwell’s article analyzed popular two-penny weekly papers targeted to adolescent males, especially the leading titles Gem and Magnet published by the Amalgamated Press. These publications, Orwell sensed, offered a better insight into the British state of mind than popular novels aimed at the middle class or motion pictures produced by a monopolistic industry. Set in public schools, the Gem and Magnet series followed the adventures of “good” British boys who enjoyed clean fun, hard work, and sports and shunned vices. Bad boys appeared in the tales but their misdeeds were limited to smoking and frequenting pubs. Sex was never referred to, and the boys rarely interacted with girls. Magnet’s leading public school chum Billy Bunter had become by 1940, in Orwell’s estimation, as famous a fictional character as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Bunter and his classmates, Orwell noted, never age, forever remaining 14 or 15 in a world that never changes. The stories appear to be set in 1910 when the Empire was at its zenith, with teenagers speaking 30year-old slang. Orwell observed that while actual public school boys stopped reading these publications at 12 or 13, council school students read them longer, and the weeklies remained popular with working class youths and young men. He noted that the publications contained advertisements aimed at adult males, suggesting an older readership. These weekly magazines drew correspondence from every part of the Empire, including Canada, Australia, and the Middle East, with readers asking incisive questions about the characters, indicating a dedicated and engaged fan base. Frank Richards was listed as the author of the series published in Magnet, and Gem’s stories were published under the name Martin Clifford, but Orwell speculated that these were probably pen names for multiple writers. “A series lasting thirty years,” he argued, “could hardly be the work of same person every week” (CEJL I, p. 463). The political viewpoint these weeklies presented, Orwell declared, could be summarized by two prevailing assumptions: “nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny” (CEJL I, p. 471). The French were depicted as bearded, excitable “Froggies” and the Chinese

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Boys’ were portrayed as sinister men with pigtails. Orwell viewed the “mental world” of Gem and Magnet as a reassuring vision of Anglo supremacy: The year is 1910—or 1940, but it is all the same. You are … a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh, tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study…. There is a cosy fire in the study…. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay…. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever [CEJL I, p. 473].

If these weeklies were jingoist and chauvinistic, Orwell noted, at least they lacked the overt sadism and celebratory violence prevalent in the “Yank magazines” then gaining popularity in Britain. Orwell’s main point was that these weeklies demonstrated that the Left had not influenced British popular culture, which still extolled the pre–1914 values of imperialism and upper-class snobbery. Shortly after the article’s publication, Frank Richards, who wrote the boys’ weeklies in question, asked Horizon for an opportunity to respond. In his May 1940 article Richards wittily rebuked Orwell for his numerous inaccuracies and casual denunciations, especially his suggestion that the series were written by multiple authors. “To the best of my knowledge and belief,” Richards insisted, “I am only one person, and have never been two or three” (CEJL I, p. 487). Richards had in fact written the weekly series for both magazines, using the pseudonym Martin Clifford for the Gem stories. The prolific juvenile author accused Orwell of “reading into” his “innocent fiction” a “scheme for drugging the minds of the younger proletariat into dull acquiescence in a system of which Mr Orwell does not approve” (CEJL I, p. 485). Richards found it curious that Orwell seemed offended that his boys’ series “smacks of the year 1910”—a year Richards reminded Orwell that came before the horrors of the Great War, the General Strike, and the “discontents” of the Depression and the Second World War. In responding to Orwell’s charges that his series depicted a world that never changes and that foreigners are funny, Richards reminded Orwell of the French saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Boys in 1940 would not read his stories if they did not identify with the characters, even if those characters appear frozen in 1910. In defending himself on the second allegation, Richards stated, “I must shock Mr Orwell by telling him that foreigners are funny” and went on to to detail the comic antics of Hitler and Mussolini. In humorless nations like Germany, Richards stated, the people “lap up” Hitler’s theatrics. In Britain, however, he argued, “the play-acting ass would be laughed out of existence” (CEJL I, p. 491). Richards concluded that even if he were a Communist he would avoid injecting politics into his work because “the business” of a juvenile author is to “entertain his readers, make them as happy as possible, give them a feeling of cheerful security, turn their thoughts to healthy pursuits, and above all to keep them away from unhealthy introspection” (CEJL I, pp. 492–493). Deep thinking, Richards believed, could “only harm” impressionable boys. George Bowling, the protagonist in Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, published a year earlier, recalls reading Gem and Magnet as a boy before the First World War. His favorite weekly, however, was one called Chums that featured stories about an adventurer called Donovan the Dauntless. Reading the stories at 12 and imagining himself as Donovan exploring exotic locales was “bliss, pure bliss.”

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Bozo

Bozo (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) Bozo is a London “screever” or pavement artist who draws cartoons on sidewalks for tips. Introduced to Bozo by his friend Paddy, Orwell describes the maimed Bozo as a goodspirited optimist. A war veteran from a bankrupt family, Bozo was once a housepainter in Paris. After his fiancée was run down in the street and killed, Bozo got drunk. Suffering from a hangover, he slipped from a scaffold and fell 40 feet, crushing his right foot. Returning to England, he was unable to find employment. After trying to sell books and toys, he became a screever. Although he only owns the clothes on his back and often sleeps in homeless shelters or the open air, he prides himself in earning a living rather than begging. He also takes great pride in the originality of his political cartoons he sketches on pavements. Bozo stands apart from the other tramps Orwell encountered because of his spirit. Feeling no shame or sullen defeatism about his poverty, he taps his head, telling Orwell that it does not matter whether one is rich or poor, as long as one can be a free man in his own mind. Orwell last reports that Bozo has been jailed for two weeks for begging.

The Brookers (The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937) The Brookers operated the rooming house where Orwell stayed at the beginning of his tour of northern England in 1936. Mr. Brooker, an unemployed miner, along with his wife rented rooms to boarders and ran a tripe shop as a sideline. Years before they owned a pub but lost their license for allowing gambling on the premises. Orwell surmised that even when he was working as a miner, Mr. Brooker sought to supplement his income with various downscale shops. Brooker rarely bathed, and his hands were so dirty that he left black thumb prints on the buttered bread he supplied the lodgers for meals. Mr. Brooker grumbled about having to do “bloody woman’s work” of peeling potatoes because his wife, an obese invalid, rarely stirred from her “shapeless sofa.” Brooker, Orwell noted, “was one of those people who can chew their grievances like cud” (25). The Brookers had several children, most of whom had moved to London or gone to Canada. A “pig-like” son who lived nearby ate with his parents, his wife doing much of the cooking and cleaning for the Brookers. A girl named Emmie, engaged to another son, worked in a Wigan mill for “some starvation wage” and “spent her evenings in bondage at the Brookers’ house.” Though only a fiancée, she was badgered by Mrs. Brooker who treated her like a daughter-in-law expected to help the family. Orwell saw the Brookers not as eccentric characters but symbolic of the “tens of thousands” of people like them who are the “by-products of the modern world,” noting they are part of “what industrialism has done for us” (28).

The Brotherhood (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Brotherhood is the rumored underground resistance movement against Big Brother headed by the exiled renegade Emmanuel Goldstein. Winston Smith mistakenly assumes that O’Brien, an Inner Party member, belongs to the Brotherhood. O’Brien invites Smith to his apartment, enlisting him in the Brotherhood, leading him to admit his disloyalty to the Party and reveal the location of his hideout. O’Brien, in fact, operates as a double-agent, posing as a member of the Brotherhood

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Brownell to lure rebels into identifying themselves. Under torture, Smith, asks if the Brotherhood is real or simply a ruse used by the Thought Police to trap traitors. O’Brien informs Smith that he will never learn the answer to that question. “As long as you live,” he tells Winston, “it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind” (260).

Brownell, Sonia Sonia Brownell (1918–1980), Orwell’s second wife, was born in Calcutta, India, where her father worked for the British administration. Her father died when she was four. Her mother remarried, but her second husband was plagued by drinking and financial problems. Returning to England, Sonia’s mother borrowed money from friends to set up a boarding house that supplied enough income for Sonia’s education at a strict convent school that banned girls from having mirrors and refused to let them bathe naked. After leaving the convent, Sonia renounced Catholicism, later spitting on the sidewalk whenever a nun passed by. In 1936 she went canoeing with three friends, two boys and another girl, on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. A sudden wind gust capsized the boat, plunging all four into the water. Swimming toward shore, she realized her friends were in distress and returned to help. She tried to rescue one of the boys but was forced to push him under the water when he began thrashing, threatening to drag her under. She studied French and secretarial skills. She served as assistant to Eugene Vinaver, editing and transcribing his work on Malory. Orwell met Sonia Brownell in 1945 when she was working for his friend Cyril Connolly at The Horizon. Friends have often suggested that Sonia was the model for Julia, the “girl from the Fiction Department” that Winston Smith falls in love with in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell proposed to Sonia in July 1949, and they were married in his hospital room on October 13, 1949, in London’s University College Hospital. Orwell, still bedridden with tuberculosis, wore a smoking jacket for the ceremony. Over the next months, Sonia, who lived nearby, often visited Orwell in the hospital. On January 18, 1950, Orwell prepared his will, making Sonia Orwell his sole beneficiary. Three days later Orwell suffered a lung hemorrhage and died before Sonia could reach his bedside. After Orwell’s death Sonia collected his papers and was protective of his legacy. Working with David Astor and Richard Rees, she established the George Orwell Archive at University College London in 1960. She and Ian Angus edited Orwell’s letters, essays, and reviews, producing the four-volume collection The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell published by Secker & Warburg in London in 1968. In 1958 she married a wealthy landowner named Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been involved in a celebrated scandal and trial that eventually led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain. They divorced in 1965. She was acquainted with a number of writers and painters, including Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, William Coldstream, and Victor Pasmore. Because of mismanagement and possible fraud, Sonia Orwell endured poverty in her last years, living in a small London apartment. She died of a brain tumor in 1980. The painter Francis Bacon helped pay off her debts.

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Burmese • Further Reading Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Little and Brown, 1980. Schiff, Stacy. “The Widow Orwell.” New York Times, 15 June 2003. Sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. HarperCollins, 1991. Spurling, Hilary. The Girl From the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell. Counterpoint, 2003.

Burmese Days (novel, 1934) Set in the fictional village of Kyauktada, Burma (then a part of India) in 1926, Orwell’s first novel details the decline and ultimate suicide of his 35-year-old protagonist John Flory. An English timber merchant, Flory lives in a remote colonial outpost consisting of a halfdozen bungalows, a tin-roofed church, a British cemetery, and a shabby European Club, which forms the center of the community. The novel characterizes the oppressive racism of British imperialism, the loneliness of life at the fringes of the Empire, the enervating heat of the tropics, and the stultifying mentality of bigoted jingoists. It is a novel of doomed love and dashed hopes. A young Englishwoman arrives in Kyauktada, and Flory sees an escape from loneliness and dissolution. When she rejects his desperate pleas for marriage, he kills himself, a death Orwell tells readers will soon be forgotten because suicides by Europeans “occasion very little surprise” (240). Orwell devotes the opening chapter to detailed descriptions of U Po Kyin, Kyauktada’s subdivisional magistrate. A native Burmese, U Po Kyin is a corrupt judge who takes bribes, conspires against adversaries, and exacts tributes from his fellow Burmese. Superficially subservient to his colonial masters, U Po Kyin has nothing but contempt for the British. Determined to be a parasite upon them since childhood, he rose from clerking for rice merchants to getting a job in the British government and eventually becoming a magistrate. Though thoroughly corrupt, he is held above reproach because “no British officer will ever believe anything against his own men” (9). At 56, he celebrates his obesity because he imagines himself growing fat devouring his enemies. U Po Kyin’s current scheme is destroying the reputation of the Civil Surgeon Dr. Veraswami, who refuses to take bribes. John Flory, Veraswami’s English friend, provides the doctor with a powerful ally and potential defender. U Po Kyin dismisses the Englishman as a “coward” he can “deal with.” The Burmese magistrate operates like a secretive Big Brother, his spies reporting on the movements of his English superiors and intercepting their mail. Convinced that he will soon be elevated to an even higher post, U Po Kyin savors the time when Englishmen will not only be his peers but his subordinates. Overhearing his plans, his wife urges him to strive for more merit to atone for his sins. U Po Kyin, who already donates to the monastery and sets fish free in the river, plans to build a series of pagodas to assure a high status in the afterlife. U Po Kyin appears briefly in the rest of the novel, his invisible machinations manipulating John Flory and engineering his eventual demise. Introduced in the subsequent chapter as someone targeted by the corrupt judge, the protagonist John Flory is depicted as a man apart—physically, intellectually, and emotionally distanced from his peers. Branded with a disfiguring birthmark, Flory is self-conscious about his appearance and unable to look people in the eye, leading him to avoid confrontation. Inwardly disgusted by the racist attitudes of his peers he regards as “dull boozing witless porkers” (30), Flory lives inwardly, reading books. He two closest relationships are with Asians, both of which are unsatisfactory. He keeps a faithless Burmese mistress named Ma Hla May he purchased from her parents for 300 rupees. Doll-like and exotic, she pro-

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Burmese vides Flory with sexual release but little intimacy or spiritual companionship. Flory views her as a “kitten,” a kind of pet. She uses his need for sex to wheedle money from him and steals his cigarette case. His closest friend, an Indian physician, Dr. Veraswami, is an Uncle Tom figure who reads Dickens and extols the virtues of British colonialism. Flory is unable to express his misgivings and resentments about British imperialism to the good doctor, who praises the British for bringing order and civilization to the Orient. Flory is frustrated by his friend’s submissiveness and his willingness to forgive the English for their arrogance and prejudice. Flory stipulates that despite his resentments toward his English peers, he is no radical, rejecting Veraswami’s claim his views are seditious: I don’t want the Burmans to drive us out of this country. God forbid! I’m here to make money, like everyone else. All I object to is the slimy white man’s burden humbug. The pukka sahib pose. It’s so boring…. We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we’d only admit that we’re thieves and go on thieving without any humbug [35–36].

Veraswami is horrified by Flory’s sentiments, arguing about all the benefits the British had brought to India. Although the patriotic doctor steadfastly disagrees with Flory’s disenchantment, their conversations give Flory an outlet. “In fifteen years I’ve never talked honestly to anyone except you,” he tells Veraswami. “My talks here are a safety valve; a little Black Mass on the sly” (39). Veraswami warns Flory about U Po Kyin, calling the magistrate “a crocodile in human shape” intent on destroying his reputation (41). The doctor tells Flory he would be better able to withstand U Po Kyin’s attacks if he were a member of the European Club, which would make an Asian “sacrosanct.” Veraswami insists he is not asking Flory to nominate him for membership. Flory, who believes that it was “his duty to support the doctor,” shies away from the prospect of the ugly “row” the nomination of an Asian would cause among the club’s racist members. Veraswami claims to understand his friend’s position, pointing out that just having a white man visit his home boosts his prestige. On parting, the doctor warns Flory about U Po Kyin, telling him that “like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot!” (44). Flory, however, naively dismisses the warning. Flory is too shy, too cowardly to challenge his English peers about admitting his friend to their shabby clubhouse. Pressured to integrate the club by superiors, Deputy Commissioner Macgregor posts a notice suggesting that members consider admitting Asians. Ellis, an overt racist, decries the idea, denouncing Veraswami as a “nigger-boy,” calling him Dr. Very-slimy. Flory burns with rage at the insults to his friend but takes no action. Orwell depicts Flory as a flawed man. Insecure since childhood because of his disfigurement, he is disinclined to challenge others or freely speak his mind. Afraid to voice his views to anyone other than Veraswami, Flory lives in “secret, sterile worlds” of his own thoughts (61). Above all, he endures insufferable loneliness. He finds Burma beautiful but feels that beauty has to be shared to be fully savored. Flory receives an anonymous letter warning him to “eschew” Veraswami, who is accused of raping female patients, peddling drugs, and torturing jail inmates. Flory recognizes the letter as an obvious ploy by U Po Kyin but feels invulnerable to a native quarrel. “No Englishman,” Orwell notes, “ever feels himself in real danger from an Oriental” (69). Flory’s sense of entitled security reveals another character flaw, his failure to recognize the forces operating against him.

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Burmese The arrival of a young Englishwoman in Kyauktada stirs Flory into action with the hopes of finally establishing a meaningful relationship leading to marriage and children. Elizabeth Lackersteen, 22, moves to Burma to stay with her aunt and uncle following the death of her mother in Paris. Flory meets her by accident when he hears her cries for help. Frightened by a harmless water buffalo, she throws herself into Flory’s arms when he comes to her rescue. She initially finds Flory interesting and desirable, despite his age and birthmark. She is excited by his manly demeanor and relishes his tale of shooting an elephant. The appearance of Elizabeth promises a new life for Flory. He gets a haircut, purchases new shirts, curtails his drinking and smoking, and dismisses his Burmese mistress with a check. Flory, however, misreads Elizabeth’s character. Hearing that she has lived in Paris, he mistakenly believes she shares his interest in the arts. But Elizabeth, an eager social climber, dislikes artists and progressives, viewing them as ineffectual dilettantes. When Flory tries to share his love of books and introduces Elizabeth to Burmese culture, she is put off, especially by Flory’s willingness to interact with Asians. She is convinced that proper white men would not “rub shoulders with those smelly natives” (93). No longer seeing Flory as her “manly” savior, Elizabeth distances herself. Her interest in Flory, however, is revived when he takes her on a hunting trip and they kill a leopard. Flory has the leopard skinned, hoping to present her with a trophy of their hunt. Flory’s attempts to woo Elizabeth Lackersteen are interrupted by a number of fateful events. An earthquake disrupts his marriage proposal. When he attempts to repeat his proposal, Elizabeth, informed by her aunt about Ma Hla May, turns away from Flory in disgust. Hoping to regain her favor, Flory collects the leopard skin only to discover their hunting trophy was improperly cured, reducing it to discolored “rubbish.” In delivering the ruined skin, Flory awkwardly knocks over a vase of flowers. A visiting British officer named Verrall briefly arouses Elizabeth’s interests. When the officer abruptly departs, leaving Flory her lone potential suitor, Elizabeth returns to Flory, willing to accept him, despite his flaws. Their engagement seems guaranteed until Ma Hla May, urged on by U Po Kyin, appears at the European chapel whining and wailing at Flory for abandoning her. Flory is disgraced; Elizabeth is disgusted. She breaks off with Flory, who begs her to forgive him, to promise to reconsider marriage at a later date. Desperate for some kind of relationship, he offers a platonic arrangement. But Elizabeth is adamant in her rejection. Despondent, Flory goes home, shoots his dog, then himself. His friend Dr. Veraswami claims that Flory died accidentally, but the Europeans readily accept the idea that he was the chap with the birthmark who shot himself over a girl. Because suicides are not uncommon among the Europeans, Flory is quickly forgotten. Orwell ends the novel summarizing the fates of the other characters. With Flory gone, the obese corrupt Burmese magistrate U Po Kyin successfully deals with Dr. Veraswami. Flory’s friend is demoted and transferred to Mandalay General Hospital. Living in a small bungalow near the hospital, he operates a small clinic to supplement his reduced salary. He joins a second-rate club and tries to befriend its lone white member, a dull lout named Macdougall who is only interested in whisky and magnetos. Ma Hla May ends up working in a low-class brothel where she is beaten by her customers. She regrets not saving more of the money she extracted from Flory. U Po Kyin himself is promoted, granted membership in the European Club, and makes 20,000 rupees in bribes in a single year in his new post.

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Cat But before he can build the pagodas and do the works of charity that will ensure high status in the afterlife he is felled by a stroke and dies. His widow fears that with his sins unatoned for, her husband may have been thrown into hell or returned to life as a lowly rat or frog. A few months after Flory’s death, Elizabeth Lackersteen marries Macgregor, 20 years her senior, and becomes a matronly hostess, giving “charming little dinner parties,” putting the wives of her husband’s subordinates “in their places,” and terrorizing her Burmese servants. Victor Gollancz was hesitant about publishing the novel, fearing it would offend the Indian government and expose the firm to libel. The libel concerns were raised when Orwell told one of Gollancz’s assistants that the characters were based on actual people and that he had used their real names. Although the book had been published in America the year before without complaint, Gollancz insisted on changing the names. (Subsequent editions restored the original names, so both British and American editions are identical). Initial reviews were largely positive, though some criticized the unrelenting bitter tone of the novel. The notice in the Times Literary Supplement stated that the novel “has traces of power and is written with a pen steeped in gall” but faulted the book for not representing the “newer type of Burman official, men of high character who resent” the corrupt characters Orwell so graphically depicted. George Stonier’s review in Fortnightly called the debates between Flory and Dr. Veraswami an “admirable stroke of irony” that creates “excellent comedy.” He found Burmese Days as part of a “heat-wave in current English fiction” but “the most impressive novel of the five.” The New York Times review by Fred Marsh praised the novel as “one of those rare personal records of the seamy side of life that combine sincerity, convincingness and judgment with a sound and attractive literary style.”

• Further Reading “Books: To the Heart of Matters.” Time, 6 Feb. 1950. “Burmese Days.” Times Literary Supplement, 18 July 1935, p. 462. Gopinath, Praseeda. “An Orphaned Manliness: The Pukka Sahib and the End of Empire in A Passage to India and Burmese Days.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 41, no. 2, 2009, pp. 201+. Larkin, Emma. Finding George Orwell in Burma. Penguin, 2004. Lieskounig, Jürgen. “The Power of Distortion: George Orwell’s Burmese Days.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian University of Modern Language Association, vol. 117, 2012, pp. 49–68. Marsh, Fred. “Sahibs in Burma.” New York Times, 28 Oct. 1934, p. 45. Melia, Paul. “Imperial Orwell.” Atlantis, vol. 37. no. 2, pp. 11–12. Shihada, Isam M. “Racism in George Orwell’s Burmese Days.” IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 80–99. Stansky, Peter, and William Abrahams. Orwell: The Transformation. Knopf, 1980. Stonier, G. W. “Burmese Days.” Fortnightly, Aug. 1935, p. 255. Taylor, D.J. “Defeat into Victory: Orwell’s Novels of the 1930s Prefigure the Horror of Nineteen Eighty-Four.” New Statesman, 28 May 2009.

The Cat (Animal Farm, 1945) The unnamed cat is an elusive solitary character in Animal Farm. When Old Major summons the animals to the barn to hear about his strange dream, the cat arrives last, seeks the warmest place, and purrs in contentment throughout Old Major’s address without listening to a word he is saying. After the Rebellion and the establishment of Animal Farm, the cat disappears whenever there is work to be done, showing up at meal time with a

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Charles variety of excuses for her absence. When a vote is taken on whether wild animals should be embraced as fellow comrades, she votes on both sides. The cat joins the Re-education Committee and is active for a brief time. She is spotted sitting on a roof telling sparrows that they are comrades now and invites them to sit on her paw in safety. The birds, however, maintain a safe distance. The cat does spring into action on behalf of Animal Farm when Jones and other humans attempt to retake the property. She jumps on the back of a farmhand, sinking her claws into his shoulders and making him cry out in pain.

“Charles Dickens” (essay, 1939) Orwell’s lengthy essay about Dickens first appeared in his collection Inside the Whale published in 1940. Dickens, Orwell remarked, attacked English institutions without making people hate him so that “he has become a national institution himself ” (CEJL I, p. 415). But Dickens, he maintained, was widely misunderstood by the readers who embraced him. He was not a “proletarian” writer, his novels featuring only one industrial worker, Hard Times’ Stephen Blackpool. He also was not a “revolutionary” writer because although he attacked social abuses, he never criticized the economic system itself. His social criticism, Orwell noted, “is almost exclusively moral” because his target is not social institutions but “human nature” (CEJL I, p. 416). Dickens attacks the law, education, and government but never suggests what changes he would make. Viewed as a social critic, his message is that “capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be rebellious.” According to Orwell, Dickens’ whole message can be summarized into a simple “platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent” (CEJL I, p. 417). Dickens’ role model is “the Good Rich Man” who increases workers’ wages, gets debtors out of jail, and rescues children from destitution and grinding labor. But he never suggests changing the underlying structure that creates these abuses in the first place. The fact that Dickens always calls for “a change of heart” instead of “a change of structure” does not lessen his value. Orwell saw Dickens as representing one side of a dialectical debate: Two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?... “If men would behave decently the world would be decent” is not such a platitude as it sounds [CEJL I, pp. 427–428].

Orwell recognized that Dickens had limitations. Although an attacker of social abuses, he was “a south of England man” who was unfamiliar with the mass of oppressed industrial workers and farmers in the north of England. As a Londoner, Dickens writes about the consumption of food but not its production. His lower-class characters are valets, not workers. Orwell detects another oddity about Dickens. For a social reformer, he had little interest in modern technology that might improve people’s lives. He rarely mentioned railroads and did not have characters sending or receiving telegrams, so that his books written in the 1860s appeared to be taking place decades earlier. Despite his limitations, Dickens exhibited a “generosity of mind” that Orwell viewed as “probably the central secret of his popularity.” Dickens represents a moral force that leads juries to “award excessive damages when a rich man’s car runs over a poor man.” Most Britons in the 20th century still live in Dickens’ moral world while intellectuals have

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Chestnut embraced some form of totalitarianism. Both Marxists and Fascists would dismiss Dickens for his “bourgeois morality.” But in Orwell’s view, “Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it” (CEJL I, p. 460). Dickens, in Orwell’s estimation, was a 19th-century liberal with a free intelligence, “a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls” (CEJL I, p. 460).

Mr. Charrington (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Mr. Charrington operates the small frowzy junk shop where Winston Smith purchases an old notebook he uses for his diary. The cream laid pages attracted him because they were a link to the past. Later Smith returns and purchases a century-old glass paperweight containing a bit of sea coral. Charrington, a stooped, white-haired man in his 60s, takes Winston upstairs to show him a few items in a disused bedroom that does not have a telescreen. Smith determines to return to the shop to buy rubbishy artifacts because they are a link to the real past, not the continually revised past taught in Party history books. After Winston begins a relationship with Julia, he rents the spare bedroom from Charrington for their hideout. The couple meets at the junk shop to carry on their illicit affair until the day of their arrest when they discover the room has a telescreen hidden behind a picture. Charrington reappears, no longer the shuffling elderly shopkeeper, but a black-haired agent of the Thought Police in his mid–30s.

Mr. Cheeseman (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Mr. Cheeseman operates a “poky, mean-looking” bookshop on “the desolate stretch of road south of Waterloo Bridge.” Described as “tiny” and “evil-looking,” Cheeseman hires the protagonist Gordon Comstock after he is discharged from McKechnie’s bookstore following his arrest. Shabbily dressed, Cheeseman does not use a cash register but carries his money in a leather purse tucked in his vest. Although he is a shrewd bookseller, Orwell points out that Cheeseman “had never in his life read a book himself ” and views the collectors who purchase his rare editions the way a hardened prostitute regards her clients. Looking for a new sideline, Cheeseman assigns Comstock to running his small two-penny library consisting of cheap novelettes organized on shelves marked “Sex,” “Wild West,” and “Crime.” Reminding the discharged Comstock that “beggars can’t be choosers,” he announces the position pays 30 shillings a week, ten less than his previous job. Cheeseman hectors Comstock, always seeking an opportunity to dock his wages.

The Chestnut Tree Café (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Chestnut Tree Café is a known “haunt of painters and musicians.” Though there is nothing illegal about patronizing the café, Winston Smith considers the place “illomened.” Big Brother’s nemesis Emmanuel Goldstein reportedly frequented the café before he defected. Party leaders who have fallen out of favor have been known to drink there. Smith once saw the discredited leaders Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford in the bar after their trials and before their execution. Syme, the intelligent philologist visits the café.

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Clergyman’s After being released from the Ministry of Love, Smith, a broken man, becomes a fixture at the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking there almost every evening until closing time.

A Clergyman’s Daughter (novel, 1935) A Clergyman’s Daughter was Orwell’s second novel and his only major work of fiction featuring a female protagonist. Several chapters draw on Orwell’s tramping, hop picking, and teaching experiences. The novel explores Orwell’s views of religious faith and the spiritual void that is left when people lose their belief in God but not their need for belief in God. Overall, Orwell considered it his least satisfactory novel, telling his agent that he had “made a muck” of a good idea. The novel, he confessed, was “very disconnected” and “rather unreal,” but it was the best he could accomplish. The characters are largely stereotypical, even cartoonish, and the main plot device, an attack of amnesia, is clumsily explained. Ideas are presented, but the novel offers no satisfactory conclusion. His main character Dorothy Hare is too naïve and unsophisticated to provide a meaningful exploration of his subject. In addition, the novel awkwardly shifts from conventional narration to Joycean dialogue. Dorothy is the 27-year-old virgin daughter of Rector Charles Hare, who presides over St. Athelstan’s church in Knype Hill, Suffolk. A widower, Charles Hare expects his daughter to take on the chores of a housekeeper and parson’s wife. Submissive to her father, Dorothy lives in perpetual self-denial and drudgery until a sudden episode of amnesia disrupts her life and exposes her to the wider world. She ventures to London, but at the novel’s end she returns to her father and her old life. Although she has lost her religious faith, she takes comfort in her well-established habits of self-denial. The novel consists of five chapters with numbered sub chapters. The first chapter takes place on August 21 and details Dorothy’s harried life carrying out her duties—shopping, making sick calls, organizing rummage sales, and fashioning costumes for a children’s pageant. She is especially frustrated by her father’s refusal to listen to reason. The Hare family is deeply in debt to the tradesmen of Knype Hill. Dorothy is humiliated by having to confront the dunning merchants her father dismisses as lowly shopkeepers who should be willing to wait for their money. Embittered and contemptuous, Charles Hare has watched his congregation and income steadily dwindle. Dorothy is distressed by her father’s chain of poor investments that have eroded his savings. Spending her days making home visits and her evenings typing sermons and sewing pageant costumes, Dorothy has no social life. She does not date, and there is no mention of female friends her own age. Her religious devotion has masochistic elements. She forces herself to take cold baths from April to November and pricks her arms with a needle when her mind wanders during religious services. As an act of self-abasement she drinks from the communion cup after it has been slobbered on by an elderly crone named Miss Mayfill. Running errands in Knype Hill, Dorothy encounters Mr. Warburton, a middle-aged lecher of independent means who gleefully refers to his children as “bastards” and relishes being considered the town’s Lothario. Dorothy has an approach-avoidance relationship with Warburton. She is intrigued by his rakish tales and worldly manners, yet is repulsed by his physical advances.

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Clergyman’s A signature feature of Dorothy Hare’s personality is her frigidity and total aversion to human sexuality. At the age of nine Dorothy witnessed “certain dreadful scenes between her father and her mother” that left “a deep, secret wound in her mind” (93). She was further traumatized by engravings of satyrs, leading her to fear walking through the woods alone. Nearing 30, she retains her childhood fear of sexuality, which she calls “all that.” She had once been wooed by Francis Moon, an honorable young curate, a man she would have eagerly married except for all that. She vows to herself that she can never marry, never endure the prospect of engaging in all that. Although suspicious of Warburton, she accepts his invitation to visit his home when he promises to introduce her to a visiting novelist. Arriving at Warburton’s house, Dorothy discovers she is the only guest (the visiting writer being a ploy to lure the reluctant virgin to his home). Warburton makes clumsy advances, and Dorothy insists on leaving. Warburton follows her outside and makes further approaches just outside the home of Mrs. Semprill, the town gossip. Dorothy returns to her father’s house safely and plunges into work, making costumes for the upcoming children’s pageant well past midnight. The second chapter opens a week later on August 29. Emerging from “a black, dreamless sleep,” Dorothy discovers herself walking down New Kent Road in London with no memory of her previous life or even her name. She passes signs announcing new clues in the “Rector’s Daughter” case, unaware that she is the subject of a national tabloid scandal. Touching her breasts, she concludes that she is a woman. Looking in a mirror she finds herself inexplicably dressed like a ragged tart. Orwell awkwardly explains that Dorothy Hare has suffered a not uncommon ailment, an attack of amnesia. Already recovering, Dorothy could regain her memory if carefully questioned or shown a photograph that would trigger remembrances of her past. But while gathering her wits, she is confronted by a pair of young tramps named Nobby and Charlie and a girl called Flo. Asked her name, Dorothy chooses a female name at random and calls herself Ellen. Dorothy falls in with the trio and sets off begging and hop picking. This section of the novel draws on Orwell’s own “down and out” experiences. Much of the dialogue includes the intricate slang used by the tramps Orwell encountered and presented in the glossary attached to his 1931 essay “Hop-Picking.” Having no memory of her past life, Dorothy feels no shame in begging alongside her new peers. Overhearing the tramps gossip about her scandal, she does not recognize the term “rector” and has only dim associations with words like “church” and “clergyman.” Orwell shifts to second person, describing Dorothy’s hop picking drudgery in journalistic terms, noting how in the morning “your hands were still stiff ” and “the hops were wet and slippery.” The exhausting work is so draining that “even before you had eaten your supper you were dropping with sleep” (129). Numbed by hardship, Dorothy sinks into slavish mindlessness until she reads a newspaper given to her by Nobby. She recognizes the smudged photo of the missing “Rector’s Daughter” as herself and is shocked by the tabloid’s retelling of Mrs. Semprill’s depiction of her as a tipsy scantily-clad girl driving off with Mr. Warburton. Stricken with “horrible fascination” about the accounts, Dorothy cannot concentrate on her work. She writes her father a long letter, asking him to send her clothes and £2 and to use her adopted pseudonym Ellen Millborough. When days pass without a response, she is convinced that her father must have accepted Mrs. Semprill’s account and has rejected her.

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Clergyman’s With hop-picking season ending in late September and believing her father’s home is now closed to her, Dorothy heads to London to find a room and a job. Too shabbily dressed to be hired as a servant, she writes her father several times, pleading for help. Her money gone, Dorothy is forced to leave her rooming house and gravitates, like other homeless Londoners, to Trafalgar Square. Chapter Three mimics the “Nighttown” section of Joyce’s Ulysses with dialogue and stage directions. Dorothy is largely silent as characters like Deafie, Daddy, Charlie, and the pastor Tallboys sing, chant, and converse in Beckett-like verse. Tallboys conducts a mock church service for the homeless outcasts, declaring, “Our destiny is the pauper’s grave, twenty-five deep in deal coffins, the kip-house of underground” (192). New to life on Trafalgar Square, Dorothy cannot believe that people can endure this suffering “night after night, year after year.” Without support, Dorothy joins the “tribe” of penniless homeless women who wash their faces in public fountains and beg for coins. Orwell notes that her educated accent proves valuable in soliciting charity. Soon Dorothy, weakened by hunger and cold, enters a “dreamlike” state and accepts the “horrible communism of the Square” as normal. Chapter Four details the Reverend Hare’s tortured and confused attempts to help his daughter. Unwilling to invite controversy by welcoming his daughter home, Charles Hare responds to Dorothy’s written pleas indirectly. He sends £10 to his cousin Sir Thomas who lives in London. Described as a “chuckle-headed” 65-year-old, Thomas Hare directs his butler to track down Dorothy. After allowing his niece to stay with him a few days, Sir Thomas decides he must find a job for Dorothy and arranges, through his solicitor, to obtain a teaching position for her at a private girls’ school. As with the hop-picking episode, Orwell relies on his own experience to detail Dorothy’s ventures in education. Ringwood House is a dismal academy in a “repellent suburb.” The proprietress Mrs. Creevy, a mean-spirited crone, pays Dorothy ten shillings a week in addition to room and board. Her “gaunt” bedroom contains a bed, a chair, and a washstand. Mrs. Creevy offers Dorothy a hot shower only on Saturday nights and lectures her against using too much gaslight. At breakfast Mrs. Creevy divides a pair of eggs so that Dorothy receives two-thirds of an egg and dissuades her from requesting marmalade by keeping a protective arm around the jar. Dorothy quickly realizes that her students know “nothing, absolutely nothing” (226). Caring only about collecting fees, Mrs. Creevy provides children with only the façade of an education to impress their parents. The girls can write neatly, add sums, and parrot a few memorized French phrases, but they are wholly ignorant about history, geography, or science. They don’t know who wrote Hamlet or which ocean separates America from Europe. Asked when automobiles were invented, one girl guesses that Columbus invented them a thousand years ago. Aghast by the ignorance of children from “bookless homes,” Dorothy dispenses with copying exercises and engages the girls in making a map of Europe and reading books she purchased at her own expense. To teach them history she turns the classroom wall into a pictorial timeline, having the students paste images of knights in armor and locomotives in the appropriate eras. The girls are energized by these activities. Their parents, however, are troubled by these departures from the basic 3 R’s, with one objecting to her daughter being taught something called “decimals” rather than “arithmetic.” When their daughters report on Dorothy’s lame ambiguous explanation of Macduff being

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Clergyman’s ripped from the womb, the parents protest to Mrs. Creevy for exposing their children to the Facts of Life. In disciplining Dorothy for upsetting the parents, Mrs. Creevy instructs her novice teacher about the Facts of Education, explaining “the technique of the dirty swindle that she called practical school-teaching” (255). She is interested only the fees, not in improving the minds of her students. Orwell expands his commentary on private education, noting that there are 10,000 private schools like Mrs. Creevy’s, only 10 percent of which are subject to government inspection. Ringwood House is examined by a government health official, who measures the dimensions of the classrooms to determine if the girls are getting enough air. As Orwell points out, the educational standards of most schools are determined solely by parents, a case of “the blind leading the blind” (261). Her cold room, the “filthy” food, and Mrs. Creevy’s endless prying drives Dorothy to attend church as a respite. But church offers her a respite only, not spiritual nourishment. Like the public library, the church is simply an oasis, a refuge from the horrors of her plain room at Ringwood House. Seated in a pew Dorothy senses that her religious faith had left her “utterly and irrevocably” (269). For Orwell the loss of faith is as “mysterious as faith itself ” because it is not “rooted in logic” but “a change in the climate of the mind” (269). Dorothy receives a letter from Warburton. Having been abroad, the lecher of Knype Hill was not aware that he and Dorothy were rumored to have eloped or engaged in some sordid scandal. Warburton tells Dorothy that he confronted Mrs. Semprill, and that her father would welcome her home if it were not for the scandal. Dorothy is stunned when Mrs. Creevy dismisses her, reminding her that she does not have a written contract and thus serves only at the pleasure of her employer. Paid just £6, Dorothy goes to her room and packs her belongings in shock. Just as she leaves Ringwood School, she is stopped by a delivery boy who has a telegram for her. Warburton’s wire informs Dorothy that Mrs. Semprill has been discredited and silenced by a libel action and her father wishes her to return home as soon as possible. Warburton explains that he is coming to London and soon arrives in a taxi to escort her to back to Knype Hill. On the train to Suffolk, Dorothy tells Warburton that she has lost her faith. “It was like when you’re a child, and one day, for no particular reason,” she explains, “you stop believing in fairies” (295). With her faith gone, she feels an immense emptiness in her life. Warburton reminds her that the world is full of amusements, including wine, art, travel, and friends. Dorothy tells him she plans to help her father in his chores, even though she no longer has faith in his mission. Removing his hat to expose his bald head and show himself at his worst, Warburton asks Dorothy to marry him. Although fat and middleaged, he can offer Dorothy a comfortable home, travel, and security. To make his point, he outlines Dorothy’s future: “After ten years … your father will die, and he will leave you with not a penny, only debts. You will be nearly forty, with no money, no profession, no chance of marrying; just a derelict parson’s daughter like the ten thousand others in England…. You will have to find yourself a job…. A nursery governess … or companion to some diseased hag who will occupy herself in thinking of ways to humiliate you” [304–305].

Dorothy accepts Warburton’s vision of her future but cannot accept his offer of marriage. She is repelled by his presence, his fat body reminding her of satyrs. Fearing men

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Clink and the prospect of all that, she believes her only option is to return to her old life. Asked if she will make any changes in her life, Dorothy states that from now on at Communion she will kneel on Miss Mayfill’s right instead of her left. Although Dorothy had been absent for eight months, her father acts as if she is returning from a brief holiday. As soon as she arrives, Charles Hare asks his daughter to get to work and type his sermon. Resuming her chores, Dorothy struggles to make sense of religious faith. “Either life on earth is a preparation for something greater and more lasting,” she reasons, “or it is meaningless, dark and dreadful” (316). Unable to recover her belief in God, she loses herself in work, sensing that “if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance” (318–319). As she labors on making pageant costumes to feel “useful,” the smell of the gluepot erases her dilemma of faith. The novel was published in March 1935. Orwell was pleasantly surprised by the reviews he received for work he considered inferior. L.P. Hartley stated that “the thesis of A Clergyman’s Daughter is neither new nor convincing; its merits lie in the treatment, which is sure and bold, and in the dialogue, which is always appropriate, and often brilliant.” Peter Quennell’s review faulted the novel’s Trafalgar Square scene for being too close to Joyce’s Nighttown section of Ulysses. He noted that much of the novel is “uncommonly forceful” but found that as a character Dorothy Hare “remains a cipher … a literary abstraction to whom things happen.” The American edition, published by Harper’s in the summer of 1936, sold less than a thousand copies, leading the firm to decline accepting Orwell’s next novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

• Further Reading Beadle, Gordon B. “George Orwell and the Death of God.” Colorado Quarterly, vol. 23, Summer 1974, pp. 51–63. Beddoe, Deirdre. “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 139–154. Hartley, L. P. “A Clergyman’s Daughter.” Observer, 10 Mar. 1935, p. 6. Quennell, Peter. “A Clergyman’s Daughter.” New Statesman and Nation, 23 Mar. 1935, p. 422. Smyer, Richard. “Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter: The Flight from History.” Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1975, pp. 31–47. Wadsworth, Frank W. “Orwell as a Novelist: The Early Work.” University of Kansas City Review, XXII. Winter, 1955, pp. 93–99. Yamaguchi, Midori. “The Religious Rebellion of a Clergyman’s Daughter.” Women’s History Review, vol. 16, no. 5, Dec. 2007, pp. 641–660.

“Clink” (essay, 1932) “Clink” is a short autobiographical essay recounting Orwell’s deliberate attempt to get arrested for public drunkenness. In mid–December 1931, then 28, he consumed four or five pints of beer and purchased a bottle of whisky. Spotting two policemen, he brandished his bottle, grabbed a lamp post, and fell. Orwell used dialogue to recreate the conversation he had with the officers. He noted how they slyly cajoled him into accompanying them without letting him know they were heading to a police station. At the station he was searched and placed in a cell. Given bread and tea, he was later taken in a police van to a police court. His cellmates included a publican who had stolen the tavern’s Christmas Club fund, a buyer for a kosher butcher who embezzled £28 to spend

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Coming on Edinburgh prostitutes, and a burglar protesting his innocence. Orwell, who used the name Edward Burton, was fined six shillings. Unable to pay his fine, he was returned to his cell where he found two barrow boys named Charlie and Snouter. Finding their slangy, obscenity-laced language “rather interesting,” Orwell reproduced their conservation in a playlet form. Released later that day, Orwell made a few more attempts to get arrested then abandoned his ventures as a failure yet “a fairly interesting experience.” Elements of the jail scene influenced Orwell’s depiction of Winston Smith’s incarceration in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Clover (Animal Farm, 1945) Clover is a middle-aged mare who has had four foals. She and Boxer are dedicated disciples to the pigs. Loyal to the principles of Animalism, she confronts Mollie who was seen being petted by a human. Searching Mollie’s stall, Clover discovers lumps of sugar and ribbons, evidence of her fraternization. When the pigs move into the farmhouse and begin sleeping in beds, Clover is troubled and asks the mule Muriel to read her the Fourth Commandment which has been altered to read: “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.” Though she does not entertain thoughts of counter-revolution against Napoleon, Clover harbors memories of Old Major’s ideals. After Napoleon conducts a show trial followed by mass executions of animals, she wonders what has happened. “This was not what they had aimed at when they had set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race,” she thinks (73). She envisioned a society “free from hunger and the whip” where all animals would work according to their capacity and where the strong would protect the weak. Unable to express her thoughts in words, she keeps her feelings to herself. Clover attends to Boxer after he is injured and is horrified when she sees him being taken away in a knacker’s van to be slaughtered. She chases after the van, yelling at Boxer to escape, but the ailing horse is too weak to break down the doors. Clover apparently accepts Squealer’s explanation that the van did once belong to a knacker but had been recently purchased by a veterinary surgeon who had not had time to repaint the vehicle. By the end of the novel Clover is one of the few animals left on the farm who can remember Old Major and the early days of the Rebellion. She continues to work because the promised retirement system was never implemented. Still faithful to the principles of Animalism, she teaches younger horses. Although they respect Clover, they understand little of what she says to them. Clover is the first animal to notice the pigs walking on two legs and that The Seven Commandments (see The Seven Commandments) have been replaced with a single statement: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Coming Up for Air (novel, 1939) Coming Up for Air was Orwell’s fourth novel and his only one written in first person. Set in Britain in the first half of 1938, the narrative follows the insights and ventures of George Bowling, a middle-aged middle-class suburban Londoner. Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he is a keen social observer with a deep-seated dislike for the artificiality of

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Coming the world around him that robs humans from contact with nature. The novel captures the fear of looming war and introduces themes Orwell later developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Notably, Bowling is less fearful of the war on the horizon than he is of what he calls the “after-war” that he senses will follow, a Stalinist society of slogans and secret policemen. At 45 with false teeth, 200-pound Bowling realistically admits that no woman would look at him “unless paid to.” An insurance salesman, Bowling imagines that his father, a humble small-town shopkeeper, would view him a success because he lives in a modern house, wears a suit, and owns a car. But Bowling considers himself a typical “five-to-tenquid-a week” man who struggles to pay the mortgage and make his installment payments. He depicts his neighbors as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers” who have been hoodwinked into paying “twice the proper price for a brick dolls’ house” but are willing to “die on the field of battle to save his country from Bolshevism” (15). Though he acknowledges that he is that he is vulgar, insensitive, and fits his environment, Bowling maintains a cynical sense of detachment. His street is lined with ugly identical houses he describes as “semi-detached torture chambers” and “prison cells” where a henpecked husband lives in fear of his boss and is tormented by a shrewish wife and “kids sucking his blood like leeches” (12). Bowling views marriage as a swindle, sensing he fell for an age-old female ruse, his wife going from 24-year-old bride to joyless, middle-aged frump in three years. Refusing to see himself as “a kind of tame dairy-cow for a lot of women and kids to chase up and down,” Bowling stages rebellions, committing adultery when he can get away with it (9). The first half of the novel captures Bowling’s thoughts and memories in January 1938 when he takes a day off from work to pick up a new set of false teeth. Having recently won 17 quid betting on a horse, he muses how to spend his unexpected windfall. He debates between blowing his winnings on an adulterous fling or dribbling it out on petty vices like cigars and extra drinks. The plot and character are expansions on the Flaxman story in Orwell’s previous novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying published three years earlier. The protagonist Gordon Comstock lives in a rooming house with a fellow boarder named Flaxman, a chubby adulterous salesman currently separated from his wife. Given a bonus of £30 by his employer, Flaxman did not tell his wife about the payout and used the money for a lecherous spree during a ten-day sales trip to Paris. Returning home, he was confronted by an outraged wife who broke a whisky decanter over his head in retribution. Having endured this punishment before, Flaxman remains upbeat and urges Comstock to join him at a pub to check out a blonde barmaid. On the train to London, Bowling notices an RAF bomber flying overhead and contemplates the prospect of another world war. Britain is still at peace, but he knows that every shipyard on the planet is “riveting up the battleships for another war.” Passing through the city, he muses, “If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a machine gun” (24). But Bowling wonders what will happen in a few years. Walking down a street he envisions the same spot in 1941 with emaciated soldiers marching past a bomb crater and a row of bombed-out buildings: I can hear the air-raid sirens blowing and the loudspeakers bellowing that our glorious troops have taken a hundred thousand prisoners…. I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows [30–31].

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Coming Bowling finds himself remembering his boyhood home in Lower Binfield in Oxfordshire. Half of Orwell’s novel is set in Bowling’s past. “The past is a curious thing,” he states. “It’s with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago … and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually in the past” (31). Walking through London in 1938 Bowling finds himself back in Lower Binfield, recalling the simplicity of life in a 1900 market town. This memory triggers a lengthy chronological autobiography, with Bowling recounting his origins and the history of his career and marriage. For a bored henpecked husband worried about bills with war looming on the horizon, memory offers an escape to a simpler time. Bowling’s recollections are not sentimental. He does not romanticize his boyhood town, recalling that few houses had plumbing, work was hard, flies were everywhere, and most people were barely literate. But, he insists, the food was real and wholesome, the beer was good, and no one feared an air-raid. He wistfully recalls the simple joys of fishing and reading adventure serials in boys’ weeklies. Bowling’s nostalgia is not so much for his actual hometown but the civilization he claims it represents, a simpler time before Hitler, before installment payments, before processed foods, and streamlined Americanized cafés. The main feature of life in Oxfordshire before the Great War Bowling recalls was a sense of “continuity.” Farm lads worked long hours for low pay, small merchants were in “a race between death and bankruptcy,” and people died without modern healthcare, but they did not fear the future. They had shared values, knowing “their good and evil would remain good and evil.” Unlike people on the brink of world war in 1938, “they didn’t feel the ground they stood on shifting under their feet” (126). Among his most pleasant memories of Lower Binfield is losing his virginity at 20 to Elsie Waters, a 22-year-old shop girl. Elsie, he recalls, was sensual and pliable and sexually experienced. Their lovemaking took place in a lovers’ lane outside town. Bowling’s relationship with Elsie was terminated by his service in the First World War. Like the “million other idiots who joined up before conscription,” Bowling enlisted partly out of patriotism and partly out a youthful search for adventure. He became one of the millions whose lives were abruptly changed by the Great War: It was like an enormous machine that had got hold of you. You’d no sense of acting of your own free will…. The machine had got hold of you and it could do what it liked with you. It lifted you up and dumped you down among places and things you never dreamed of…. The day I joined the Army the old life was finished [131–132].

After being wounded in 1916, Bowling returned to England to recover and was later sent to officers’ training school. A newly-minted second lieutenant, Bowling was assigned to command a food dump in Cornwall that contained 11 tins of bully beef. With little to do, Bowling resumed his boyhood passion for reading, moving beyond boys’ weeklies to Conrad, Wells, Kipling and Galsworthy, devouring books “like physical thirst.” Demobilized after the Armistice, he joined the millions of other young men trying to make a living in business. Personable and affable, Bowling became a salesman, hawking office supplies, kitchen gadgets, and soap before joining The Flying Salamander insurance company. While living in a rooming house in Ealing in the early Twenties, Bowling met Hilda Vincent, the daughter of an impoverished but snobbish Anglo-Indian couple. The

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Coming son of a shopkeeper, Bowling was socially inferior to Hilda’s civil-service parents, but they deemed him a suitable match for their daughter. Living on fixed government pensions, they mistakenly viewed him as a rising executive with a bright future in the private sector. Bowling deems his marriage to have been an immediate “flop.” The “pretty, delicate girl” quickly “settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump” (159–160). Bowling admits that within a few years he seriously thought of killing his wife, driven mad by her sheer negativity. In 1930 the Bowlings bought their semi-detached home and by 1938 have two children whose shoes and school fees add to Hilda’s litany of woes. Bowling concludes his autobiographical recollections as his day off ends, and he returns to his semi-detached cell, his wife, and the prospect of another world war. Hilda announces she is going to a Left Book Club meeting to hear an anti–Fascist speaker. Having thought about war earlier that day, Bowling agrees to accompany her. The following scene, written in 1938, presages images and themes of Nineteen EightyFour published a decade later and dramatically rebuts criticisms Victor Gollancz leveled at The Road to Wigan Pier, published two years earlier. In his journalistic account of working conditions in the north of England, Orwell had depicted Socialists as eccentric cranks, characterizations that offended Gollancz. Gollancz decided to publish Orwell’s book as a Left Book Club selection, but included a foreword distancing himself and the club from Orwell’s criticisms. Gollancz was particularly offended by what he called Orwell’s “curious indiscretion” of calling Soviet commissars “‘half-gramophones, half gangsters.’” Bowling and Hilda are among 15 or 16 people who file in to hear “a famous anti–Fascist.” Bowling immediately wonders what this 40-year-old man did before Hitler existed and what he would do if Hitler ever disappeared. Taking the podium, the speaker begins to “churn it out … like a gramophone,” detailing a list of Nazi atrocities, working up the listless audience. Examining the little man at the podium, Bowling views the “anti–Fascist” as a malicious character: What’s he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he’s stirring up hatred. Doing his damnedest to make sure you hate certain foreigners called Fascists…. Every slogan’s gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you’d find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy…. Perhaps even his dreams are slogans [172].

Studying the lecturer, Bowling finds himself getting “inside his skull,” seeing the world through the eyes of the “famous anti–Fascist.” The scene he imagines presages the Two Minutes Hate scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the novel’s suggestion that the compelling image of the future is a boot “stamping on a human face.” Bowling supposes the speaker pictures himself “smashing people’s faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course,” a compulsion he wants his audience to embrace: Hitler’s after us! Quick! Let’s all grab a spanner and get together, and perhaps if we smash in enough faces they won’t smash ours. Gang up, choose your Leader. Hitler’s black and Stalin’s white. But it might just as well be the other way about, because in the little chap’s mind both Hitler and Stalin are the same. Both mean spanners and smashed faces [175–176].

While Bowling finds the lecture disturbing, others in the small audience are inspired by the anti–Fascist diatribe. When a young Trotskyist asks Bowling if the Nazis don’t make his “blood boil,” he claims that he “went off the boil in 1916,” urging the youth to save himself for a girl rather than seek military glory for a good cause. Bowling recounts his

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Coming experiences in the trenches, but it makes no impression on the young Communist eager to smash Fascist faces. Sensing that he might as well be passing out Bible tracts in front of a brothel, Bowling leaves, seeking solace by visiting a friend. Bowling calls on a retired schoolmaster named Porteous. Bowling normally enjoys the pipe-smoking scholar and his rooms cluttered with books and classical relics as an escape from his job and a household “infested by women and kids.” For Bowling, Porteous represents culture, antiquity, intelligence, and wisdom. Bowling reaches out to him for comfort and insight about his concerns, but Porteous proves to be a dry well. Asked about Hitler, Porteous, who does not listen to the radio or read the newspapers, dismisses “this German person” as an ephemeral “adventurer.” Bowling, however, insists that Hitler and Stalin are not like past tyrants but dictators who are “after something quite new—something that’s never been heard of before” (185). Insisting that nothing new happens under the sun, Porteous produces a book about a “Greek tyrant back in the B.C.S who certainly might have been Hitler’s twin brother” (186). Listening to him, Bowling senses that the schoolmaster is already dead, a “ghost” who cannot recognize what is coming, what Bowling calls the “after-war” with “the foodqueues and the secret police and loudspeakers telling you what to think” (186). Failing to be soothed by Porteous’ assurances, Bowling returns home troubled by “the vision of the coloured shirts and the machine-guns rattling” (189). Two months later while driving through Westerham on his way to close a sale, Bowling savors the coming of spring. He parks his car to relish the fresh vegetation and picks flowers. Nature offers him an escape from the coming war and dreaded “after-war.” Cherishing the peace and primroses, Bowling finally decides what to spend his 17 quid on. Instead of plotting an adulterous spree, he plans to take a week off and go fishing in late June in his hometown of Lower Binfield. Bowling provides his wife with a cover story about a business trip, arranging for a coworker to mail letters from Birmingham where he claims to be staying. On June 17, 1938, Bowling sets off to visit the hometown he has not seen in more than 20 years. Driving into his boyhood town, he finds that it has been “swallowed,” enveloped by housing estates and “two enormous factories of glass and concrete,” leaving him with the feeling that an “enemy invasion” had taken place behind his back (211–215). He discovers that his father’s seed store has become a tea shop. Many of the townspeople are newcomers with strange accents. With no one recognizing him, Bowling feels like a “ghost.” Deciding to be a ghost, he determines to “haunt” his home town. Walking down a street, he notices his first love Elsie and is shocked by her appearance. “It’s frightening, the things twenty-four years can do to a woman,” Bowling says, noting that “ghastly things had happened to her hips” so that she, although not fat, had degenerated into “a kind of soft lumpy cylinder, like a bag of meal” (243). Bowling follows Elsie into the tobacco and sweets shop she runs with her husband and asks to see some pipes as a ruse to engage in conversation. Looking at her bulldog face, he cannot believe this 47-yearold woman is the same Elsie he found so sensually appealing in his youth. Bowling is saddened, having hoped that their sexual trysts would have some lingering “after-effect,” but the woman rummaging behind the counter less than a yard away does not even recognize him. He cuts the scene short by asking for some cigarettes. Paying her, their fingers touch, but “the body doesn’t remember,” and they remain strangers. Bowling’s disappointments

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Coming mount when he seeks out his favorite boyhood fishing pool and discovers that it has been drained to become a trash pit serving a subdivision of “faked-up Tudor houses.” The following morning Bowling strolls through the marketplace and instinctively flattens like a rat squeezing under the door when he hears the unmistakable sound of a bomb whistling thorough the air. After an explosion that sounds like the Day of Judgment, Bowling looks up to see a group of schoolchildren, resembling a herd of pigs because of their gas masks, running for safety. For a few moments the townspeople believe the nation is at war until they learn the bombing was an accident. Looking into a smashed house, Bowling gets a glimpse of the Blitz to come. Amid the piles of broken dishes and shattered furniture, he notices a severed leg with its blood mixing with spilled marmalade. Bowling decides to leave his hometown, reading in the newspaper that an official from the Air Ministry found the results of the fatal bombing “disappointing.” Passing through peaceful suburban towns on his way home, Bowling looks at the houses and families he senses are on the brink of destruction. The event in Lower Binfield taught him starkly that his worst fears were “all going to happen.” The air raids are coming, he prophesizes, and after them the food queues, the men in colored shirts, barbed wire, leader-worship, and machine-guns. Bowling arrives home and is confronted by his wife brandishing evidence that blows his cover story. The hotel he claims he was staying at in Birmingham has been closed for two years. She suspects he had a friend post faked letters from Birmingham to provide him with an alibi. Facing his irate wife, Bowling comes up with three possible responses: tell his wife the truth which she would never believe, fake a spell of amnesia, or let her assume he had cheated on her and take his medicine. Bowling knows the third response is his only option. Coming Up for Air received largely positive reviews, though some critics questioned Orwell’s use of the first person. The Times Literary Supplement stated that Orwell wrote “with hard, honest clarity and unswerving precision of feeling” that was “controlled in passion, remorseless and entirely without frills.” Winifred Horrabin called Coming Up for Air Orwell’s best work. In his novel, she wrote, contemporary thoughts and events were “finely expressed as in an accurate photograph.” Margery Allingham, writing for Time and Tide, faulted Orwell’s use of first person. Bowling was supposed to be an Everyman figure, but his sophisticated thinking and perceptions were out of character. The novel went into a second printing, but sold only 3,000 copies. Coming Up for Air did not appear in the United States until a few days before Orwell’s death in January 1950. Initial American views were mixed. Charles Rolo, who reviewed the book for Atlantic Monthly, considered the creation of Orwell’s “vulgar, clear-sighted, and sympathetic narrator … a masterly achievement.” Several reviewers commented on Orwell’s political thinking, directly or indirectly referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four, published the previous year. Irving Howe described Coming Up for Air as being “trivial” and “predictable” with “a few neat vignettes of middle-class life.” He found Orwell’s visions of the future lacking: His allegories are thoroughly static, a mere conjured vision of evil in which no serious attempt is made to seek underlying causes. Orwell is not really a political prophet or even a very acute political thinker: he banks too heavily on British common sense, which after a point comes to seem mere self-indulgence. Nor does he have the creativity of the true novelist.

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Comstock Issac Rosenfeld’s Partisan Review article praised Orwell as a journalist who was “fair, honest, unassuming and reliable in everything he wrote.” He questioned the theme of nostalgia in Coming Up for Air, suggesting that it reflected a deep division with Orwell himself, revealing that he was “a radical in politics and a conservative in feeling.” Orwell was “not a genius” he argued, but as a journalist he did capture the agony of totalitarianism “as no English writer had done.”

• Further Reading Allingham, Margery. “Coming Up for Air.” Time and Tide, 24 June 1939, p. 839. Annette, Federico. “Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2005. Questia. Bulut, Dilek. “An Ecocritical Analysis of George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergis, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005. “Coming Up for Air.” Times Literary Supplement, 17 June 1939, p. 355. Eagleton, Terry. “Orwell and the Lower-Middle Class Novel.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 10–33. Fink, Howard. “Coming Up for Air: Orwell’s Ambiguous Satire on the Wellsian Utopia.” Studies in Literary Imagination, vol. vi, no. 2, Fall 1973, pp. 51–60. Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Orwell as Satirist.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 103–118. Horrabin, Winifred. “Coming Up for Air.” Tribune, 21 July 1939, p. 11. Howe, Irving. “Coming Up for Air.” The Nation, 4 Feb. 1950, pp. 110–111. Knapp, John. “Orwell’s Fiction: Funny but Not Vulgar.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 27, Summer 1981, pp. 294–301. Ligda, Kenneth. “Orwellian Comedy.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 60, no. 4, Winter 2014. Questia. Rosenfeld, Isaac. “Decency and Death.” Partisan Review, May 1950, pp. 514–518. Tukacs, Tamás. “Jonah in the Whale: The Spatial Aspects of Nostalgia in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon and George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air.” Eger Journal of English Studies, xiii. 2013, pp. 47–65. Van Dellen, Robert J. “George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air: The Politics of Powerlessness.” Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1975, pp. 57–68. Wadsworth, Frank W. “Orwell as a Novelist: The Early Work.” University of Kansas City Review, XXII, Winter, 1955, pp. 93–99. Zennure, Koseman. “Psychoanalytical Outlook for Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 15, no. 3, 2016, pp., 867–880.

Coming Up for Air (television, 1965) The long-running BBC program Theatre 625 broadcast a dramatized version of Coming Up for Air as part of a three-episode series called The World of George Orwell in November 1965. Directed by Christopher Morahan and written by Robin Chapman, the teleplay starred Colin Blakely (George Bowling), Carmel McSharry (Hilda Bowling), and Susan Tracy (Elsie).

Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) The 29-year-old protagonist of Orwell’s third novel, Gordon Comstock is a failed poet who wages a deliberate war against money. Smug, sarcastic, and self-defeating, Comstock makes a strange, eccentric protest against the commercial world he condemns but secretly admires. In 1932, when millions face unemployment, Comstock decides to quit his job at an ad agency to become a poet. Needing an income, he takes a job in a book shop at half his former salary. He somehow assumes that working full time at half pay as a retail clerk will grant him more freedom and integrity to write than working full time in a creative

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Comstock writing position paying twice as much. After getting his girlfriend pregnant, Comstock terminates his money war and returns to his old job, starts a new family, abandoning his literary career in the process. Comstock comes from a once-prosperous family in decline. His ambitious grandfather “plundered” the poor, amassed a fortune of £50,000, built a brick mansion, and fathered a dozen children. He rose “on the wave of Victorian prosperity” but his 11 surviving children sank lower and lower into the landless middle-middle class of “listless, gutless” women who “dribbled” away their inheritances in bad investments and incompetent men who ran little agencies that lost money and went under in a few years. Too poor to marry, the Comstock bachelors and their spinster siblings live out their joyless lives in “godless” rooming houses fretting over bills while struggling to maintain middle-class pretensions. The 11 surviving sons and daughters produced only two offspring, Gordon and his unmarried sister Julia. Growing up in a family with fixed incomes, Gordon developed “a crawling reverence for money,” resenting those who had it. “Money,” he believes, “is what God used to be” (43). He hates what he considers the money world and longs to see it blown apart by enemy air raids. Orwell describes Comstock as thinking in the “naïve selfish manner of a boy”: There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich … or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it. He took it for granted that he himself would never be able to make money…. He was against the money-god and all his swinish priesthood. He had declared war on money [44–45].

Naively, selfishly, Comstock wages a money-strike. With his first book of poetry about to appear, he convinces himself he only needs a small income to support a literary career. But despite promising reviews, his first volume of poetry called Mice sells less than 200 copies and is quickly remaindered, and his writing stalls. He publishes a handful of poems but after two years fails to complete his second book, London Pleasures. Unlike the cleric who takes a vow of poverty and embraces simplicity, Comstock pines for what he denies himself. He obsesses over the price of tobacco, a cab ride, a glass of beer, a postage stamp, or a meal of cheese and bread. Each movement and decision he makes is dictated by his wallet. He longs for a sexual relationship with his girlfriend but makes himself unacceptable to Rosemary, who seeks stability and marriage that require a stable income. He wants to write, but his job leaves him too impoverished, depressed, and enervated to work. He wallows in poverty, refusing to shave, going ten days without a bath, allowing his jacket to lose buttons, masochistically savoring his deprivations. Gordon Comstock is smug, snide, and selfish to others, even those who offer support. His sister Julia, who adores her younger brother, loans him £5, a large amount for a woman working in a tea shop. When he sells a poem to an American magazine for $50, Gordon promises himself to repay his sister, but ends up spending the entire amount on a drinking spree that culminates in his arrest. His girlfriend Rosemary stands by him, putting up with his cranky refusal to take a good job. His best friend Ravelston, the wealthy editor of a literary journal, publishes his poetry, offers to pay his rent, and loan him money to make a fresh start. Comstock rejects his help with whiny sarcasm, insisting he is waging a war on money and this is where it has led him. One of the features of Gordon Comstock’s life is his sense of alienation and sexual frustration. Unable to afford decent clothes and claiming that shaving costs money, he

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Confessions makes himself grubby and unappealing yet mourns the fact that women do not find him attractive. His few relationships with women have been brief, furtive, and joyless, most of them involving prostitutes. Declaring that friendship costs money, he shuns contacts and turns down invitations then complains about being lonely. While Comstock repeatedly denounces the money world, he believes in no ideological alternative. He rejects Socialism, telling his Leftist friend Ravelston that “we don’t want it.” Asked what he does want, Comstock offers a nihilistic response: “God knows. All we know is what we don’t want. That’s what’s wrong with us nowadays…. Only there are three alternatives instead of two, and all three of them make us spew. Socialism’s only one of them.” “And what are the other two?” “Oh, I suppose suicide and the Catholic Church” [88].

Comstock ends his war on money after his girlfriend becomes pregnant from their first sexual encounter. He tosses his unfinished manuscript of London Pleasures down a sewer drain, returns to the ad agency, and becomes the little man, the married man, the rent payer he always despised. Symbolic of his change of heart is his embrace of the homely houseplant the aspidistra. Throughout the novel he despises the ubiquitous plant, attempting to kill the one in his rooming house. Moving into a flat with his new bride, he selects the perfect place to put their aspidistra, promising to clean it with a toothbrush.

Julia Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Julia Comstock is the 34-year-old spinster sister of Gordon Comstock, the poet protagonist, of Orwell’s third novel. Although she was the first born, she was “sacrificed” by her parents because she was “the girl” to benefit Gordon who was “the boy” and judged to be clever. Tall, with a thin face and long neck, she resembles a goose and by 16 “had ‘old maid’ written all over her” (41). After attending “dingy” boarding schools, she was put to work. Julia gets a job in a “nasty, ladylike” teashop in Earls Court, working 72 hours a week for low wages and a free lunch. With no life of her own, she dotes on her baby brother, who fails to appreciate her generosity. She loans him £5. Gordon promises himself to repay his sister when he receives $50 for a poem published in an American review. But he ends up spending the entire amount during a drunken spree that ends in his arrest. Despite this, Julia struggles to come up with 30 shillings to purchase an occasional table as a wedding present when Gordon marries his girlfriend Rosemary at the end of the novel. Julia has much in common with Dorothy Hare, the protagonist of Orwell’s previous novel A Clergyman’s Daughter. Both are sexless, joyless women whose lives are devoted to work, routine, and sacrifice to male family members. Julia Comstock measures her happiness by her ability to provide for an ungrateful baby brother. Dorothy Hare surrenders to her father’s will, running errands, doing chores, and keeping house even after having lost her religious faith.

“Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (essay, 1946) Orwell opened his essay with a description of man in a dressing gown who is 35 but looks 50 sitting at a rickety table littered with papers and cigarette butts. The man, badgered by creditors and a crying baby, is a book reviewer struggling to meet his deadline. His

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Creevy editor has sent him five books to write about. Because he knows nothing about the subjects of three of them, he will have to read at least 50 pages to avoid making a noticeable “howler” that reveals he didn’t read the whole thing. Reviewing books is a “thankless, irritating and exhausting job.” Orwell suggested that a handful of good books receive at least a thousandword review, while most books should be ignored. The mid-length 600-word review produced by reviewers in dressing gowns is useless and should be dispensed with.

Mrs. Creevy (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Mrs. Creevy is the proprietress of Ringwood House Academy, a London girls’ school where the protagonist Dorothy Hare obtains a teaching job after recovering from amnesia. Her father’s cousin Sir Thomas pays Mrs. Creevy a five-pound premium or bribe to hire Dorothy, who works under the name Ellen Millborough. A woman in her late 40s, Mrs. Creevy is characterized as an ill-tempered crone, who runs her shabby school as a business, classifying students as good, medium, and bad payers. Interested only in impressing the parents, she gives students the semblance of an education, focusing on handwriting, basic arithmetic, and French phrases. Though operating an educational institution, she proudly claims to have never read a book through in her life and rebukes Dorothy for borrowing a novel from the public library. She offers Dorothy ten shillings a week with room and board. Parsimonious to the extreme, she admonishes Dorothy against using too much gaslight in the evening and at breakfast divides a pair of eggs so that her teacher gets only two-thirds of an egg. Mrs. Creevy has no friends, does not attend church or cinema, never reads, and lives an empty joyless life. Her only pleasure stems from waging a “guerilla war” against her hapless neighbor Mr. Boulger who operates a rival school called Rushington Grange. A woman who experiences “a kind of spiritual orgasm” when she does others harm, Mrs. Creevy delights in tormenting Boulger. When he requested she raise her chimney two feet to prevent smoke from entering his windows, she gleefully paid bricklayers 30 shillings to have it lowered two feet. Discovering that the roots of his plum tree extended into her garden, she injected them with poison, killing the tree. This victory prompted the only occasion Dorothy heard her employer laugh.

“Defense of the Novel” (essay, 1936) First appearing in The New English Weekly, “Defense of the Novel” examined the way novels have lost favor with the reading public. The statement “I never read novels” that was once stated as an apology was by 1936 openly proclaimed “in a tone of conscious pride.” Orwell argued that “the novel is being shouted out of existence” by “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers” (CEJL I, p. 250). Novels are hyped with such exaggerated praise that the public begins to dismiss them en masse. Newspapers rely on selling advertising. Fearing a publisher might pull ads if their products are criticized, editors pressure hack reviewers to create positive blurbs. “When all novels are thrust upon you as works of genius,” Orwell pointed out, “it is quite natural to assume that all them are tripe” (CEJL I, p. 250). American reviews are superior to British ones because “they are more amateurish, that is to say, more serious” (CEJL I, p. 254). Orwell discounted the widely-held belief that the novel was “doomed to disappear in

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Down the near future,” predicting it would survive in a degenerate form like a modern Punch and Judy show.

The dogs (Animal Farm, 1945) In the early days of the Rebellion, while Snowball holds classes teaching the animals how to read, Napoleon takes charge of nine newly-weaned puppies. Promising to educate them, he takes the dogs to a loft where he raises them in secret. Out of sight, the puppies are soon forgotten by the other animals until the dogs, nearly fully-grown, appear at Napoleon’s command to chase Snowball from Animal Farm. The dogs form a loyal security force for Napoleon. The animals notice that the dogs wag their tails obediently to Napoleon the way other dogs did with Farmer Jones. Soon the other animals fear the nameless dogs, who fiercely protect their master Napoleon.

Doublethink (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Doublethink is the Party term describing the ability to simultaneously accept opposing viewpoints. In interrogating Winston Smith, the Inner Party member O’Brien insists on the supremacy of mankind in the universe, maintaining that the sun and moon circle the Earth. The stars, he claims, are merely “bits of fire a few kilometers away” that could be easily reached or blotted out if the Party wished. The immensity of the universe can, however, be acknowledged for reasons of navigation. “The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them,” he tells Winston. “Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?” he asks Smith (266).

Down and Out in Paris and London (memoir, 1933) Variously labeled “fiction,” “non-fiction,” and “autobiography,” Orwell’s first published book detailed his experiences exploring the “down and outs” in France and Britain. After resigning from the Imperial Police in 1928, Orwell began his writing career by exploring poverty. Like Jack London, Orwell dressed in threadbare clothes and toured the underworld of urban slums, staying in shabby rooming houses and shelters. He later traveled to Paris where he lived in a small residential hotel, gave English lessons, and washed dishes in restaurant kitchens. Written in first person, the book moves from personal experiences to observations about poverty, work, and social values. The book opens with a vivid description of Orwell’s downscale hotel on a narrow Paris street. Orwell fictionalized the names of both his hotel and his street in the Latin Quarter. The narrow street is mostly populated by poor immigrants. He describes the residents of his 40-room hotel as a collection of eccentrics—the theology student who supported himself making shoes, the Russian woman who darned socks all day while her son lounged in cafes, the elderly couple who stayed “half starved and half drunk” by peddling sealed packets of post cards unsuspecting tourists wrongly assumed were pornographic. Orwell concludes the opening chapter with his book’s thesis, telling readers, “Poverty is what I am writing about.” The dirt and eccentric residents of the Paris slum provided him with “an objective-lesson in poverty” (9).

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Down After cataloguing a number of odd characters he met in his neighborhood, Orwell details his own experiences with poverty. Robbed by an Italian immigrant, Orwell states he was left with just 47 francs. Now poor himself, Orwell learns additional lessons about poverty. First, he states, poverty plunges you into a life of secrecy and “tangles you in a net of lies” (17). Ashamed by his lack of funds, Orwell ducked friends to avoid having to pay for drinks and lied to his laundress to explain why he had not patronized her business. Unable to pay for drinks or stamps to answer letters from friends, he found himself increasingly isolated. Second, he states he learned what real hunger was like. With limited funds, he subsisted on rye rolls and potatoes. Third, he discovered the lethargic boredom that comes with poverty. Weakened from the lack of food, he spent days lying in bed with little energy for meaningful work or thought. Orwell realized that thousands of Parisians—luckless artists, students, and down and out whores—endure this existence every day. Oddly, Orwell discovered that this life reduced his anxiety. Having finally “going to the dogs,” he found himself less anxious, realizing that he was able to survive the worst. Orwell then introduces Boris, a 35-year-old Russian exile, he met in a hospital. Once an officer in the Russian Imperial Army from a good family, Boris now waits tables and becomes Orwell’s cagey mentor and guide. Ever cunning and resourceful, Boris remains optimistic about his prospects. Although he has scrounged as a dishwasher, night watchman, floor scrubber, and lavatory attendant, he tells Orwell he had once earned 200 francs a day in tips working in a French resort. Though often foodless for days and forced to pawn his clothes, Boris dreams of getting a good wait staff job and saving enough to open a smart boutique restaurant. Boris and Orwell spend weeks traipsing around Paris searching for work. Desperate for cash, they fall prey to a group of swindlers posing as Russian Communists. Boris tells Orwell he has learned of a secret Bolshevik organization seeking to convert Russian exiles to their cause. As correspondents for a Moscow newspaper, they want articles on English politics. When Orwell claims to be apolitical, Boris suggests he simply copy articles from the Paris edition of the Daily Mail. When Orwell points out that the Daily Mail is a Conservative publication, the resourceful Boris argues that all he has to do say the opposite of the Daily Mail to earn a few hundred francs a month. Orwell follows Boris to the organization’s makeshift headquarters above a laundry. The Soviet agents rebuke them for not carrying laundry bundles to reinforce their ruse of running a laundry. The Bolsheviks request 20 francs in dues. Boris pays them five francs in advance. Asked about English politics, Orwell provides enough names of members of Parliament and expresses sufficient rejection of the Labour Party to pass as a radical commentator. The Bolsheviks tell Orwell he will receive a letter in a day or two and that he will be paid 150 francs for each article. When no letter arrives, Boris and Orwell, carrying a laundry bundle as directed, return to the hideout only to discover it empty. Evidently, having fleeced exiles of dues money, the agents of the imaginary secret society had moved on to another locale. Though cheated out of five francs, Orwell admired the con men. Demanding that visitors carry laundry “was genius” (50). Days later Boris introduces Orwell to a Russian exile patron of a soon-to-open restaurant, who offers to hire them. Waiting for the restaurant to open, Orwell takes a job as a plongeur or “diver,” French slang for a dishwasher at a hotel. Arriving before seven in the morning, Orwell is taken to a sweltering subbasement to prepare meals for hotel employees and wash their dishes.

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Down Orwell presents a detailed description of what he observed and experienced working 14 hours a day, washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and polishing brasswork. At first the din, confusion, filth, and heat of the restaurant kitchens made him think of bedlam. After more closely observing the cooks, waiters, and dishwashers at work, he learned to appreciate the orchestrated choreography of what initially appeared to be chaos. Unlike the order of a factory assembly line, a restaurant kitchen is by its nature intensely frantic. At lunch time a hundred diners might jam into a restaurant, ordering a hundred different meals, which could not be prepared in advance. Orwell sketches admiring portraits of the chef who could keep half a dozen orders straight in his head, cooking and barking demands without consulting the checks posted in front of him. Orwell learned the military-like hierarchy of the kitchen staff when he is ordered to shave off his moustache. Only cooks, he is told, wear moustaches. Comparing waiters to captains and dishwashers to privates, Orwell recognizes that he serves at the bottom rank. After providing graphic descriptions of the noise, heat, and filth of the kitchens, Orwell contemplates the different world just beyond the door where diners leisurely enjoy their meals amid flowers and wine. He notes how waiters instantly transform themselves from bullied and harassed employees in the kitchen to graceful, elegant servers once they pass into the dining room. Orwell moves beyond personal observation to political commentary. Waiters, he notes, are rarely Socialists. Serving the upper classes, overhearing their conversations about vacations and automobiles, they associate themselves with those they serve, not so much serving a meal as participating in it. Often handling large sums of money and earning tips through attentive fawning, they identify with their customers. Once the Russian-owned restaurant opens, Orwell recognizes how well-organized the hotel kitchen was in comparison to the poorly-arranged and inadequately-supplied restaurant called the Auberge. The kitchen had only gas ranges. Lacking ovens, cooks sent meat dishes to a nearby bakery. Lacking a coffee grinder, they borrowed one from a bistro. Orwell pauses the narrative to analyze the plight of a plongeur, whom he calls “one of the slaves of the modern world” (116). Paid subsistence wages without holidays, dishwashers are so thoroughly enslaved they do not consider forming unions or striking for better conditions. Why, he wonders, is there a need for people to spend 80 hours a week washing dishes so others can dine in comfort? Orwell questions whether the plongeur is performing what he calls “necessary work” or supplying a “luxury which … is not a luxury” (117). Unpleasant jobs like mining coal constitute “necessary work” because civilization needs coal to function. In contrast, an Indian rickshaw puller provides a needless luxury simply because Asians “consider it vulgar to walk” (118). Hotels and restaurants must exist, Orwell argues, but there is no need for them to enslave hundreds of underpaid, overworked employees. Orwell’s taste for simplicity and aversion to consumerism is summarized with his observation that “a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want” (118). Simple efficiency, he argues, could reduce the dishwasher’s hours from 15 hours a day to eight. Orwell moves beyond the plight of the plongeur to address the reason for exploitation and drudgery of the working class. The irrational “fear of the mob,” Orwell argues, leads the wealthy and those in the middle-class who identify with them to view the poor as a

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Down barbarous horde threatening civilization that must be restrained at all costs. This “superstitious fear” stems from the fact that “intelligent, cultivated people” who might be assumed to be liberal do not “mix with the poor” (120). Failing to recognize the humanity of poor people, the middle and upper classes demonize them as “a horde of submen” bent on revenge and looting. Fear of the mob leads people to accept injustice as a necessary restraint against the vandals. Orwell ends his stint as a Parisian dishwasher and returns to England as a third-class passenger on a boat. Not having a cabin, he sleeps in the saloon with a Romanian couple heading to Britain on their honeymoon. Homesick, Orwell extols the virtues of his country, only to be disillusioned by pulling into port and seeing one of the gauche seaside hotels “which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall” (126–127). Learning that his employer would be absent for a month, Orwell goes to a rag shop, exchanging his clothes for used dungarees and a shilling. He spends a night in a doss house, sharing a room with half a dozen men. Kept awake by their coughing, retching, and urinating, Orwell leaves for tea and bread in a coffee house. In London Orwell encounters an elderly Irish tramp who, like Boris, proves to be a useful mentor. The unnamed Irishman shows Orwell where he can obtain a free cup of tea and a bun, provided he is willing to sit through a prayer service. He also guides him to a spike or homeless shelter for tramps. Orwell learns the spike system keeps the homeless men in transit, moving from one to another because they cannot stay in the same spike for more than one day a month. Other regulations forbid men from possessing more than eight pence. Joining 50 other homeless men, Orwell enters a spike. They are directed to a lavatory where they bathe using communal tubs, are issued grey workhouse shirts, and are given bread and margarine. Orwell shares a cell-like room, sleeping on the floor next to a tramp who makes homosexual advances. Orwell brushes the man off, who explains his wife had left him after he lost his job three years ago. Homosexuality, Orwell observes, is common among “tramps of long standing” (147). Orwell introduces two figures who show contrasting responses to poverty. Paddy, another Irishman, becomes Orwell’s companion for two weeks. Born in Ireland, Paddy served for two years in the Great War and worked in a factory. Unemployed for two years, Paddy is ashamed of being a tramp, clinging to his former status by wearing a better grade of clothing as he scans pavements for cigarette butts. Although poor and often hungry, he eschews crime, refusing to swipe a forgotten bottle of milk left on a door step. He pines for work, often complaining that employed old men or young boys were unfairly keeping men in their prime out of work. Immigrants, in Paddy’s view, were also a cause of his joblessness. Orwell describes Paddy as possessing the “regular character of a tramp— abject, envious, a jackal’s character” but still generous, sharing his food with friends (153). Paddy introduces Orwell to his friend Bozo, a screever or pavement artist. Orwell discovers the hierarchy of tramps. Men like Paddy and the unnamed Irishman survive by accepting charity and staying in state-run shelters. Pavement artists, organ grinders, and street acrobats insist they “earn” money by collecting tips for services or entertainment provided to an appreciative public. He takes note of a street musician who enters pubs, plays for tips, then upon leaving performs a pro bono encore to demonstrate he is not a beggar. Like Paddy, Bozo is a Great War veteran and a former worker. Once a housepainter, he was

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Down crippled when he fell 40 feet, smashing his right foot. Disabled, he sold toys on the street before becoming a pavement artist. Working for tips during clement weather, Bozo sleeps in spikes or the open, owning only the clothes on his back, artist materials, and a few books. Half-starved, he remains positive and optimistic, taking great pride in the originality of his political cartoons, deriding artists who simply copy famous paintings or daily recreate the same image. Unlike other tramps Orwell meets, Bozo retains intellectual interests. When Orwell argues that poverty reduces one’s self worth and sense of purpose in life, Bozo disagrees. Tapping his head, he insists you can keep alive with books and ideas and stay free in your own mind. Bozo stands apart from other defeatist tramps because of creativity and optimism. As with plonguers in Paris, Orwell interrupts his autobiographical narrative to examine the lives of tramps and beggars. People, Orwell observes, view beggars as a race apart from workers. But what, he asks, constitutes work? A beggar does not swing a hammer or total sums of numbers, but instead obtains money by standing for hours in all kinds of weather. Begging may be defined as “useless work,” Orwell argues, but it is more honest than selling patent medicine. Beggars, he assumes, are despised not because they do not work but because they do not make a large income. “Money,” he states, “has become the grand test of virtue” (174). Orwell also pauses his narrative to include a brief glossary of London slang, providing definitions of words like “moocher” and “gagger” and explaining expressions such as “to knock off ” or “to skipper.” Orwell returns to his life of tramping, recounting an interesting experience he had with Paddy, who took him to a church that served a weekly tea to tramps. Joining a hundred filthy tramps Paddy and Orwell climb the steps to the gallery where they are served a jam jar of tea and six slices of bread and margarine. Once the church service begins, Orwell is shocked to see the tramps behave outrageously, tossing bread and insults at the small congregation below for humiliating them by feeding them. The “brave” minister continues with his service, addressing his sermon to the “unsaved sinners” cursing above him. Those receiving charity, Orwell observes, hate their benefactors and when their numbers are large enough, they will demonstrate their contempt for those helping them. Orwell concludes his narrative with his observations about the “tribe of men … marching up and down England like so many Wandering Jews” (200). Social stereotypes demonize tramps as “repulsive” and “dangerous” men beyond sympathy. Orwell opens his commentary by asking why tramps exist. Tramps are presumed to be lazy, preferring to beg than work, and live like modern nomads, drifting about and surviving on the gleanings of others. Orwell’s observations led him to see tramps as broken docile men rather than uncouth ruffians. A hundred homeless tramps staying in shelters are effectively supervised by a staff of three. The food given to tramps keeps them in a constant state of near malnutrition. Another starvation Orwell notes is sexual. The vast majority of homeless tramps are male. A tramp “is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road” (204). Cut off from women, a tramp “feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic” (204). Nothing, Orwell argues, damages a man’s self-esteem more than the sense that he is unworthy of female companionship. Even worse for tramps is the enforced idleness of waiting, accompanied by the tenand 15-mile marches from spike to spike, forcing thousands of men to expend useless

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Down energy. The only way to humanize tramps, he concludes, is to “depauperize” them by providing meaningful work. Workhouses could be made self-sufficient institutions with tramps growing their own food. Orwell then catalogues the range of sleeping options London provides the homeless, including The Twopenny Hangover, where men sit on benches and lean over a rope strung across the room to sleep. At 5 a.m., a man humorously dubbed the “valet,” cuts the rope and sends the sleeping tramps tumbling to the floor. For four pennies homeless men can spend a night at The Coffin sleeping in boxes. Orwell recounts parting with his friends Paddy and Bozo. Paddy sets out to find work in Portsmouth and is later reported killed in a traffic accident. Bozo, Orwell tells readers, is currently serving two weeks in jail for begging. Orwell concludes his “fairly trivial” story, admitting that he feels he has only seen “the fringe of poverty” (213). But he states that he has learned two or three things by being hard up himself. He vows never to assume that all tramps are lazy drunks, expect the poor to be grateful for receiving a penny, or enjoy a meal in a smart restaurant. “That,” Orwell maintains, “is a beginning” (213). Victor Gollancz accepted the book for publication in August 1932, offering Blair an advance of £40. Gollancz favored changing the title to The Confessions of a Down and Out. Blair objected to being labeled a “down and out” and preferred The Confessions of a Dishwasher. Gollancz finally settled on revising Blair’s original title to Down and Out in Paris and London. Down and Out in Paris and London appeared in January 1933 and received good reviews in the Daily Mail and Evening Standard. Writing in Adelphi, C.D. Lewis stated that Orwell’s factual descriptions of poverty “should shake the complacence of twentieth century civilisation.” In June the book appeared in the United States, published by Harper and Brothers. James Farrell provided a positive review in New Republic in October 1933, calling Orwell’s narrative “genuine, unexaggerated and intelligent.” The New York Times review offered tepid praise, describing the book as being “worth reading.” The initial printing of 1,500 copies sold well enough to justify two additional printings for a total of 3,000 copies. Sales, however, quickly tapered off. Harper’s American edition of 1,750 copies sold fewer than 1,400 copies after a year. A French edition appeared in 1935 and sold modestly, as did a Czech translation published the same year. In 1940 Penguin printed 55,000 copies in a six-penny paperback edition. The book involved Orwell in a curious editorial spat. Offended by the book review in the Times, a hotelier and restaurateur named Humbert Possenti wrote a letter to the newspaper claiming that Orwell’s grim depictions of Paris hotel kitchens were “inconceivable.” Angered, Orwell responded with a letter stating that his observations were based on his experiences in a single hotel, not a generic survey. Since Possenti had no idea which hotel Orwell was writing about, he could not possibly refute the validity of his observations. Sir St. Clair Thompson settled the dispute by suggesting that restaurants post notices inviting the public to inspect their kitchens.

• Further Reading “Books: To the Heart of Matters.” Time, 6 Feb. 1950. Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Little, Brown, 1980, pp. 109–156.

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Ellis Davies, W.H. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” New Statesman and Nation, 18 Mar. 1933, pp. 338–40. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Nation, 6 Sept. 1933, p. 279. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Times Literary Supplement, 12 Jan. 1933, p. 12. Farrell, James. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” New Republic, 11 Oct. 1933, pp. 256–257. George, Daniel. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Tribune, 24 Jan. 1941, p. 13. Gorman, Herbert. “On Paris and London Pavements.” New York Times, 6 Aug. 1933, p. 31. Hillier, Bevis. “Going Native at Home.” The Spectator, vol. 281, no. 8,865, 4, 1998. Lewis, C.D. “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Adelphi, Feb. 1933, p. 382. Meyers, Jeffrey. “Orwell and the Experience of France.” The World and I, vol.18, no. 11, Nov. 2003, pp. 274+. Orwell, George. Introduction. La Vache enragée. Gallimard, 1935, pp. 7–9. Sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 12–133. Stansky, Peter, and William Abrahams. Orwell: The Transformation. Knopf, 1980, pp. 21–22. Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit. Schocken, 1984, pp. 111–123.

Ellen (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Ellen is the name Dorothy Hare chooses after her attack of amnesia. When asked her identity by a tramp named Nobby, Dorothy cannot remember her own name. She randomly chooses “Ellen” from a half-dozen female names. Regaining her memory and scandalized by the tabloid coverage of the infamous “Missing Rector’s Daughter,” she chooses a fictitious last name, calling herself Millborough after a town in Sussex. To avoid attention, Dorothy writes her father and asks him to respond using her new name. Dorothy maintains her pseudonym while teaching at Mrs. Creevy’s Ringwood House academy for girls. Only after being contacted by Mr. Warburton does she revert to her original name when she returns to her father’s home in Knype Hill.

Ellesmere Road, West Bletchley (Coming Up for Air, 1939) The protagonist George Bowling lives at 191 Ellesmere Road in West Bletchley. He describes his street as a long row of semi-detached houses with matching stucco fronts, privet hedges, and green doors. He cynically views the homes as a line of “semi-detached torturechambers” populated by “little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers” tormented by “the boss twisting his tail and his wife riding him” (12). The identical houses, costing £550, are leasehold, not freehold, so even when their owners pay off their mortgages they don’t actually own their homes. The houses on Ellesmere Road are part of a sprawling subdivision called the Hesperides Estate owned by the Cheerful Credit Building Society. Bowling envisions a statue being erected to honor building societies and the middle-class society they foster: It would be a queer sort of god. Among other things it would be bi-sexual. The top half would be a managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family way. In one hand it would carry an enormous key—the key of the workhouse, of course—and in the other—what do they call those things like French horns with presents coming out of them?—a cornucopia, out of which would be pouring portable radios, life-insurance policies, false teeth, aspirins, French letters and concrete garden rollers [13].

Ellis (Burmese Days, 1934) The assistant manager of a timber company in Upper Burma, Ellis is a racist who heatedly opposes opening Kyauktada’s shabby European Club to Asian members. Though

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Elsie working with the Burmese daily, Ellis never develops any empathy for Asians, regarding even the “hint of friendly feeling toward an Oriental” as a “horrible perversity” (23). Orwell describes Ellis as an intelligent and responsible employee but one of the many decent Englishmen who “should never be allowed to set foot in the East” (23). Ellis badgers the novel’s protagonist John Flory about his friendship with Dr. Veraswami, whom Ellis regards as a “greasy little sod of a nigger doctor” (23). Ellis’ tirades against Asians reveal Flory’s inability to stand up for his values or defend his only friend Dr. Veraswami. Ellis insists that showing kindness to Asians threatens the British Empire, arguing, “The only possible policy is to treat ’em like the dirt they are” (29). After a scurrilous attack against Deputy Commissioner Macgregor is published in a Burmese nationalist newspaper, Ellis insists on posting a notice rejecting the admission of Asians into the European Club. Unable to confront Ellis or protect his Burmese friend, Flory joins the other members in signing the notice. Ellis strongly objects to accepting Veraswami as a member. After Maxwell, a fellow Englishman, is murdered in revenge for shooting a native during an uprising, Ellis is boiling with anger. Encountering some Burmese high school students who taunt him, he lashes out, striking one in the face with his cane. The student’s comrades pelt Ellis with stones then flee before the police arrive. The injured boy is taken to a Burmese doctor who applies concoctions to his eyes that blind him. Enraged natives riot, but none of the Europeans blame Ellis for the uprising.

Elsie (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Elsie was George Bowling’s first girlfriend in his boyhood Oxfordshire town. A shopgirl two years older than George, she was sexually experienced when they began dating or “walking out” as it was called in 1910. Bowling describes Elsie Waters as being both intensely feminine and pliant. “As soon as you saw her,” he states, “you knew that you could take her in your arms and do what you wanted with her” (121). Though not small or weak, she was “submissive” and would “always do what a man told her” (121). In 1913 at 20 Bowling lost his virginity to the more experienced Elsie. A year later, the First World War started, and Bowling left Lower Binfield for the army and did not see her on return visits. In 1938 Bowling returns to his boyhood town and encounters Elsie on the street and follows her with “a kind of horrible fascination.” Bowling is shocked to realize that the “milky-white” girl of 24 had degenerated into a “great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels” (243). Seeing her enter the tobacco and sweets shop she runs with her husband, Bowling follows her inside, asking to look at some pipes as a ruse to engage in conversation. Bowling notes her “bull dog” face as she rummages through her wares. To cut their encounter short, Bowling asks for cigarettes. When their fingers briefly touch, Bowling expects to feel some kind of reaction. But “the body does not remember,” and Elsie does not recognize her customer as a former lover. Bowling leaves the shop, feeling like a ghost estranged from his past.

“The English People” (essay, 1944) Orwell wrote a series of sketches about the British people in 1944, which were published in 1947. Presented as a single entry in The Collected Essays, they offer Orwell’s overall

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English view of the English people and his speculations about their postwar future. His observations appear under six general subtitled categories. “England at First Glance” characterizes the misleading stereotypes foreigners have about the English. The American concept of the “English accent,” he notes, is spoken by only a quarter of the population. The tall thin Englishman depicted in European cartoons is typified only by the upper class who are unlike the short squat working class. Most foreigners, Orwell asserts, base their perceptions of the English on the habits and customs of the upper class. What is true about the English, Orwell asserts, is their “artistic insensibility, gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions, and an obsession with sport” (CEJL III, p. 2). The English, he observes, have little interest in the arts, with the majority of the population dismissing poetry with “derision or embarrassment” (CEJL III, p. 2). On the other hand, the English are known for their decency, their deference to the handicapped, and their gentleness. Unlike the Spanish and Italians, they highly respect the police and legal institutions, believing in the general fairness of the courts. Unlikely or unwilling to learn foreign languages, the English regard other nationalities with suspicion or contempt. Because travelling overseas and enjoying Continental cuisine is associated with the upper class, “xenophobia is reinforced by class jealousy” (CEJL III, p. 2). The English sentimentality about animals is illustrated by London’s pet cemeteries and the creation of miniature stretchers designed for cats injured during the Blitz. Sports fascinate the English and dominate their conversation and attention. The great class distinctions that so clearly marked Victorian England were breaking down during the Depression and the Second World War. “The Moral Outlook of the English People” surveys the largely secular ethical sense of decency and charity. Though most English people maintain a belief in life after death, only 10 percent regularly attend religious services. Sympathy for the oppressed leads the English to side with the Ethiopians rather than the Italians and the Chinese rather than the Japanese. This sensibility also applied to Britain’s adversaries so that “the real weapon of the Irish rebels was British public opinion” which would not allow the government to take measures needed to crush the rebellion (CEJL III, p. 9). The hatred of violence means the English would never countenance the gangsterism found in America. The English have no great love of militarism and do not succumb to leader worship. Although Britain had conditions conducive to the rise of Fascism, the movement never took root in the United Kingdom. “The Political Outlook of the English People” analyzes the general political illiteracy of the English. Britons have no love of ideology and are largely ignorant of their own political system. Many do not vote, and many cannot name their Member of Parliament. The two major political parties, Conservative and Labour, increasingly mirror each other, disagreeing over minor discrepancies in bills and policies rather than advocating opposing ideologies. The compact nature of British society and the nation’s dependence on imported food makes revolution or civil war impossible. The Communist Party in England never attained the numbers and influence of Communist parties in France or pre–Hitler Germany. Orwell summarizes the political views of the working classes as a desire for “steady jobs and a fair deal for their children” (CEJL III, p. 15). “The English Class System” opens with the acknowledgment that the British class system is “the enemy propagandist’s best argument” because Britain is one of the few nations

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Erskine that maintains remnants of feudalism (CEJL III, p. 18). Titles remain and are invented. The House of Lords with its hereditary peers retains genuine political power. The class system, Orwell observes, is more cultural than economic. The successful shopkeeper might earn twice as much as a clergyman or an army officer but belong to a lower class. Although class differences are striking to the foreign visitor, Orwell asserts, they have greatly diminished since the First World War. The Second World War required men and women of different classes to serve, volunteer, and accept rationing together. In addition, mass production makes inexpensive clothing resemble luxury clothing, so it is harder to immediately place someone’s class by appearance alone. Mass media and popular culture create more uniform tastes, as all classes watch the same movies, read the same newspapers, and listen to the same radio broadcasts. “The English Language” summarizes Orwell’s observations about the large vocabulary and simple grammar of the English language. He notes the utility of the language and the ability of words to serve as both nouns and verbs and that verbs and adjectives can be easily turned negative by adding “un.” The disadvantage of speaking English, Orwell notes, is that it is difficult for native speakers to learn other languages. An illiterate Indian, he notes, will learn English quicker than a British soldier can learn Hindustani. While tens of thousands of Indians speak perfect English, only a few score English subjects can converse in any Asian language. Orwell comments on the influence of the American language on English. American words and phrases are popular in Britain because they are free of class labels. An upperclass English speaker might use the American term “cop” to refer to a police officer but never say “copper” because of its working-class origins. Orwell considers American a “bad influence” on English because it debases the language. American English should be viewed with “suspicion,” arguing that the English should “borrow its best words” but not allow it to “modify the actual structure of our language” (CEJL III, p. 29). “The Future of the English People” details Orwell’s predictions and hopes for postwar Britain. If international conflict continues after the war, Orwell reasoned, there “will be only room in the world for two or three great powers, and in the long run Britain will not be one of them” (CEJL III, p. 30). No longer a world power, Britain, in Orwell’s view, could remain a valuable influence because of the English “habit of not killing one another” (CEJL III, p. 30). Britain’s record of peaceful domestic politics, general civility, and freedom of expression make it a role model for the rest of the world, offering “a much-needed alternative to Russian authoritarianism … and American materialism” (CEJL III, p. 30).

Erskine (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Large, slow, but likeable, Erskine is the managing director of the New Albion Publicity Company which employs the protagonist Gordon Comstock as a copywriter. Although Comstock’s fellow employees smugly deride him for publishing poetry and mockingly call him “the bard,” Erskine is somewhat impressed by Gordon’s literary achievements. Interested in cultivating talent at New Albion, he promotes Comstock to the special post of secretary to the firm’s lead copywriter. Despite receiving a ten-shilling raise, Comstock becomes dissatisfied with his work at New Albion, fearful he is being trapped into middle-class commercialism by having a “good job.” After his book Mice is accepted for publication, Com-

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Flory stock tells Erskine he is leaving New Albion to launch a literary career. Erskine is puzzled by Comstock’s decision and promises to hold a job open for him if he cares to return. After abandoning his two-year money strike, Gordon returns to his “good job” at New Albion in order to marry his pregnant girlfriend Rosemary.

The European Club (Burmese Days, 1934) Although described as a shabby, single-story, fly-blown building, the mildewed European Club is the “spiritual citadel” and “the real seat of British power” in the Burmese village Kyauktada, the setting of Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days. The Club has only seven English members, including the protagonist John Flory. The building consists of a “forlorn ‘library’” of 500 moldy novels, a billiard room, a lounge, and a verandah overlooking the Irrawaddy River. The Club offers its members month-old European newspapers, gin, and occasional ice. The members have resisted reforms, and in 1926 maintain one of the few remaining Clubs with no Asian members. John Flory faces a crisis of consciousness when his friend Dr. Veraswami is blackballed. After Flory’s suicide, his nemesis, the corrupt Burmese magistrate U Po Kyin is granted membership. Visiting only occasionally, he ingratiates himself with his English peers by buying them drinks and becoming a skilled bridge player.

Facecrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Displaying an improper facial expression, a visual marker of “thought crime,” facecrime is a punishable offense in Oceania. A simple tic, an anxious look that might imply guilt, or an expression of skepticism during a victory announcement can lead a Party member to be arrested by the Thought Police.

Flaxman (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) A fellow lodger in Gordon Comstock’s rooming house, Flaxman is a traveling sales representative for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Company. Fat, boisterous, and loudly dressed, Flaxman currently lives apart from his wife after a row following his adulterous spree in Paris. Given an unexpected bonus of £30, Flaxman did not tell his wife about his windfall and spent the money during a business trip to Paris. Accustomed to his wife’s jealous ire, Flaxman presumes the storm will eventually pass, allowing him to return home. In the meantime he spends his evenings ogling barmaids in local pubs. After Comstock is arrested, Flaxman accompanies Ravelston to visit him in jail. Flaxman’s backstory provided the genesis of George Bowling’s misadventures in Orwell’s next novel Coming Up for Air, published in 1939.

John Flory (Burmese Days, 1934) The protagonist of Orwell’s first true novel, John Flory is a 35-year-old timber merchant living in 1920s Burma, then a part of India. The most striking physical feature about Flory is a “hideous” dark blue crescent birthmark stretching across his left cheek from his eye to

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Flory his mouth. Ridiculed in childhood and dubbed Blueface and Monkeybum by classmates, Flory suffers from low self-esteem and an inability to face others. Always sensitive about his birthmark, he avoids looking at others in the eye, preferring to stand sideways to hide his bad side. Born in Britain to “good parents,” he attended a third-rate public school. At 20 his parents secured him a job with a timber firm based in Burma. By 1926 he had spent 15 years in Asia, having never returned to England. He dodged military service during the First World War, unwilling “to exchange his whisky, his servants and his Burmese girls for the boredom of the parade ground and the strain of cruel marches” (59–60). An attempted trip home was interrupted by a call from the timber firm to return to his post after three of his men died of fever. Flory “acclimatised” himself to Burma, slowly adjusting to its oppressive heat and humidity, its drenching rains, lack of amenities, and poverty. When not in the forests harvesting trees, he stays in his home in Kyauktada, a small town with seven English people, a ragged European Club, and a single motor vehicle. Here Flory joins his fellow countrymen drinking, exchanging gossip, reading Punch, savoring the dwindling supply of ice, and enduring the inescapable heat. His isolation and loneliness are partially alleviated by two unsatisfactory relationships. For sexual release, he purchased a 20-year-old Burmese girl, Ma Hla May, from her parents for 300 rupees. Described as an exotic, alien Dutch doll of a figure, she wheedles Flory for money and gold bracelets, hungering for affection. Despite her claims of fidelity, Flory knows she has a Burmese lover. Her shallowness and her lack of education render her to be an outlet for physical release only, leaving Flory starved for a meaningful relationship. He maintains a friendship with Dr. Veraswami, a local physician who defends the British Empire. In contrast, Flory sarcastically dismisses the British contribution to Asia, stating the only two things they brought to India were syphilis and the machine gun. Despite the heat and the resentment of the Burmese, Flory loves the beauty of Asia with its exotic plants and animals. The lush landscape, however, fills him with loneliness because he finds beauty “meaningless until it is shared” (51). His prospects of “sharing” his life brighten with the arrival of Elizabeth Lackersteen, a 22-year-old English girl without an income, who comes to Burma to live with her aunt and uncle. Because she has recently arrived from Paris, Flory mistakenly assumes she shares his interests in books and culture. But Elizabeth does not care for the arts and dislikes “brainy” people, preferring those who hunt grouse, play tennis, and attend tea parties. Flory’s attempts to introduce Elizabeth to Burmese culture backfire because she regards all Asians as “smelly” barbarians. She does, however, admire his manly skills in hunting and sees him as hero after he helps subdue a native uprising. But when Flory’s former mistress appears during a church service to confront her master, Elizabeth loses all respect for Flory and rejects even his proposal for a platonic relationship. Despondent, Flory shoots himself. John Flory’s sense of alienation is much like Winston Smith’s in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both men are bitterly alone, taking solace in private thoughts, alcohol, cigarettes, and sex with prostitutes. Both live in societies where free thought is impossible. Flory lives in “a stifling, stultifying world” in which “every word and every thought is censored” by the unspoken code of the imperialists who dare not acknowledge the obvious immortality of

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Gissing their society. Just as Winston Smith is willing to do anything to destroy the Party ruling his country, Flory longs “for a native uprising to drown their Empire in blood.” Like Smith, he lives alone in “secret, sterile worlds” of his own thoughts (61). Both men are mere puppets to forces beyond their control. Smith is duped by the secret police to join a fake opposition group, leading to his arrest. Flory is manipulated by the corrupt U Po Kyin, who uses Flory’s former mistress to discredit him, ruin his chances of marriage, and drive him to suicide.

Foxwood (Animal Farm, 1945) see Mr. Pilkington Mr. Frederick (Animal Farm, 1945) Frederick owns Pinchfield, a small well-ordered farm that borders Animal Farm. A tough, shrewd businessman, he is continually involved in litigation and has a record for driving hard bargains. He is at odds with his other human neighbor Mr. Pilkington, a gentleman farmer who spends his days fishing and hunting. Their animosity presents them from forming a united front against Animal Farm and offers Napoleon the opportunity to play one human against another. Napoleon agrees to sell timber to Frederick, who pays the pigs in cash. When the bank notes turn out to be forged, Napoleon calls for Frederick’s death. Backed by 15 men, half of whom carry guns, Frederick marches onto Animal Farm. His men inflict heavy casualties on the animals who have no protection against firearms. Using explosives, the attackers destroy the windmill. The humans are driven off Animal Farm in what the pigs call the Battle of the Windmill, a campaign Napoleon declares as a victory.

Freedom Is Slavery (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) “Freedom Is Slavery” is one of the central slogans of the unnamed Party ruling Oceania. O’Brien, the Inner Party leader who interrogates Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love, explains that the Party seeks power for the sake of power. Power is both a means and an end. To achieve and maintain power the Party must eradicate individuality and independence. By enslaving themselves to the will of the Party, humans achieve freedom from death, man’s ultimate failure: Alone—free—the human being is doomed to die…. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal [264].

To ensure that the Party maintains control and is protected from renegades and dissent, any independent thought is deemed heretical and must be erased. Individuality or ownlife is a crime. Winston Smith commits thoughtcrime by keeping a diary and questioning the Party’s version of history. Only by accepting the Party’s truth, by believing that he can see five fingers when O’Brien displays four, can Winston Smith find “freedom” in Oceania.

“George Gissing” (essay, 1948) George Gissing (1857–1903) was an English novelist who had a major influence on George Orwell. Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Gissing grew up in a middle-class home. His

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Gissing father operated a chemist’s shop and was an amateur botanist. After his father’s death, Gissing, then a teenager, realized that he would only achieve success or financial stability through hard work. An excellent student, he read the complete works of Shakespeare three times by the time he was 15. He received a scholarship to attend Owens College in Manchester, where he maintained a rigorous schedule of academic work until he became involved with Helen “Nell” Harrison, a local prostitute. He provided her money to stay off the streets, resorting to robbing a college cloakroom to obtain funds. Caught in the act by a detective, he was expelled and sentenced to a month of hard labor. His promising academic career ruined, Gissing was aided by family friends with gifts of money to start a new life. After a year in America, where he began a literary career writing short stories for the Chicago Tribune, Gissing returned to England and Nell, whom he married. His first novel Workers in the Dawn was published in in 1880, when he was 23. He would write 20 novels over the next 20 years, dying at 46 in France. Gissing earned little money from his books and had to supplement his income by tutoring. His marriage to Nell failed, as did a distressful second marriage. During Orwell’s lifetime Gissing’s work was largely forgotten, his out-of-print novels available only in dog-eared library copies. Orwell held Gissing in high esteem. “I am a great fan of his,” he wrote his friend Julian Symons, claiming that Gissing’s The Odd Women “is one of the best novels in English” (CEJL IV, p. 416). Disappointed that no biography of Gissing existed, he called it “a job that is crying out to be done” and regretted he was unable to conduct the research needed to write one himself (CEJL IV, p. 438). In the last years of his life, Orwell was delighted when friends located hard-to-find copies of Gissing novels for him. In 1948 the magazine Politics and Letters asked Orwell to write about one of his favorite authors. Orwell responded with an essay assessing Gissing’s works, ideas, themes, and times. “In the shadow of the atomic bomb it is not easy to talk confidently about progress,” he wrote, assuring readers that Gissing’s novels provide proof that the current age “is a good deal better than the last one” (CEJL IV, pp. 429–429). Gissing lived in “the fog-bound, gas-lit London of the ’eighties, a city of drunken puritans, where clothes, architecture and furniture had reached their rock-bottom of ugliness” (CEJL IV, p. 429). Gissing was a bookish “over-civilised man” caught in a society built on money and rigid hypocritical morality. Money and women were the major themes of Gissing’s novels. Without money men cannot marry intelligent women, and Gissing’s sensitive heroes suffered for it. Gissing, Orwell noted, criticized the society he lived in but was not a political reformer. He showed little interest in “social justice”: He did not admire the working class as such, and he did not believe in democracy. He wanted to speak not for the multitude, but the exceptional man, the sensitive man, isolated among barbarians [CEJL IV, p. 430].

Despite his conservative, sometimes reactionary attitudes, Gissing, in Orwell’s view, was a compelling writer. “He had … a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of the society he lived in,” Orwell noted, “but he was concerned to describe it rather than to change it.” What struck Orwell was Gissing’s “frank” and honest treatment of sexual matters avoided by most Victorian writers. Gissing did not write erotica or approve of free love, but he was willing “to face the facts” and disregard the “unwritten law of English fiction” that men and women remain virgins until marriage.

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Gollancz Although he was unable to find copies of all of Gissing’s works, Orwell praised him, stating, “I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists” (CEJL IV, p. 433). He concluded his essay, stating that “we must be thankful for the piece of youthful folly which turned him aside from a comfortable middle-class career and forced him to become the chronicler of vulgarity, squalor and failure” (CEJL IV, p. 436). Orwell was disappointed because Politics and Letters folded before his essay could be published. The article eventually appeared a decade after his death in London Magazine and is included in his collected works.

• Further Reading Connelly, Mark. Orwell and Gissing. Peter Lang, 1997.

Emmanuel Goldstein (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Once a leading revolutionary figure nearly equal to Big Brother, the renegade Emmanuel Goldstein is a bearded Trotsky-like figure declared an Enemy of the People. Condemned to death by the Party, Goldstein escaped to head the Brotherhood, an underground resistance group dedicated to overthrowing Big Brother. He is rumored to be under the protection of “foreign paymasters” or living secretly somewhere in Oceania. All treacheries, incidents of sabotage, heresies, and deviations are blamed on Goldstein, who reputedly collected his anti–Party diatribes in a volume called the book (see the book). Goldstein is featured in the films shown during the Two Minutes Hate, where he denounces Big Brother and calls for freedom of speech, the press, thought, and assembly. Although universally hated and rejected, Goldstein manages to inspire dupes and traitors in Oceania who are systematically rooted out and exposed by the Thought Police. Posing as a secret member of the Brotherhood, the Inner Party member O’Brien (see O’Brien) recruits Winston Smith and his girlfriend Julia into the organization. He toasts their leader Emmanuel Goldstein and sends Smith a copy of the book, which details the nature of oligarchical collectivism, the system used by the world’s three totalitarian superstates to hold their populations in bondage. After his arrest Winston Smith is tortured and interrogated by O’Brien, who dupes him into revealing his disloyalty to Big Brother. O’Brien tells him that he will never know whether the Brotherhood exists in reality or is simply a Party invention to lure traitors to reveal themselves.

Victor Gollancz (1893–1967) Victor Gollancz was born in London and became a publisher noted for advancing Leftist causes. He began as a member of the Labour Party but later supported many causes of the Communist Party, though he never joined the organization. The grandson of a noted rabbi and scholar, Gollancz predicted Hitler would attempt to annihilate the Jews in Europe. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he broke with the Communist Party, calling himself a Christian Socialist aligned with the new party Common Wealth. Gollancz was one of the founders of the Left Book Club (see Left Book Club). Gollancz had a long relationship with George Orwell, working with him to publish

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Hanging his first book Down and Out in Paris and London. Gollancz initially refused to accept Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days, fearing libel suits. After it was published by Harper’s in New York and Orwell agreed to change some characters’ names, Gollancz published the novel in Britain. He went on to publish several of Orwell’s following books, including A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Coming Up for Air. He commissioned Orwell to write a study about conditions in the north of England. Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier and made it a Left Book Club selection, which boosted its sales. However, Gollancz insisted on including a foreword that criticized many of Orwell’s comments about Socialism. In 1941 Victor Gollancz released The Betrayal of the Left: An Examination and Refutation of Communist Policy which included two chapters by George Orwell. Gollancz, who had the right of first refusal on Orwell’s fiction, declined to accept Animal Farm while the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler, and Orwell sought another publisher. Sensing their growing rift over postwar politics, Orwell wrote Gollancz in 1947, asking to terminate their contract (CEJL IV, pp. 308–309). As a result, Gollancz did not publish Orwell’s most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• Further Reading Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Victor Gollancz: A Biography. Gollancz. 1987.

“A Hanging” (essay, 1931) Originally published in Adelphi under the name Eric Blair, “A Hanging” became one of Orwell’s most anthologized pieces. The essay graphically describes the execution of a nameless Hindu inmate in Burma. The condemned man’s crime is never mentioned. Orwell’s exact role in the event is left unstated. He includes himself simply as one of “the rest of us, magistrates and the like,” who followed the warders escorting the condemned man to the gallows. The solemn procession is suddenly and almost comically interrupted by the appearance of a large dog, wagging and barking. The dog bounds toward the prisoner and attempts to lick his face. After the animal is restrained, the procession continues. Watching the inmate step aside to avoid a puddle, Orwell experiences an epiphany about “what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” The prisoner, like the men guarding him, is alive and healthy. But within minutes one of the men in the procession “would be gone—one mind less, one world less.” As Orwell watches, the prisoner mounts the gallows and begins crying out to his god, repeating “Ram! Ram! Ram!” as the hood is placed over his head. Hearing the cries of the condemned man, Orwell imagines that everyone around him shares the same desire to kill the man to end “that abominable noise!” Once the man is hanged, the officials depart, with the Indian jailer sharing stories of botched executions that required the supervising doctor to pull on the prisoner’s legs to complete the process. Retelling the story of a man who had to be dragged from his cell, the jailer jokes that the man “would not listen to reason.” Heading for a drink with his compatriots, Orwell joins the others in laughter, with the dead man hanging just 300 feet away. The essay does not contain a thesis or make a political statement. Orwell’s epiphany makes him appreciate the significance of hanging a man but does not lead him to condemn or even question the morality of capital punishment. Critics and biographers have long debated whether Orwell actually witnessed the

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Hare event he described. There were hundreds of executions throughout Burma during his years of service, but Englishmen in Orwell’s position were rarely required to assist in or attend hangings. In later years Orwell offered conflicting statements about the veracity of his account. He told a friend and his housekeeper that “A Hanging” was “only a story,” though he declared twice in print that he had “watched a man hanged once.” Some biographers, like Bernard Crick, assert that Orwell may have dismissed the essay as fiction when conversing with friends to avoid answering questions about a distasteful experience.

• Further Reading Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Little, Brown, 1980, p. 85. Rodden, John. “‘A Hanging’ circa 80.” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, 2014, pp. 70+. Sheldon, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 102–104.

Charles Hare (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) The father of Orwell’s sole female protagonist, Charles Hare is the 64-year-old rector of St. Athelstan’s church in Knype Hill, Suffolk. An embittered widower, he browbeats his 27year-old daughter Dorothy, who cares for their house, runs errands, and does clerical chores. Townspeople joke that he would have Dorothy deliver his sermons if he could. Orwell describes Hare as a man living in the wrong era. Had he been born centuries before, he would have been happy and prosperous when the Church was powerful and respected. Unfortunately, he is living in “the age of Lenin and The Daily Mail” and struggles financially. He inherited £4,000 when he came of age, but a series of poor investments has eroded his net worth to £1,200. Each year he makes additional bad investments, dwindling his income even further. Dorothy complains to him about their debts to local tradesmen. The rector is dismissive, insisting that lowly grocers and butchers can wait for their money. His determined bitterness alienated the people of Knype Hill, so that during his tenure the church congregation declined from 600 to 200. Hare does not respond to his daughter’s letter from London when she recovers from an episode of amnesia. Dorothy assumes her father believes the tabloid stories fueled by Mrs. Semprill, the town gossip, and does not wish to associate himself with the now infamous “Missing Rector’s Daughter.” In fact, after getting over his initial anger, Charles Hare tries indirectly and clumsily to aid his daughter. He reads her letters from London but does not believe her amnesia story. Not wishing to get directly involved with scandal, Hare contacts his wealthy cousin Sir Thomas, who lives in London, to locate Dorothy and help her find employment in London, forwarding £10 for her benefit. Once Mrs. Semprill is discredited in a libel action, Charles Hare is willing to allow Dorothy to return home. Although she has been gone for eight months, he greets his daughter as if she had away for a brief holiday, expecting Dorothy to automatically resume her old role and duties. Immediately on her arrival, he directs her to drop her bag and bring the typewriter downstairs to type his sermon.

Dorothy Hare (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Orwell’s only female protagonist, Dorothy Hare is the 27-year-old virginal daughter of Charles Hare, the rector of St. Athelstan’s in Knype Hill in Suffolk. With her mother dead,

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Hare Dorothy fulfills the role of a parson’s wife, making sick calls, chairing church committees, organizing rummage sales, typing sermons, and helping with Sunday school pageants. She lives a life of self-denial, taking cold baths from April to November, and pricking herself with a needle when her thoughts stray during sermons. Half her days are occupied with calling on members of her father’s congregation, often providing homecare and healthcare to elderly shut-ins. A major element of Dorothy Hare’s personality is her frigidity, which Orwell describes as her special secret. At age nine she witnessed “dreadful scenes” between her parents that left “a deep, secret wound in her mind” (93). Dorothy uses the euphemism “all that” to describe sex. Wooed by a young curate years before, she rejected his proposals because marriage would entail “all that.” Her fear of sexuality evidently triggers her amnesia after Mr. Warburton, the town lecher, makes some clumsy advances. Awaking from a week-long blackout, Dorothy finds herself walking down a London street. Unable to recall her name, she calls herself Ellen Millborough and befriends a trio of tramps in begging and hop picking. Her mind still clouded, she falls into a near comatose state of drudgery and suffering, allowing herself to be guided by her peers. Gradually recalling her name and past, she writes her father for assistance. After enduring homeless nights in Trafalgar Square, she is aided by her father’s uncle, who acquires a teaching position for her in a private girls’ academy. Although the school is an abysmal fee-trap run by an avaricious crone named Mrs. Creevy, Dorothy excels as a teacher. But her creative innovations offend Dorothy’s employer, who insists she stick to teaching sums and penmanship. Terminated at the end of the term, Dorothy, left with only £6, faces homelessness but receives a wire from Warburton who soon arrives in London to escort her back to Knype Hill. On the train back to Suffolk, Dorothy Hare explains to her rescuer that although she has lost her religious faith, she plans to return to serve her father. Warburton offers to marry her. Although he is fat, bald, and middle-aged, the aging lecher can offer Dorothy a comfortable home, financial security, and a life of friends, art, and travel. But because marriage entails “all that,” Dorothy is repulsed and is determined to resume her old life. As a character, Dorothy Hare mirrors Orwell’s other two protagonists from his Depression-era novels. All three characters experience a brief escape or rebellion from an unsatisfactory life only to return where they started, surrendering to forces beyond their control. Dorothy lives a joyless, crabbed, life of chores and self-denial with her rector father. An unexplained lapse of memory transports her to London which exposes her to a wider world. Even though she has lost her faith in God, she believes her only option is to return to old life. Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying consciously rejects middle-class conformity by leaving an advertising job to work at reduced pay in a bookshop to write poetry. After getting his girlfriend pregnant, he abruptly abandons his starving artist pose to get married and return to the ad agency. In Coming Up for Air George Bowling, a henpecked insurance salesman, takes a secret trip to his boyhood home to escape the pressures of living paycheck to paycheck and the looming war in Europe. When his hometown is accidentally bombed by the RAF, Bowling gets a glimpse of the war to come. Realizing there is no escape from current events, he returns home to an irate wife who suspects him of adultery. Dorothy Hare, like her male counterparts, is too weak a character to move beyond

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Homage circumstances and convention to create an independent fulfilling life. Knype Hill in the Depression is just as hostile to individuality and personal expression as Airstrip One in 1984.

Hate Week (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Hate Week is a seven-day national celebration in Oceania featuring parades, marches, demonstrations, and extended working hours. Winston Smith works 90 hours in five days doing special tasks associated with Hate Week. His neighbor Tom Parsons collects donations for Hate Week, urging Smith to make a contribution so that their apartment building will be bristling with flags. In 1984 on the sixth day of Hate Week it is announced that Oceania is no longer at war with Eurasia but with Eastasia. Suddenly all the posters denouncing Eurasia are declared wrong and have to be replaced. Agents of the renegade Goldstein are blamed for the deception.

Homage to Catalonia (nonfiction, 1938) While completing The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell followed events unfolding in Spain, where war had broken out between the leftist Republican government in Madrid and military forces led by General Francisco Franco. Orwell wanted to not only report on the conflict but serve as a soldier fighting the Fascist forces supporting Franco. He contacted Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the British Communist Party, for press credentials to allow him to enter Spain, but his request was declined. He turned to the Independent Labour Party, which agreed to supply him with press credentials to cover the war in Spain. Orwell arrived in Barcelona in late December 1936. Orwell joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (P.O.U.M.) or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, which focused on establishing a socialist government while fighting the Fascists. In contrast, the larger Communist Party argued that the Left’s primary goal should be defeating Franco before attempting radical social change. The Communists suppressed the P.O.U.M., waging a propaganda campaign against it, denouncing its members as renegade Trotskyites and Fascist collaborators. Orwell was distressed by the Communist disinformation printed in The Daily Worker, believing that it totally misrepresented the facts and gave the British Left a distorted view of events. The opening chapter of Orwell’s account recalls his arrival in revolutionary Barcelona, which he found both “startling and overwhelming.” Buildings had been seized by workers, churches were being demolished, cafés and shops bore signs announcing that they had been “collectivized,” waiters refused to accept tips, formal greetings had been dropped, people called everyone “comrade,” and private automobiles had been commandeered. Although there were elements of this movement he did not understand or like, he “recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for” (5). Underneath the revolutionary fervor, Orwell noted the poverty of Barcelona. Shops were poorly stocked, and items like sugar, gasoline, and coal were scarce. Still, he saw that “human beings were trying to behave like human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine” (6). Orwell went to the Lenin Barracks, which he found in disarray. The recruits were tough teenagers who talked back to their officers, knew nothing about warfare, and were not trained in using

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Homage any kind of weapon. Poorly supplied, the “rabble” of soldiers eventually boarded a train bound for the Aragon front. Orwell was disappointed by the conditions he found at the front. The P.O.U.M. militia occupied a line of shallow trenches and crude dugouts atop a mountain. Few men were issued helmets, bayonets, grenades, or even workable rifles. Orwell, a trained police officer, was given a corroded 40-year-old Mauser, while the best weapon was given to an untrained 15-year-old. The Fascist positions were out of firing range. The greatest struggle both encampments faced was staying warm. There was little available firewood on the rocky mountains, and coal was non-existent. “The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm,” he noted (23). The enemy was not Fascism but “pneumonia.” Most of the wounded Orwell saw had been accidentally shot by their comrades. Orwell was promoted to corporal and later transferred to serve with 20 or 30 other English volunteers at Monte Oscuro. Again, his unit suffered from the cold and a shortage of supplies. It was a quiet sector. Where the trenches were within shouting distance, the opposing forces shouted propaganda slogans and insults through megaphones. Orwell recorded that in three weeks’ service he fired his rifle three times. Given the commonly accepted maxim that it takes 20,000 bullets to kill each enemy solider, he reasoned it would take 20 years before he killed his first Fascist. Moved to another quiet sector in February, Orwell began to consider the political aspect of the conflict and why he had joined. Trying to articulate his initial motives, Orwell stated he came to Spain to “to fight against Fascism” and to fight for “common decency” (47). He was both troubled and confused by the political situation he found. This was not a simple two-sided conflict. The anti–Fascist forces consisted of a “kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions,” including the P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T, and others, leading Orwell to think that Spain was “suffering from a plague of initials” (47). In assessing the political situation, Orwell realized that the Leftist perception of the conflict was misguided. After the democracies failed to respond to the advances made by Japan, Italy, and Germany, European liberals and Leftists were inspired when a mildly Socialist government in Spain rose up to resist Franco’s attempt to topple their Republic. It was seen as the first time Leftists and democrats were standing up to Fascism. But, as Orwell argued, Franco was not Hitler. Backed by the Catholic Church, Franco was not trying install Fascism but to “restore feudalism” (48). The conflict was not so much a civil war but a revolution. The English newspapers distorted what was going on, with conservative papers viewing it as a conflict between the Church and godless Bolsheviks and liberal papers seeing it as “gentlemanly republicans quelling a military coup” (51). The Communists insisted that no revolution had taken place or that it was of little political consequence. Orwell, who saw the revolution happening on the ground, realized that outsiders were being misled. In addition, the Soviet Union supplied weapons only to Communists, ignoring the needs of the Anarchist militias. Middle class shopkeepers and small landowners, fearing confiscation of their property by the Anarchists, joined forces with the Communists who focused on defeating Franco rather than advancing social reform. Orwell recognized the strategic irony of Soviet policy. The Soviets had formed an alliance with France. For France to be a serviceable ally, it had to be strong. French Communists became nationalists and imperialists because it served Moscow to have a strong capitalist France rather than a militarily-weakened socialist France. Similarly, the Communist argument in Spain was that revolutionary change

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Homage would weaken the national government and make it harder to defeat Franco. Revolutionary activities were denounced as “defeatist” and “chaotic.” Orwell did respect the Communists because they were organized and well-armed, forming an effective force against Franco. The P.O.U.M. did little, but Orwell respected them for not attacking other Leftists or engaging in personal attacks. In contrast, Communist propaganda denounced the P.O.U.M. as Fascists in disguise. Meanwhile Orwell continued to serve on the front, where there was little fighting. Both sides were poorly equipped. Many artillery shells were duds, and were lobbed back and forth, never exploding. The soldiers in Orwell’s unit continued to suffer from the cold. Their rations were irregular, and their boots and uniforms were wearing out. In March Orwell developed an infected hand and was treated in a hospital, where the staff robbed him of his camera and photographs. Returning to his unit, he participated in a diversionary raid of some military consequence. After three and a half months at the front, Orwell returned to Barcelona and was struck by the change. The revolutionary fervor that had greeted him on his arrival from England had vanished. Men and women in stylish clothes were riding in private cars. Old class divisions were reemerging. Elegant couples dined in swanky hotels while poor children scrounged for food. The patrols of workers were replaced by pre- war police officers. Cabarets and brothels closed by the revolutionaries were reopening. Street battles broke out between government police troops and the P.O.U.M. and other Leftist groups. Orwell participated in the fighting, but, as on the front, the fighters were poorly armed and supplied. Without rations, soldiers dodged gunfire to grab meals in nearby hotels. The government was taking command, breaking up the workers’ militias and placing them under control of the Popular Army. Orwell concluded that future historians would be unable to discern what happened in Barcelona. Objective records do not exist, only a “a mass of accusations and party propaganda” (150). Admitting he only had personal experiences to go on, he determined to provide an accurate account. The long- standing conflict between the Anarchists and Communists came to a head in May 1937 when the government ordered all militias to surrender their weapons. A “non-political” police force, which excluded trade union members, was to be formed. It would end the advances made by the Anarchist revolutionaries and restore private enterprises to bolster the government in order to fight Franco. The Communists, dedicated to defeating the Fascists, supported this move, which was bitterly opposed by the Anarchists. The government decided to take control of the Telephone Exchange, then operated by a worker militia. Anarchists supported the workers, and Communists sided with the government police. Britain’s Communist newspaper The Daily Worker claimed that “a minority gang of Anarchists” had seized the telephone building and begun firing in the streets when in fact they were defending the exchange they had been operating from attacks by Communists. Orwell noted the intensity of the propaganda that depicted the P.O.U.M. as a Fascist organization. Orwell knew the P.O.U.M. had roughly 80 rifles, but The Daily Worker reported that the militia had “scores of machine guns and several thousand rifles” (165). The paper claimed the organization was also equipped with tanks and heavy artillery, weapons, Orwell observed, that never appeared once the P.O.U.M. was suppressed. The Communist press and propaganda denounced members of the P.O.U.M as being both Trotskyites and Fascist spies. Given the lies he read in the Communist press,

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Homage Orwell told a Communist official he would never join their organization. The P.O.U.M. may have been a nuisance to the government, but it was never guilty of “direct treachery” (172). In June the P.O.U.M. was suppressed, its leaders arrested, accused of being guilty of “Trotskyite treachery.” Orwell returned to the front, reconciling himself that whatever its faults, the government would be better than rule by Franco’s Fascists. Though the government repressed the revolutionary gains by the workers, it would at least be “anti-clerical and anti-feudal” and develop the country by building roads, expanding healthcare, and providing improved education. Franco was an “anachronism” who would be supported only by “millionaires and romantics” (181). Defeating Franco would mark the first defeat of Fascism. Ten days after returning to the front Orwell was shot in the neck by a Fascist sniper. Given preliminary treatment, he was sent on to a makeshift hospital in Sietamo, where he was robbed again. He was transferred by truck and then train to a hospital in Lérida. Declared medically unfit, he was told he would never regain his voice. Orwell returned to Barcelona on May 29. Orwell recovered quickly, though his voice remained hoarse for several weeks. While he recuperated, the P.O.U.M. came under greater attack from the Republican government that denounced it as a Franco Fifth Column organization. The party’s newspaper was banned, and in mid–June the organization was outlawed. With his colleagues being arrested, Orwell and his wife went into hiding, then slipped out of Spain posing as English tourists. Returning to England at the end of June, Orwell submitted an article to the New Statesman reporting on his Spanish experiences. His assertion that the Republican government in Madrid had Fascist tendencies led the editor Kingsley Martin to reject the article because it would antagonize British Leftists who believed the struggling Republic was a victim of Fascism. Martin did suggest that Orwell write a book review about the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s article about Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit was also rejected but did appear in Time and Tide in July. Orwell began writing his book about Spain titled Homage to Catalonia that summer, completing a rough draft in December. He completed the book in January 1938. The book appeared in April, and Orwell expected it to sell only a few thousand copies because of its controversial conclusions. The book sold 700 copies. The publisher had remainders on stock until 1951. The reviews, however, were better than Orwell expected. Geoffrey Gorer, who critiqued the book for Time and Tide, called Homage to Catalonia a “work of first-class literature and a political document of the greatest importance.” He warned that “it will probably be abused both by Conservatives and Communists” but argued that “anyone interested in the political situation (whatever their own views) … would be foolish to neglect it.” The Manchester Guardian’s review credited Orwell for not “being blind to the faults of those who share his beliefs” and writing “without rant and ideological malice.” Homage to Catalonia was not published in the United States until 1952. With the Spanish conflict resolved and Fascism defeated around the globe in 1945, reviewers saw the book as source material to understand Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. T.R. Fyvel, noted that in addition to illustrating the ideas that shaped his later novels, Homage to Catalonia “also remains one of the few books on the Spanish Civil War which can be read today with-

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Hop-Picking out qualification.” Herbert Matthews offered a tempered recommendation of Homage to Catalonia. He praised the book “as an honest, vivid, personal account of one man’s bitter experience in the Spanish Civil War,” stating that if people “read it for its literary value, they will have a rewarding experience.” He cautioned, however, that “if they read it as history, they will be either misled or confused.”

• Further Reading Alexander, Bill. “George Orwell and Spain.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 85–102. Alldritt, K. The Making of George Orwell. Edward Arnold, 1969. Burrowes, Darryl Anthony. “‘In Spain with Orwell’: George Orwell and the Independent Labour Party Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.” Flinders Journal of History and Politics, vol. 30, 2014. Questia. Fyvel, T.R. “Homage to Catalonia.” New Leader (New York), 16 June 1952, pp. 22–3. Gorer, Geoffrey. “Homage to Catalonia.” Time and Tide, 30 Apr. 1938, pp. 599–600. Ingle, Stephen. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment. Routledge, 2006. J., A.W. “Homage to Catalonia.” Manchester Guardian, 14 June 1938, p. 8. Kopp, George. “Bullet in the Neck.” Orwell Remembered, ed. Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick. Facts on File, 1984, pp. 158–161. Lief, Ruth Ann. Homage to Oceania. Ohio State University Press, 1969. Matthews, Herbert. “Homage to Catalonia.” Nation, 27 Dec. 1952, pp. 597–599. Mellicamp, Leslie. “George Orwell and the Ethics of Revolutionary Politics.” Modern Age, vol. ix, 1965, pp. 272–278. Perlès, Alfred. “A Meeting with Henry Miller.” Orwell Remembered, ed. Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick, Facts on File, 1984, pp. 143–146. Rossi, John. “Orwell on Fascism.” Modern Age, vol. 54, no. 1–4, Fall 2012. Rust, William. Britons in Spain: The History of the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade. Lawrence & Wishart, 1939. Stradling, Robert. “Orwell and the Spanish Civil War: A Historic Critique.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 103–125. Wildemeersch, Marc. George Orwell’s Commander in Spain: The Enigma of Georges Kopp. Union Bridge, 2013. Wykes, David. “Orwell in the Trenches.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 59, Summer 1983, pp. 415–435. Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. Yale University Press, 1974.

“Hop-Picking” (essay, 1931) In late summer 1931 Orwell went hop picking and tramping, moving from mingling with the homeless sleeping in Trafalgar Square to working in the fields picking hops during harvest time. Written in diary form, “Hop-Picking” opens on August 25 with Orwell recounting his experiences trying to sleep in a public square, fighting off the cold and wakened by continual warnings about approaching police officers. He noted the unintended consequences of social reform. The London County Council required lodging houses to space beds farther apart for reasons of hygiene, which raised prices. Three days later Orwell headed to the hop fields. He encountered an athletic, “quite brainless” 26-year-old named Ginger who had served time in reform schools. He married at 18, but his wife died. He joined the army but was invalided out after receiving an eye injury. Ginger and his peers, Orwell noted, were sexually frustrated by their lack of contact with women and spent much of their time exchanging dirty stories. Searching for work, they stole apples and raspberries and slept in a house under construction. Working on a farm, Orwell documented the hardships faced by the pickers. Laboring 60 hours a week, a hop picker might earn 30 shillings, but this was rare. The job was hard

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How and tiring. The pickers were mostly costermongers from London’s East End, gypsies, and tramps. Orwell noted that he earned 26 shillings in 18 days. He and Ginger traveled to London in late September where they found work as porters. Orwell found it impossible to write while staying in a lodging house and asked his family for money so he could rent a room where he could work. Orwell ended his essay with a list of words and phrases he learned from the hop pickers and tramps, noting that among East Enders the word “tart” was now interchangeable with the word “girl” and no longer implied a woman was a prostitute. Much of the material in Orwell’s journal was included in Down and Out in Paris and London and provided background for the hop-picking scenes in A Clergyman’s Daughter. The 26-year-old widower Nobby who serves as Dorothy’s friend and mentor is based on Orwell’s chum Ginger.

“How the Poor Die” (essay, 1946) “How the Poor Die” recounts Orwell’s experiences as a patient in Paris in 1929. Suffering from pneumonia, Orwell went to a hospital he calls Hôpital X in the essay. After filling out forms, he was stripped, ordered to take a bath, given a nightshirt and marched outside across the courtyard to a crowded ward. Orwell describes his fellow patients and their ailments, noting how doctors examined and treated them like specimens, never speaking with them. Orwell had a noticeable bronchial rattle, and medical students came to listen to his chest. They were learning their jobs “with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings” (CEJL IV, p. 226). The beds had no screens. When a patient died, his body was left lying in bed for hours, leading Orwell to comment on the horrors of natural death that is “something slow, smelly, and painful” (CEJL IV, p. 226). Because most of the patients were common workers, they were resigned to the conditions of the hospital. They accepted slovenly, uncaring nurses, who often cajoled able-bodied patients to do their chores. In Britain nurses were “welltrained and rigidly-disciplined” and sensitive to patients. Orwell recalls nurses “adroitly” handling the death of a patient in his ward, so that the body was discreetly removed while other patients were at tea. Orwell describes “the great change in the relationship between doctor and patient” since the turn of the century with the introduction of modern medicine. In the 19th century a hospital was viewed like a prison or dungeon, “a place of filth, torture and death.” Patients were operated on without anesthetics and usually died of shock or gangrene. Technology has reduced the horrors of medical treatment and national health insurance has granted more dignity to working-class people who are no longer dismissed as paupers or “free” patients. Institutions, Orwell believed, have a collective memory. Just as a modern army barracks is “still haunted by the ghost of Kipling,” modern hospitals are still dreaded by the poor who think of them as “the reeking, pain-filled hospitals of the nineteenth century” (CEJL IV, p. 232).

Ignorance is Strength (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) “Ignorance is Strength” is one of the central slogans of the unnamed Party ruling Oceania in 1984. For Oceania and its ruling Party to remain strong, its citizens must remain

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Inside ignorant. Believing that whoever controls the past controls the future and that whoever controls the present controls the past, the Party denies that objective truth and reality exist. Historical photographs and documents are destroyed, edited, or replaced with fakes to create a record that proves that the leader Big Brother is always right. History books tell schoolchildren that the Party invented the airplane, and that before the Revolution London was ruled by greedy capitalists who held the people in slavery. Nearly every book published before 1960 has been destroyed. Writing a diary, making independent record of events and recording personal thoughts is a punishable act. Under constant surveillance at home, at work, and in public places, Party members parrot slogans to assure a collective uniformity of thought. The vast majority of Oceania’s population is kept ignorant by distraction. The Party produces sensational newspapers, dreamy pop tunes, cheap novels, sexy films, and pornography to keep the public preoccupied with trivia. The drug trade and prostitution are tolerated because, like the sham lotteries operated by the Party, they divert attention from anything that might threaten the rule of the Party.

INGSOC or English Socialism see The Party (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Inner Party (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The unnamed Party ruling Oceania, which comprises the English-speaking world and South and Central America, contains an elite membership just below its leader Big Brother. Comprised of some six million people, according to Emmanuel Goldstein’s estimate (see the book), the Inner Party rules over the lesser members of the Outer Party. Inner Party members like O’Brien enjoy a higher, but not a luxurious, standard of living. They have larger, more comfortable apartments, private automobiles, servants, better food, and enjoy rarities like wine. Most significantly they have the privilege of switching off their telescreens for brief periods of privacy.

“Inside the Whale” (essay, 1940) “Inside the Whale” was the title essay in Orwell’s first non-fiction collection published in 1940. Orwell’s three-part essay opens with a commentary on Henry Miller’s 1935 novel The Tropic of Cancer. In Orwell’s view the novel’s success seemed ill- timed. When it appeared, “the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps were already bulging,” and the intellectual centers of Europe were the totalitarian capitals of Moscow, Rome, and Berlin. In contrast, Miller’s novel was set in Paris in the 1920s, when the city was full of American dilettantes, would-be artists, drunks, and deadbeats. Opening the book, Orwell was first put off by the “unprintable words” and was prepared not to be impressed. “But read him for five pages, ten pages,” Orwell stated, “and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. ‘He knows all about me,’ and you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me’” (CEJL I, p. 495). Orwell heard in Miller “a friendly American voice” that was familiar, inviting, and not judgmental. What Orwell detected in Miller’s work was an “acceptance” of life, an

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Jones attitude that by the late 1930s would mean accepting Hitler, Stalin, barbed wire, and machine guns. Orwell expanded his discussion to contrast the literature from the Great War and the books about the Spanish war of the late 1930s. The Great War writers were veterans who saw themselves as “victims” or survivors who simply tried to endure events. The Spanish war writers were propagandists “telling you what to think.” In the second section Orwell commented on the literature that emerged after the Great War. He recalled reading the poems of Housman at 17 in 1920, pondering that a modern teenager would regard A Shropshire Lad as being “cheaply clever.” After Housman came writers like Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Huxley who formed “the movement” of the 1920s to be followed by the “Auden-Spender group” of the 1930s. Despite their differences, Orwell observed a commonality in the work of Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats—a striking lack of politics: When one looks back at the ‘twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian revolution … all but vanishes from the English consciousness…. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievski and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and museums—but not Blackshirts. Germany means films, nudism and psychoanalysis—but not Hitler [CEJL I, p. 508].

Literature avoided writing about “places where things are actually happening” and was reduced to nothing more than “the manipulation of words.” After 1935 the Communist Party “had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under forty.” The Communist movement which began as movement to overthrow capitalism “degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy” (CEJL I, pp. 512–513). The rise of Hitler stimulated the “cult of Russia” as an antidote to Fascism. Orwell saw allegiance to political orthodoxy as dangerous to a writer because literature “is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship” (CEJL I, p. 518). “Good novels,” he states, “are written by people who are not frightened.” In the third section Orwell returned to Henry Miller, recounting their 1936 meeting in Paris when Orwell was making his way to fight in Spain. What intrigued Orwell the most about Miller was his total disinterest in the Spanish war. Orwell considered Miller’s refusal to fight “a declaration of irresponsibility.” Miller wrote an essay about Anais Nin, comparing her to Jonah inside the whale, which Orwell saw as an ideal metaphor for Miller himself. Inside the belly of a whale, one is like a fetus in a womb, comfortable and cozy, “with yards of blubber between yourself and reality” in a state of total “irresponsibility.” Miller, the amoral “passive accepter of evil,” is a Jonah, “a sort of Whitman among the corpses.”

Mr. Jones (Animal Farm, 1945) Mr. Jones was the human owner of Manor Farm, renamed Animal Farm after the Rebellion. Once a “capable farmer,” Jones became disillusioned after losing a lawsuit, started drinking excessively, and neglected his affairs. His farm hands became lazy and unreliable. Weeds began choking the fields, and the farm buildings fell into disrepair. Getting drunk at the Red Lion pub one Saturday night, Jones fails to feed his animals. Passing out once he gets home, he wakes up when his hungry animals revolt, chasing him, Mrs. Jones, and his employees off the property. Deprived of his farm, Jones spends most of his time drinking

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Julia in the Red Lion, complaining to his fellow farmers who hope to profit from his misfortune. Months after being driven off his land, Jones stages a counter-revolution. Backed by his employees and workers from neighboring farms, he returns brandishing a gun. Anticipating an attack, Snowball stages a skilled defense. Jones fires his weapon, hitting Snowball and killing a sheep. Though wounded, Snowball knocks Jones to the ground and the gun flies out of his hands. Routed by the animals, the humans retreat. The animals declare victory in the conflict they call the Battle of the Cowshed. Jones, like an exiled autocrat resigned never to regain his throne, moves away, eventually dying in a sanitarium for alcoholics. Although Jones never poses a threat to Animal Farm after his defeat in the Battle of the Cowshed, the propagandist Squealer uses the threat of Jones’ return to make the animals acquiesce to Napoleon’s demands.

Julia (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Julia is the 26-year-old dark-haired woman who becomes Winston Smith’s lover and partner. Smith first sees Julia at the Ministry of Truth, where she works in the Fiction Department. Because he has seen her carrying a spanner and with oily hands, he assumes she works on one of the novel writing machines. Smith is initially struck by her bold slim figure and put off by her demeanor. He presumes that she is an ardent Party loyalist and perhaps even an agent of the Thought Police. She wears a narrow scarlet sash around her waist, the symbol of the Junior Anti–Sex League. At first Smith resents her and fantasizes about raping her and cutting her throat as he climaxes. Above all, he is angered by the tight red sash that symbolizes her chastity. One day Smith passes her in an office corridor and notices she has one arm in a sling. She slips and falls on her injured arm. When Smith comes to assist her, she presses a piece of paper into his hand. Later, in his cubicle, Smith unfolds the paper to read her message: “I love you.” Although she appears to be a Big Brother loyalist and dedicated member of the Junior Anti–Sex League, Julia is both a political and sexual rebel. She had her first affair at 16 with a middle-aged Party member who later committed suicide. Since then she has slept with scores of Party men in a variety of hide-outs. Her bold promiscuity inspires Smith who falls in love with her, seeing sex as “the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (126). Commenting on her sexuality, Smith tells her she is “only a rebel from the waist downwards” (156). Julia, however, makes speculations about the Party that shock Smith. She openly doubts if Oceania is really at war, suggesting that the “rocket bombs” that hit London almost every day might actually be launched by the Party “just to keep people frightened.” Yet, being younger than Smith, she accepts what she was taught in school, believing that the Party invented the airplane. Separated from Julia after their arrest, Smith is later told by O’Brien that Julia betrayed him immediately and without reservation: I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness—everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case [259].

In Room 101, faced with “the worst thing in the world”—in his case rats—Smith betrays Julia, begging O’Brien to “do it to Julia!” to place her in his place.

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Katherine Released from the Ministry of Love, Smith encounters Julia, a stiffened and thickened figure of a woman with a long scar across her forehead and temple. Smith places his arm around her waist but feels no romantic or erotic impulse. They both confess to betraying each other under torture. “Sometimes they threaten you with something … you can’t stand up to.” Julia tells Winston, “and you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else.’ … All you care about is yourself ” (292). Afterwards, she tells him that “you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer,” a statement Smith echoes. Smith decides not to walk her to the Tube station but returns to the Chestnut Tree Café to drink gin.

Katherine (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Katherine married Winston Smith in 1973. A tall, fair-haired girl with “splendid movements” and a “bold, aquiline face,” she was attractive but sexually cold. A Big Brother loyalist, she thought only in slogans, leading Winston to secretly nickname her “the human soundtrack” (66). The slogans that irritated him the most were his wife’s terms for reluctantly engaging in intercourse—“our duty to the Party” and “making a baby” (67). Frustrated with her stupidity and sexual frigidity, Smith fantasized about killing her. After 15 months, they separated.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (novel, 1936) Orwell’s third novel, set in London from November 30, 1934, to the spring of 1935, chronicles the final months of Gordon Comstock’s two-year cynical, self-defeating “war against money.” At a time when millions are losing jobs and struggling for necessities, 27-year-old Comstock stages a curious and cranky protest against capitalism by voluntarily leaving a good job to work for half his former salary while perpetually whining about his lack of money. Born into a struggling middle-class family populated by bachelor uncles and spinster aunts “too poor to marry,” Comstock grew up “in an atmosphere of cut-down clothes and stewed neck of mutton” (40). Attempting to maintain middle-class pretensions on marginal incomes, his parents continually fretted over bills, so that the most common phrase in the Comstock family was “we can’t afford it” (42). His father, a “cadaverous, despondent man, with a bad stoop,” exuded “an atmosphere of failure, worry, and boredom” (42). While at school, Gordon dreaded parental visits when his wealthier classmates watched his shabby father tip him half a crown instead of 30 bob. Twenty years later, these memories still make Gordon “shudder” with humiliation. As a result of these experiences Gordon Comstock develops “a crawling reverence” for money. “Money,” he determines, “is what God used to be” so that “good and evil” have been replaced by “failure and success” (43). Comstock decides there are two ways to live: one can be wealthy or one can reject money. The worst thing, he concludes, is to want money and not get it. Sensing that he will never become rich, Comstock would rather reject money on principle than settle down with a “good job” that will trap him in a life of commercialism and conformity. He loathes the idea of “worshipping the money god” by becoming “the little docile cit” who commutes home to dine on “cottage pie and stewed tinned pears,” listens to the radio, then settles for “a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife ‘feels in the mood’” (48).

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Keep An aspiring poet, Comstock believes that his only escape from the money-god would be becoming a writer which would provide him an income without surrendering his independence. When his first volume of poetry is accepted for publication in 1932, Comstock leaves his job at the New Albion Publicity Company to launch a literary career. Assuming he will only need a marginal income before his writing takes off, he takes a job clerking in a small book shop for £2 a week. He somehow assumes working at a menial job at half his current salary will provide him more integrity and dignity than working in an ad firm. His book, titled Mice, appears and receives 13 reviews. Although declared a work of “exceptional promise” by The Times Literary Supplement, Gordon’s book sells only 153 copies and is quickly remaindered. The novel opens two years later on a dreary November afternoon with a “moth-eaten” Gordon Comstock contemplating his dwindling supply of smokes. With only four cigarettes left and payday two days away, he dreads the coming “tobaccoless hours.” Living on £2 a week, Comstock has been unable to buy new clothes, so his worn coat is torn and missing a button, and his aging trousers are stained and shapeless. Depressed and dispirited, he has managed to publish only a handful of poems in two years, and work on his second volume of poetry London Pleasures is stalled. Although his former employer promised to hold a job open for him—a striking offer during the Great Depression—Comstock insists on carrying on his eccentric, masochistic “money-strike.” His protest is fueled by spite, self-loathing, and whiny sarcasm. He rejects middle-class values, but unlike the cleric or bohemian who eschews materialism to embrace a life of simplicity, Comstock jealously pines for what he cannot afford. Every move he makes is measured by his wallet. He mourns the fact that he cannot afford a decent apartment, a meal, drinks with friends, a cab ride, or cigarettes. Claiming that shaving costs money, he becomes grubby, going ten days without bathing, then bemoans the fact that women do not find him appealing. Throughout the novel Comstock repeatedly expresses the obvious revelation that things cost money: Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm—they’ve all got to to paid for in hard cash [9]. Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you…. For moneyless, you are unlovable [14]. He was forever snubbing friendly advances. Of course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money. You can’t be friendly, you can’t even be civil, when you have no money in your pocket [26]. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure—above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week? [31].

Although he rages against the money world he despises, Comstock does not embrace any alternative ideology or system. He rejects Socialism, which he envisions as a Brave New World kind of society where people work four hours a day in state-run factories, live in hostels, and go on community hikes. The only other options, both of which he rejects, are suicide and the Catholic Church. He believes writing will rescue him from poverty and forced conformity, allowing him to be a free sovereign individual. But, too bored and depressed to concentrate on poetry, he spends his free time brooding and reading Sherlock

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Keep Holmes stories. Smug, whiny, and self-loathing, he comes to masochistically enjoy his plight, wallowing in poverty and refusing to wash. Comstock lives in a depressing rooming house presided over by a middle-aged snoop who forbids her male lodgers from receiving female visitors or brewing tea in their rooms. His squalid room contains his bed, a kitchen table he uses for a desk, and a dusty, indestructible aspidistra. For Comstock the homely, sturdy houseplant found in almost every middle-class British home is a symbol of conventionality and bourgeois pretention. He expresses his cynical view of middle-class family life as “licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra” (104). He denounces marriage as a trap that ensnares men into semi-detached suburban villas “with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the window” (114). Comstock wages a “secret feud” with the aspidistra in his rooming house, “starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth” but the “beastly” thing refuses to die (28). Aspidistras haunt Gordon throughout the novel, appearing in his rooming houses, peering at him from windows, and dominating his imagination. Although Comstock complains about being lonely, he has two steadfast friends. Philip Ravelston, a wealthy Socialist, edits the literary magazine Antichrist, which publishes some of Gordon’s poems. Ravelston is sympathetic to Gordon’s plight, promising to help the starving artist by offering him cash to make a fresh start, which Comstock refuses. Dedicated to helping struggling poets, Ravelston uses his influence to arrange for the publication of Mice. Unaware of his friend’s efforts on his behalf, Comstock mistakenly assumes he has genuine talent and will be able to support himself by writing poetry alone. One of Comstock’s continuing reasons for feeling dejected, frustrated, and unappealing is his “womanless bed.” Comstock, however, does have a loyal, supportive girlfriend. Twenty-nine-year-old Rosemary Waterlow met Gordon while working at the New Albion agency. She longs to make love to Gordon but refrains from having sex because she fears it will end her girlhood. Because their lodgings do not permit visitors of the opposite sex, the pair limits their meetings to public places. With little disposable income, Comstock cannot afford conventional dating by taking her to movies, pubs, or restaurants. Nevertheless, Rosemary patiently supports him, even though he accuses her of conspiring against him by wanting to get married. Women, Comstock asserts, are tools of the money-god, dragging men into good jobs, marriages, and mortgages. He accuses Rosemary of belonging to “the sex that cultivates” the aspidistra. Despite his whiny rants, Rosemary genuinely loves Comstock. Their disputes are features of the “merry war” between them. After two years of a chaste courtship, the couple plans a day trip into the country. Gordon prays for warm weather, intending to make love to Rosemary. Even though it is winter, the countryside is more conducive to their romance than “the mean wilderness of London” (125). After a lunch in an overpriced hotel, they venture into the woods and lie down in a secluded spot. Rosemary is willing to have sex until she discovers that Gordon has forgotten to bring a contraceptive. Gordon suggests she must take a chance, but Rosemary is adamant about avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. Disappointed, Gordon escorts Rosemary back to London, calculating what this failed outing cost him. He dreads more “tobaccoless hours” until Rosemary slips a pack of cigarettes into his pocket and runs off before he can object.

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Keep Gordon’s spirits are lifted a few days later when he receives a check for $50 from an American magazine that accepted one his poems, the editors stating that they were “very favorably impressed” by his work. Cashing the check, Comstock receives over £10 sterling in exchange, more than five weeks’ wages. Mentally, he promises to save £5 of it to repay his sister Julia who has lent him ten times that amount in recent years. He stops in a pub for food, drink, and cigarettes, contemplating what he could afford with £5—a new suit, a day in Paris, or ten dinners in Soho restaurants. Flush with cash, Comstock invites Ravelston and Rosemary to dinner. While they try to curb his spending by ordering beer, Gordon insists on purchasing a bottle of Asti. They try to dissuade him from ordering a second one, but Comstock insists to protest against his family’s mantra “We can’t afford it.” After paying £4 for their dinner, Comstock urges his friends to continue drinking with him. Taking Rosemary aside, he kisses her, trying to coax her into bed. Insulted, Rosemary flees. Though he promised to save £5 for his sister, an intoxicated Gordon Comstock is intent on having sex. While Ravelston attempts to find them a taxi, Comstock picks up two prostitutes and urges his wealthy Socialist friend to join him. Reluctantly, Ravelston accompanies his poet-friend to a seedy hotel, comforting himself with the realization that he could pay the girl and not do anything. Gordon follows his streetwalker into a “mean dreadful” room with a double bed and aspidistra. Determined to have sex, he pays the girl £2 but discovers he is too drunk to perform and collapses. The following morning Comstock wakes up in a police cell, having been arrested for drunk and disorderly behavior. Ravelston bails him out of jail and lends him money. Fired from the bookshop and turned out of his room by his landlady, Comstock stays with his wealthy friend but refuses to accept additional aid. Rosemary reminds him that the ad agency is still holding a job for him, but Comstock rejects her suggestion, wanting nothing more than to wallow in his poverty and “to sink, sink, effortless, down into the mud” (199). Comstock takes a job in a seedy bookshop that pays 30 shillings a week and rents a bed sitting room nearby for eight shillings a week. In his dirty, dusty, bug-ridden room Gordon lets himself “go to pieces.” Ravelston visits him, offering further assistance, but Gordon vows to continue his money-strike. “I’ve made war on money,” he tells his Socialist friend, “This is where it’s led me” (211). Rosemary visits, and, with little pleasure, makes love to Gordon on his “dingy” bed. This single act of intercourse changes Gordon Comstock’s life. Informed by Rosemary that she is pregnant, Comstock, just turned 30, decides to grow up and end his protest: He looked back over the last two frightful years. He had blasphemed against money, rebelled against money, tried to live like an anchorite outside the money-world; and it had brought him not only misery, but also a frightful emptiness, an inescapable sense of futility. To adjure money is to adjure life [237].

Believing that eventually everyone surrenders to the “money-code,” Comstock marries Rosemary, returns to the New Albion ad agency, and abandons his literary career. Wadding up his manuscript of London Pleasures, he stuffs it down the sewer with an aspidistra peeking at him from a nearby window. Touring their new apartment, Gordon places a coffee cup on their new occasional

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Keep table, announcing it will be the perfect place for the newlyweds to place their aspidistra, which he now embraces as “the tree of life.” Orwell’s third novel received mixed reviews. William Plomer, who critiqued the book for the Spectator, called the book “bitter” and “often crude.” Orwell’s friend and former classmate Cyril Connolly published a review in the New Statesman that described the novel as being inferior to Burmese Days. The Times Literary Supplement stated the novel was “persistently irritating” but argued that “this is exactly what makes it worth reading” because “few books have enough body in them to be irritants.” The unsigned notice stated that Orwell “writes well and vividly. The more depressing his theme, the more effectively is his skill displayed.” Richard Rees criticized Orwell’s dialogue but praised him for having “a passion for writing which is quite different from the nauseous literary obsession which afflicts so many reputedly serious modern writers.” The first printing sold 2,194 copies. The novel was released in the United States in 1956, after Orwell had become universally recognized for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Notices and reviews were mixed but generally favorable. Dorothy Van Ghent, writing in Yale Review, found the book interesting but one of Orwell’s lesser works. “The action of the novel is humorously pathetic,” she wrote, “the characterizations winsome, but one feels that Orwell was not—here, at least—in complete command of his feelings and judgments.” In contrast, Louis Simpson, writing for The Hudson Review, argued that Keep the Aspidistra Flying “may be the best book Orwell wrote” because it made the terrors of Nineteen Eighty-Four “relevant to our own everyday lives” and displayed “Orwell’s unflagging honesty.” Keep the Aspidistra Flying was produced as a television drama by the BBC in 1965. A British film version, distributed in the United States with the title A Merry War, was released in 1997.

• Further Reading Beddoe, Deirdre. “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 139–154. Breton, Rob. “Crisis? Whose Crisis? George Orwell and Liberal Guilt.” College Literature, vol. 29, no. 4, 2002, pp. 47–66. Connolly, Cyril. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” New Statesman, 25 Apr. 1936, pp. 635. Eagleton, Terry. “Orwell and the Lower-Middle Class Novel.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 10–33. Felski, Rita. “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame and the Lower Middle Class.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2000, pp. 33–45. Fiderer, Gerald. “Masochism as Literary Strategy: Orwell’s Psychological Novels.” Literature and Psychology, vol. 20, no. 1, 1970, pp. 3–21. Guild, Nicholas. “In Dubious Battle: George Orwell and the Victory of the Money God.” Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1975, pp. 49–56. Hitchens, Dan. “Orwell and Contraception.” First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, Apr. 2016. Questia. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 1936, p. 376 Plomer, William. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Spectator, 24 Apr. 1936, p. 768. Rees, Richard. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Adelphi, June 1936, p. 190. Rosenfeld, Issac. “Gentleman George.” Commentary, 1 June 1956, pp. 589–591. Simpson, Louis. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Hudson Review, Summer 1956, pp. 306–307. Van Ghent, Dorothy. “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” Yale Review, Spring 1956, pp. 461–463 Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. Yale University Press, 1974. _____. “Orwell: Socialism vs. Pessimism.” New Review, vol. 1, no 3, June 1974, pp. 5–17.

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Kyauktada

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (motion picture, 1997) Produced and directed by Robert Bierman, the film version of Orwell’s third novel starred Richard E. Grant (Gordon Comstock), Helena Bonham Carter (Rosemary), and Julian Wadham (Ravelston). Filmed in Britain, the movie was released in the United States and New Zealand under the title A Merry War. Critics largely dismissed the film as a fluffy romance that lacked the tough sarcasm and social commentary of Orwell’s novel. Gordon Comstock was depicted as a dreamy poet temporarily captivated by the notion of being a “starving artist” until events forced him to grow up and take on adult responsibilities.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (television, 1965) Produced by the BBC, the teleplay version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying starred Alfred Lynch (Gordon Comstock) and Anne Stallybrass (Rosemary). Directed by Christopher Morahan, who three years later directed a television drama based on Nineteen Eighty-Four, this version was credited as being truer to the tone of the novel than the 1997 film directed by Robert Bierman.

Ko S’la (Burmese Days, 1934) Ko S’la is the protagonist John Flory’s manservant, pimp, and guardian. At 35, he has been Flory’s servant since his arrival in Burma. A polygamist with five children, Ko S’la views his bachelor employer as a child needing tending. He runs errands for Flory, carries him on his back when they encounter a river, and puts his master to bed when he is drunk. He pities Flory because of his disfiguring birthmark and believes him easily deluded by others. Ko S’la is dismissive of Flory’s Burmese mistress because he is jealous of her influence on Flory. He is even more troubled when Flory begins to woo Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young English woman who threatens to upset his master’s slovenly bachelor ways. After Flory’s suicide, Ko S’la inherits 400 rupees. He opens a tea shop, which fails after a year of mismanagement. He returns to service work, but having grown lazy caring for Flory, he is dismissed from one job after another. At novel’s end he is working as a “second boy” to a rice merchant.

Kyauktada (Burmese Days, 1934) Kyauktada is the setting of Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days. The fictional village was modeled after Katha, Burma, where Orwell was posted in 1926. Located on the Irrawaddy River, Kayauktada changed little from the times of Marco Polo until 1910 when the British built a railroad terminus. The population of 4,000 includes a few hundred Indians, dozens of Chinese, seven Europeans, and two Eurasians. The English outpost consists of six white bungalows, a small cemetery, a tin-roofed church, and a single-story European Club that serves as the community center, offering colonial luxuries—ice, occasional deliveries of mail, and month-old newspapers. Kyauktada exhibits the nature of British colonialists, ranging from paternalistic reformers to jingoist racists who collectively suffer from oppressive heat, tinned food, boredom, unreliable servants, and insects. For the protagonist John Flory, the village epitomizes the

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Lackersteen “stifling, stultifying world” of imperialism where “every word and every thought is censored” (61).

Elizabeth Lackersteen (Burmese Days, 1934) Elizabeth Lackersteen is the 22-year-old niece of the Lackersteens who travels to Burma from France following the death of her mother. Without an income, she is forced to stay with relatives until, urged by her aunt, she finds a husband. The protagonist John Flory first encounters Elizabeth when he hears her calling for help. Frightened by harmless water buffalo, she is grateful when Flory comes to her aid. Seeing him as her manly rescuer, she initially overlooks his birthmark. She finds Flory appealing when he acts in a masculine matter. Because she has lived in Paris, Flory mistakenly assumes she is a cosmopolitan sophisticate who shares his interests in literature and the arts. Bored with his companions’ stultifying, predictable shallow gossip, smutty jokes, and racist jingoism, Flory excitedly talks with Elizabeth about books, unaware she views intellectuals as useless and effete. Good people, she maintains, are not “brainy” or artistic (82). Simple-minded, Elizabeth divides everything into two categories: the “lovely” and the “beastly” (79). Among the “lovely” are luxury items, people who shoot grouse and go yachting, and stylish clothing. Highbrow people who write, paint, or talk about Socialism are labeled “beastly.” Elizabeth views Asians with contempt, barely recognizing them as being humans. She finds everything about non-whites to be barbaric, crude, and unclean. Flory further loses favor in Elizabeth’s eyes when he praises Burmese culture and escorts her to a native ceremony. She is especially disgusted by the appearance of Burmese women, calling them “queer little creatures” (76). Aware of her husband’s lecherous advances toward her niece, Mrs. Lackersteen continually badgers Elizabeth to “marry anyone” in order to escape a life of dependency or menial labor. At first Elizabeth considers Flory a potential husband, wishing only that he would stick to manly pursuits like hunting and shooting rather than talking about books and Asian culture. She becomes infatuated with Flory on a hunting trip, seeing him as “splendidly manly.” She likens his sunburnt features to “a soldier’s face” (138). With her uncle pinching her, she resigns herself to marrying Flory—despite his age, odd views, and disfiguring birthmark. Flory, in turn, dismisses his Burmese mistress Ma Hla May, curtails his drinking and smoking, orders new shirts, and gets a haircut in hopes of winning Elizabeth’s hand. Flory views Elizabeth as more than a lover, seeing her a soul mate who can rescue him from his years of loneliness, bitterness, and isolation. Burma, he tells her, is hell to him as a solitary man. With her, with the nation’s beauty shared, Burma would be “paradise.” Just as Flory is about to pop the question, an earthquake disrupts his proposal mid-sentence. When Flory attempts to speak to Elizabeth again, she brusquely rejects him, having been told by her aunt that he has “been keeping” a Burmese woman. Ma Hla May stalks Flory, demanding more money. Flory gives her a gold cigarette case worth 30 rupees. Leaving her, Flory senses her tenacity seems unnatural “as though someone else was egging her on” (169). The arrival of a real soldier in the village leads Elizabeth to shift her attention to a

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Lackersteen younger, more virile man whose attitudes toward Asians match her own. Verrall, a 25-yearold military policeman described as a “tough and martial rabbit,” has contempt for all Asians and most British civilians. Living only for polo, he goes riding with Elizabeth in the evenings. With her aunt insisting that a girl should be willing to marry almost “anyone,” Elizabeth takes an interest in Verrall. Sensing he may become trapped in marriage and being dunned by native merchants who supply feed to his ponies, Verrall leaves Kyauktada without notice, ordering the train to depart ahead of schedule. With Verrall gone, Elizabeth resigns herself to resuming her relationship with Flory. Flory and Elizabeth appear set to be married when U Po Kyin, eager to discredit Flory, urges Ma Hla May to embarrass her former lover. Yelling “like a maniac,” she interrupts an English church service, tearing her clothes and addressing the white community to see how Flory had cast her aside “to starve as his gate like a pariah dog” (232). Flory is humiliated by this public display in front of Elizabeth, who rejects him in disgust. Flory begs Elizabeth to reconsider, pleading for a platonic marriage to escape what he calls his “horrible death-in-life” of decay, loneliness, and self-pity (235). Elizabeth, however, is adamant, refusing to have any kind of relationship with the disgraced Flory. After Flory commits suicide, Elizabeth marries 43-year-old Macgregor. As the wife of a Deputy Commissioner, Elizabeth quickly becomes rather matronly, hostessing “charming little dinner parties,” putting the wives of her husband’s subordinates “in their places,” and tormenting her Burmese servants.

Mr. Lackersteen (Burmese Days, 1934) An alcoholic timber merchant, Mr. Lackersteen is a leading figure in the small European community in Kyauktada, Burma. A “simple-minded” man, Lackersteen is motivated by a single ambition of having “a good time.” In the first year of his marriage, his wife returns unexpectedly from a two-week to trip to discover her drunken husband cavorting with a trio of naked Burmese girls. Since then, Mrs. Lackersteen never leaves her husband alone for more than an hour. Now watching him “like a cat over a bloody mousehole,” she limits her husband’s “good times” to hurried trysts and daily boozing. Lackersteen’s unwanted sexual overtures toward his 22-year-old niece prompt Elizabeth to escape her uncle by getting married. Lackersteen symbolizes the dissolute, sodden nature of British colonials, whose worst instincts and habits are enabled by the corrupt nature of imperialism.

Mrs. Lackersteen (Burmese Days, 1934) Mrs. Lackersteen, the 35-year-old wife of a timber merchant, is a stereotype of the struggling British upper-class woman who steadfastly defends the British Empire, regards Asians as worthless servants, and sees any moves toward integration or democracy as signs of dissolution and a decay of values. She complains that reforms have made the Asian servants lazy and resentful and “almost as bad as the lower classes at home” (27). She relishes the days when servants loved their masters like dogs and willingly submitted to beatings for showing disrespect. She invokes the views of British colonialists, claiming that if the Indians do reject their British masters, the English should simply leave and refuse to come back even when the Asians beg them to return.

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Lear She becomes the guardian and mentor to her 22-year-old niece Elizabeth who arrives in Burma from France following the death of her mother. Without an income or a career, Elizabeth is dependent on her relatives. Mrs. Lackersteen, perhaps aware of her husband’s lecherous propensities, urges Elizabeth to marry as quickly as she can. Though she loathes Flory for keeping a Burmese mistress and befriending an Asian doctor, she urges Elizabeth to consider him a suitable husband.

“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (essay, 1947) In his second essay analyzing Leo Tolstoy’s pamphlet denouncing Shakespeare (see “Tolstoy and Shakespeare”), Orwell refutes the Russian author’s conclusions. Orwell opens his critique by quoting from Tolstoy’s essay. At 75 Tolstoy stated that Shakespeare roused in him the feelings of “repulsion, weariness and bewilderment.” Shakespeare, he charged, was not only not a genius but not even “an average author.” Tolstoy supported his argument, citing King Lear’s bombastic speeches, unrealistic plot, and stock stage conventions. Looking at Shakespeare’s plays in general, Tolstoy found them exaggerated in language and lacking any “aesthetic feeling.” After summarizing Tolstoy’s attack, Orwell counters with the question he raised in his previous essay, if Shakespeare is so bad, why does he remain so admired? Tolstoy suggested a kind of mass delusion had taken hold of the world, comparing it to fads like the Crusades or the craze for tulips in Holland. Tolstoy claimed a few German critics praised Shakespeare at the end of the 18th century and his fame was “transferred to England.” Tolstoy considered it his duty to unmask Shakespeare and reveal his faults. After critiquing Tolstoy’s argument point by point, Orwell returns to his earlier observation, Shakespeare’s enduring popularity. Tolstoy “turned all his powers of denunciation against Shakespeare, like all the guns of a battleship roaring simultaneously” yet “forty years later, Shakespeare is still there, completely unaffected” (CEJL IV, p. 302). Orwell states that Tolstoy’s attack endures only as a “yellowing” pamphlet that few people have ever read and would be wholly forgotten had Tolstoy not written War and Peace.

The Left Book Club Orwell’s publisher Victor Gollancz, along with John Strachey, and Stafford Cripps, founded The Left Book Club in 1936. Members received a selected title each month, along with a newsletter which achieved the status of a political magazine. The club’s stated goal was to advance world peace and confront Fascism. The publishing venture was far more successful than its creators expected. They needed 2,500 subscribers to pay their expenses. Within the first year they had 40,000 subscribers. Within three years membership rose to a peak of 57,000, making it one of the most influential political media outlets in the United Kingdom. Given the club’s large membership, any monthly selection was guaranteed wide distribution, bringing political books into the ranks of best sellers. Club books and authors were also promoted in more than a thousand book discussion groups located throughout Britain. The Left Book Club published titles by Clement Attlee, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, and Clifford Odets. Gollancz, who had published Down and Out in Paris and London, A Clergyman’s

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Lion Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, commissioned Orwell to travel to northern England to investigate the conditions of workers and the unemployed. Orwell lived among miners and commercial travelers in grim boarding houses, inspected workers’ homes, and conducted research in local libraries, documenting the high mortality rate of coal miners. Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier consisted of two parts. The first detailed his observations of the living conditions of the working class in northern England. The second criticized the way Socialism was advocated, often portraying progressive leftists as eccentric cranks whose lifestyles would alienate the socially conservative working class. Gollancz chose Orwell’s book as the Left Book Club selection for March 1937, making it Orwell’s most widely published book until Animal Farm appeared nearly a decade later. Gollancz did, however, write a foreword distancing the club from Orwell’s conclusions, especially his depiction of Socialists as “cranks.” Orwell, he insisted, was a “snob” who made “the curious indiscretion to referring to Russian commissars as ‘half-gramophones, halfgangsters.’” Two years later Orwell responded in fiction. In Coming Up for Air, Orwell’s protagonist George Bowling, a cynical insurance salesman, attends a suburban Left Book Club meeting with his wife to hear a guest speaker lecturing on the evils of Fascism. Listening to the tirade, Bowling echoes Orwell’s “curious indiscretion” saying, “These chaps can churn it out by the hour. Just like a gramophone” (171). Contemplating the “anti–Fascist” speaker, Bowling speculates that maybe even “his dreams are slogans” (172). The Left Book Club backed the Popular Front in the late Thirties, promoting pro– Soviet books. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, Gollancz broke with the Communist Party, changing the direction of the club and its selections. Alienating the Communist base within the Left weakened the club’s influence. Wartime paper rationing hindered the British publishing industry, and the club suffered, finally dissolving in 1948.

• Further Reading Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Victor Gollancz: A Biography. Gollancz, 1987. Lewis, John. The Left Book Club: An Historical Record. Gollancz, 1970. Samuels, Stuart. “The Left Book Club.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol.1, no. 1, pp. 65–86.

“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” (essay, 1941) In a lengthy three-part essay Orwell explained that in the war against Hitler that Socialism and English patriotism could be reconciled and fused to form a distinctly British and democratic revolution. PART I: ENGLAND, YOUR ENGLAND: Orwell argued that Britons have a distinct culture that has to be understood before making any predictions about their future. The British maintain their unique system of currency and weights and measures in a decimal and metric world. Unlike other Europeans, they maintain a strong resistance to regimentation so there are “no party rallies, no Youth Movements, no coloured shirts, no Jew-baiting or ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations” (CEJL II, p. 59). “The power- worship … which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people,” he commented. The British are gentle. Bus conductors are courteous, and police officers are unarmed.

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Literature Britain is democratic but is also “the most class-ridden country under the sun.” It is not the “jeweled isle of Shakespeare” or “the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels” but more like a “stuffy Victorian family” with all the power in “the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.” The war, he predicted, will eradicate class privileges: The Stock Exchange will be pulled down … the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same [CEJL II, p. 78].

PART II: SHOPKEEPERS AT WAR: Orwell contended that the Second World War demonstrated that capitalism “does not work” because it “cannot deliver the goods.” Socialism’s “common ownership of the means of production” is better able to solve the problems of production and consumption than private enterprise. Fascism, which contains elements of Socialism, organizes the economy for efficiency. Fascism may be “horrible” but “it works because it is a planned system” that does not allow “any private interest, either capitalist or worker, to stand in its way” (CEJL II, p. 81). The British war effort was hampered by class divisions and a disparity in sacrifice. The bombed-out workers in the East End go homeless; the bombed-out rich in the West End motor to their country homes. As a result, he believed that only “by revolution” will Britain win the war. The “revolution” Orwell called for does not involve “red flags and street fighting” but a “fundamental shift in power” leading to a planned economy. It means an eradication of class privilege because “the lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering’s bombing planes” (CEJL II, p. 90). PART III: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: The revolution Orwell advocated, he stated, began after Dunkirk. The Labour Party was never revolutionary because it is run by trade unions whose desire to raise wages and improve working conditions depends on the prosperity of capitalism. Its timid reformism did not advance Socialism. The Marxists were too bound to 19th-century idealism and ideology to propound any sensible policy. The “suffocating stupidity” of left-wing propaganda antagonized the middle class. To be effective, a Socialist Party would have to recognize that “the old-fashioned ‘proletarian revolution’ is an impossibility.” Socialists have to recognize that the war provides the Left with an opportunity. “We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism,” Orwell claimed, “nor establish Socialism without winning the war” (CEJL II, p. 94). For Orwell, patriotic Socialism was both possible and necessary. Capitalism is too inefficient to win the war. To defeat Hitler class privilege has to be erased. “An intelligent Socialist movement,” he maintained, will “use” the people’s patriotism instead of “insulting” it. To win the war, Orwell called for nationalizing major industries, reforming education, and limiting incomes so the highest does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one. Patriotism, Orwell concluded, “has nothing to do with Conservatism…. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.” Only by a patriotic revolutionary war will Britain prevail.

“Literature and the Left” (essay, 1943) In this short essay Orwell examined the way the Left approached literature. The Left was correct, he believed, about “insisting on the importance of subject-matter” and perhaps

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London even right in demanding “that literature shall be first and foremost propaganda.” He objected, however, to the Left making “literary judgments for political ends” (CEJL II, p. 293). It is acceptable to recognize a good writer but a political enemy and wish to silence him. “The deadly sin,” he insisted, “is to say “X” is a political enemy; therefore he is a bad writer” (CEJL II, p. 293). The Left alienated writers, so that most young writers were pacifists or leaning toward Fascism because Socialism had become “meaningless and uninteresting.”

“Literature and the Totalitarianism” (essay, 1943) Orwell saw his age as not a “critical one” because of the influence of politics in literature that symbolized the conflict between the individual and the community: We live in an age in which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist—or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to have the illusion of being autonomous…. The whole of modern European literature … is built on the concept of intellectual honesty…. Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks or feels, or it is nothing [CEJL II, pp. 134–135].

With the era of free capitalism coming to an end, the “economic liberty of the individual is waning,” limiting the freedom to travel and seek employment. The loss of economic liberty also means a loss of intellectual liberty. “Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought,” he states, outlining themes that would be presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Thought Police: It not only forbids you to express—even to think—certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it controls their actions [CEJL II, p. 135].

Totalitarianism in the 20th century differs from the totalitarianism of the past. The Church in the Middle Ages circumscribed what people thought, but it gave people a single framework to live within from birth to death. Now dictatorships shift ideologies for power politics, forcing people to change not only their thoughts but their emotions. For Orwell the hope was that countries with liberal traditions could develop “a form of Socialism which is not totalitarianism, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism” (CEJL II, p. 137).

“London Letters” (essays, 1941–1946) In December 1940 Orwell was invited to contribute articles about wartime Britain to the American magazine Partisan Review. Established in 1934 by the John Reed Club of New York, a Communist organization, the journal was edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, who sought to feature proletarian literature. The magazine suspended publication in 1936, returning to print the following year. Stalin’s purges led Phillips and Rahv to depart from the Communist Party line and adopt a more Trotskyite orientation. After the signing

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London of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Partisan Review departed farther from the Communist Party and advocated a more nationalistic tone, arguing for American rearmament while Communists dismissed the war in Europe as a capitalist conflict. By the end of the Second World War, the still progressive magazine was highly critical of the Soviet Union and began to publish anti–Communist writers. Orwell’s “London Letters” appeared from January 1941 to the summer of 1946. “LONDON LETTER” JANUARY 3, 1941: In his introductory article, Orwell explained Britain’s domestic political situation to American Leftists. During the invasion fears of 1940, Orwell reported, there was a moment when the forces of anti–Hitlerism and anticlass privilege could have been combined. He believed that Socialists outside Britain did not appreciate that the King and Country middle-class patriots would accept a Socialist government if it were properly presented to them. By the first month of 1941 Orwell sensed that this moment had passed. The Labour Party had been tamed by a Conservative government, and the Communist Party was wholly irrelevant. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact still in force, the Communist Party had little influence among the working class. War production had reduced unemployment, and the bombing had stirred traditional nationalism. Although banned, Oswald Mosley’s Fascist Blackshirts had greater influence than the Communist Party, with a minority of Britons blaming the war on the Jews. Antisemitism had been embraced also by the dwindling number of pacifists who condemned “this Jewish war.” In all, Orwell estimated that the number of pro–Hitler Britons was 150,000. Their influence, barring a German occupation, he argued was negligible. In Orwell’s view the Nazi-Soviet Pact which led Communists to take a pro–Hitler stance had shattered the Leftist orthodoxies of the Thirties. For years the Left had been anti–Fascist, often declaring that no British capitalist government would ever challenge Hitler. When Chamberlin declared war against Nazi Germany while Communists remained pro–Hitler, the Left’s ideology lost credibility. British Leftists were largely defeatist, with one, Orwell noted, suggesting that if Britain were invaded the public should not take up arms against the occupiers. Commenting about the Blitz, Orwell stated that it amounted to more nuisance than terror, with only 15 percent of Londoners sleeping in shelters during the air raids. Most of the serious damage was limited to the City of London and the East End slums. Still, the war had changed everyday life. Theatres were closed save for matinees, telephone service was interrupted, and bus service unreliable. Watching the enormous fires when the Germans bombed the London docks, Orwell sensed he was watching the end of an era. He was surprised, however, how quickly “things have slipped back to normal” (CEJL II, p. 55). “LONDON LETTER” APRIL 15, 1941: In Orwell’s second Partisan Review article, he responded to ten questions posed to him by the editors. Asked about the accuracy and tone of the British Press, Orwell reported that the major newspapers and BBC were largely accurate, though there was a tendency to exaggerate victories and downplay growing labor unrest. Commenting on the production of war writing, Orwell stated he saw little true “war literature” emerging from the war at this point, aside from short articles and diaries. Concerning the morale of the British army, he stated that by and large soldiers had a high morale when it came to fighting but were troubled by low separation allowances, class-privilege in promotions, and boredom. Officers and enlisted

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London men wore similar battle dress, signaling a lessening of class differences. The Home Guard was a mix of working men and middle-class professionals guided by old-fashioned patriotism and showed no signs of becoming either a revolutionary Leftist force or a reactionary army. Regarding the role of big business, Orwell reported that because of the war the old chaotic laissez-faire was dead in Britain. The economy must be centralized, but the wealthy will “manipulate taxation and rationing in their own favour, and avoid a revolutionary war strategy.” Asked about the “remarkable amount of democracy and civil liberties” Britain displayed during the war, Orwell answered that much of it was due to British tradition rather than anything political. The British historically respected free speech and personal freedom. Workers grumble without fear of punishment, and the ruling class has no genuine Fascist tendencies. The fact that most Britons lacked a political consciousness meant the government could not get citizens to spy on each other because people would not know what to look for. Overall, Britons were accepting the restrictions of a war economy. Unemployment was non-existent, and the bombing and conscription united the classes. There was a notion that the burden was shared by everyone. In response to a question about the labor movement, Orwell saw the Labour Party as fused with the government, so that liberal conservatives were more likely to adopt a Socialist policy than the Labour leaders. Churchill had lost some of his popularity since his ascendency but still had the greatest following of any premier in two decades. “LONDON LETTER” AUGUST 17, 1941: Given the opportunity to select his topic for his third London Letter, Orwell chose to comment on the Anglo-Soviet alliance. The working classes tended to be pro–Russian, but this was offset by the nation’s two million Catholics, most of whom were lower-class Irish workers. The Catholics were supportive of Franco and Petain and hostile to the Soviet Union. The Communists in Britain exhibited a crude power worship of Stalin and sought nothing more than a “vulgar military triumph for their adopted Fatherland” that distanced themselves from the interests of their fellow Britons. The Home Guard was stronger and provided a credible force against any German invasion. Orwell believed the Guard would remain active until the end of the war, even if the danger of invasion ebbed. As a political force it could pose an opposition to any government excesses. Overall, he reported that that people in Britain were adjusting to the war, accepting the rationing, troubled mostly by the shortage of tobacco and the failure of wages to keep up with prices. With changes coming gradually, there was wide acceptance of wartime life, noting “I can hardly imagine the London skies without the barrage balloons, and should be sorry to see them go” (CEJL II, p. 154). “L ONDON LETTER” JANUARY 1, 1942: Orwell reported on growing tendencies in Britain for the Blimps—British conservatives—to argue that Britain was fighting Germany, not Nazism, and that the “only good German is a dead one.” This suited their nationalist spirit and aided them in aligning Socialism with Germany. At this point anyone who claimed to be “anti–Fascist” was viewed as “pro–German” because the position suggests there is nothing wrong with the German people but only a minority belonging to a rightwing political party. There was, Orwell noted, a shared political disconnect. The “pinks” on the Left could not accept that the working class in Germany supported Hitler; the Blimps on the Right could not accept that they will have to be “levered out of control” for Britain to win the war.

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London Orwell reported that despite the bombing there was no widespread hatred of the Germans, who were called “Jerries” and not “Huns” as in the previous war. People tended to blame everything on Hitler. Similarly, there was little hatred of the Italians, who were called “Eyeties” rather than the more offensive term “Wops.” There was great sympathy for Russia and delight that Hitler had not taken Moscow. The Communist Party, however, had lost influence. The Daily Worker was banned, and its replacement the British Worker, though sold on the street without interference, had a small circulation and was not even a daily paper. Britons were somewhat hostile to the United States, fearing its goal was to absorb the British Empire. There was a long-standing view that Americans were “boastful, bad-mannered and worshippers of money.” Orwell detected a rise in anti–Semitism with the influx of Jewish refugees, who initially were greeted with hostility by trade unionists who feared they would take jobs from Britons. Jews were accused of dodging the draft and being involved with the Black Market but “no one wants actually to do anything to the Jews.” Although Chamberlain’s brand of appeasement faded, there were defeatists on the far Left and the far Right opposed to Lend Lease and alliances with America. German propaganda programs broadcast from the Continent were spuriously claimed to come from illegal “freedom” stations based in England. The German-created New British Broadcasting Station spewed anti–American propaganda in the name of British patriotism. Orwell noted that with a lessening of air raids, urban renewal programs had been curbed due to the lack of bomb debris. “LONDON LETTER” AUGUST 29, 1942: Orwell reported on political and social changes in Britain. The Conservatives continued to dissuade the public from seeing the war as a war against Fascism. The Leftist enthusiasm for radical change had dampened. The lack of imports reduced the consumption of tea and sugar. The lack of imports drove the British toward a healthier diet of local products like apples, oatmeal, potatoes, and vegetables. Clothing rationing had noticeable effects, and it seemed “the thing” for people not in uniform to dress shabbily in public. With fuel rationed, private cars were rarely seen. Buildings looked shabby, not from air raids, but from the lack of routine repairs. American troops were seen in greater numbers. Paid five times as much as their British counterparts, American GIs were courted by English girls, who found their Hollywood accents appealing. The influx of Polish soldiers earlier in the war, Orwell quipped, did “their bit towards solving our birth-rate problem.” “LETTER FROM ENGLAND” JANUARY 3, 1943: Orwell reported that although the military situation was far better than when he wrote his first letter to Partisan Review, “the political situation is blacker than it has ever been.” With the fear of invasion over, Conservatives were “elbowing-out” the reds who were no longer needed to spark morale. Anti–American sentiments were increasing as Britons sensed they were losing control of the war. Paid ten shillings a day, Americans were middle class by British standards. Londoners resented that American officers seemed to commandeer all the taxis and drank up all the whisky in clubs. British seamen were placed at risk shipping American beer across the Atlantic because American soldiers would not drink English beer. This resentment, Orwell noted, could lead many in Britain to label the war in the Pacific “an American war” if Britain had to fight Japan after the defeat of Germany.

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London Orwell described the creation of a new Fascist party in Britain but saw no increase in the level of anti–Semitism. “LONDON LETTER” MAY 1943: Orwell wrote his next “London Letter” just as the Comintern, an organization promoting world communism founded in 1919, was dissolved. Stalin, eager to appease Roosevelt and Churchill, may have suspended the organization as a way of assuring the West he had no intention of interfering in foreign countries. Orwell also noted that the “mystique of the Revolution” had faded as the Soviet Union became more nationalistic during the war. Without the Comintern, Orwell speculated that the British Communist party would either “wither away” or modernize with new leaders less loyal to Moscow. An important development in British politics was the emergence of Common Wealth, the party of Sir Richard Acland. Common Wealth called for Indian independence, the nationalization of industries, an international army, and the distribution of raw materials from richer to poorer countries. The rich would lose their property but be given pensions. The economic program focused on increasing production rather than redistributing wealth. Common Wealth sought to transform national patriotism into international patriotism. Orwell noted that the organization avoided using the word “Socialism.” Overall, the party had elements of “demagogy” and “Utopianism.” Orwell then shifted to address an increase in British anti–Semitism, which was traditionally a working-class prejudice, especially among the Irish. Some, he noted with shock, objected to Jews because many of them were German. Officially, anti–Semitism was condemned, and Orwell observed that the “Jew joke” had vanished from the media. But sympathy toward Jews, especially refugees, had waned. “Because two days ago a fat Jewess grabbed your place on the bus,” he noted, “you switch off the wireless when the announcer begins talking about the ghettoes of Warsaw; that is how people’s minds work nowadays” (CEJL II, p. 291). “LONDON LETTER” JANUARY 15, 1944: In addressing an American audience, Orwell believed it was important to explain the differences between Parliament and the Monarchy in order to understand the forces shaping British politics in the later stages of the war. As a Socialist, he feared the Conservatives would claim to have “won the war” and “bring forward hundreds of handsome young RAF officers as candidates, promise everything under the sun, and then chuck it all down the drain as soon as they are back in office” (CEJL III, p. 75). The Labour Party seemed unwilling to challenge the Government, and the newlyformed Common Wealth party was making little headway. The most striking thing about Parliament in 1944, in Orwell’s view, was how shabby it appeared and how poorly attended the sessions were. It was rare for more than 400 of the 640 members of the House of Commons show up on any given day. Watching a debate on India, Orwell reported that only 200 members were present and this number dwindled to less than 50 after an important speech began. Parliament was hobbled by the electoral system that over-represented rural districts and under-represented industrial districts. Conservative safe seats were doled out to rich men, and Labour seats were given to aging trade unionists as pensions. Anyone who showed a strain of independent thought risked losing party support in the next election. No voters had been registered since 1939, so that no one under 25 or anyone who had changed addresses in the last five years had

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London a vote. All these features led the British public to feel that Parliament had lost its importance. The Monarchy, which one French journalist credited as helping save Britain from Fascism, was, in Orwell’s view, losing its stature since the abdication of Edward VIII. But Orwell noted that the nations in Europe that avoided Fascism were constitutional monarchies. Although Orwell did not embrace the royal family, he believed it “may have an inoculating effect” against totalitarianism. In Britain “the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breastplates is really a waxworks” (CEJL III, p. 81). The figurehead, however, served to give the people a sense of authority and leadership they might otherwise seek in a dictator. “LONDON LETTER” APRIL 17, 1944: Reporting on Britain during the buildup for “It,” meaning the long-awaited cross-channel invasion, Orwell told Americans that cars were scarce but the food was better. A typewriter that cost £12 new before the war now fetched £30 used. Churchill was aging, and most assumed he would be followed by Anthony Eden. The opposition party Common Wealth was making some headway but was weakened by internal disputes. Strikes by coal miners made the public more aware of the conditions Orwell described in The Road to Wigan Pier, with most seeing nationalization as the only option. Orwell detected “extraordinary contradictions” stated by intellectuals. Some on the Left demanded a Second Front but protested the bombing of German cities. Others argued that a Second Front was either no longer needed because the Russians were bound to defeat Hitler or that an invasion would fail. Leftists had a “schizophrenic attitude” toward militarism and war, which they saw as a “massacre brought about by capitalists” and that working-class soldiers hated their officers and saw their enemy as comrades, except when the Red Army was concerned. He speculated that Russian propaganda would “defeat itself simply by being overdone” (CEJL III, p. 127). “LONDON LETTER” JULY 24, 1944: Orwell reported that public opinion was drifting to the Left, while the Right consolidated power because of the weakness of the Labour Party. Both sides tried to exploit the public’s high regard for the Russians in their fight against Hitler. The new party Common Wealth gained votes in elections but was not able to attract new members. The public was primarily concerned with domestic issues, anticipating the problems of demobilizing servicemen and providing them with jobs and their families with housing. He reported that with the introduction of Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs, people were taking shelter in Tube stations as they did in 1940 during the Blitz. As a result, there were “disgusting scenes” of “sordid piles of bedding” cluttering passageways and “hordes of dirty-faced children” playing on the platforms. “LONDON LETTER” DECEMBER 1944: Believing that “we have seemingly won the war and lost the peace,” Orwell proposed that he could look back on his previous London Letters with some perspective. He acknowledged making mistakes, predicting, for instance, that Churchill would fall from power. Orwell attributed his errors to clinging to political observations he made during the desperate days Britain faced in 1940, believing that to win the war Britain would have to undergo a revolution. Looking back on intellectual attitudes toward the war expressed a few years before, Orwell declared that all the attitudes were wrong. He catalogued five widely-held assumptions that people got wrong:

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London 1. Because nothing is worse than a Fascist victory we should support any anti–Nazi regime. 2. The war must be turned into a revolutionary one to defeat the Axis because capitalism cannot win. 3. If capitalism survives, any victory over Fascism will be useless because it will establish Fascism in our own country. 4. A war against Fascism, no matter what government is in charge, will turn us into Fascists. 5. It is pointless to fight the Axis because Germany and Japan are bound to win. While the first statement was embraced by radicals, pacifists cited both four and five. Now the various groups argued “I told you so,” with pacifists claiming that Britain was becoming just as Fascist as Nazi Germany. Orwell presented his American readers with a list of his own predictions and statements that have been disproven. He exaggerated the influence of the Left and underestimated the power of reactionary forces in Britain. “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes,” Orwell argued, “and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome” (CEJL III, p. 297). Even when predictions come true, it does not mean people understand the flow of events. Orwell pointed out that some Conservatives foresaw a Nazi-Soviet alliance but “the wrong kind of agreement, and for the wrong reasons.” Objective predictions are difficult because people are blinded by their ideological mindset. “To a Stalinist it is impossible that Stalin could ever be wrong,” he noted, “and to a Trotskyist it is equally impossible that Stalin could ever be right” (CEJL III, p. 298). Being objective, Orwell asserted, “involves a moral effort” to acknowledge one’s subjective feelings and make allowances for them. “LONDON LETTER” JUNE 5, 1945: Orwell reported that there was much excitement about the upcoming General Election, with many predicting a Labour victory. But any government would face the overwhelming problems of demobilization, rationing, coal shortages, and housing. Orwell also reported a reduction in pro–Soviet attitudes. Stalin’s arrest of Polish delegates and negative reports about the Russians by British prisoners liberated by the Red Army influenced public opinion. Many people argued that a conflict with Russia was inevitable and that only a Labour government could take a strong stand against Stalin as when it took a Conservative government to oppose Hitler. Returning from the Continent, Orwell could see Britain with fresh eyes, noting a nostalgia for the war when all classes were subject to rationing and unemployment was nonexistent. He also observed that despite the war, the British maintained their values of free speech and decency. German shops were never looted, suspected spies were not hanged in Hyde Park, and children’s books never depicted Germans as pigs. He considered it worth noting that “almost no English people changed sides” during the war, whereas hundreds of thousands of Poles, Czechs, and Russians fought for the Germans or served in their labor battalions. “LONDON LETTER” AUGUST 1945: Orwell opened his letter noting that it was “fashionable to say that all the causes we fought for have been defeated,” which he rejected. After six years of war, Britain retained its democratic traditions. Churchill, who had almost dictatorial powers, was thrown out of office by voters. Labour made gains, while the 20 Com-

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Looking munist candidates garnered about 100,000 votes between them. The progressive party Common Wealth fared equally badly. Economically, however, Britain faced tremendous challenges: a loss of markets, a shortage of housing, a need to maintain its armed forces to protect its sources of oil. The Labour Party could make headway if it nationalized major industries, granted India Dominion status, and purged the government of officials to “forestall sabotage from the Right.” Labour, however, was hobbled by a basic failure. “The weakness of all left-wing parties,” Orwell maintained, “is their inability to tell the truth about the immediate future…. The British people have never been warned, i.e., by the Left, that the introduction of Socialism may mean a serious drop in the standard of living” (CEJL III, p. 396). Britain relies on exploiting people of color, which is antithetical to Socialism. To abandon it means a lower standard of living during the transition period. A fundamental question being debated was Britain’s place in the world. Unable to compete single-handedly against America or Russia, Britain faced three options: hold onto the Empire as best as possible, move into the American orbit, liberate India and form a bloc with Western European countries and their African possessions. The last option, Orwell believed, was a “pipe-dream” because France and Britain could not overcome their differences. Orwell closed his letter with comments about the atomic bombings of Japan. Many people, he stated, were horrified by the initial reports but changed their mind when Japan quickly surrendered. Some advocated giving the atomic secret to the Russia, which Orwell viewed as “carrying trustfulness a bit far” (CEJL III, p. 400). “LONDON LETTER” MAY 1946: Orwell reported on the difficulties faced by the Labour government. Though it remained popular, the public felt no change since the end of the war. Food was “dull,” and the queues remained long. People resented shortages and rationing now that there was no war to justify them. Orwell observed a drift toward Socialism with the nationalization of transport. The Communist Party remained small. Orwell suspected that perhaps 10 percent of Labour MPs were secret members of or sympathetic to the Communist Party. There remained conflict between Stalinists and anti–Stalinists. The public accepted the fact that eventually the Soviet Union and the United States would go to war and Britain could be blasted with atomic bombs, but viewed it as a future inevitability like the cooling of the sun. Although the war was over, consumers goods were still scarce. With difficulty one could locate a new vacuum cleaner, but refrigerators were unavailable. Given the shortages, the person who managed to purchase a watch or a fountain pen boasted about it for weeks. Orwell signed off, noting that although London was still shabby, life without the blackout was “still an acute pleasure” (CEJL IV, p. 190). .

“Looking Back on the Spanish War” (essay, 1943) Five years after his memoir about his war experiences Homage to Catalonia was published, Orwell reflected again on his time in Spain, offering thoughts on specific memories and universal comments about war and politics. He recalled the drudgery and hardships of army life—the foul latrines, the rough clothing, the boredom, the irregular rations, agreeing with the features of war books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Front-line soldiers are generally too cold, frightened, or hungry to care about politics. He recalled the “swings of opinion,” noting how the Left went “from ‘War is Hell’ to

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Lower ‘War is glorious’” with “no sense of incongruity.” Commenting on atrocities, Orwell noted that they “are believed in or disbelieved in solely on the grounds of political predilection” (CEJL II, p. 252). Orwell stated that he drew up a list of atrocities reported since 1918, noting “there was hardly a single case where the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously.” What Orwell found even stranger was that “yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed” (CEJL II, p. 252). The propaganda Orwell saw in Spain was troubling because people denied what they knew to be true. “This kind of thing is frightening to me,” he stated, “because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” (CEJL II, p. 258). A British and German historian writing about the First World War, he argued, would disagree about various points, even fundamentals, but would still mutually acknowledge objective facts. The Nazi historian today operates on a radical philosophy preaching racial superiority based on “German science” that ignores objective truth: The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement [CEJL II, p. 259].

The control of the past and the two and two are five observations would form a major theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published six years later. A related fear is that there is a mistaken naïve belief, later voiced by Winston Smith, that somehow good will always overcome evil. But who would believe, he asks, that slavery would be re-established in Europe in the 20th century? At the end of his essay, Orwell returns to a meeting he had with a young Italian militiaman, an episode he used to open An Homage to Catalonia. Arriving in Spain, Orwell visited the Lenin Barracks where he was greeted by a “tough-looking” Italian of 25 or 26 with “powerful shoulders.” Orwell felt an immediate liking to this man, stating it “was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy” (4). A decade later, looking back, Orwell speculates that the young idealist is likely dead. He ends his essay with a poem about the militiaman, whose name he never knew. The final lines assert a faith in individuality and personal spirit: Your name and your deeds were forgotten Before your bones were dry, And the lie that slew you is buried Under a deeper lie; But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit; No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit [CEJL II, p. 267].

Lower Binfield (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Lower Binfield is the fictional hometown of Londoner George Bowling, the protagonist of Orwell’s fourth novel. Living on the eve of the Second World War and despairing of the

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Ma sleekness and artificiality of the modern world, Bowling has nostalgic memories of his boyhood town. Located five miles from the Thames in Oxfordshire, Lower Binfield was a market town with a population of 2,000 in 1900. Bowling’s father ran a small shop in High Street, where he was assisted by Bowling’s shiftless older brother Joe. Bowling recalls his hometown with realistic nostalgia. Few of the houses had modern plumbing, flies were omnipresent, few had access to health care, and most people were shockingly ignorant of the outside world. His mother, for example, had no idea whether Ireland was east or west of Britain and limited her reading to women’s magazines. Yet the food was natural and wholesome, the beer was real, and no one lived in fear of air raids. Memories of this simple life lead Bowling to decide to splurge the 17 quid he won betting on a trip back to Lower Binfield to escape the streamlined sleek artificiality of modern life and the looming war in Europe. But as he enters his hometown, he is shocked by the changes. The small town he fondly remembers has disappeared, swallowed by modern housing estates and gleaming factories. Looking at the rows of new houses, cinemas, and shops, Bowling states, “I had that feeling of a kind of enemy invasion having happened behind my back” (215). Lower Binfield, Bowling discovers, is just as sleek, modern, and commercial as London. His nostalgic trip is one of continual disappointment. The rich beer he remembered as a lad is replaced by the current brew tasting of chemicals. His father’s seed store is now a trendy tea shop. His boyhood fishing hole has been drained to serve as a landfill for a subdivision of “faked-up” Tudor houses and lawn ornaments. Walking the streets among strangers, Bowling feels like a “ghost,” invisible to the town’s current residents, many of them transplants from other parts of England. Bowling’s greatest disappointment is running into his old girlfriend Elsie. The once pliable, sensuous girl of his youth is now a thick middle-aged woman with a bulldog face who does not recognize him. In visiting Lower Binfield, Bowling realizes he cannot escape to the past or avoid the future. As he is walking down a street in his hometown, an RAF bomber accidentally releases a bomb which shatters a nearby house. Glancing into the debris, Bowling sees among the smashed furniture a severed leg and its blood mixing with spilled marmalade. Given a glimpse of the Blitz to come, he senses he cannot escape his fate. “There’s no way back to Lower Binfield, you can’t put Jonah back into the whale,” he states, realizing that his old life is gone, and war is surely on the horizon.

Ma Hla May (Burmese Days, 1934) Ma Hla May is the 22- or 23-year-old mistress of the novel’s protagonist John Flory, who purchased her from her parents for 300 rupees. Only five feet tall, she carries herself like “an outlandish doll” who is “grotesquely beautiful.” Flory uses her for sex and has no illusions about her pledge of fidelity to him. He accuses her of having a Burmese lover, but Ma Hla May falsely insists she is faithful, claiming to find dark men repulsive. Flory recognizes their relationship as purely prostitution. He uses her for sexual release, showing her no affection after the act, dismissing her rudely from his bed. Despite Flory’s mistreatment, Ma Hla May is convinced she can entice Flory to love her. Believing that her sexuality is a kind of “witchcraft,” she thinks her embraces will enslave her master. She passes herself as a “white man’s wife” to impress her fellow Burmese and views herself as superior to other Burmese women.

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Macgregor Flory dismisses Ma Hla May with a check for a hundred rupees to woo a newly-arrived Englishwoman, Elizabeth Lackersteen. Ma Hla May later returns to Flory, whining and begging to be reinstated as his mistress. Flory assures her that he does not hate her, giving her 50 rupees to leave him alone. Angered and dismayed by her loss of income and status, Ma Hla May becomes a willing tool of the corrupt subdivisional magistrate U Po Kyin, who will use a whore to discredit Flory and ruin his chances of marrying an Englishwoman. At the end of the novel just as it seems Flory is about to marry Elizabeth Lackersteen, Ma Hla May appears at the English church, disrupting the service. Wailing like “a screaming hag of the bazaar,” she openly berates Flory, ripping her clothes and shouting, “Look at this body that you have kissed a thousand times” (32). The proper, racist Elizabeth is appalled and rejects Flory, who begs her to reconsider. He offers a platonic marriage, claiming only to want her company to save him from his alienation and loneliness. When she steadfastly rejects him, a broken-hearted Flory returns home and shoots himself. After Flory commits suicide, Ma Hla May ends up in a Mandalay brothel. Having lost her looks, she earns only four annas and is kicked and beaten by abusive customers. She mourns the good times and exclusive status she had with Flory and regrets not having saved more of the money she “extracted” from her English master.

Ma Kin (Burmese Days, 1934) Ma Kin is the wife of U Po Kyin, the obese Burmese subdivisional magistrate who conspires to ruin the English protagonist John Flory. Unlike her husband, Ma Kin never adjusted to Western ways, finding it uncomfortable to sit in chairs. Like a native woman, she walks to the marketplace each morning with a basket on her head. She serves as her husband’s confidant and conscience, urging him to do good deeds to balance the evils he has committed. A devout Buddhist, she tells him to purchase live fish and release them in the river and donate rice to the priests. She reminds U Po Kyin when he was honored to simply have a fountain pen with a gold clip and wicker furniture. At the end of the novel when her husband dies before building the pagodas that would atone for his sins and ensure an exalted status in the afterlife, she grieves deeply, fearing her husband is wandering in hellfire or has returned to Earth as a lowly creature such as a rat or a frog.

Macgregor (Burmese Days, 1934) Owner of the lone motor vehicle in Kyauktada, Burma, Macgregor, the Deputy Commissioner, is a decent, if ineffectual, Englishman who patronizingly regards Asians as charming and expresses a genuine affection for them. Free of overt race hatred, he disapproves of fellow Englishmen referring to the Burmese as “niggers.” Although he is not a bigot, he is a defender of the Empire and does not wish to see the Burmese achieve independence. Unlike the alcoholics around him, Macgregor follows a policy of only drinking after sunset. Macgregor’s letters to the Commissioner are routinely intercepted and read by the corrupt Burmese magistrate U Po Kyin. The bilingual nationalist newspaper Burmese Patriot accuses Macgregor of fathering and abandoning children by Burmese women he casts off to starve. A large heavy man in his 40s with spectacles, he is nicknamed “the tortoise” by the Burmese. Despite his weight, he attempts to keep fit by working out.

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Mark Macgregor causes a row among the British residents of Kyauktada when he posts a notice announcing that the European Club should, like others in Burma, consider admitting Asian members. Ellis, a passionate racist, is angered by the suggestion of “bringing niggers in here” (23). After the novel’s protagonist John Flory commits suicide, Macgregor waits a few months before proposing to the woman who spurned him. Elizabeth Lackersteen immediately accepts his offer, eager to become the wife of a Deputy Commissioner. Relishing her status, she hosts dinner parties, lording over the wives of her husband’s subordinates and terrorizing her Burmese servants with her demands.

“Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester” (essay, 1943) Examining the American author of 19th-century classics, Orwell saw him as a product of “the golden age of America,” a remarkable time “when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries.” Twain’s burlesque, free-wheeling characters, in Orwell’s view, were products of a special era when men were “not frightened of the sack” (CEJL II, p. 325). Unlike the masses of workers Orwell knew in Britain whose lives were marked by low-paid drudgery or the dole, Twain’s characters knew few constraints: The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen…. But at least it was not the case that a man’s destiny was settled from his birth. The “log cabin to the White House” myth was true while the free land lasted [CEJL II, p. 328].

“Marrakech” (essay, 1939) Written in the spring of 1939 and published later that year in New Writing, “Marrakech” records Orwell’s observations on race, poverty, and colonialism. Empires, Orwell argued, are based on the simple fact that Europeans do not “see” people with brown skin as human. Walking through a city with tens of thousands who only possess the rags on their bodies, Orwell noted that it is difficult to see them as fellow humans. He wondered if these people even have names or are “merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff ” with no more individual identity than bees or coral insects. Orwell compared them to plant life, stating that they “rise out of the earth” to “sweat and starve” then “sink back” into the earth with nobody recognizing their departure. Like birds or squirrels, they were simply a feature of the landscape. He recounted that when old women hauling firewood filed past his house each day, he simply noticed the firewood moving. The old women, he recalled, were invisible, unlike the overburdened donkeys that immediately caught his attention when he arrived in North Africa. The mistreatment of animals infuriated him, while the poverty of the people was accepted as simply a feature of the landscape. Orwell related several events that revealed the pervasive poverty of Morocco. Visiting a public park, Orwell was approached by a man asking if he could have some of the bread

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Memory he was feeding to a gazelle. The man was not a tramp, Orwell noted, but a municipal employee. Walking through the dense Jewish ghetto, Orwell lit a cigarette and was swamped by a “frenzied rush of Jews” begging for smokes. A blind man appeared, groping the air at the mention of cigarettes. For the Jews of Marrakech, who labored 12 hours a day, a single cigarette was an “impossible luxury.” These incidents led Orwell to declare that empires are based on the fact that people with brown skin are invisible to Caucasians. Europeans who would never think of vacationing in distressed industrial cities in their native countries will travel to resorts in Asia and Africa to relax in a region where 90 percent of the population engage in backbreaking labor to avoid starvation. Orwell concluded his remarks with the description of a long column of black soldiers in French uniforms marching in the sun. A soldier caught Orwell’s eye as he passed, looking at him with a “look of profound respect.” Orwell assumes that the soldier has been taught that the white race were his masters and accepted his status. Whenever a white man sees black soldiers marching in service of their colonial masters, Orwell proclaimed, he must be thinking one thing: “‘How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?’” (CEJL I, p. 393). While whites, even the French officers and NCOs leading the column, might possess this thought, the black soldiers marched on like a flock of docile cattle.

Maxwell (Burmese Days, 1934) Maxwell is the 25-year-old acting Divisional Forest Officer in Kyauktada, Burma and a member of the town’s small English community. A quiet youth, he is given to telling smutty rhymes and is accused by a fellow Englishman of “running after Eurasian tarts” (24). During a failed Burmese revolt, Maxwell shoots a native. The dead man’s relatives kill Maxwell, chopping his body to bits with swords. Maxwell’s remains are brought back to Kyauktada. Although he had no close friends, his death causes a great shock throughout Burma because he was a white man.

Mr. McKechnie (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) After the protagonist Gordon Comstock leaves the New Albion publicity firm to launch a writing career, he obtains a job at McKechnie’s bookshop through his wealthy friend Ravelston. McKechnie is more shopkeeper than bookseller, viewing literature as mere merchandise. He hires Comstock at £2 a week to preside over his store which includes a twopenny lending library of popular novels that Comstock regards as “eight hundred slabs of pudding” (5). Despite Ravelston’s efforts, McKechnie, a declared teetotaler, fires Comstock after reading about his arrest for drunken and disorderly conduct. He does, however, refer Gordon to another bookseller, Mr. Cheeseman, who is seeking an assistant.

Memory hole (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) In the Ministry of Truth where Winston Smith works, employee cubicles are equipped with “memory holes,” small grates that are used to dispose of incorrect, obsolete, or banned

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Minimus documents and photographs. Air drafts suck anything thrust into the memory hole and carry it to massive furnaces for destruction. Memory holes are found in the corridors of the Ministry of Truth, and workers habitually pick up any discarded paper and slip it into the nearest receptacle.

Minimus (Animal Farm, 1945) Minimus is the poet pig who composes the replacement anthem to Old Major’s “Beasts of England.” He also writes the prayer-like verse extolling the leadership of Napoleon, proclaiming him to be the “fountain of happiness” who is “like the sun in sky” watching over all. His poetry fails to inspire the animals the way Old Major’s song did before the Rebellion.

Ministry of Love (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Ministry of Love (Miniluv in Newspeak), charged with law and order, is the most fearsome of Oceania’s four ministries. The massive windowless pyramid is headquarters of the Thought Police. Before his arrest Winston Smith had never been within a half a kilometer of the building, which is guarded by a maze of barbed wire entanglements, machine guns, and “gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms.” After Smith and Julia are captured in the room above Charrington’s junk shop, they are taken to the Ministry of Love, which contains the dreaded Room 101 (see Room 101).

Ministry of Peace (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Charged with war, the Ministry of Peace (Minipax in Newspeak) handles military affairs for Oceania (see War is Peace).

Ministry of Plenty (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty in Newspeak) is one of four major ministries that tower over London. Charged with economic affairs, the Ministry of Plenty rations items like chocolate and clothing. Working in the Records Department in the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith writes propaganda using economic statistics he knows to be false. While the Ministry of Plenty reports the production of millions of pairs of boots, Winston Smith suspects none had been manufactured at all.

Ministry of Truth (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak) is housed in one of four ministry buildings that tower over London. The pyramid-like building is a thousand feet high and contains some 3,000 rooms above ground and a comparable number below ground. The ministry is responsible for news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. It produces official publications for the Party. In 1984 the Research Department is compiling the Eleventh Edition of the official Newspeak Dictionary. The ministry also generates prole-

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Mother tarian art and entertainment, including sexy movies, sensational novelettes, sentimental songs, and “rubbishy” newspapers specializing in sports, crime, and astrology. One unit called Pornosec prints “the lowest kind of pornography” which is forbidden for Party members to see. Machines write novels and compose songs. The purpose of the arts, news, and entertainment is to amuse and distract the public and prevent the working-class citizens of Oceania from developing a political consciousness. Winston Smith works in the Records Department, revising historical documents so that archived books and newspapers reflect current policy and assure that Big Brother’s predictions always come true. When a Party member is eliminated and declared an “unperson,” he or she is expunged from history. Articles mentioning his or her name are rewritten and photographs doctored to remove his or her image. Smith rewrites history, dictating new versions of articles. The Records Department employs actors, photographers, and editors to fake photographs and documents to create an alternative historical record of the past.

Mollie (Animal Farm, 1945) Mollie is the “foolish, pretty white mare” who pulls Farmer Jones’ trap and enjoys being pampered and treated to lumps of sugar. Vain and lazy, she covets ribbons and human fineries. When she is taught to read she refuses to learn anything beyond the six letters that spell her name. She often traces her name out in twigs and decorates it with flowers. To shirk work she claims to have a stone caught in her hoof. When Jones and other humans attempt to retake Animal Farm, Mollie cowers in her stall. Accused of letting a human stroke her nose, Mollie denies fraternizing with humans. Clover, however, inspects Mollie’s stall and discovers ribbons and lumps of sugar hidden beneath the straw. Three days later Mollie disappears and is reported to be pulling a dog cart for a publican. Fed sugar and decorated with new ribbons, Mollie appears to be happy. Viewed as an ungrateful defector, Mollie is never spoken of again.

Moses (Animal Farm, 1945) Moses, Mr. Jones’ tame raven, is the only animal on Manor Farm who does not obey Old Major’s summons to hear his speech. Fed on crusts of bread soaked in beer by Mr. Jones, Moses never accepts Animalism or views humans as his enemies. While the pigs urge the animals share their vision of an Animal Republic, Moses offers a divine alternative. He tells the animals of a special place called Sugarcandy Mountain where all animals go after death. On Sugarcandy Mountain every day is Sunday, lump sugar grows on hedges, and the fields are full of clover year-round. Many view Moses as a spy and traitor and resent that he does not work, yet many believe his tales of a heavenly paradise. The animals notice that although the pigs ridicule Moses for not working and spreading false ideas, they do not object to him lingering on Animal Farm.

Mother Meakin (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Mother Meakin runs a “filthy” rooming house in Lambeth near Mr. Cheeseman’s bookshop. After being turned out of a more respectable rooming house following his arrest, the

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Muriel protagonist Gordon Comstock rents a room in Mrs. Meakin’s establishment for eight shillings a week. A “disheveled, jelly-soft old creature,” Mother Meakin has no middle-class pretentions. Unlike Comstock’s previous landlady, who spied on her lodgers and banned female visitors, Mrs. Meakin never interferes with her boarders as long as they pay their rent. Determined to wallow in poverty and dirt, Comstock finds his seedy, insect-infested room fully suitable. To make his place more “’omelike,” Mrs. Meakin provides her new boarder with a weedy, dying aspidistra.

Muriel (Animal Farm, 1945) The white goat Muriel is one of the animals who learns to read. In a key scene after the pigs begin sleeping on beds, the horse Clover recalls that one of the commandments forbids animals from sleeping in beds. She asks Muriel to read her the Fourth Commandment (see The Seven Commandments). Muriel spells out the modified commandment which now reads, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.”

“My Country Right or Left” (essay, 1940) First published in Folios of New Writing, “My Country Right or Left” opens with Orwell’s memories of the First World War, which started when he was 11. Oddly, he recalled that no battle he read about struck him with the same intensity as the sinking of the Titanic a few years earlier. He described three vivid memories of the early days of the war: seeing a cartoon of the Kaiser, watching a cabman cry when his horse was commandeered by the army, and seeing a mob of young men scrambling for newspapers. In the middle years of the war he recalled the uniforms of artillerymen. By the end of the war rationing led him to focus on margarine. The Russian Revolution made no impression on him. Too young for the war, Orwell, like many of his classmates, felt “less than a man” because he missed military service. Addressing the current war, Orwell justified supporting the British government because it was better to resist Hitler than surrender to him. “Patriotism,” he asserted, “has nothing to do with conservatism.” Believing in the possibility that one kind of loyalty can “transmute itself into another,” Orwell valued “patriotism and the military virtues” the Left disparaged because “no substitute has yet been found” (CEJL I, p. 540).

Napoleon (Animal Farm, 1945) A large, fierce-looking boar, Napoleon does not say much but has a reputation of getting his way. He assumes leadership alongside Snowball and Squealer following the death of Old Major and helps craft the tenets of Animalism. Less vivacious than Snowball and apparently less inventive, Napoleon initially takes a secondary role after the Rebellion. He objects to Snowball’s bold plans to build a windmill, arguing the animals will starve if they work on a construction project instead of producing food. Napoleon offers no plans of his own but stages a coup, ousting Snowball. During the heady days just after the Rebellion when Snowball holds classes to teach the animals to read, Napoleon takes charge of nine newly-weaned puppies and promises to educate them. He keeps the puppies in a loft, meeting with them in secret. Soon the other animals forget about the dogs until, nearly full-

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New grown, they appear like storm troopers at Napoleon’s command to drive Snowball from the farm. The animals notice that the dogs obediently wag their tails at Napoleon the way other dogs did with Mr. Jones. The dogs serve as Napoleon’s bodyguards, secret police, and executioners. Napoleon takes over leadership of Animal Farm, now claiming the windmill project as his own. He directs the animals to build the windmill. When the structure collapses during a windstorm, Napoleon blames the disaster on Snowball, who becomes a Trotsky-like foil used to explain failures and shortages. Snowball, Napoleon claims, visits the farm at night to engage in sabotage and conspires with humans to oppose the animals. Napoleon’s career closely parallels Stalin’s. He uses terror and intimidation to get the animals to accept his leadership. His propagandist Squealer begins calling him Leader. When a Republic is declared Napoleon runs unopposed for president. He conducts purge trials to eliminate enemies and blames the farm’s failings on wreckers and saboteurs. Like Stalin, Napoleon removes himself from public functions, becoming the remote godlike dictator now called “our Leader, Comrade Napoleon.” His birthday becomes an official holiday. Like Stalin, Napoleon takes credit for successes and expects other animals to worship him with unquestioning loyalty. The poet pig Minimus composes a prayer-like ode that proclaims Napoleon “Friend of the fatherless!/Fountain of happiness!” who is “the giver of/All that thy creatures love” (78–79). The poem, along with a portrait of Napoleon, is inscribed on the wall of the barn. Like Stalin, Napoleon reshapes the revolutionary ideology to enhance his power and maintain a totalitarian regime.

New Albion Publicity Company (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) After leaving a red lead firm and launching his first money strike, Gordon Comstock is turned out of his room and endures days of homelessness before returning to his family to find shelter and borrow money. After months of unemployment he gets a job in the accounts department at the New Albion Publicity Company through his sister’s employer’s brother. A small firm, the New Albion designs cosmetics and millinery ads for women’s magazines. One of the firm’s large accounts is the Queen of Sheba cosmetics company which employs Comstock’s fellow lodger Flaxman. Comstock dislikes his colleagues, described as the “hard-boiled, Americanised, go-getting type” who only find one thing in life sacred: money (51). After a fellow employee notices one of his poems, Gordon Comstock earns the nickname “the bard” and is judged as not being the type who will “Make Good” (52). Although promoted to work under the head copyrighter and given a raise, Comstock decides to leave the firm after he learns his first volume of poetry Mice is accepted for publication. While working in the agency Gordon meets his future girlfriend and wife Rosemary Waterlow, a design assistant. After Rosemary reveals she is pregnant, Gordon Comstock decides to marry her and returns to the New Albion, embracing the middle-class life he once abjured.

“New Words” (essay, 1940) Orwell noted that the English language adds few words a year, and they are usually names of objects, never abstract concepts. He suggested adding several thousand new words

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Newspeak to fill a noticeable void in the lexicon. “Our language,” he stated, “is practically useless for describing anything that goes on inside the brain” (CEJL II, p. 3). As an example, he pointed out how difficult it is to describe a dream “because no words that convey the atmosphere of dreams exist in our language” (CEJL II, p. 3). He suggested inventing new words “as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor-car engine” to name the “nameless feelings that men have in common” (CEJL II, p. 7). It might take several thousand people, Orwell speculated, to effectively invent words that would remain in use. Acknowledging “there must always be some correlation between the sound of a word and its meaning,” the phonetics would have to be considered. The idea of inventing new words, Orwell concluded “is at least worth thinking over.”

Newspeak (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Newspeak is the official language of the Party in Oceania. In 1984 the Ministry of Truth is compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Official communiqués and announcements are written in Newspeak, though most Party members still speak Standard English, called Oldspeak. It is estimated that Newspeak will totally replace Oldspeak by 2050. The goal of Newspeak is to simplify the English language by reducing the number of words, narrowing the range of thought and limiting or even eliminating the ability to engage in thoughtcrime, thinking or expressing disloyal thoughts. At the end of the novel, after Winston Smith has been reeducated and reintegrated, he is assigned to a subcommittee of a sub-committee working on an interim report regarding minor difficulties compiling the Eleventh Edition. Orwell included an appendix “The Principles of Newspeak” to Nineteen Eighty-Four, detailing elements of its three vocabularies.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel, 1949) Orwell’s last novel is a culmination of his experiences investigating the poor, fighting in Spain, and working for the BBC. It builds on themes presented in Animal Farm, published four years earlier, and expressed in many of his essays. Literary influences include Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We (see We), the novels of H. G. Wells, and Jack London’s futuristic The Iron Heel. Many of the novel’s characters and incidents reflect political events in the middle of the 20th century. The dictator Big Brother resembles Stalin; his Jewish nemesis Goldstein mirrors Leon Trotsky; Oceania’s sudden shift in alliances draws on Stalin’s unexpected non-aggression pact with Hitler. In Orwell’s 1984 the world is divided into three massive “superstates.” Oceania consists of the British Isles (now called Airstrip One), the Americas, Australia, and parts of southern Africa. Eurasia runs from Portugal to the Bering Strait, and Eastasia contains China, Japan, and contested parts of Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria. Oceania is continuously at war with one the other superstates. In the spring of 1984 Oceania shifts alliances, ending its war with Eurasia and declaring war on Eastasia. The three superstates wage continuous war so that war is “peace,” normal life and not an interruption to the everyday flow of events. The three states are so vast that no single state or even a pair of states can defeat a rival. The aim of these ongoing wars is not defeating an adversary but using up the products

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Nineteen of industry without raising the standard of living. Eternal war means eternal sacrifice for a cause, keeping most of the population poor and docile to authority. Although each state professes allegiance to a distinct ideology, the purpose of these oligarchies is the same, dictatorial rule over the masses. Orwell’s futurist world is essentially 1940s London with a few technical innovations, such as the ubiquitous telescreens, dictating machines called speakwrites, and police helicopters. Food and clothing are rationed, and ordinary items like razor blades and shoelaces are hard to find. Buildings are war damaged and poorly maintained. Oceania uses the metric system, runs on military time, and issues a decimal currency counted in dollars and cents. Although nuclear weapons exist (Smith recalls an atomic bomb falling on Colchester in the 1950s) London in the mid–1980s is hit 20 or 30 times a week by V-2-like “rocketbombs” nicknamed “steamers” that destroy a handful of buildings at a time. Churches and statues that represent life before the Revolution have been destroyed, renamed, or repurposed so they give no clue to the past. Four massive pyramid-like structures, each a thousand feet high, now dominate the London skyline. These buildings house the Ministry of Truth, concerned with the media, arts, entertainment, and education; The Ministry of Plenty, which manages the economy; the Ministry of Peace, charged with waging war; and the most feared institution, the Ministry of Love, dedicated to security. The Party, led by Big Brother, rules over its members in Oceania with rigorous surveillance and ruthless terror. Telescreens, which both observe and transmit, are installed in every Party member’s home. Cameras are placed on streets, office cubicles, public squares, and lavatories. The Thought Police ruthlessly search for traitors and unreliable citizens. Children are encouraged to spy on their parents. But unlike the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, the vast majority of the people in Oceania, called “proles,” are considered “beneath suspicion” and are left to their own devices, the Party dampening any political movements by saturating the lower classes with cheap distractions like lotteries, “rubbishy” newspapers, and mindless entertainment. Vast criminal enterprises are allowed to flourish throughout London as long as they do not pose a threat to the rule of Big Brother. Central to maintaining Party authority and rooting out “thoughtcrime” is the introduction of a new language. Newspeak, an abbreviated form of English, is the official language of the Party, though most citizens still speak traditional English or Oldspeak. The goal of Newspeak is to reduce the number of words and simplify the vocabulary to “narrow the range of thought” so that rebellious sentiments or thoughtcrimes will be impossible to be formed or communicated. The protagonist, 39-year-old Winston Smith, is a Party member who works in the Ministry of Truth. Employed in the Records Department, he is tasked with altering historical documents, such as news articles, to reflect current policies. Big Brother is infallible, so his past statements are altered to prove all his predictions true. Shifts in policy require that historical records are amended. When a high-ranking Party member is purged and declared an unperson, he or she is erased from history, often replaced by a fictional personality. In Oceania the past is malleable, a record that is revised and reinvented to serve present circumstances. Smith doubts if any books published before 1960 are still in existence. In the opening chapter Smith begins to write a diary, an act, that although not illegal, might lead to imprisonment or execution if discovered. Smith jots down the date, unsure if it is actually April 4, 1984. He is unsure about his age, believing he had been born in 1944

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Nineteen or 1945. Smith only has dim memories of his parents, whom he assumes vanished in the purges of the Fifties and Sixties. Two people dominate Smith’s thoughts that first day. One is an Inner Party member named O’Brien, a senior official Smith has only seen a dozen times in a dozen years. Something in O’Brien’s mannerisms leads Smith to believe that he might hold “unorthodox” views. In fact, Smith had a dream about O’Brien seven years earlier, a dream in which a voice, he now associates with O’Brien, told him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” (25). The other person is a dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department. Smith, separated from his frigid wife, resents the girl’s bold manner and the red Junior Anti–Sex League sash about her waist. In the Ministry of Truth Smith participates in a ritual called Two Minutes Hate. A large telescreen displays the image of Big Brother’s nemesis, a Trotsky-like renegade named Emmanuel Goldstein. Bleating like a sheep, Goldstein denounces Big Brother, calling for freedom of speech and assembly, ideas the Party views as heretical. The employees demonstrate their hatred for Goldstein by protesting and shouting. The girl from the Fiction Department screams and throws a dictionary at the telescreen. Then the reassuring face of Big Brother appears and the employees begin to chant “B-B! … B-B!” in unison. During this emotional demonstration, Smith transfers his hatred from Goldstein to the girl, fantasizing about raping and killing her at the moment of climax. Back in his flat, Smith opens his diary and fills half a page, repeatedly writing “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in large print. Having written this declaration, Smith views himself as a dead man, a man guilty of “thoughtcrime.” Smith dedicates his diary to a time when “thought is free” and “when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone” (28). Altering history every day, Smith is fixated on learning the truth. He knows that although the public is told they have always been at war with Eurasia, he remembers that just five years before Oceania was fighting Eastasia. Smith enjoys the creative nature of his work which is as absorbing as solving a mathematical problem. When he is directed to remove all references to a disgraced Inner Party member, Smith deletes an article about the man declared a “nonexistent person” and replaces it with an article heralding the career of an invented character who will become as real in the history books as Julius Caesar. This work, however, drives Smith to want to know what really happened. He doubts if the Party histories are valid. Although history books claim the Party invented airplanes, he recalls seeing planes in his childhood before the Revolution. More and more he comes to oppose the rule of Big Brother and long for his downfall. With Party members under continual surveillance, Smith realizes the Party could never be defeated from within. The hope, he believes, lies in the “proles” who comprise 85 percent of the population. In one scene Smith enters a working-class pub and buys a beer for an 80-year-old man, hoping the old man can shed light on the past, on life before the Revolution. But the old man offers only jumbled recollections about a time when men wore top hats and beer came in half-pints and pints instead of half-liters and liters. The proles, Winston realizes, are too consumed by family matters, petty personal feuds, football, beer, and films, to develop a political consciousness that could form any organized opposition to the Party. Adding to Smith’s dissatisfaction with life in Oceania is his ongoing sexual frustration. The Party represses sexuality, viewing it as a distraction and a threat to Party loyalty. Marriages must be approved by a Party committee, which denies permission to couples who exhibit

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Nineteen any evidence of mutual sexual attraction. Marriage is viewed as a service to the Party as a means of producing children. Sexual intercourse itself “was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema” (65). Divorce is not allowed, though childless couples are allowed to separate. Contact with prostitutes, though not encouraged, is tolerated as long as the sex is “furtive and joyless.” The “unforgiveable crime” is promiscuity between Party members. In 1973 Smith married Katherine, an attractive woman with “splendid movements.” Frigidly loyal to Big Brother, she reluctantly engaged in intercourse as her “duty to the Party.” Her coldness and robotic dedication to the Party led Smith to fantasize about murdering her. They separated after 15 months. In the years since his only sexual experiences have been furtive joyless encounters with low-class prostitutes. In trying to make sense of life in Oceania, Smith writes in his diary, “I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY” (80). Smith returns to the shabby junk shop where he purchased the notebook he uses for his diary. Mr. Charrington, the white-haired proprietor, sells Winston a glass paperweight containing a bit of coral. The century-old artifact is a link to the past, a relic that cannot be altered by the Party. Charrington leads Smith upstairs to an unused bedroom to show him a painting. Winston is shocked that the room has no telescreen. Smith leaves the shop, determined to return to buy “further scraps of beautiful rubbish” from the past (100). On the street Smith is taken aback by the sight of the girl from the Fiction Department. Fearing she might be a spy tailing him, he considers killing her, then hurries home. One day while walking to the lavatory in the Ministry of Truth, he passes the darkhaired girl in the corridor. She slips and when he comes to her aid, she hands him a crumpled piece of paper. In his cubicle he unfolds the paper to read the message “I love you.” Given the ever-present telescreens and cameras, Smith and the girl, named Julia, have to carefully arrange an outing to meet unobserved. They rendezvous in the countryside and have sex. When Julia tells Winston she has done this scores of times with Party members, Smith is impressed and excited. Sex, he realizes, “was the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (126). He tells her that he loves her more because of her promiscuity. Sex, especially promiscuous sex, is a political act. They meet again for sex in other hideouts. As cover, Julia adopts the pose of a selfdenying loyalist and urges Smith to volunteer for part-time munitions work. Smith rents the spare bedroom above Charrington’s shop for a trysting place, and the pair meets regularly in June. Both realize that they cannot elude detection for long and declare themselves extinct, dead. Their union emboldens their anti-government sentiments. After O’Brien reaches out to Winston, Smith and Julia visit his apartment. They broach the subject of a conspiracy against the Party, and O’Brien reveals he is a member of Goldstein’s secret movement called the Brotherhood. Because of the Thought Police, the Brotherhood is not an organization, he explains. Collective action is impossible, so rebels must act individually or in small groups. It is inevitable that they will be captured or killed. Under interrogation, they will only be able to betray a handful of comrades. They will never know, he tells them, whether the Brotherhood has a membership of hundreds or millions. He asks Winston and Julia if they are willing to give their lives, commit murder, serve a foreign power, spread venereal disease, distribute narcotics, even throw acid in a child’s face to defeat Big Brother. O’Brien does not promise they will prevail but perhaps only be able to

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Nineteen “extend the area of sanity little by little” and “spread our knowledge” to prepare future generations. Winston and Julia agree to join the Brotherhood, and Smith reveals the location of their junk shop hideout. O’Brien promises to send Winston a copy of the book, a secret document prepared by Emmanuel Goldstein. Reading Goldstein’s book, Winston, who understood the “how,” now learns the “why” of the society he lives in. Goldstein’s book, officially titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, explains that the three superstates are mirror images of each other, dictatorships that maintain power by keeping their empires at perpetual war. The purpose of war is no longer to conquer territory for resources or defeat an ideological adversary but to “use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living” (188). Those in power realized that with industrial production the standard of living could rise so that millions would become literate and independent, threatening the rulership of the hierarchy. The elite could only stay in power by keeping the masses poor, ignorant, and hungry. By the 1980s “the essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor” by having people toil to make weapons that are consumed or declared obsolete. The superstates possess nuclear weapons but after a rash of atomic attacks in the 1950s, decided their use threatened the organization of the very societies they wanted to control. Although no formal agreement was signed, the superstates refrain from using nuclear bombs, so that London in 1984 is randomly hit with rockets reminiscent of Hitler’s V2’s launched 40 years before. Waiting for orders from O’Brien, Winston studies the book and enjoys making love to Julia unaware that the room has a secret telescreen and that they have fallen for a trap. They are arrested. The elderly Mr. Charrington turns out to be a 35-year-old agent of the Thought Police in disguise. Separated from Julia, Smith is taken to several places of incarnation, beaten and tortured into making a chain of confessions to crimes he never committed. When O’Brien enters his cell, Winston initially assumes the Inner Party member has been arrested but quickly learns that O’Brien is a Big Brother loyalist who merely posed as a conspirator to trap traitors. Although he has confessed, Winston Smith is kept alive for “treatment.” O’Brien, his tormentor, protector, inquisitor, and friend, tells Smith that he has a defective memory but that he can be cured. What follows is a debate, built on observations Orwell made in his essays about language, literature, nationalism, and totalitarianism. O’Brien, who calls himself one of “the priests of power,” represents totalitarianism. Smith represents the free man who believes in individuality, objective science, facts, and personal freedom. O’Brien displays a copy of a newspaper photograph Smith had come across 11 years before. Three disgraced Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford are shown attending a Party function in New York on a day when they were supposedly in Eurasia plotting against Big Brother. The photograph proved their confessions were false. Smith had destroyed the photograph in 1973 but retained it in his memory. O’Brien places his copy in the memory hole where it vanishes in a flash of flame, telling Smith that it no longer exists. When Smith insists that “it exists in memory,” O’Brien demurs, stating, “I do not remember it.” He asks Smith to repeat the party slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” then asks if the past has objective or “real existence.”

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Nineteen Smith insists that objective reality exists, and the past exists in books, records, and human memory. O’Brien maintains that the past is what the Party says it is, that Smith has refused to accept this truth and remains “a lunatic, a minority of one.” Reality, O’Brien states, exists only in the mind of the Party. Smith must “humble” himself and submit to the Party to become sane and be cured of his delusion. Smith is attached to a torture device that inflicts pain at the twist of a dial. O’Brien holds up four fingers and asks Smith how many fingers would he see if the Party says it was five. When Smith answers “four,” O’Brien turns the dial, and Winston suffers an agonizing jolt of pain. Again and again, O’Brien asks how many fingers Smith sees. Winston clings to objective truth, arguing that “two and two are four.” But O’Brien counters, stating, “Sometimes they are five” (250). Asked why people are brought to this place, Smith suggests “to make them confess” and “to punish them.” O’Brien sternly states “No!,” explaining the process is designed to make people “sane” by erasing their individuality and making them subservient to the Party. He tells Smith, “You are a flaw in the pattern … a stain that must be wiped out” but not before he willingly submits to the Party. “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty,” O’Brien tells Smith, “and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” The Party will eventually execute Smith but not until he is converted and corrected. The Party must not allow martyrs or even an errant thought to remain in the mind of a single individual about to be executed. Victims of the Russian purges went to their executions as rebels in their own minds. The Party of Big Brother cannot accept this. “We make the brain perfect before we blow it out,” O’Brien explains. O’Brien informs Winston there will be three stages to his “reintegration”—learning, understanding, and acceptance. O’Brien reveals that he helped write the book, which he dismisses as nonsense. The Party, he tells Smith, is dedicated to power as an end, not a means. “The object of power is power,” he argues. The Party offers people immortality through total submission so that they become the Party, making them “all-powerful and immortal.” The Party controls all reality because reality is in the mind. “We make the laws of nature,” O’Brien tells Smith, claiming that he could float like a soap bubble if he wanted to. Smith argues for an objective reality outside control of the Party, pointing to ancient fossils and stars millions of light years away. O’Brien dismisses Smith’s objections, insisting that the planet is as only as old as man. Fossils, he tells Winston, were invented by 19thcentury biologists, and the stars are merely “bits of fire a few kilometers away” that the Party could obliterate. Denying Galileo, O’Brien insists that the earth is the center of the universe, circled by the sun and moon. O’Brien explains to Smith that the world the Party is creating is unlike the “stupid hedonistic Utopias” of the past promising progress and love. Big Brother’s Party is founded on hatred and destruction. The only emotions the Party will permit are “fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement” (267). Family loyalty, the love between man and woman, the link between parent and children will be destroyed. Children will soon be taken from their mothers at birth “like eggs from a hen.” Procreation will become an annual duty devoid of pleasure, affection, love, or intimacy. “We will abolish the orgasm,” O’Brien proclaims, ending his lecture with a chilling image, “If you want a picture of the future,” he tells Smith, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” (267). Smith struggles to object, maintaining such a system cannot survive. Lacking vitality,

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Nineteen it “will commit suicide,” defeated by life, by “the spirit of Man.” Weakened by torture, Smith asserts that he is a man, an individual. O’Brien calls Smith “the last man.” He orders Smith to strip naked and stand before a mirror, mocking his starved and tortured body, at one point pulling a rotted tooth from his mouth and tossing across the room. O’Brien insists he has been beaten and broken. Asked if he has escaped a single degradation, Smith answers that he has not betrayed Julia. O’Brien acknowledges Smith’s point. Winston is given better food, new clothing, and medical treatment. He begins to accept the doctrine of the Party, writing “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE.” But O’Brien is not satisfied with Smith’s progress, stating that he has only intellectually accepted Big Brother. Asked what he feels about Big Brother, Smith expresses hatred and anger toward the immortal leader of the Party. O’Brien states that Smith must come to love Big Brother. To achieve the final step in the reformation process, Winston is sent to Room 101, which contains “the worst thing in the world.” For some it might be death by fire or drowning, O’Brien explains, but in Winston’s case it is his childhood fear of rats. A cage-like mask is secured around Smith’s head. A screen separates his face from a cage of hungry rats. When O’Brien lifts the screen, he tells Smith, the rats will leap at his face to attack his eyes or gnaw through his cheeks to devour his tongue. Faced with his ultimate dread with no way of escape except by placing someone in his place, Winston betrays his last link to humanity, crying out, “Do it to Julia!” (286). Smith is released and given a meaningless job in the Ministry of Truth working on a sub-committee of a sub-committee drafting on an interim report regarding minor problems compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. One day he runs into Julia on the street. Both lovers admit they betrayed each other. The erotic spark that united them has been extinguished. When Smith places his arm around her, he feels nothing and Julia looks at Winston with “dislike.” In the final scene Smith sits drinking gin in the Chestnut Tree Café, broken but reformed, longing for the eventual bullet that will enter his brain: Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother [298].

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in Britain and the United States in June 1949 and received instant praise. The novel initially sold 50,000 copies in Britain and 170,000 in the United States. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, selling an additional 190,000 copies. An abridged version appeared in Readers Digest. Life magazine featured the book in “Orwell’s Strange World of 1984,” an eight-page article illustrated by Abner Dean. According to the New York Times Book Review the novel garnered 60 book reviews by July, 90 percent of which were favorable. Lionel Trilling called the book “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating.” Writing in Partisan Review, Philip Rahv saw the novel as a powerful political lesson: This novel is the best antidote to the totalitarian disease that any writer has so far produced. Everyone should read it; and I recommend it particularly to those liberals who still cannot get over the political superstition that while absolute power is bad when exercised by the Right, it is in its very nature good and a boon to humanity once the Left, that is to say “our own people,” takes hold of it.

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Nineteen Many on the far Left, however, dismissed the novel as cynical and hateful. Samuel Sillin, who reviewed the novel for the Communist journal Masses and Mainstream, denounced the book for having received “an ovation in the capitalist press.” “Indeed the response is far more significant than the book itself; it demonstrates that Orwell’s sickness is epidemic,” he proclaimed. Noting that “Orwell’s novel coincides perfectly with the propaganda of the National Association of Manufacturers,” Sillin denounced Orwell personally: The author of this cynical rot is quite a hero himself. He served for five years in the Indian Imperial Police, an excellent training center for dealing with the “proles.” He was later associated with the Trotskyites in Spain, serving in the P.O.U.M. and he freely concedes that when this organization of treason to the Spanish Republic was “accused of profascist activities I defended them to the best of my ability.” During World War II he busied himself with defamation of the Soviet Union.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has never gone out of print and has been translated into 60 languages, inspiring a number of television, film, and stage versions. The novel has been widely taught in schools, sometimes making the list of banned books, usually because of its sexual content. The year 1984 itself became a benchmark political and cultural term, inspiring Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik to title his 1970 book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Sales of Orwell’s last novel have spiked since its release depending on events. Throughout the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s Nineteen Eighty-Four was favored by conservatives and promoted as an anti–Soviet tract. Later, some on the Left embraced the book as an attack on authoritarian and militaristic regimes. In 1982 Orwell’s novel topped German best seller lists. In the early months of 1984 Orwell received worldwide publicity, boosting sales of the novel to 50,000 copies a day. Sales spiked following Edward Snowden’s revelations about CIA spying operations in 2013 and again after the election of Donald Trump. In January 2017 the New York Times reported that sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four rose 20 percent in Britain and Australia.

• Further Reading Agathocleous, Tanya. George Orwell: Battling Big Brother. Oxford University Press, 2000. Beauchamp, George. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s WE and George Orwell’s 1984.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. V, no. 4, Dec. 1973, pp. 285–301. Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. Tauris, 2016. Bryfonski, Dedria. The Abuse of Power in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Greenhaven, 2010. Campbell, Beatrix. “Orwell—Paterfamilias or Big Brother?” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 126–138. Carpentier, Martha C. “The ‘Dark Power of Destiny’ in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Mosaic, vol. 47, no. 1, Mar. 2014. Questia. Carr, Craig L. Orwell, Politics, and Power. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012. Carter, Michael. George Orwell and the Problem and Authentic Existence. London, 1985. Connelly, Mark. The Diminished Self: Orwell and the Loss of Freedom. Duquesne University Press, 1987. Croft, Andy. “Worlds Without End Foisted on the Future—Some Antecedents of Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 183– 216. Deutscher, Isaac. “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 119–132. Easthope, Antony. “Fact and Fantasy in Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 263–285. Gleason, Abbott and Jack Goldsmith. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Princeton University Press, 2005.

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Nineteen Gleckner, Robert P. “1984 or 1948.” College English, XVIII, Nov. 1956, pp. 95–99. Glicksberg, Charles Irving. “George Orwell and Morality of Politics.” The Literature of Commitment, ed. Charles Irving Glicksberg. Bucknell University Press, 1976, pp. 289–318. Horan, Thomas. “Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Extrapolation, no. 2, 2007, p. 314. Jensen, Ejner J. ed. The Future of Nineteen Eighty-Four. University of Michigan Press, 1984. Kateb, George. “The Road to 1984.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of 1984, ed. Samuel Hynes. PrenticeHall, 1971, pp. 73-87. Kroes, Rob, ed. Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Apocalyptic Imagination in America. Free University, 1984. Lewis, Peter. Orwell: The Road to 1984. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Lewis, Wyndham. “Orwell, or Two and Two Make Four.” The Writer and the Absolute. Methuen, 1952, pp. 153–193. Lief, Ruth Ann. Homage to Oceania. Ohio State University Press, 1969. McNamara, James. “Waiting for 1984: On Orwell and Evil.” Encounter, vol. 59, Dec. 1982, pp. 43–48. “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Reader’s Digest. Sept. 1949, pp. 129–157. Pritchett, V. S. “1984.” Twentieth Century, pp. 20–24. Rahv, Philip. “The Unfuture of Utopia.” Partisan Review, XVI, July 1949, pp. 743–749. Rai, Alok. Orwell and the Politics of Despair. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Reilly, Patrick. Nineteen Eighty-Four: Past, Present, and Future. Twayne, 1989. Rosenfeld, Isaac. “Decency and Death.” Partisan Review, May 1950, pp. 514–518. Sandison, Alan. George Orwell: After 1984. Macmillan, 1986. Saunders, Loraine. The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell: The Novels from Burmese Days to Nineteen EightyFour. Ashgate, 2008. Sillen, Samuel. “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Masses and Mainstream, Aug. 1949, pp. 79–81. Slater, Ian. Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2003. Small, Christopher. The Road to Miniluv: George Orwell, the State, and God. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976. Steinhoff, William. George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. University of Michigan Press, 1976. “The Strange World of 1984.” Life, 4 July 1949, pp. 78–85. Taylor, D.J. “Defeat into Victory: Orwell’s Novels of the 1930s Prefigure the Horror of Nineteen Eighty-Four.” New Statesman, 28 May 2009. West, W. J. The Larger Evils: Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Truth Behind the Satire. Canongate, 1994. “Where the Rainbow Ends.” Time, 20 June 1949, pp. 91–96. White, Richard. “George Orwell: Socialism and Utopia.” Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Winter, 2008. Questia. Wilson, John Howard. “Brideshead Revisited in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Evelyn Waugh’s Influence on George Orwell.” Papers on Language & Literature, Winter 2011, vol. 47, no. 1. Questia. Young, John Wesley. Totalitarian Language: Orwell’s Newspeak and its Nazi and Communist Antecedents. University Press of Virginia, 1991. Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period from Gorki to Pasternak, ed. Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Vintage, 1960, pp. 168–353. Zehr, David Morgan. “Orwell and the Proles: Revolutionary or Middle Class Voyeur?” Centennial Review, vol. 27, Winter 1983, pp. 30–40. Zennure, Koseman. “Psychoanalytical Outlook for Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 15, no. 3, 2016, pp. 867–880. Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. Yale University Press, 1974. _____. “Orwell: Socialism vs. Pessimism.” New Review, vol. 1, no 3, June 1974, pp. 5–17.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (motion pictures) William Templeton wrote a screenplay loosely based on the novel for a film released by Columbia Pictures in 1956. Shot in Britain, the movie was directed by Michael Anderson. The cast included Edmund O’Brien (Winston Smith), Michael Redgrave (O’Connor), and Jan Sterling (Julia). In 1984 MGM released Michael Radford’s version, using the tagline “The year of the movie. The movie of the year.” Filmed in London, the production starred John Hurt (Winston Smith), Richard Burton (O’Brien), and Suzanna Hamilton (Julia).

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (opera, 2005) The American conductor and composer Lorin Maazel wrote an operatic version of Orwell’s novel with a libretto by J.D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan. The production, directed by Robert Lepage, premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in May 2005. The cast included Simon Keenlyside (Winston), Nancy Gustafson (Julia), and Richard Margison (O’Brien). The production was filmed and broadcast in 2006 as a TV movie.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (play) Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan adapted Nineteen Eighty-Four for a dramatic play first produced at the Almeida Theatre in London. Later, production moved to the West End. The play had its Broadway premiere in 2017. Starring Tom Sturridge (Winston Smith), Reed Birney (O’Brien), and Olivia Wilde (Julia), the show ran for 125 performances.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (television) An hour-long dramatization of Nineteen Eighty-Four was produced as an episode for the series Studio One in Hollywood in 1953. Directed by Paul Nickell and written by William Templeton, the teleplay starred Eddie Albert (Winston Smith), Lorne Greene (O’Brien), and Norma Crane (Julia). A two-hour dramatization directed by Rudolph Cartier and written by Nigel Kneal was aired on BBC Sunday-Night Theatre in December 1954. The cast included Peter Cushing (Winston Smith), André Morell (O’Brien), Donald Pleasance (Syme), and Yvonne Mitchell (Julia). The Duke of Edinburgh stated that he and Queen Elizabeth enjoyed the program. Four days later the live repeat broadcast received one of the largest viewing audiences since the Queen’s coronation. Complaints about the program prompted questions in the House of Commons. In 1965 Nigel Kneal’s script was used for an episode of the long-running BBC program Theatre 625. Directed by Christopher Morahan, the cast included David Buck (Winston Smith), Joseph O’Conor (O’Brien), and Jane Merrow (Julia). Three years later the program was broadcast in the United States on NET Playhouse. In 1985 Four Episodes from 1984 was premiered and released on Blue-ray. Written and directed by Marshall Peterson, the film consists of eight scenes from the novel. Nineteen EightyFour also inspired the 1970 six-part London Weekend TV mini-series Big Brother which examined if society in the 1970s was heading toward the dystopian world Orwell depicted.

Nobby (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Nobby, 26, is one of the trio of young cockneys who discover Dorothy Hare wandering the Kent Road in London. Disoriented by a week-long spell of amnesia, Dorothy befriends Nobby. After surviving a scruffy childhood in Deptford, Nobby served in the army for six months before being invalided out because of an eye injury. His 18-year-old wife died in childbirth when he was 20. He sold newspapers, thieved, and robbed a factory of £125, which he spent in three weeks. For his crime, he was sent to a youth correctional center. Along with his friends Charlie and Flo, Nobby encourages Dorothy, who tells them her name is Ellen, to join them hop picking. With no memory of her former life, Dorothy dumbly accepts his offer and becomes the fourth member of Nobby’s crew. Nobby makes

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Notes sexual advances toward Dorothy but goodheartedly accepts her rejection. Resourceful and optimistic, much like the Boris character Orwell described in Down and Out in Paris and London, Nobby guides Dorothy in the ways of tramping, begging, and hop picking. Arrested for theft by the police, he is taken from the hop fields never to be seen by Dorothy again. The character of Nobby is based on a tramp named Ginger that Orwell met in the summer of 1931 and described in “Hop-Picking.” Like Nobby, Ginger was a Borstal boy who was invalided out of the army with an eye injury. He married at 18, but his wife died early, and Ginger engaged in petty crime, mostly burglaries.

“Notes on Nationalism” (essay, 1945) Orwell’s lengthy essay on nationalism outlines various ideologies based on identity politics. He distinguished “patriotism” from “nationalism.” Patriotism, he stated, is “a devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” which people prefer but have no wish “to force on other people.” Nationalism, in contrast, assumes humans “can be classified like insects” and “confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’” Central to nationalism, in Orwell’s definition, is “the desire for power.” Nationalism is not limited to a devotion to a country but a cause or movement such as Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism, and Pacifism. The British Communist embraces the Soviet Union, serving it as his or her adopted country. In contrast, Trotskyism is wholly negative, denouncing the Soviet Union without pledging allegiance to any other nation state. Nationalism, Orwell asserted, is marked by principal characteristics: OBSESSION. The nationalist focuses on the supremacy of his or her unit or identity, reacting to the “smallest slur” or any “implied praise of a rival.” The nationalist insists his or her nation or movement is superior to others in size, power, beauty, or art. The nationalist obsesses about images, symbols, and nomenclature. INSTABILITY. Nationalists can transfer loyalty to other nations or movements. Many nationalist leaders were not even born in the nations they are pledged to. Hitler was Austrian, Stalin was Georgian, Napoleon was Corsican, DeValera was half-Spanish and American-born. INDIFFERENCE TO REALITY. Nationalists are contradictory and irrational. The British Tory who supports the right of self-determination in Eastern Europe opposes it in India. Liberals are shocked and outraged by the hanging of Russians by the Germans but warmly approve the hanging of Germans by Russians. Nationalists alter history and deny or distort current events to advance their cause.

Orwell further divided nationalism into positive, transferred, and negative movements. Positive nationalists such as Neo-Toryists, Celtic Nationalists, and Zionists refuse to admit their movement is in decline, assert their superiority over occupiers, or wish to create a nation state. Transferred nationalists include Communists, Political Catholics, and adherents of Colour Feeling, Class Feeling, and Pacifism who embrace a belief or loyalty beyond national borders such such an ideology, religion, or racial identity. Negative nationalists, such as Anglophobes, Anti-semites, and Trotskyists, are focused on defeating or protesting something seen as evil, whether it be British rule, the Jews, or Stalin's regime. The main observable feature of the nationalist mindset is the denial of truths that conflict with their ideological positions. Orwell listed five illustrative examples: British Tories who refuse to admit Britain is losing its power and prestige. Communists who cannot accept the fact that without aid from Britain and America Stalin would have lost the war. Irish Nation-

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O’Brien alists who pretend that Ireland can remain free without British protection. Trotskyists who cannot acknowledge that Stalin is supported by the Russian masses. Pacifists who can “abjure” violence only because others are engaging in violence on their behalf.

Orwell argued that nationalist feelings are endemic and may be not able to be eradicated but can be recognized to “prevent them from contaminating your mental processes” (CEJL III, p. 380).

O’Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) A large, bulky man with “a coarse, humorous, brutal face,” O’Brien is an Inner Party member whose position is so remote and lofty that Winston Smith has little idea of his responsibilities. Winston has only seen him a dozen times in as many years but has always been intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s “urbane manner and his prizefighter’s physique” (11). More importantly, Winston senses or hopes that O’Brien was not perfectly “orthodox,” and wonders what O’Brien would say if he could speak with him alone out of range of a telescreen. Smith recalls a dream he had some seven years before. In the dream he hears O’Brien’s voice telling him, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness” (25). One day O’Brien stops Smith in an office corridor to compliment him on his work. On the pretext of presenting him with the latest Newspeak dictionary (see Newspeak), O’Brien invites him to his home. Arriving with his lover Julia, Smith is astonished by the modest luxury of O’Brien’s flat and his ability to switch off his telescreen. Smith asks about the existence of the mysterious Brotherhood, and O’Brien confirms that the conspiratorial movement is genuine and not a ploy of the Thought Police. O’Brien serves them wine, something Winston has never tasted, and toasts their leader Emmanuel Goldstein (see Emmanuel Goldstein). Because of the ruthlessness and thoroughness of the Thought Police, organized opposition to the Party is impossible. The Brotherhood is not an underground party or organization, O’Brien explains, but a loose federation of rebels who act individually. If arrested and interrogated, a member of the Brotherhood can only reveal a handful of names. He tells Smith he will never know whether the Brotherhood consists of a few hundred renegades or millions. O’Brien asks Winston and Julia if they are willing to lose their lives for their cause, and if they are willing to murder, spread venereal diseases, distribute drugs, even throw acid in a child’s face if needed. Smith readily agrees, but Julia objects when O’Brien asks if they are willing to separate and never see each other again. As Brotherhood rebels, they will be subject to arrest and torture and will endure loneliness and isolation. Smith and Julia return to their hideout waiting for orders from O’Brien. But the Inner Party leader turns out to be a Big Brother loyalist posing as a member of the Brotherhood to lure dissidents into revealing themselves. After Winston and Julia are arrested, Smith encounters O’Brien in the Ministry of Love. After Smith is beaten and tortured into making a series of confessions to imaginary crimes, he encounters O’Brien who was “the tormentor … the protector … the inquisitor … the friend” who assures him that he is in his “keeping.” O’Brien tells Smith he has been watching over him for seven years. Although he has confessed, Smith will not be executed, O’Brien explains, until he is rehabilitated. The Party will not allow martyrs, rebels who go to the firing squad with disloyal

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Oceania thoughts in their heads. “We make the brain perfect before we blow it out,” O’Brien announces, stating that there will be three phases of Smith’s treatment: learning, understanding, and acceptance. O’Brien is the spokesman of absolute totalitarianism that surpasses that of the Nazis and Communists, regimes that promised a Utopia for its followers. The Party of Big Brother, O’Brien tells Winston, is built solely on power and terror. Its ideology has theological principles, promising immortality to its followers: Alone—free—the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is allpowerful and immortal [264].

The Party, like God, controls all matter and time. It will reshape human experience so that the individual will have no loyalty except to the Party. “In the future,” he tells Smith, “there will be no wives and no friends” (267). Children will be taken from their parents “like eggs from a hen,” he predicts, and procreation reduced to a joyless annual obligation. If the lifespan of humans were altered so that people were senile by 30, it would not matter. The Party is immortal. Humans are simply cells in its organism. In explaining the Party to Winston Smith, O’Brien leaves him with an allegorical image. “If you want a picture of the future,” he tells Smith, the last man, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” (267).

Oceania, Eastasia, Eurasia (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) In Nineteen Eighty-Four the world is divided into three “superstates” that emerged following the Second World War. Living in London, Winston Smith is a citizen of Oceania, which consists of North and South America, Australia, parts of southern Africa, and the British Isles. Britain is now called Airstrip One, one of three provinces in Oceania. Eastasia is comprised of China, Japan, and parts of Mongolia, Tibet, and Manchuria. Eurasia contains Russia and the entire European continent, running “from Portugal to the Bering Strait.” All three states are dictatorships founded on a ruling ideology. In Oceania the Party is guided by the principles of INGSOC or English Socialism. Eurasia follows NeoBolshevism, and Eastasia adheres to a dogma known as Death-worship. The beliefs may differ, but their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unquestioned leadership of a totalitarian elite. The three superstates have been at war since 1960, shifting alliances, so that in the year 1984 Oceania, then at war with Eastasia, suddenly reverses policies and goes to war against Eurasia. The purpose of these wars is not victory but power. By gearing their economies to manufacturing weapons rather than consumer goods, the superstates can impoverish their populations to keep them subservient and use the threat of annihilation by the enemy to suppress personal freedom.

Old Major (Animal Farm, 1945) Old Major is the 12-year-old “majestic-looking” boar who serves as a Karl Marx/Lenin figure to the animals of Manor Farm. Appearing “wise and benevolent,” he is widely

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Outer respected by the other animals. Claiming to have had a strange dream, he requests all the animals to meet with him in the barn the following night. After the farmer Mr. Jones goes to sleep, they gather to listen to Old Major. Addressing his fellow animals as “comrade,” Old Major glumly summarizes the fate of animals in England. No animal in England is free; their lives are marked by “misery and slavery.” The cause of their suffering is Man. Man, who consumes without producing, enslaves, starves, and slaughters animals. Once the tyrant Man is eliminated, there will be food and freedom, and all animals will be able to enjoy a life of comfort and abundance. He predicts there will eventually be a Rebellion when animals rise up against their human masters. “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy,” he tells them, “Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.” In fighting Man, Old Major warns that they must not adopt his vices, declaring that no animal should live in a house, sleep in a bed, wear clothing, consume alcohol, smoke, touch money, or engage in trade (10). To inspire the animals with his revolutionary vision he sings “Beasts of England” (see “Beasts of England”), a song he states came to him in his dream. Old Major dies three days later, never living to see the Rebellion he envisioned. Although he never named his philosophy, the two younger boars Napoleon and Snowball, who assume leadership after his death, decide to call their ideology Animalism (see Animalism). Like Lenin, Old Major’s remains are placed on display. His skull is disinterred and set atop a stump next to the flagpole, and the animals are “required to file past the skull in reverent manner” (49). At the end of the novel, when Napoleon celebrates making peace with the human farmers, he announces that the “very strange custom” of marching past a boar’s skull has been suspended and that the skull has been reburied, erasing any memory of Old Major and his vision.

Oldspeak see Newspeak (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) George Orwell (pseudonym) Eric Blair requested that his publisher Victor Gollancz use a pseudonym for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, stating that he was not proud of his work. Blair sent him a list of names that included Kenneth Miles, H. Lewis Allways, George Orwell, and the name he used when tramping, P.S. Burton. Blair noted that he preferred George Orwell, which consisted of a standard British Christian name “George” and “Orwell,” the name of an English River. Although Blair would be known as George Orwell to his readers and new acquaintances, he continued to be called Eric by long term friends and colleagues, answering to both names depending on who addressed him. Blair did not exclusively use his new pen name, signing reviews and poems appearing in Adelphi as Eric Blair or E.A.B. Orwell never officially changed his name, using Eric Blair to sign checks, contracts, leases, and legal documents.

The Outer Party (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The unnamed Party ruling Oceania in 1984 has two levels. Those members just below the dictator Big Brother belong to the Inner Party (see Inner Party) and enjoy a higher

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Ownlife standard of living and greater privileges than those of the Outer Party. The Outer Party, roughly 13 percent of the population according to estimates (see the book), consists of technocrats like Winston Smith, skilled workers, professionals, and managers. With higher levels of education and capable of independent thought, they are needed by the Party but are viewed as potential enemies. They live under constant surveillance, with telescreens monitoring their actions at home and at work. Subject to greater rationing and less pay, they do not enjoy the modest luxuries of the Inner Party.

Ownlife (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Ownlife is a term describing individual or eccentric behavior the Thought Police consider a threat to the Party and Big Brother. Taking solitary walks, reading, collecting unique items, or having a simple hobby is viewed as disloyal or questionable. Winston Smith feels nervous about frequenting a junk shop and hides his purchase of a 19th-century glass paperweight containing a bit of sea coral. Collecting artifacts is suspicious because it suggests someone is developing a personal sense of aesthetics and possibly an individual political sensibility. Ownlife would attract the attention of authorities. Winston Smith’s opening of a diary, though not illegal, would be punishable by death or decades of imprisonment.

Paddy (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933) Paddy was a 35-year-old Irish immigrant and war veteran Orwell befriended while tramping in London. Orwell describes Paddy as “a typical tramp” representative of the thousands roaming England. An unemployed metal worker, Paddy clings to his past by staying clean-shaven and wearing better clothes than most of the homeless men he associates with. Ashamed of being a tramp, he tries to dissociate himself from his peers. Two years of tramping led him, however, to develop tramp habits, forever scanning the pavement for the fallen penny or the salvageable cigarette butt. Orwell notes that Paddy is incredibly ignorant, once asking whether Napoleon lived before or after Jesus. Like Boris in Paris, Paddy serves as Orwell’s mentor, showing him ways to obtain free meals at churches and cheap places to sleep. Orwell admires Paddy’s rigid respect for the law, refusing to swipe an abandoned bottle of milk on a doorstep. He also credits Paddy for his generosity, often sharing his food with Orwell. At the end of the book Orwell states had he heard unreliable reports that Paddy had been killed in a traffic accident.

Tom Parsons (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Parsons lives next door to Winston Smith in Victory Mansions and works in the Ministry of Truth. At 35 he retains boyish attributes, writing clumsily and wearing short pants. He leads community hikes and is the treasurer of their block’s “house-to-house” fund, collecting money for Hate Week. He prods Winston into paying $2 so their apartment building will be bristling with flags. At lunch in the Ministry canteen Parsons tells Smith that his seven-year-old daughter spotted a suspicious-looking man while on a troop hike. Enlisting two friends, she led the girls into following the man for hours then had him arrested. Par-

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Pilkington sons’ daughter had noticed the man wore strange-looking shoes and must have been a foreigner, perhaps an enemy agent dropped by parachute. Later when Winston is arrested Parsons appears in his cell. Dressed in short pants, he admits he is guilty of thoughtcrime. Listening at the keyhole, his daughter heard him say “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Though worried about his fate, Parsons says he is glad he was caught “before it went any further.” He hopes he will only get five or ten years in a labor camp, not believing the Party would shoot him for “going off the rails just once.”

The Party (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) The unnamed single Party that rules Oceania follows the principles of INSOC, or English Socialism. Big Brother is the Party’s unquestioned and infallible leader, an embodiment of the Party itself, and possibly an invented persona. The Party’s philosophy is expressed in its three cardinal slogans emblazoned on ministry buildings and stamped on coins: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Unlike the Nazis in Germany or the Communists in Russia, the Party of Big Brother espouses no promise of a better life for its citizens, no promise of a stronger nation or an equal society. Under torture in the Ministry of Love, Winston Smith learns the motives of the Party from O’Brien: The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power…. Power is not a means, it is an end…. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power [265].

The Party promises its members not only power but immortality: Alone—free—the human being is doomed to die…. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal [264].

To utterly submit, a person has to erase any sense of individuality. Anyone who thinks for himself would be guilty of a number of crimes, including facecrime, thoughtcrime, and ownlife. For the Party to prevail it must control not only matter but thought. The Party operates on a basic maxim: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Reality, the past, is not external but a product of the Party. Doublethink allows the Party to believe that the Earth is only as old as mankind and that it is the center of the universe, that the stars are just a few kilometers away. The party controls all thought as well as all material. In developing Newspeak, the Party seeks to narrow language to prevent people from developing or expressing individual thoughts.

Mr. Pilkington (Animal Farm, 1945) Pilkington owns Foxwood, a neighboring farm to Animal Farm. An “easy-going gentleman farmer,” he spends most of his time hunting and fishing. His dislike of his other

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Pleasure human neighbor, a farmer named Frederick who owns Pinchfield, benefits Napoleon who seeks to play one human against his rival. In the final scene of the novel Pilkington toasts the pigs for operating a well-ordered farm, praising Napoleon because his animals “did more work and received less food than any animals in the county” (115). In accepting the toast, Napoleon announces that henceforth Animal Farm will be called by its rightful name Manor Farm. In playing cards with the pigs, both he and Napoleon simultaneously play an ace of spades, sparking the uproar that causes the animals to look in on the gathering, unable to distinguish the men from the pigs.

Pinchfield (Animal Farm, 1945) see Mr. Frederick “Pleasure Spots” (essay, 1946) First published in the Tribune, “Pleasure Spots” critiques the planned “pleasure resorts” described in a “shiny magazine” article. Hoping to cash in on the postwar boom, an entrepreneur envisioned building a resort featuring illuminated dance floors, drive-in theaters, bars, restaurants, car parks, and car hops under a sliding roof that could be closed during inclement weather. Commenting on the visionary resort, Orwell enumerated its essential characteristics: people are never left alone, they rely on others for basic services, contact with nature is limited, light and temperature are artificially controlled, and there is constant music. Music, Orwell noted, is a “most important ingredient” because it serves to “prevent thought and conversation” and shut out natural sounds. In many English homes, he observed, the radio is never turned off and kept on during meals for a definite purpose: The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought [CEJL IV, p. 80].

Much of what passes for pleasure, in Orwell’s view, “is simply an effort to destroy consciousness.” Pleasure is often simple escapism. He ended his essay with an observation reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four where the Party of Big Brother blunts any rebellion from the vast number of “proles” by distracting them with lotteries, sexy films, trashy magazines, and pornography weakening the individual: The tendency of many modern inventions—in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane—is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals [CEJL IV, p. 81].

In Nineteen Eighty-Four the distracted proles are largely left to their own devices. “Like cattle turned loose on the plains of Argentina,” they are born, reproduce, age, and die without any political consciousness.

“Poetry and the Microphone” (essay, 1943) In this article Orwell recounted his experiences broadcasting literary radio programs to India for the BBC. Realizing that an Indian audience would he hostile to overt British

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Politics propaganda, the BBC decided to create a series of “highbrow” literary programs for a select, university-educated audience. The programs Orwell worked on usually consisted of poetry readings, often given by the poets themselves. Poems were introduced to explain cultural associations an English-speaking Asian audience might not be familiar with. Orwell noted how broadcasting poetry on the radio differed from a live stage reading. “In broadcasting,” he observed, “your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one” (CEJL II, p. 331). Millions might be listening, but the speaker does not see them and is not influenced by their reaction. Unlike the bored listener who might be reluctant to leave a crowded lecture hall in front of others, the bored radio listener can switch off the wireless. Orwell sensed that radio broadcasts could help popularize poetry, despite the public’s distaste for it, paraphrasing Arnold Bennett’s statement that the word “poetry” would disperse a crowd faster than a fire-hose. Radio is a cheaper medium than motion pictures. “At present the loudspeaker is the enemy of the creative writer,” but with the expansion of radio this could change: It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by which poetry could be brought back to the common people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain by being more of a spoken and less of a written thing. But I do urge that these possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often to this much-despised medium [CEJL II, p. 336].

“Politics and the English Language” (essay, 1946) One of Orwell’s most famous and widely anthologized essays, “Politics and the English Language” calls for a rejuvenation of the English language. Orwell rejected the idea that the decline in English is inevitable, viewing language an “instrument which we shape” rather than a “natural growth.” The decline in language is both a cause and an effect. English, he argued, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts” (CEJL IV, p. 128). Orwell asserted the decline is reversible if common errors are identified and avoided. After presenting five passages taken from essays, a pamphlet, and a letter to the editor, he noted that they share two qualities: stale imagery and imprecision. He then catalogued four errors to be avoided: Dying metaphors—worn out expressions “which have lost all evocative power,” such as stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, swan song, and hotbed. Operators or verbal false limbs—needless words that create a phrase where a single word would suffice, such as militate against for fight, give rise to for cause, or render inoperative for break. Pretentious diction—words like phenomenon, primary, and exploit used to “dress up simple statements or give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements,” adjectives like inevitable and inexorable used “to dignify the sordid processes of international politics,” foreign words or phrases like deus ex machina or Gleichschaltung used “to give an air of culture and elegance.” Meaningless words—words like romantic, plastic, and sentimental that “do not point to any discoverable object” and used for deception [CEJL IV, pp. 130–133].

Not only does bad language lead to bad thinking, it allows writers to defend the indefensible through avoidance, abstraction, and euphemism:

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Politics Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of borders. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements [CEJL IV, p. 136].

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” Orwell reasoned. Believing that the “decadence” of language is “curable,” Orwell ended his essay with five “elementary” rules for writers: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous [CEJL IV, p. 139].

“Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (essay, 1946) Orwell opened his essay about Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by summarizing the four parts of the book in which “humanity is attacked, or criticized” from several angles. “No one would deny,” Orwell asserted, “that Gulliver’s Travels is a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book” (CEJL IV, p. 207). Swift, in Orwell’s view, shows a “physical repulsion from humanity,” claiming that “he denounces injustice and oppression, but he gives no evidence of liking democracy.” Swift’s reactionary mindset is illustrated by his attitude toward science and lack of “intellectual curiosity.” His ideal beings, the Houyhnhnms, know nothing about boats or even wheels. They lack an alphabet and show no interest in learning anything about the world around them. In assessing Swift’s political stance, Orwell viewed him as an intransigent nihilist: We are right to think of Swift as a rebel and iconoclast, but except in certain secondary matters, such as his insistence that women should receive the same education as men, he cannot be labelled “left.” He is a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible…. But the most essential thing in Swift is his inability to believe that life … could be made worth living [CEJL IV, pp. 216–217].

Orwell compares Swift to Tolstoy, who also had a “sincere loathing” about sexuality that was “mixed up with a morbid fascination.” Orwell related his conflicted feelings about Swift, stating, “In a political and moral sense I am against him…. Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with least reserve” (CEJL IV, p. 220). Orwell first read Gulliver’s Travels at eight and over the years reread it half a dozen times, never growing tired of the book. If he had to select a half-

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Porteous dozen books to preserve over the destruction of all others, he would include Gulliver’s Travels. Considering his own mixed feelings about Swift, Orwell questioned the relationship between agreeing with a writer’s views and enjoying his work. Swift’s “world’s view is so peculiarly unacceptable” yet he remains a popular writer. Orwell saw Swift as “a diseased writer” but not wholly irrational. If his work was so eccentric and misanthropic he would never remain so universally popular. Swift, in Orwell’s view, focuses on one element of a human duality. “Part of our minds … believes that man is a noble animal and life worth living,” Orwell argued, “but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence” (CEJL IV, p. 222). The human body is both “beautiful” and “repulsive”; the sexual organs are objects of both “desire” and “loathing.” Orwell concluded that with “his endless harping on disease, dirt, and deformity, Swift is not actually inventing anything, he is merely leaving something out.” Swift endures in our minds because of his “terrible intensity of vision” that captures the dark side of human consciousness.

Porteous (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Old Porteous is a retired public-school master in his late 50s, a figure the protagonist George Bowling regards as a symbol of culture in his London suburb. Although Bowling surmises that Porteous regards him as a Philistine, he enjoys chatting with the bookish bachelor, savoring his quiet scholarly chambers as a respite from a household “infested by women and kids.” Disturbed by the rantings of an anti–Fascist speaker at a Left Book Club meeting and anxious about the prospect of a looming war, Bowling visits Porteous who represents wisdom and the past. His rooms are cluttered with books, ancient artifacts, and photographs of Greek statues. Bowling usually finds the scholarly atmosphere comforting because it suggests the notion that nothing of substance has “happened since the Goths sacked Rome” (182). Porteous does not own a radio, has never seen a movie, and avoids the daily papers. When Bowling asks Porteous what he thinks of Hitler, the old schoolmaster states he sees no reason to pay attention to “this German person” he dismisses as a “mere adventurer.” When Bowling argues that Hitler and Stalin cannot be compared to past tyrants who chopped off heads. “They’re after something quite new—,” he tells Porteous, “something that’s never been heard of before” (185). Responding with his favorite saying “there is nothing new under the sun,” the classical scholar pulls out a book and tells Bowling about a Greek tyrant who “might have been Hitler’s twin brother” (186). Porteous’ education and intelligence fail to soothe Bowling, who senses that the old life the school master represents “is being sawn off at the roots.” He believes a new world war is coming that will be followed by a grim “after-war” of “food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think” (186). Porteous begins to read a poem by Keats, leading Bowling to wonder what good poetry will have against machine guns. Listening to the retired teacher, Bowling is struck with the thought that Porteous is already dead, a ghost. Learned, decent people like him are doomed because they “can’t defend themselves against what’s coming” (188). Old Porteous cannot shake Bowling’s fear of “coloured shirts and the machine guns rattling” (189).

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Prevention

“The Prevention of Literature” (essay, 1946) Viewing literature as the product of the free individual, Orwell saw it under threat by two forces—apologists for totalitarianism and monopoly and bureaucracy. “The enemies of intellectual liberty,” he stated, “always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism” (CEJL IV, p. 61). Previously the freedom of intellect was under attack by the Catholic Church and Conservatives; in the postwar era Communists and their apologists were the main threat. When Germany collapsed it was revealed that many Russians had switched sides during the war and had fought for the Nazis. This was not reported because it would counter the narrative that “the USSR ‘had no quislings.’” Telling the truth is sometimes discouraged, he observed, because it will “play into the hands of ” of adversaries. In this essay Orwell outlined concepts about the revision of historical events that are precursors to Nineteen Eighty-Four in which the Party holds that “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”: 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…. 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 [CEJL IV, p. 64].

Orwell’s comments on the English Communist Party’s abrupt changes toward Germany also presage the shifts in allegiances between Oceania and Eastasia and Eurasia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A loyal Communist had to shift his thinking on cue: 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 so 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 [CEJL IV, p. 64].

Orwell’s speculation that books might be written by machinery the way Disney films are assembled in a “factory process” is spelled out in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Julia works in the Fiction Department operating a novel writing machine. Literature, Orwell asserted, demands freedom of thought. “Imagination, like certain wild animals,” he insisted, “will not breed in captivity” and any writer “who denies that fact … is, in effect, demanding his own destruction” (CEJL IV, p. 72).

“The Principles of Newspeak” see Newspeak (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Proles (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Eighty-five percent of Oceania’s population consists of “proles” or proletarians, working class men and women with little or no formal education. They are granted freedoms not

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Raffles allowed to Party members because they are viewed as being “beneath suspicion.” Proles are permitted to divorce and engage in promiscuous sex. Few have telescreens in their homes. The Thought Police send a few agents into their communities to spread disinformation and eliminate troublemakers, but by and large leave the proles to their own devices. Vast criminal undergrounds involving drugs and prostitution exist throughout London, which the Party tolerates because they are not political in nature. “Like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina,” the proles appear to follow an instinctual pattern. They are born, go to work at 12, marry at 20, become middle-aged at 30, and die at 60, never posing a threat to the Party. Their lives are focused on sports, child-rearing, squabbles with in-laws and neighbors, beer, and lotteries. The Party controls them by distraction, providing them with sensational newspapers, dreamy pop tunes, cheap novels, and even pornography to prevent them from developing a political consciousness. Early in the novel Winston Smith, convinced the Party cannot be destroyed from within, believes the only hope of toppling the dictatorship of Big Brother lies in the proles. Hoping to learn the truth about the past, he speaks with an 80-year-old prole in a pub, asking him about life before the Revolution. But the old man only recalls scattered trivia and mourns the fact that beer no longer comes in half-pints. The proles disappoint Smith, who now sees that only Party members have the ability to counter Big Brother.

“Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (essay, 1944) Originally published in Persuasion, “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” analyzes the nature of official language used to communicate to the British public during the Second World War. In Orwell’s opinion, the striking feature of government broadcasts and publications was “their remoteness from the average man” (CEJL III, p. 135). He pointed out that even after countless radio broadcasts and the distribution of leaflets and posters, many Britons remained confused about which siren signaled an Alert and which announced the All Clear. The abstract words favored by politicians, journalists, and academics were incomprehensible to the working class. Speeches and broadcasts, Orwell noted, are written in advance and tend to maintain the bookish syntax and vocabulary found in publications but not used in common conversation. The result is a form of oral English that does not sound like anything anyone speaks. The problem, Orwell maintained, was finding “some way of getting ordinary, slipshod, colloquial English on to paper” (CEJL III, p. 139). Orwell suggested recording speakers talking on a range of subjects along with group conversations. A stenographer could record “authentic specimens of spoken English” that could be used to form rules of spoken English to determine how they differ from the written language. An effective spoken English would better communicate with the public to ensure that Britain became an effective democracy.

“Raffles and Miss Blandish” (essay, 1944) Orwell documented the growing fascination with power worship by comparing two popular crime stories. Raffles was a fictional gentleman thief featured in 26 short stories, a novel, and two plays by E.W. Hornung published between 1898 and 1909. Raffles was an “inverted” Sherlock Holmes, an urbane gentleman who lived in the West End, played cricket,

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Ravelston moved in elite social circles, and robbed only the rich. The stories sometimes played on themes of the unfair distribution of wealth. Raffles never robs his hosts, never resorts to violence, and shows flashes of patriotism. Orwell pointed out that in one story he celebrates the Diamond Jubilee by mailing a gold cup he had stolen from the British Museum to Queen Victoria. In contrast, James Hadley Chase’s 1939 best seller No Orchids for Miss Blandish is a crime story full of sexual sadism, torture, rape, and perversion. The daughter of a millionaire, Miss Blandish is kidnapped and held for ransom by gangsters. Their original plan was to dispose of her once the money is paid. The mother of one of gangsters decides to keep her alive until her son, a sadist named Slim, can overcome his impotence by raping her. Slim beats Miss Blandish, who falls in love with her tormentor. After Slim is killed, she throws herself out a window. Orwell catalogued the number of murders, rapes, and sadistic scenes in the novel, noting that the overwhelming theme is “the pursuit of power” and that the sexual sadism “lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure” (CEJL III, p. 217). Orwell found it ironic that the novel achieved its best-seller status during the Blitz of 1940, when Britons faced death and destruction in reality. Soldiers in trenches, Orwell imagined, while away their time reading Yank gangster stories, the fictional machine guns of the Chicago mobsters more interesting than the real bullets “crackling a foot or two overhead.” Orwell presumed that the “explanation is that in real life one is usually a passive victim” but reading an adventure story “one can think of oneself as being at the centre of events” (CEJL III, p. 219). Orwell noted that although Chase was British, his novel was written “in the American language.” American pulp magazines featuring violence and pornography were popular in Britain and sold as “Yank Mags” for three pence. American gangster movies were far more brutal than their British counterparts and more popular with the public. Chase’s popularity has been explained because of his “realism,” which Orwell viewed as simply a euphemism for violence and sadism: The interconnection between sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate [CEJL III, p. 222].

Power worship, in Orwell’s view, has become a central feature of modern life: People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook [CEJL III, pp. 223–224].

Philip Ravelston (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Gordon Comstock’s best friend and occasional benefactor, Ravelston is an upper-class Socialist who edits the literary magazine Antichrist. He prints Gordon’s poems and uses his influence to arrange publication of Comstock’s volume Mice. With an after-tax income of £2,000, Ravelston is immensely wealthier than Comstock, who earns £2 a week. Ravelston is presented as a decent well-meaning but ultimately naïve and ineffectual intellectual. He makes it a point to wear casual clothing to rebel against capitalism, a pose Orwell points out that only a wealthy person could get away with. An advocate for Socialism and con-

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Reflections cerned about the poor, Ravelston nevertheless recoils at contact with working class people. A guilty liberal, Ravelston is described as eating a steak “with all the shameful joy of a dog with a stolen leg of mutton” (99). When he accompanies Gordon Comstock to a low-class brothel, he comforts himself with the realization that he could pay the girl without actually doing anything.

Richard Rees (1900–1970) Richard Rees was a baronet, diplomat, writer, editor, and artist. He worked in the British Embassy in Berlin and later became a lecturer at the Worker’s Educational Association in London. He became the editor of Adelphi in 1930, meeting George Orwell the same year. Although he had initial doubts about Orwell’s writing, he encouraged him to contribute to the magazine. He and Orwell later became good friends. Like Orwell, he served in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War driving ambulances. He may have been the model for Ravelston, the wealthy Socialist who edits the magazine Antichrist in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Rees was very close to Orwell during his last illness. Orwell named Rees and his wife Sonia his literary executors in his will.

“Reflections on Gandhi” (essay, 1949) Commenting on Gandhi’s autobiography The Story of My Experiments with the Truth, Orwell questioned to what extent Gandhi was driven by vanity and to what degree he compromised his values by entering politics. On first reading the autobiography, Orwell was put off by Gandhi’s homespun “medievalist programme” that was ill-suited for a “backward, starving overpopulated country.” The British in his early days made use of him. He was opposed to British rule, but his calls to prevent violence when a crisis occurred only served to maintain the status quo. Still, he was capable of “shaking empires by sheer spiritual power.” While many admire Gandhi’s saint-like abstinence from meat, tobacco, alcohol, and sex, Orwell found something troubling in his asceticism because it entails denying close relationships and “exclusive loves.” Gandhi considered close friendships dangerous and distracting. “To an ordinary human being,” Orwell argued, “love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others” (CEJL IV, p. 466). On three occasions Gandhi denied animal-based food to his wife and child prescribed by a doctor, risking their lives rather than compromising his principles. Rather than purity, Orwell saw the motivation of “non-attachment” to be a self-serving “desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work” (CEJL IV, p. 468). Commenting on Gandhi’s pacifism, Orwell believed that unlike many pacifists who pretend that in a war both sides are equally wrong, Gandhi did not avoid awkward questions. He knew, for instance, and was prepared to accept that his call for passive resistance to a potential Japanese invasion would lead to the deaths of millions. Asked about the plight of German Jews, Gandhi reportedly argued that they should commit mass suicide to arouse the world about Hitler’s violence. Orwell questioned whether Gandhi’s strategies would operate in a nation without a free press or freedom of assembly. “Is there a Gandhi in Russia

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Revenge at this moment?” he asked, wondering, “if there is, what is he accomplishing?” (CEJL IV, p. 469). Orwell restated his personal distaste for Gandhi’s philosophy and methods, feeling that his “basic aims were anti-human and reactionary; but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!” (CEJL IV, p. 470).

“Revenge Is Sour” (essay, 1945) Published in the Tribune six months following the end of the Second World War, “Revenge Is Sour” summarizes Orwell’s thoughts on war crimes trials. Whenever the subject of prosecuting the Nazis comes up, Orwell recalled an incident he saw in a POW camp in South Germany. An Austrian Jew interrogating prisoners for the American army led Orwell and another correspondent to a cage where SS prisoners were being held. Suddenly agitated, the Jewish officer savagely kicked a disabled man, forced him to stand at attention, and regaled Orwell with a list of his crimes against humanity. Observing the scruffy unshaven prisoner, Orwell saw the face of a mentally disturbed man who needed “psychological treatment,” not punishment. Although Orwell could not blame the Jewish officer for his attitude, the experience led Orwell to see revenge as “a childish day-dream.” Revenge, he asserted, is felt by the powerless. Once they regain their power, the desire for revenge “evaporates.” The prospect of kicking an SS officer would make people jump for joy in 1940, but with the war over, the act would be “merely pathetic and disgusting” (CEJL IV, p. 5). Reportedly, an Italian woman fired five shots into Mussolini’s corpse to avenge her five sons. Orwell questioned if the act gave her the satisfaction she anticipated. The desire to punish the Nazis led the British public to accept and support the “monstrous peace settlement” being “forced on Germany.” Britain did not protest the expulsion of Germans from East Prussia because there was a prevailing sense they deserved punishment. The average Briton, Orwell noted, probably could not name the crime Nazis like Goering or Ribbentrop should be charged with. “Only a minority of sadists,” he stated, take “a keen interest” in tracking down and punishing war criminals. The punishment of Nazi “monsters” becomes less appealing because once captured the pathetic prisoners “cease to be monsters” (CEJL IV, p. 5). Orwell sensed that war is simply an abstraction for many people. Orwell recalled a Belgian journalist he had met in Stuttgart. After broadcasting anti–Nazi propaganda for four years, the correspondent was shocked by the devastation of the city and averted his eyes when they passed a dead German soldier. This contact with the reality of war changed the Belgian, who gave coffee to Germans and prevented looting. Seeing the dead man, he told Orwell, had changed his feelings toward the Germans, humanizing them as fellow victims in a war that had killed millions.

Ringwood House Academy (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Asked by his cousin, Rector Charles Hare, to locate his missing daughter, Sir Thomas rescues the protagonist Dorothy Hare from homelessness and pays £5 to Mrs. Creevy to

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Road hire her as a teacher. Although she operates a school, Mrs. Creevy openly boasts about having never read a book. Interested only in collecting fees, she classifies her students as good, average, and bad payers. Her Ringwood House Academy is depicted as a 20th-century girls’ version of Wackford Squeer’s Dotheboys Hall in Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. She provides students only with a sham education, using 19th-century school books to copy from. Her curriculum consists mainly of penmanship and elementary arithmetic. To impress parents she teaches her girls to parrot a few French phrases. Dorothy soon discovers that her students know nothing about basic history and geography. They are unable to name the author of Hamlet, identify which ocean separates Europe from America, or even guess which century produced the automobile. She introduces innovative methods, which the girls enjoy. To teach them history Dorothy creates a timeline mural, having her students cut out and paste pictures of knights and locomotives in the appropriate century. In teaching Macbeth, however, she is asked about the line regarding Macduff being “untimely rip’d” from his “mother’s womb.” Dorothy’s evasive explanation of the word “womb” sends an “electric thrill of horror through fifteen decent Nonconformist homes,” leading a delegation of parents to confront Mrs. Creevy (249). After addressing the parents’ concerns, wholly agreeing with their objections, Mrs. Creevy takes Dorothy aside and lectures her about her philosophy of teaching: “What you’ve got to get hold of once and for all,” she began, “is that there’s only one thing that matters in a school, and that’s the fees. As for all this stuff about ‘developing the children’s minds,’ as you call it, it’s neither here nor there. It’s the fees I’m after, not developing the children’s minds…. The fees come first, and everything else comes afterwards … it’s the parents that pay the fees, and it’s the parents you’ve got to think about. Do what the parents want—that’s our rule here” [255].

Given that the parents live in “bookless homes” and have no idea that “decimals” have anything to do with mathematics, having them dictate educational standards is a case of “the blind leading the blind” (261). Orwell injects an editorial denouncing the quality of private schools, using Ringwood House Academy as an example: There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England. Second-rate, third-rate and fourthrate (Ringwood House was a specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to Government inspection. And though some of them are better than others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil in all of them; that is, that they have ultimately no purpose except to make money. Often, except that there is nothing illegal about them, they are started in exactly the same spirit as one would start a brothel or a bucket shop [259–260].

The Road to Wigan Pier (non-fiction, 1937) In January 1936 Victor Gollancz commissioned Orwell to write a book about economic conditions in northern England for the Left Book Club. Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris and London and his articles about hop picking and tramping were based on personal experiences and observations. In exploring the north of England, Orwell lived among the poor, inspected slums, and visited coal mines, but he also conducted research, checking local libraries to document housing conditions and collect statistics on industrial accidents.

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Road In Wigan, a town in Greater Manchester, Orwell stayed in a crowded boarding house with pensioners, unemployed miners, and commercial travelers. In February he toured working class neighborhoods in Liverpool and attended several political rallies. In late March he returned to London to write about his observations and experiences. Orwell divided his book titled The Road to Wigan Pier into two parts. The first section chronicled his observations of conditions faced by the poor in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The second consisted of a long essay expressing his views on politics, technology, and Socialism. Orwell opened his account with a graphic description of his rooming house operated by the Brookers. An unemployed miner, Mr. Brooker rented out beds in his home for as little as ten shillings a week and ran a shabby, beetle-ridden tripe shop as a sideline. The beds in Orwell’s room were jammed so tightly together, he had to sleep with his legs doubled up to avoid kicking his roommate in the back. The room was filthy, its chandelier so dusty it appeared to be covered in fur. With windows shut from the cold, the stench of the room reminded Orwell of an animal cage. The meals served by the Brookers “were uniformly disgusting,” generally consisting of cheese and crackers or bread and butter, often bearing Mr. Brooker’s black thumbprint. The residents included permanent lodgers who were retired or unemployed and a floating population of temporary boarders, including newspaper canvassers who spent ten hours a day pounding the streets to make their 20-sales-a-day quota to keep from being fired and entertainers performing in local pubs. Orwell decided to leave the Brookers after noticing a full chamber pot under the breakfast table. The Brookers, he argued, were filthy and depressing but worthy of notice because they represented an entire class of English society: It is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us [28].

On the train pulling out of town, Orwell glanced out the window and noticed something that deeply registered with him and gave him an insight into poverty. A young woman who was probably 25 but looked middle-aged “thanks to miscarriages and drudgery” was kneeling in the cold, poking a stick up a blocked kitchen wastepipe. As the train passed, she glanced up, and Orwell was struck by her face that bore “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen” (29). That look proved to him that the upper-class notion that the poor accept their situation because it is all they know was wholly wrong. Her face, Orwell claimed, expressed “not the ignorant suffering of an animal” because she “knew well enough what was happening to her” and fully appreciated “how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe” (29). The second chapter provides a graphic, deeply personal description of coal miners at work. What astonished Orwell about coal mining was the realization that miners, once lowered by elevator into a mine, often had to walk or crawl three miles through wet and dangerous tunnels to get to the coal face to start work. In describing this underground commute called “traveling,” Orwell used second person to put his readers in the miner’s

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Road place—“You start off, stooping slightly…. You press yourself against the wall…. You creep…. Your pace grows slower and slower … you try walking head down … and you bang your backbone” (34–36). After spending pages describing this painful, exhausting journey, Orwell pointed out that since “‘travelling’ is not technically work” but simply commuting to work, miners were not paid until they picked up a shovel at the coal face. A miner’s shift was seven and a half hours, but he might spend an additional three hours a day underground crawling to and from work. As with the Brookers, Orwell urged his readers to pay attention to the hellish conditions miners faced every day because everyone’s life in Britain depended on the coal they produced. “Practically everything we do,” he stated, “from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal” (40). The arts depended on coal. A war depended on coal. If there was a revolution “the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop” (40). Orwell concluded the chapter urging readers to share his admiration for the colliers who made civilization and the life they led possible: all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, digging their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel [42].

In the following chapter Orwell presented miner pay stubs as evidence that miners were not as well paid as the public thought. Before his trip north Orwell shared the widelyheld assumption that colliers made £3 a week. Studying actual pay slips, however, he learned that miners earned substantially less. Miners averaged £115 a year in 1934, not the £150 most people presumed. In addition, miners’ pay was subject to special deductions beyond the usual insurance fees and union dues. Miners were required to pay for sharpening tools and had to rent the lamps they needed to see underground. The danger of mining was evidenced by a curious stamp Orwell noticed on three pay stubs. When a miner was killed, coal companies deducted a shilling from his fellow workers to benefit his family. This deduction was called a “death stoppage.” What struck Orwell was the use of a “rubber stamp.” Workplace fatalities in the mines were so routine that companies made up rubber stamps. Every year, Orwell noted one miner in 900 was killed and one in six was injured, creating casualty lists equivalent to those of a small war. Orwell detailed the range of accidents miners faced, from collapsing roofs to explosions. Unlike the worker hurt in a factory or on a construction site, an injured miner could not be easily rushed to a hospital. His fellow colliers might have to drag him three miles through tunnels to reach the elevator to lift him to the surface. In addition to injuries, miners suffered from rheumatism, lung disease, and nystagmus, an eye disease that left many of them blind. Orwell met a blinded miner who was granted a pension but had to report to the coal company each week to receive his money, often forced to wait in the cold for hours to collect 14 shillings in compensation. In the following chapter Orwell recorded his inspections of housing conditions. In northern industrial towns, he stated, there were entire neighborhoods where not a single house had hot water or a lavatory. The majority of miners’ homes were 50 or 60 years old and constructed without modern plumbing. Some only contained a sink. Filthy miners bathed in tubs filled with water heated in pots on the stove. In Wigan 2,000 families lived

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Road in condemned houses allowed to remain standing. In this chapter Orwell reproduced his notes detailing the conditions of shabby two-room houses without bathrooms, noting that for many residents the nearest public lavatory was 50 yards away. Far worse were the conditions found in the “caravan” communities consisting of wagons and junked single-decker buses taken off their wheels and propped up with wooden beams. Without plumbing, caravan dwellers rigged up crude outhouses and walked 200 yards to collect water in buckets from a hydrant. After detailing the squalid slum homes, Orwell described the council houses rising to replace them. Although the new houses were larger and contained bathrooms, they were not popular with the poor, who could not afford to fully heat their units and complained about the costly commute from outlying neighborhoods to their places of work. Although these “smart-looking” houses were clean and decent, Orwell noted they had “an uncomfortable, almost prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly aware of it” (69). Although grateful to have indoor plumbing and private back yards, many of the residents “miss the frowsy warmth of the slum” (69). In Chapters Five and Six Orwell described the situation of the unemployed, pointing out the gender differences it entailed. While women carried on their domestic chores with or without paying jobs, unemployed men were unoccupied. Their manhood attached to their ability to earn a living, jobless males felt weakened and lessened. Efforts to teach them new skills were doomed to fail simply because no industry needed newly trained workers. “We may as well face the fact,” he argued, “that several million men in England will—unless another war breaks out—never have a real job this side of the grave” (80). Orwell remarked that paradoxically the popularity of cheap luxuries soared in an era of depression and mass unemployment. The unemployed 20-year-old could, for £2 on the installment plan, buy a suit or a dress and pretend to be Clark Gable or Greta Garbo. Cheap clothing, inexpensive chocolates, movies, the radio, and football pools have “averted revolution” by giving the poor an escape rather than a remedy. Orwell questioned the value of technology, noting the irony that “twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio” (84). The desire for cheap luxuries, Orwell argued, led to a physical decline. Candy, fish and chips, and ice cream were affordable distractions and more tempting than wholesome nutritious food. “We may find in the long run,” he stated, “that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun” (90). Orwell concluded the first section of The Road to Wigan Pier with a comment on the aesthetics of industrialism. After detailing the sheer ugliness of slag heaps, factories, coal mines, and belching chimneys, Orwell stated that there was nothing “inherently and unavoidably ugly about industrialism” (98). The modern factory outside London, he reminded readers, was often “a glittering white structure of concrete, glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips” (98). Smoke abatement technology and thoughtful design can make industrial plants less offensive to the senses. He warned, however, that industrialism has a “deeper” evil besides ugliness and pollution, pointing out “there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless as long as it is clean and orderly” (99). His final remarks celebrated a moment in time he sensed was being lost. “In a workingclass home,” he wrote, “you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere…. His

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Road home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape” (104). Workers before the First World War with good jobs maintained cozy homes that encouraged a healthy human family life. “Skip forward two hundred years into the Utopian future,” he warned, “and there won’t be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater” (105). Everything will be clean and hygienic with steel and rubber furniture, no pets, and few children “if the birth-controllers have their way” (105). Skipping back a few centuries the same family would live in “a windowless hut” and plagued with lice, scurvy, “a yearly childbirth and a yearly child-death, and the priest terrifying you with tales of Hell” (105). Orwell’s fascination with a passing age instead of a future shaped by science and technology signaled some of his views about Socialism that his editors found troubling. The second part of the book opens with Orwell’s autobiography, tracing his “road from Mandalay to Wigan.” Raised in a shabby genteel family, he admitted that at 14 or 15 he was “an odious little snob” and by 17 or 18 “both a snob and revolutionary.” After five years in the Indian Imperial Police, he hated imperialism with a deep bitterness he could not fully express. By 1927 he decided to leave government service, having developed “an immense weight of guilt” he felt he had “to expiate” (128). He wanted to remove himself from the class of oppressors. “I wanted to submerge myself,” he explained, “to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants” (128). Orwell recounted his experiences living among tramps but acknowledged that because tramps were social outcasts they did not provide much insight into the fundamental class system of Britain. Although he hated imperialism, he saw how much Britain depended on the suppression of other countries to maintain its status. You can decry the evil of imperialism, he wrote, “but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” (136). Getting rid of the Empire would reduce Britain “to a cold and unimportant little island” with a population forced to live on herring and potatoes. The Leftist did not want to live this way, so he was willing “to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together” (136). Orwell argued that Socialism was the only sane alternative to the capitalist system. Viewing the world as a raft with “plenty of provisions for everybody,” he contended that “the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems … blatantly obvious” (144–145). Only those with corrupt motives, he stated, would reject Socialism to maintain the present system. Despite being obviously desirable and sensible, Socialism, he noted was not being established. The very people who would benefit most from Socialism fled from it. At a time when Socialism should be gaining acceptance it was being challenged by Fascism, which was attracting many in the lower and middle classes. The reason so many people rejected Socialism was the nature of Socialists themselves. “As with the Christian religion,” Orwell suggested, “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents” (146). He despaired that the mere word “Socialism” drew with “a magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England” (147). These “cranks,” who seem as foreign to the British public as “Red Indians,” alienated the socially conservative working class, making Fascism, with its nationalism and call for traditional values, a more appealing alternative. Because Socialism was advocated by “that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-

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Road wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers” the “ordinary decent person” who accepted the “essential aims of Socialism” felt he had no place in a Socialist party (153–154). Orwell also questioned the assumption that Socialism was inextricably bound to technological progress and the creation of “an ordered world, an efficient world” (158). He objected to the notion that for many Socialists’ mechanical progress had become “a kind of religion.” As with the “dreary tribe” of Bohemians, Socialist visions of a shining Utopian society where there will be “no disorder, no loose ends, no wildernesses, no wild animals, no weeds, no disease, no poverty, no pain” felt alienating and deeply inhuman. Man, he insisted, is not simply “a kind of walking stomach” but a being with “a hand, an eye and a brain.” If you stop using your hand you “have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness” (165). He questioned the kind of life humans will have in the future when machines replace all work, eliminating “the human need for effort and creation” (167). Orwell wrote that “the machine has come to stay” but argued that it should be accepted “as one accepts a drug” because, like a drug, “the machine is useful, dangerous, and habitforming” (169). He railed against the artificiality of the modern world in which “the blaring of a radio” was “more normal” than the sounds of lowing cattle or singing birds. “In a healthy world,” he claimed, “there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones,” but “a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce” (170). Orwell concluded by stating that the “essential aims of Socialism are justice and liberty” not the promise of a Utopian machine state that makes “the world safe for little fat men” (175). For Socialism to prevail, class prejudices have to be overcome. When school teachers, underpaid journalists, jobless college graduates, and bankrupt merchants sink into the working class “where we belong … it will not be so dreadful as we feared … after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches” (191). Victor Gollancz accepted The Road to Wigan Pier and chose it as the March selection for the Left Book Club, making it Orwell’s first widely published book. Thirty-two photographs depicting the slum conditions in northern England were included. Gollancz felt obliged to also include a foreword directed to Club members, stating that although he was its sole author, his fellow editors John Strachey and Harold Laski would agree with his comments. He approved of the first part of the book for its powerful reporting on the “evil conditions” endured by poorly-paid workers and the unemployed, stating that it was likely to “rouse the ‘unconverted’ from their apathy” (ix). He strongly objected, however, to much Orwell had to say in the second part, claiming to have discovered a hundred “minor passages” he would object to. Gollancz considered the second part “highly provocative” because it depicted Socialists as a collection of “cranks.” He found it ironic that Orwell would document the fate of women worn out by pregnancy and miscarriages while dismissing birth-control advocates as “cranks.” He rejected Orwell’s assumption that Socialists “glorify” industrialism. He took special exception to Orwell’s description of Soviet commissars as “half-gramophones, half-gangsters” and faulted him for never really defining Socialism except in vague terms of “liberty” and “justice” which were also used by the Nazis to describe the Third Reich. “Emotional Socialism,” Gollancz asserted, “must become scientific Socialism” (xv-xvi). Orwell, he concluded, was effective at describing conditions that demanded reform but failed to understand the nature of the Socialism he claimed to support.

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Room Many critics shared Victor Gollancz’s reaction to The Road to Wigan Pier. Harold Laski, his fellow Left Book Club selector, praised the first part of the book as “admirable propaganda for our ideas” but found faults with Orwell’s analysis of Socialism. Orwell’s argument, he maintained, was basically “an emotional plea for socialism addressed to comfortable people” because he did not fully understand the nature of class conflict. Walter Greenwood, who reviewed the book for the Tribune, called the opening section “authentic and first rate” but was “infuriated” by much of what he read in the second half. In contrast, Arthur Calder-Marshall’s Time and Tide review praised the opening part of the book for its graphic descriptions. He was less vehemently opposed to Orwell’s comments about Socialism. He argued that Socialism was failing because of well-funded media campaigns from the Right and the trade unions’ willingness to engage in “co-operation.” Without militant leadership, “the hungry sheep look up and are not led.” Douglas Goldring’s review in The Fortnightly heralded both sections of Orwell’s “thought-provoking” book: This brilliant, disturbing book should be read and pondered over by every jobless wearer of an old school tie. Socialists who are puzzled to understand why their party has been steadily losing ground during the past ten years, should read it also.

The Road to Wigan Pier was not published in the United States until 1958.

• Further Reading Beadle, Gordon B. “George Orwell’s Literary Studies of Poverty in England.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 24, Summer 1978, pp. 188–201. Bluemel, Kristin. George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London. Palgrave, 2004. Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. Tauris, 2016. Calder-Marshall, Arthur. “The Road to Wigan Pier.” Time and Tide, 20 Mar. 1937, p. 382. Campbell, Beatrix. “Wigan Pier and Beyond.” New Statesman, vol. 106, Dec., 1983, pp. 23–24. Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Victor Gollancz: A Biography. Gollancz, 1987. Fitzgerald, John J. “George Orwell’s Social Compassion.” Discourse, vol. 9, 1966, pp. 219–26. Goldring, Douglas. “The Road to Wigan Pier.” The Fortnightly, Apr. 1937, pp. 505–506. Greenwood, Walter. “The Road to Wigan Pier.” Tribune, 12 Mar. 1937, p. 12. Hoggart, Richard. “Introduction to The Road to Wigan Pier.” George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Raymond Williams. Prentice Hall, 1974, pp. 34–51. Ingle, Stephen. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A Reassessment. Routledge, 2006. Karwowski, Michael. “Revisiting Orwell’s Trip to Wigan Pier.” Contemporary Review, vol. 294, no. 1707, Dec. 2012. Questia. Kennan, Joe. “With the Wigan Miners.” Orwell Remembered, ed. Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick, Facts on File, 1984, pp. 130–133. Laski, Harold. “The Road to Wigan Pier.” Left News, Mar. 1937, 275–276. Samuels, Stuart. “The Left Book Club,” Journal of Contemporary History, vols. 1 and 2, 1966, pp. 65–86. White, Richard. “George Orwell: Socialism and Utopia.” Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, Winter, 2008. Questia. Zehr, David Morgan. “Orwell and the Proles: Revolutionary or Middle Class Voyeur?” Centennial Review, vol. 27, Winter 1983, pp. 30–40. Zwerdling, Alex. Orwell and the Left. Yale University Press, 1974. _____. “Orwell: Socialism vs. Pessimism.” New Review, vol. 1, no 3, June 1974, pp. 5–17.

Room 101 (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Room 101 is the most dreaded room in the Ministry of Love. When Smith is initially detained, guards take various prisoners from the cell, stating they are going to Room 101.

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Rudyard The horror of the room is first demonstrated when a detainee balks in terror, literally turning “a shade of green” when a guard announces that he is being taken to Room 101. “Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years,” he begs, suggesting they can murder his wife and children in front of him instead. During his interrogation, O’Brien reveals that Room 101 contains “the worst thing in world.” For some the “worst thing” is death by drowning, for others it might be impalement or some dread non-fatal horror. For Winston Smith, his personal horror is his fear of rats. A cage full of rats is attached to his face like a mask. With a click, a screen would be lifted and the hungry rats would lunge at him. “Sometimes they attack the eyes first,” O’Brien explains, preparing to press the lever. Horrified, Smith becomes “a screaming animal,” eager to put someone else in his place. Like the man begging to have his family slaughtered before his eyes rather than face Room 101, Smith breaks down, shouting, “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!” The purpose of Room 101 is to break down any human bond or loyalty preventing total and unquestioning devotion to Big Brother.

“Rudyard Kipling” (essay, 1942) Published in Horizon, “Rudyard Kipling” analyzed the famed British poet and writer that many intellectuals denounced as “Fascist.” Orwell opened his essay stating that Kipling’s view of life cannot “be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.” Kipling, Orwell asserted, “was not a Fascist” but a “jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” (CEJL II, p. 184). When he described a British soldier beating a native, Orwell argued, it is clear that Kipling was not simply “reporting” on the soldier’s behavior but “approving” of it, revealing a deep strain of sadism. As a jingoist, Kipling believed in the “white man’s burden” and saw the empire as a kind of evangelic venture instead of the commercial enterprise it was. For him “you turn a Gatling gun on a mob” to “establish ‘the Law’” and build “roads, railways and a court-house.” His crudities, vulgar nationalism, and simplistic phrasing made him a popular poet. Orwell credited Kipling for vividly capturing the nature of battle and army life and for adding memorable phrases to the English language. Having a “snack bar wisdom,” Kipling “dealt largely in platitudes” but “since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.”

St. Athelstan’s (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) St. Athelstan’s in Knype Hill, Suffolk, is the church presided over by the protagonist’s father, Charles Hare. Standing atop the highest point in town, the crumbling church “looms like a leaden sphinx” over Knype Hill, symbolic of the state of the Church in the 20th century. The roof visibly sags, its beams and rafters weakened by “that mortal foe of Christendom, the death-watch beetle” (11). The belfry floor is splintering under the weight of the large bells because Hare cannot afford to have them reswung or removed. Cold and smelling of “candle-wax and ancient dust,” the church is too large for its dwindling congregation. When Charles Hare arrived in 1908, St. Athelstan’s had a congregation of 600. Over the years the number of worshippers dwindled to barely 200, largely due to Hare’s insistence on clinging to a form of old-fashioned High Anglicanism that alienated younger generations.

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Mrs. Semprill (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Mrs. Semprill is the town gossip of Knype Hill, who approaches the protagonist Dorothy Hare with a litany of perverse scandals, including the curate who molested a choirboy, a doctor who impregnated two of his nurses, and the baker’s daughter who had three children by her brother. Orwell notes that her scandalous tales become monotonous because in a “town in which everyone is either a bigamist, a pederast or a drug-taker, the worst scandal loses its sting” (54). Nevertheless, Semprill’s scandals have impact, causing half a dozen broken engagements and numerous arguments between husbands and wives. Mrs. Semprill falsely reports to the press that she witnessed a scantily clad and intoxicated Dorothy Hare leaving in a car with the town lecher Mr. Warburton. Her stories help propel the tabloid coverage of the missing Rector’s Daughter that briefly dominate British headlines. At the end of the novel Mrs. Semprill is thoroughly discredited. She made the mistake of sharing scandalous stories about a bank manager in a letter to a friend. The friend showed the letter to the bank manager who sued Mrs. Semprill for libel. Declared a liar in court and forced to pay £150, Mrs. Semprill is silenced and ignored in Knype Hill. The downfall of Mrs. Semprill clears the way for Dorothy to return home.

The Seven Commandments (Animal Farm, 1945) After the successful rebellion, the pigs introduce their philosophy of Animalism to the other animals. The tenets of the philosophy, based on Old Major’s vision (see Old Major), are summarized by The Seven Commandments that Snowball paints on the barn wall: 1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. 2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. 3. No animal shall wear clothes. 4. No animal shall sleep in a bed. 5. No animal shall drink alcohol. 6. No animal shall kill any other animal. 7. All animals are equal. Because some animals are unable to read or comprehend the commandments, Snowball simplifies their message in a maxim: four legs good, two legs bad. As the pigs become more corrupted and begin to imitate humans, the commandments are altered so that no animal shall “sleep in a bed with sheets” or “drink alcohol to excess.” Eventually, the Seven Commandments are replaced by the single commandment: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. With the pigs now walking upright like humans, Snowball’s maxim is replaced with a new one: four legs good, two legs better!

“Shooting an Elephant” (essay, 1936) First published in New Writing, “Shooting an Elephant” became one of Orwell’s most famous and most anthologized essays. Orwell recounted an incident in Lower Burma that revealed the nature of his job as a colonial police officer and his attitudes toward the British Empire. Exposed to the abuses of British rule, he decided that imperialism was “evil” and

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Simmons he planned to quit his job. While still in uniform, however, he was a symbol of the government he now hated and was reviled by the Burmese who loved to taunt British officials. He summarized his conflicting feelings in his widely quoted statement: With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts [CEJL I, p. 236].

One day a routine incident provided Orwell greater insight into the true nature of imperialism. A working elephant had escaped and was rampaging through a nearby village. The beast had killed a man, but when Orwell arrived the elephant was calmly grazing. A large crowd followed Orwell, expecting him to shoot the animal. Orwell was reluctant to kill a valuable working elephant. The 2,000 Asians, Orwell realized, had no respect for a British policeman but found him “worth watching.” The animal seemed no more dangerous than a cow and not a threat to anyone. Killing a working elephant, Orwell reasoned, was akin to destroying a costly machine, so he was reluctant to shoot it. But the crowd came to see an elephant shot. Orwell was a police officer. He was armed. The crowd was unarmed. But Orwell felt more like “an absurd puppet” pushed by the will of the crowd rather than the “leading actor.” Once he had sent for the rifle, the crowd expected him to shoot the elephant, and now he felt compelled to complete the scenario. He had lost his ability to act independently and was simply playing a role of the British policeman. Orwell recounted the nightmarish process of killing an elephant, which was not neatly felled by a single shot. Orwell aimed at the elephant’s head and fired. The bullet hit home, and “a mysterious, terrible change” came over the elephant, but it did not fall. Orwell fired a second shot with little effect. He fired a third bullet, and the elephant trumpeted then fell over. Rushing forward, Orwell discovered the animal was not dead. He fired two shots at the heart, but the elephant continued to breathe. The animal was dying slowly and in great agony. Out of bullets, he grabbed a smaller rifle and fired more shots into the heart and down the elephant’s throat, but “the tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock” (CEJL I, p. 241). Unable to stand the noise anymore, Orwell left, later learning that the elephant suffered for another half hour. Burmans then brought knives and baskets and stripped the animal to its bones within hours. Afterwards, Orwell’s actions were widely debated. The elephant’s owner was furious but was an Indian and was powerless to take action against a police officer. Orwell could defend his actions because the animal had killed a man, but he wondered if anyone understood he killed the elephant “solely to avoid looking like a fool” (CEJL I, p. 242).

Katie Simmons (Coming Up for Air, 1939) Katie Simmons was a teenage girl who babysat the protagonist George Bowling when he was growing up in Lower Binfield. At 15 she had a baby out of wedlock. Gossips claimed that the father was one of her numerous brothers. The child was put up for adoption, and Katie took a service job. Later she married a tinker and lived in a small bug-infested shack near the railway line, an area where wandering gypsies camped. Bowling recalls last seeing her in 1913. Passing the huts, he noticed a “wrinkled-up hag of a woman” shaking out a rag mat. The hag was Katie Simmons who was just 27.

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Smith Katie is a fictional version of the prematurely-aged working-class woman Orwell described in The Road to Wigan Pier published two years earlier. As his train passed a row of slum houses in Northern England, Orwell looked out the window and spotted a young woman kneeling to clear a clogged drain pipe. She was a typical “exhausted” working class girl who was 25 but looked 40 “thanks to miscarriages and drudgery.” Orwell recalled her having “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen,” leading him to realize that the poor appreciate what is happening to them. This woman, he asserted, fully understood “how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe” (29).

Hermione Slater (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Hermione Slater is the girlfriend of Gordon Comstock’s wealthy Socialist friend Philip Ravelston. Although she has been the editor’s lover for two years, she has no interest in getting married because she considers matrimony “too much fag.” Born into a wealthy family, she exemplifies the idle rich. Orwell repeatedly uses the word “sleepy” to describe Hermione, who falls asleep “as promptly as animal” when there is nothing to do. Lazy, indulgent and narcissistic, she does not share Ravelston’s interests in literature or politics. Hermione yawns when Ravelston discusses Socialism and refuses to read his magazine Antichrist. Repeatedly she tells her lover not to mention poor people because “they smell” (93). Nevertheless, Ravelston adores her and thinks guiltily of her smooth shoulders when Comstock grumbles about his sexual frustration.

Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Winston Smith is the 39-year-old protagonist of Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. A small, frail, thin man with fair hair, Smith lives in London, the chief city of Airstrip One, the third most populous province of Oceania, a superstate that also includes the Americas, Australia, and portions of southern Africa. Smith is employed at the Ministry of Truth housed in a mammoth thousand-foot-high building that is responsible for media, education, entertainment, and the fine arts. Working in the Records Department, Smith revises history, altering archived newspapers so file copies will not include references of people who have been purged. Statistics and speeches are changed so that the dictator Big Brother is infallible. His past predictions must reflect current realities. Although the work is often tedious, it takes a level of creativity. When one human is to be purged from the records, Smith composes a replacement article, inventing the biography of a fictional hero who exhibits the virtues of a dedicated Party member. “Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work,” Orwell states. Smith enjoyed those jobs that were “so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem” (43). He creates fictional characters who are inserted into official records so that these invented people become as real as Charlemagne and Julius Caesar. Although a useful employee in altering historical records, Smith is troubled by the world around him and questions if life had always been like the present. Knowing that books and articles are often propaganda fakes and forgeries, he tries to determine what the past was really like. He talks to an old man who would have been an adult long before the Rev-

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Smith olution, hoping to learn through an oral history what life was like before the establishment of the Party. Smith is disappointed because the old man’s memories are cluttered with trivial details and personal memories that shed no light on past social and political conditions. A key feature of Smith’s personality is his sexual frustration. He was briefly married to a woman named Katherine in 1973 but was exasperated by her cold frigidity, so they separated after 15 months. In one of his first diary entries he confesses to a disagreeable sexual encounter with a middle-aged prostitute that makes him want to shout obscenities. Smith is both aroused and irritated by a dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department in the Ministry of Truth. Her slim youthful body is appealing, but her righteous smugness and her Junior Anti–Sex League sash anger him. Encountering the girl on a street, Smith, fearing that she is an agent of the Thought Police or a snitch, contemplates killing her. After she slips him a note reading “I love you,” Smith begins to court her. Under constant surveillance Smith and the girl named Julia must make secretive rendezvous. Smith rents a room over a junk shop as a hideout where they can meet in private. For seven years Winston Smith sensed that O’Brien, a high-ranking member of the Inner Party, shared his attitudes. O’Brien once appeared to him a dream promising that they would meet in “the place where there is no darkness.” When the Inner Party member invites him to his home on the pretext of receiving the latest edition of a dictionary, Smith assumes he is being recruited to join the secret rebel organization called The Brotherhood. Meeting with O’Brien, Smith and Julia offer to join the resistance movement, promising to do anything, including murder, to fight the Party and Big Brother. Smith’s trust is misplaced, and he and Julia are arrested. Separated from his lover, Smith is beaten and tortured, forced into confessing to a chain of imaginary crimes and conspiracies dating back to the 1960s. He is then interrogated by O’Brien, who posed as a rebel to lure traitors into revealing themselves. O’Brien tells Smith, who has already confessed, that he will not be executed until he is rehabilitated. The Party cannot allow martyrs who remain rebels in their own minds. “We make the brain perfect before we blow it out,” O’Brien explains. During the interrogation, Smith and O’Brien engage in a debate which echoes themes Orwell developed in his essays about literature and totalitarianism. O’Brien tells Smith that the Party is immortal, that there is no reality or history except what the Party declares to be true, that men and events are malleable and can be shaped to serve Big Brother. The Party cannot be defeated by the proles or isolated individuals. O’Brien asserts that the earth is the center of the universe, that the stars are merely “bits of fire” a few miles above the earth, that fossils and records of past centuries are a hoax. The Party is the center of everything and will be in power forever. Smith rebels. Weakened by hunger and torture, he claims the Party will be ultimately defeated, that it will commit “suicide” or be defeated by “the spirit of Man.” O’Brien mocks Smith, declaring him to be “the last man.” Forced to strip naked and examine himself in a mirror, Smith views his emaciated body festering with sores. O’Brien tears a tooth from Winston’s rotting gums and tosses it across the room in contempt. Weakened but not broken, Smith clings to one shred of his humanity and independence: he has not betrayed Julia. To finally break Winston Smith of his individuality, O’Brien takes him to Room 101, which contains “the worst thing in the world.” The room, he explains to Smith, is tailored to meet each person’s deepest fear. In Smith’s case, it is his childhood fear of rats. A cage

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Snowball containing rats is strapped to his face. O’Brien holds a lever that will remove the screen preventing the rats from devouring Winston’s face. In terror, Smith realizes the only escape is to transfer the horror to someone else, to put someone else in his place. Screaming, “Do it Julia!,” Winston Smith betrays his last link to humanity and individual loyalty. Now broken and rehabilitated into total subservience to Big Brother, Smith is released. He is given a meaningless job on a meaningless sub-committee. He encounters Julia who admits that she betrayed him. She, too, was faced with the “worst thing in the world” and wished Winston to take her place. Afterwards she felt “differently” about him and now looks upon her former lover with “dislike.” Now “reintegrated” into society, Winston Smith is no longer the “flaw in the pattern” or the “stain” O’Brien identified. He now looks back on his rebellion against Big Brother as a “cruel, needless misunderstanding” and a “stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast” of Big Brother. Realizing he will eventually be shot, Smith sees himself as victorious, having defeated himself, renouncing his individuality to love Big Brother. As a character, Winston Smith bears many similarities to Orwell’s first protagonist John Flory in Burmese Days published in 1934. Both are minor officials in a system they find oppressive. Both are unable to share their thoughts and feelings with others and live inwardly. They struggle to maintain their individually in a hostile environment. Both men are sexually frustrated. Flory keeps a greedy faithless mistress. Smith was married to a frigid wife. Both men are stirred by a new woman who promises an opportunity for a relationship of companionship, intimacy, and sexual fulfillment. The woman Flory courts rejects him, and he commits suicide in despair. Smith’s brief relationship with Julia is ended by their arrest. After being forced to betray Julia, Smith is released, a broken man, to be eventually executed. Both men are individuals struggling against a hostile social environment and culture that eventually overwhelms them.

• Further Reading Agathocleous, Tanya. George Orwell: Battling Big Brother. Oxford University Press, 2000. Beauchamp, George. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. V, no. 4, Dec. 1973, pp. 285–301. Carter, Michael. George Orwell and the Problem of Authentic Existence. London, 1985. Connelly, Mark. The Diminished Self: Orwell and the Loss of Freedom. Duquesne University Press, 1987. Lewis, Wyndham. “Orwell, or Two and Two Make Four.” The Writer and the Absolute. Methuen, 1952, pp. 153–193.

Snowball (Animal Farm, 1945) Quick, inventive and vivacious, Snowball is one of the young boars, alongside fellow pigs Napoleon and Squealer, who assume leadership of the animals after the death of Old Major. They meet in secret and develop the philosophy of Animalism. After the Rebellion, Snowball summarizes Animals in The Seven Commandments (see The Seven Commandments) he paints on the barn wall. He soon becomes a rival of Napoleon, especially after he outlines elaborate plans to build a windmill that will generate electricity for the farm. Modeled after Trotsky, Snowball is an internationalist, believing in fomenting rebellion on neighboring farms. Like Trotsky, he is expelled by Napoleon, who assumes a Stalinist role, supplanting the principles of Animalism with a cult of personality backed by fear and terror.

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Spike Once exiled, Snowball is blamed for any failures in Animal Farm and is accused of collaborating with humans and visiting the farm at night to engage in sabotage and wrecking.

“The Spike” (essay, 1931) Published in Adelphi in April 1931 under the name Eric Blair, “The Spike” recounts some of Orwell’s tramping experiences. Orwell first submitted the piece while living in Paris in 1929, making several revisions until it was accepted for publication. He described joining some 50 vagrants waiting for a workhouse, colloquially known as a “spike,” to open its doors. The essay contains some of Orwell’s most descriptive writing. He recalled the tramps being “littered” on the grass outside the spike, defiling “the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.” Orwell detailed the rules of the spike, which forbade tramps from bringing tobacco or money onto the premises. Warned that he would be jailed for a week for possessing an eightpence, Orwell buried his taboo coin under a hedge, marking the spot with a piece of flint. Once the gates opened, Orwell shuffled inside with the other tramps to be searched. Ordered to strip, the naked men, filthy and flabby, took baths, were issued nightshirts, and fed a meal of bread and tea. They slept in jail-like cells and were awakened for another meal of bread and tea. Ordered to strip again, the line of naked vagrants was inspected for smallpox. Dressed again, the men were herded into a dining room to wait ten hours for their next meal. Orwell observed the difficulty that “unlettered types” have with inactive captivity. “It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog to a barrel,” he noted. Orwell deftly captured the exhausting boredom the men endure sitting on uncomfortable benches with no amusements or thoughts to divert them. Working in the kitchen, Orwell was stunned by the wastage of food, watching “great dishes of beef ” being tossed into trash cans rather than being given to tramps. Orwell engaged in a brief debate with a “superior tramp,” an unemployed carpenter with “literary tastes.” Wearing a tie, the man kept apart from other tramps, dissociating himself from his peers. Though homeless, he preferred to see himself as temporarily impoverished because he lacked tools. He condemned the workhouse system that locked up tramps 14 hours a day then forced them to keep on the move for the other ten. He defended, however, the disposal of good food to keep the spikes from being “too pleasant” to prevent the workhouses from being overwhelmed by freeloaders. He urged Orwell not to pity the tramps because, he insisted, they were not like other men, referring to them as “scum, just scum.” When the tramps were dismissed from the spike, Orwell recovered his eightpence and began the long march to the next shelter ten or 20 miles away “where the game would begin anew.” Orwell concluded the essay with a detail symbolizing the mean poverty of tramp life. Orwell had given a tramp named Scotty a cigarette. To repay the favor, Scotty chased after Orwell to hand him “four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends.”

Squealer (Animal Farm, 1945) Squealer is a small fat pig with twinkling eyes and nimble movements, described as a “brilliant talker” who skips from side to side as he speaks. His ability to persuade others

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Such leads some animals to claim that he “could turn black to white.” After the Rebellion he becomes the pigs’ Goebbels-like propagandist, rationalizing sudden shifts in doctrine and ideology. He explains, for example, that milk and apples must be reserved solely for the pigs because science proves it is a dietary requirement. As the “brainworkers” responsible for management and organization of Animal Farm, the pigs require special consideration. After Snowball is exiled, Squealer becomes the exclusive propagandist for Napoleon, helping create a cult of personality and promoting his infallibility as Leader. In getting the animals to accept sacrifices and show obedience to Napoleon, Squealer presents the Leader as the only option to prevent the return of Farmer Jones. He uses language to manipulate public opinion and obfuscate, calling a “reduction” in rations a “readjustment.” When the animals see the hardworking horse Boxer being taken away in a knacker’s van to the slaughterhouse, Squealer assures them that their ailing comrade was being taken away for medical treatment. A veterinary surgeon had recently purchased the van and had not had time to repaint the signage. One evening the animals are awakened by a crashing sound in the yard and discover a stunned Snowball lying beside a broken ladder, a lantern, a paint brush, and a bucket of white paint. The animals could not grasp what the incident meant, but a few days later they notice that the Fifth Commandment has been altered to read “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.”

“Such, Such Were the Joys” (essay, 1947) Orwell opened his autobiographical essay about his years at St. Cyprian’s school with an embarrassing incident. Shortly after arriving at the school at age eight, he began wetting his bed. Then viewed as a spiteful act or a sign of weakness, bedwetting was a punishable offense. Young Eric Blair was ordered to appear before the headmaster’s wife, a woman nicknamed Flip. “Here is a little boy … who wets his bed every night,” Flip announced to a female friend, a stern-looking woman in a riding habit. Told if he committed this offense again he would be beaten by “the Sixth Form,” young Blair thought Flip said “Mrs. Form” and feared the woman in riding clothes was the school enforcer. When he wet the bed again, he was sent to the Headmaster, nicknamed Sambo, who beat him with a riding crop. Blair endured further beatings for failing at lessons. This embarrassing event was following by other humiliations. Flip and Sambo publicly reminded Blair that he was a poor boy, a scholarship student taken on at reduced fees. When he did badly at his studies they chided Blair, warning that unless he performed better he would end up being “a little office boy at forty pounds a year.” If he spent his savings on something the couple felt extravagant, they would tell him his family could not afford it or be asked if the item was something a boy like him should purchase. Blair, like other lower-class students, was continually harassed and humiliated by richer peers. A Russian boy once asked him how much money his father had. Blair exaggerated his father’s net worth only to have his fellow student pull out notebook and hastily calculate that his father was 200 times wealthier than Blair’s. Poorer students were peppered with questions about how many servants their parents had, if they had a butler, and the kind of car their parents drove. The focus on money was part of an ongoing contradiction. On one hand the school

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Syme preached Christian virtues, chastity, hard work, and disapproval of luxuries. On the other, it extolled a “worship of games,” dislike for foreigners and the working class, a “neurotic dread of poverty,” and the notion that it was better to inherit money than work for it. Orwell recounted losing his religious faith at 14, finding it difficult to both “love” and “fear” God. Hating Jesus, he identified with Pontius Pilate and Judas. He found it difficult to feel the emotions he was expected to feel. He supposed he should have felt grateful to Flip and Sambo, but he did not feel grateful. He reasoned he was supposed to love his father on principle but could not love the “gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don’t’” (CEJL IV, p. 360). Looking back on his childhood, Orwell stated he did have “good memories of St. Cyprian’s, among a horde of bad ones,” including an instance of bullying. Harassed by a bigger boy, Orwell responded by approaching him nonchalantly and punching him in the face. Challenged to a fight, Orwell refused. He reasoned it was wrong to hit his rival unawares but knew if subjected to a fair fight, he would lose. Only 20 years later would he recognize the significance of the event. Living “in a world governed by the strong,” the weak faced a moral dilemma and were compelled to “break the rules, or perish.” Looking back on his years at St. Cyprian’s, Orwell pondered the nature of childhood. The present age was more humane toward children, but he wondered if adults ever fully understood what children were experiencing. A child who appears happy, he noted, “may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal” (CEJL IV, p. 366). Children live in a separate world because from the age of seven or eight they do not want to reveal their “true feelings” to adults. Considering his own childhood, he imagined how he would regard Sambo and Flip now that he was older than they were when he was their student. Instead of being “terrible, all-powerful monsters” they would appear to him now as “a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people” (CEJL IV, p. 367). Orwell concluded his essay stating that he had placed St. Cyprian’s out of his system, that “its magic works no longer.” Orwell stated that he had no desire to find out if Sambo and Flip were still alive or if the “story of the school being burnt down was true” (CEJL IV, p. 369).

Syme (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Described as a “tiny creature” with protuberant eyes, Syme is a philologist in the Ministry of Truth’s Research Department compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Winston Smith considers him a “friend” though he is distrustful of Syme, who is “venomously orthodox” in his Party patriotism. Syme gleefully recounts stories of helicopters shooting up enemy villages and traitors being tried and executed in the Ministry of Love. He enjoys watching public hangings, especially when the victims’ legs are allowed to kick in their death agony. Syme enthusiastically describes his work to Winston, calling “the destruction of words” beautiful. He chides Smith because he still “thinks in Oldspeak.” The new dictionary will simplify language, reducing the number of words to “narrow the range of thought” to the point that thoughtcrime will be impossible. He speculates that in the future even the Party slogan “Freedom is Slavery” will have to be revised when the concept of “freedom” disappears from the language.

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Thought Listening to him, Smith senses that Syme, for all his dedication to the Party, is too intelligent and is marked for eventual vaporization. One day Syme disappears. Some “thoughtless people” mentioned his absence from work. The following day no one spoke of him. A day later Winston Smith observes that a list of members of the Chess Committee is one name shorter. Syme’s name was not crossed out but erased as if Syme never existed.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism see the book (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1948) Sir Thomas (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Sir Thomas is the cousin of Rector Charles Hare, the father of the protagonist Dorothy Hare. After Dorothy’s scandalous departure from Knype Hill, Hare is reluctant to expose himself to the press by directly searching for his daughter. He sends £10 to his rich cousin, a baronet in London, to look for Dorothy and aid her. Sir Thomas is a “good-hearted” but “chuckle-headed” widower in his 60s whose chief feature is an “abysmal mental vagueness” that gives him “the appearance of a well-meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn” (207). Willing to help his cousin, Sir Thomas directs his butler Blyth to seek out his missing relative. A week later Blyth locates Dorothy and brings her to the baronet’s home. Sir Thomas, who had never seen Dorothy, is shocked by her plain appearance, having expected the infamous “Missing Rector’s Daughter” to be a “some rouged and powered siren.” Incapable of handling anything on his own, Sir Thomas enlists the aid of his solicitor who finds a teaching job for Dorothy. To secure her hiring, Sir Thomas pays a five-pound bribe to Mrs. Creevy, the proprietress of Ringwood House Academy.

The Thought Police (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) To ensure the rule of Big Brother and the Party in Oceania is absolute, the Thought Police ruthlessly spy on citizens, especially members of the Party. Telescreens and cameras are placed in homes, offices, and public places. Secret agents in disguise identify those who pose a threat to the Party by holding or expressing heretical ideas or displaying an unacceptable degree of individuality. Keeping a diary is a punishable offense. Questioning authority is a crime. Showing an unacceptable facial expression is called facecrime. Holding beliefs or expressing ideas unapproved by the Party is labeled thoughtcrime. Anyone who develops personal interests such as collecting artifacts or taking solitary walks can be accused of ownlife. Fear of the Thought Police leads Party members to donate to Party causes, volunteer to work in munitions plants, and demonstrate their loyalty to Big Brother by screaming at his enemy Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate (see Two Minutes Hate). The Thought Police are less interested in the 85 percent of the population labeled “proles” because they are believed to be “beneath suspicion.” The working classes are controlled by distractions such as lotteries, beer, football, and popular entertainment. Few proles have telescreens in their homes. The Thought Police send in a few agents to root out potential troublemakers and spread disinformation. The Thought Police are not concerned

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Tolstoy with ordinary crimes such as drugs and prostitution. The civil police handle these matters, and because they pose no political opposition, vast criminal enterprises involving narcotics and prostitution are largely ignored by the Party and the Thought Police.

“Tolstoy and Shakespeare” (essay, 1941) Tolstoy wrote an essay about Shakespeare arguing the venerated English dramatist was a writer without merit or talent. He claimed that Shakespeare lacked a core philosophical grounding and merely stitched together improbable scenes and unrealistic poetic speeches into plays that are awkward collections of ballads, jokes, and soliloquies. Orwell accepted that Tolstoy did have points, agreeing that Shakespeare was not “a profound thinker” and that the structure of his plays was often flawed. If all of Tolstoy’s charges were true, Orwell argued, then Shakespeare’s reputation should have “withered away.” The one thing Tolstoy cannot explain away is Shakespeare’s popularity. Tolstoy was puzzled by it, blaming it on a worldwide conspiracy or mass hypnosis. He attributed Shakespeare’s undeserved fame to early 19th-century German critics who praised Shakespeare and have not been contradicted. Orwell considered Tolstoy’s theory nonsense because the majority of people who enjoy Shakespeare’s plays have never read German literary critics. Orwell recounted seeing a foreign language production of Shakespeare in Ceylon. Something enduring must be expressed in Shakespeare’s plays for them to be read and seen by millions of ordinary people throughout the world. A poet is more than a thinker, Orwell stated, and does not have to have a consistent philosophy but a compelling voice.

Two Minutes Hate (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) Working in the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith participates with other employees in a ritual exercise called the Two Minutes Hate. A large telescreen shows Oceania’s arch nemesis Emmanuel Goldstein, declared the Enemy of the People, delivering a speech condemning Big Brother. Party members scream and denounce Goldstein in a frenzy of loyalty to Big Brother. The purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to fire up fury and test loyalties. Smith notices how he cannot help but be absorbed in the furor of anger, though he transfers his hatred from Goldstein to the girl from the Fiction Department who both attracts and offends him. At the end of the video when the people’s anger reaches a fevered climax the assuring face of Big Brother appears on the screen and the calmed audience begins to chant his initials “B-B! … B-B! … B-B!” in ritual unison.

U Po Kyin (Burmese Days, 1934) U Po Kyin is the obese 56-year-old subdivisional magistrate of Kyauktada in Upper Burma who conspires to ruin the English protagonist John Flory. Introduced in the opening chapter, U Po Kyin is presented as a master manipulator of the British who supposedly run Burma. Born in poverty, Kyin was terrified by the presence of “great beef-fed” British soldiers marching into Mandalay. Realizing that the Burmese were “no match for this race of giants,” Kyin determined “to become a parasite upon them” (8). He began his career as a lowly clerk who supplemented his salary by stealing from the government. Learning of an

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Veraswami upcoming opportunity for a promotion, Kyin denounced his fellow clerks for theft to eliminate rivals. Regarded as honest by the British, he was made an Assistant Township Officer. Now a magistrate, Kyin operates with Machiavellian prudence, refusing to let money sway his judgment because corrupt judges are eventually caught. Sensibly, he takes bribes from sides then bases his decision on merit. In addition to bribes, Kyin levies a personal tax on the villages in his jurisdiction, threatening leading residents with arrests and beatings from gangs under his control. Skilled in manipulation, he is “practically invulnerable” from prosecution, largely because the British never question the honesty of their colonial officials. Orwell depicts U Po Kyin as cannibalistic, a man whose teeth are stained blood-red from betel nuts and who is proud of his obesity because it represents becoming “swollen with the bodies of his enemies” (15). Once poor and thin, he is now “fat, rich and feared” (15). Kyin believes his invulnerability will extend into the afterlife. He intends to devote his later years to charity, building Buddhist pagodas to erase his earthly sins and assure that after death his spirit will return in the form of a man or perhaps an honored beast such as an elephant. In conspiring against Dr. Veraswami, Kyin recognizes that he must carefully strike against the protagonist John Flory who has befriended the doctor, giving the Burmese physician legitimacy in the eyes of the British. Kyin views Flory as a naïve coward. When Flory dismisses his Burmese mistress Ma Hla May to pursue an English woman he hopes to marry, Kyin “tutored” the spurned girl into publicly humiliating Flory. After the broken-hearted Flory commits suicide, U Po Kyin’s schemes achieve fruition. Without his English protector, Dr. Veraswami is discredited, demoted, and transferred to a hospital in Mandalay. U Po Kyin becomes the first Asian admitted to the European Club. Visiting rarely, he became a model member, buying drinks for his English peers. Promoted to Deputy Commissioner, U Po Kyin is decorated by the Indian government, achieving greater recognition. But just days later, fate intervenes. U Po Kyin is felled by apoplexy before he can build the pagodas to assure his status in the afterlife. His grieving widow fears her late husband is suffering in hell or has returned to Earth as a lowly animal such as a rat or frog.

Unperson (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) When people fall out of favor with the Party and are eliminated, they are declared an “unperson” or “nonexistent” and all documents, historical records, and news reports are revised to erase any mention of their names or depiction of their images. Smith’s job in the Ministry of Truth is editing and revising archived newspapers, deleting real people from history and often replacing them with idealized biographies of Party loyalists who never existed.

Dr. Veraswami (Burmese Days, 1934) A small plump dark man, Veraswami is a Burmese medical doctor and John Flory’s best friend. A staunch defender of the English and their values, Veraswami is an Uncle

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Verrall Tom figure who decries his native culture as barbaric and crude, while extolling the civilizing order the British have brought to Asia. He and John Flory engage in good-natured and often sarcastic debates. Flory, an English timber merchant, who admits coming to Burma to make money, disparages what his countrymen have done to India. Veraswami, the Asian, defends the British, dismissing and excusing incidents of prejudice directed against him. Flory, who cannot voice his opinions to his jingoist British peers, regards his honest discussions with the Asian doctor as a kind of “Black Mass on the sly” (39). Veraswami is targeted by U Po Kyin, the corrupt subdivisional magistrate, who resents the doctor because of his unwillingness to take bribes. U Po Kyin begins a campaign of libel against the Asian physician, sending anonymous letters to the European community, accusing Veraswami of drug trafficking, torture, rape, and sodomy. Veraswami warns Flory about U Po Kyin’s machinations, calling the corrupt judge a “crocodile” who “strikes always at the weakest spot!” (44). The doctor tells Flory that membership in the European Club would give him credibility and a shield against an Asian enemy. Understanding that admitting an Asian would stir controversy, Veraswami assures Flory he only wants be accepted as a member and would never actually visit the club or attend its functions. Veraswami’s dilemma reveals Flory’s weakness. Scarred physically and emotionally by a disfiguring birthmark, Flory is disinclined to challenge people or invite controversy. Although he knows he should support his only true friend, Flory signs a petition to exclude Asians from the Club to appease his racist peers. When he receives one of the anonymous letters denouncing Veraswami, Flory feels it ill-advised to get involved in “Oriental” matters. Later when the campaign against Versaswami intensifies, Flory summons the courage to aid his friend, suggesting that he will nominate the doctor to be a member of the European Club. Versawami’s loyalty to Flory remains unwavering. He excuses Flory’s failure to assist him. At the end of the novel Veraswami covers up evidence of Flory’s suicide, declaring that he accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun, telling his servant, “It shall not be written on his tombstone that he committed suicide” (240). Without his white friend, Veraswami falls victim to U Po Kyin’s campaign and is “ruined.” Demoted and transferred to Mandalay General Hospital, Veraswami lives in a small bungalow and runs a private clinic to supplement his reduced salary. He joins a “second-rate” club and befriends its sole white member, an alcoholic electrician from Glasgow whose only interests are “whisky and magnetos.” Veraswami attempts to engage the Scotsman in intellectual conversations with little success.

Verrall (Burmese Days, 1934) The youngest son of a peer, 25-year-old Verrall is a British cavalry officer who transferred to the Burma Military Police. Described a “tough and martial rabbit,” Verrall arrives in Kyauktada for a month’s posting. With “horsemanship and physical fitness” being “the only gods he knew,” Verrall is devoted to polo playing (173). Verrall has contempt for British civilians, Asian natives, non-cavalry military officers, and all women. He famously does not pay his bills and transfers to other military units rather than face his creditors. With desirable white males in great demand in India, women often throw themselves at the young officer who believes their one aim was to “lure men away from polo and enmesh them in tea-fights and tennis-parties” (174). Succumbing to his sexual urges, Verrall protects

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Warburton himself from female entrapment by abruptly ending his occasional lapses from celibacy and horsemanship. After learning that the protagonist John Flory has kept a Burmese mistress, Elizabeth Lackersteen transfers her affections to Verrall, seeing him as the only option for marriage and escape from her uncle’s unwelcome sexual advances. She admires Verrall both for his horsemanship and his loathing of books and culture. Elizabeth and Verrall begin riding together almost every evening, and soon she forgets about Flory. When Verall’s replacement unexpectedly appears at the European Club, Elizabeth and her aunt Mrs. Lackersteen race to the train station only to learn that Verrall has departed, demanding the conductor leave early to avoid not only Elizabeth but a pair of dunning Indian merchants. With Verrall’s unannounced departure, Elizabeth briefly sees John Flory as her only eligible suitor.

War Is Peace (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949) “War Is Peace” is one of the central slogans of the unnamed Party ruling Oceania. In Orwell’s imagined future, war is not a dramatic episode interrupting the flow of normal events but an ongoing feature of daily life. In 1984 the world is comprised of three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. At any one time two of them are in conflict. Alliances shift, but war is ever-present. The three superstates are economically self-sufficient, so wars are not conflicts over resources. The superstates are so large, they do not seek to destroy rivals. Unlike the Second World War there are not massive invasions or major battles claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Wars are now highly technical, involving small units of highly trained individuals waging battles in remote contested regions. The three superstates possess nuclear weapons, but after a rash of atomic bombings in the 1950s they suspended their use. There was no treaty or formal agreement banning nuclear weapons but the mutual realization that they were too powerful and threatened a collapse of the order the superstates sought to maintain. So in 1984 London, which could be obliterated by atomic bombs, is hit 20 or 30 times a week by “rocketbombs” no more powerful than the V-1s and V-2s of 1944. The purpose of war is to absorb production to prevent the rise of a prosperous middle class that would enhance personal liberty and independence. With Oceania at perpetual war, the Party can keep millions employed producing things to be destroyed, explain rationing and shortages, and use the threat of an invading enemy and spies to justify maintaining a police state.

Mr. Warburton (A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935) Warburton is the stout bald 48-year-old lecher whose sexual advances unhinge Dorothy Hare’s mind, triggering her episode of amnesia. Living on a private income, Warburton calls himself a painter and produces a handful of passable landscapes each year. He delights in being considered the decadent Lothario of Knype Hill. Until she left him, he openly lived with a Spanish woman who served as his housekeeper and caregiver to his three children he openly calls “the bastards.” Although his randy advances disturb her, Dorothy finds his company compelling and occasionally visits his house.

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Waterlow Encountering Dorothy in town, Warburton pinches her elbow and offers to introduce her to Ronald Bewley, author of Fishpools and Concubines, a novel he tells her is “high class pornography.” Bewley, he tells her, is visiting him, and he invites Dorothy to dine with them. That evening Dorothy arrives at Warburton’s home, only to discover she is the sole guest, the visiting novelist invented as a ruse to lure the rector’s virginal daughter to his house. When Warburton begins to caress her, Dorothy is reminded of satyrs and insists on leaving. Not willing to give up, he follows her outside to continue his wooing. Dorothy is fearful they will be seen by the town gossip Mrs. Semprill who lives next door. Warburton assures Dorothy that with any luck “the blasted hag” has not noticed them. Dorothy returns home to work on children’s costumes then inexplicably lapses into amnesia, finding herself a week later walking through London with no memory of her name and past life. Mrs. Semprill, having witnessed Dorothy leave Warburton’s home, gleefully relates a lurid account of a tipsy, scantily clad Dorothy climbing into a car and driving off with the middle-aged lecher. Having left for Europe shortly after their meeting, Warburton has no idea of the scandal he helped generate or Dorothy’s mysterious disappearance. Eight months later, just after Dorothy is discharged from her teaching position, Warburton wires her, informing her that he has returned to England and that Mrs. Semprill has been discredited and silenced because of a libel suit. Warburton arrives in London to escort Dorothy back to Knype Hill. On the train ride to Suffolk, Dorothy explains to Warburton that she has lost her religious faith but sees no alternative than to return to live with her father and serve his needs. To show himself at his worst, Warburton removes his hat to expose his bald head and proposes marriage. Though 20 years her senior, he can offer Dorothy a comfortable home, financial security, art, books, friends, and travel. He soberly outlines her prospects if she returns to her father, predicting that he will die in ten years, leaving her penniless. Too old to marry by then, he warns, Dorothy will have to get a job and spend the rest of her life working as an underpaid governess or a caregiver so some elderly “diseased hag.” Listening to Warburton, Dorothy acknowledges her fate but sees no other option than to return to her old life because marriage, even to an older man, would entail the dreaded “all that” of sexuality.

Rosemary Waterlow (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) Rosemary is the 29-year-old girlfriend of the protagonist Gordon Comstock. They met while working at the New Albion ad agency. A virgin in her late 20s, she is a healthy variant of Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman’s Daughter. While Dorothy maintains a lifelong dread of sexuality, Rosemary holds off from having sex, fearing pregnancy and because she senses that a sexual life would end her girlhood. Although she finds white hairs on her head, she continues to dress and act like a teenager. She loves Gordon but finds his money-strike immature and childish. She admonishes him for not shaving and taking a good job. She puts up with his whiny complaints about money and patiently urges him to be sensible. She loves Gordon and accompanies him on an erotic outing. Unable to entertain members of the opposite sex in their London rooms, they find a romantic spot in the woods.

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We Rosemary is willing to have intercourse with Gordon but refuses when she discovers that he has not brought a contraceptive. Comstock tells her she must be willing take a chance, but she steadfastly disagrees. Eventually, in an effort to rescue Gordon from his masochistic slide into poverty, she sleeps with him in his slummy rooming house. The loss of her virginity is marginally pleasurable, and she leaves Gordon feeling “dismayed, disappointed and very cold” (221). This single sexual union changes the course of their lives. Learning that he has impregnated Rosemary, Gordon decides to marry her, return to his advertising job, end his writing career, and embrace the lower middle-class lifestyle he once scorned.

• Further Reading Beddoe, Deirdre. “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell.” Inside the Myth: Orwell: Views from the Left, ed. Christopher Norris. Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp. 139–154.

“W.B. Yeats” (essay 1943) Commenting on V. K. Narayna Menon’s biography of William Butler Yeats, Orwell sensed a connection between Yeats’ “tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life.” In his view, Yeats had Fascist leanings because he was “a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress” and “the idea of human equality” (CEJL II, p. 273). Orwell saw Yeats as someone embracing an authoritarian society without realizing that it will not be run by “noblemen” but “by anonymous millionaires, shiny-bottomed bureaucrats and murdering gangsters” (CEJL II, p. 274).

We (novel by Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, 1924) The Russian satirist Evgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884–1937) wrote the futuristic fantasy novel We in 1921, which became one of the first books to be banned in the Soviet Union. The son of a Russian Orthodox priest and teacher, Zamyatin joined the Bolsheviks while studying naval engineering in St. Petersburg. Arrested during the 1905 Revolution, he was exiled to Siberia. He escaped, returned to St. Petersburg, and completed his education. After graduating, he became an engineer for the Russian navy and was sent to Britain in 1916 to study ship construction. Returning to Russia after the October Revolution, he published The Islanders, a satiric novel about English life, and edited translations of British and American authors. Although a supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, Zamyatin was soon disillusioned by the artistic censorship that followed. His 1921 article “I am Afraid” argued for freedom of expression, extolling creativity and individuality over officialdom and conformity. We was not printed in the Soviet Union, although it was read at a writer’s meeting in 1924. Zamyatin smuggled a copy to the United States where it was published in English by E. P. Dutton. Zamyatin was subjected to criticism following the release of We in a foreign country. With the aid of Maxim Gorky, he appealed to Stalin for permission to leave the Soviet Union. In 1931, he was allowed to emigrate to Paris, where he died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1937. Orwell received a copy of We in 1944 from Gleb Struve who had included the novel

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We in his anthology 25 Years of Soviet Russian Literature. In his thank you letter Orwell mentioned Zamyatin’s novel, stating that he had an interest in futuristic novels and was “making notes” for one of his own. In January 1946 Orwell published a review of We in the Tribune, calling it “one of the literary curiosities of the book-burning age” (CEJL IV, p. 72). Orwell believed that Huxley must have used Zamyatin’s book as a source for Brave New World because both books “deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world” set in the 26th century. Orwell’s review details the main features of Zamyatin’s imagined Utopia where humans are numbered rather than named, live in a one-party Single State ruled by The Benefactor, and are policed by the Guardians. Residents are under constant scrutiny, only allowed to lower the curtains of their glass houses for the “sex hour.” Love is illegal, as is political dissent. Officials discover that “imagination” is responsible for rebellious individuality and develop an X-ray treatment to eradicate its nerve-center. Besides drawing parallels between We and Brave New World, Orwell indicated that Zamyatin’s novel, written a decade before the excesses of Stalinism, was not a narrow critique of Soviet Communism but “a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again” (CEJL IV, p. 75). We clearly influenced Orwell’s final novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In both the protagonist, a technocrat for the State, keeps a journal, and falls in love with a female dissident he later betrays. Both characters live under constant surveillance by the state. In We the central character called D-503 walks down avenues banked by “cleverly” disguised “street membranes” used by the Bureau of Guardians to record outdoor conversations. Orwell noted in his review that Zamyatin’s characters live in glass houses to eliminate privacy except during regulated “sex hours” because he was writing before the advent of television. Clearly in 1946 Orwell was contemplating the “telescreens” used to observe the citizens of Oceania in Ninety Eighty-Four. Zamyatin’s Great Benefactor and Guardians presage Orwell’s Big Brother and Thought Police. In addition, both novels focus on the artificiality of life in a structured totalitarian state created after a great Revolution. Food is synthetic, and humans are separated from the natural world. In We the Green Wall separates the “perfect machine world from the irrational, hideous world of trees, birds, animals” (241). In both novels sexual life is highly controlled and designed to reduce romance, intimacy, and bonds between partners. In We sex is limited to specific hours and requires people to have rationed pink coupons. Sexual intercourse in Nineteen Eighty-Four is described as “a slightly disgusting minor operation” (57). Both novels end with the rebellious protagonist being crushed by the state. After his imagination is irradiated, D-503’s last journal entry asserts that “rationality must conquer” (353). Orwell ends his novel with his tortured hero Winston Smith loving Big Brother as he waits for the inevitable executioner’s bullet. We did not appear in the Soviet Union until 1988 when it was published along with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• Further Reading Beauchamp, George. “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. V, no. 4, Dec. 1973, pp. 285–301. Horan, Thomas. “Revolutions from the Waist Downwards: Desire as Rebellion in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Extrapolation, no. 2, 2007, p. 314.

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Wells, Hitler and the World State (essay, 1941) For Orwell, H. G. Wells’ emotional denunciation of Hitler as a screaming defective monster masked a troubling contradiction between what turn-of-the-century internationalist progressives preached about the future and the reality that followed. Wells believed that a world government and science would bring peace and prosperity. All of the elements of Wells’ futurist world state were apparent in Hitler’s Reich: Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based [CEJL II, p. 143].

As a Utopian idealist, Wells could not understand “that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself could describe as sanity” (CEJL II, p. 144). He also could not foresee that the technology and centralized government he envisioned bringing world peace could be marshaled by “creatures out of the Dark Ages” who “have come marching into the present” (CEJL II, p. 144).

Westfield (Burmese Days, 1934) The District Superintendent of Police in Kyauktada, Burma, Westfield is a member of the outpost’s small European Club and an associate of the novel’s protagonist John Flory. He continually tries to joke with his peers, but his voice usually sounds “hollow and melancholy” (19). Less racist than the other British subjects (he objects to calling the Burmese “niggers”), Westfield provides the lonely protagonist John Flory with an acquaintanceship, if not friendship.

“What Is Science?” (essay, 1945) In October 1945 J. Stewart Cook wrote a letter to the Tribune arguing that to avoid “scientific hierarchy,” the public should be educated in science and that scientists should take a greater role in politics and government policies. Orwell published his response a week later, noting that while most readers would generally agree with Cook’s sentiments, there were problems with his assumptions. Orwell questioned what is meant by the word “science.” Most people, he presumed, used the word to refer to the “exact” sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology or as a “method of thought” based on rational analysis of observable facts. To heighten the status of the physicist over the poet, Orwell argued, was dangerous. Scientists may be knowledgeable, but they are not morally superior to others. While many German writers resisted the Nazis and accepted exile or punishment, the exact scientists were only too willing to cooperate with the dictatorial regime and equip it with advanced military technologies. Improving the public’s marginal understanding of chemistry and physics might do more harm than good by narrowing people’s range of thought. A scientific education, in Orwell’s view, should not be focused on specific subjects but a method of thinking “that can be used on any problem one meets” (CEJL IV, p. 12).

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Who Reading about physicists who refused to conduct research on the atom bomb, Orwell speculated that many of them probably had some knowledge of history, literature, and the arts.

“Who Are the War Criminals?” (essay, 1943) “What crime, if any, has Mussolini committed?” Orwell asked following the collapse of the Italian dictator. A book titled The Trial of Mussolini envisioned the Duce indicted before a British court with Mussolini testifying and calling witnesses, both living and dead, in his defense. The list of charges read against him is impressive, yet, as Orwell noted, leading British officials in the 1920s and 1930s, including Winston Churchill, praised the Fascist dictator as providing “the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.” Orwell pointed out that Tories supported Mussolini because of his anti–Communism just as Leftists “excuse almost anything” done by the Russians “‘because they’re on our side.’” Orwell questioned the rationale for war crimes trials, since few executions of leaders have ever occurred. “When tyrants are put to death,” he argued, “it should be by their own subjects; those who are punished by a foreign authority, like Napoleon, are simply made into martyrs and legends” (CEJL II, p. 324). What is important is not that dictators be “made to suffer” but “made to discredit themselves.” Assuming that Hitler and Mussolini would eventually lose power, Orwell speculated that if the Germans and Italians decide not to execute them, “let the pair of them escape with a suitcase of bearer securities and settle down as the accredited bores of some Swiss pension” rather than turn them into heroes and martyrs.

“Why I Write” (essay, 1946) In “Why I Write” Orwell recounted his childhood interest in writing, explained his adult ambitions, and examined the universal motivations that drive people to write. As a middle child separated from his siblings by five years, he grew up isolated and lonely, a sentiment exacerbated by his father’s extended absences. Like other lonely children he comforted himself by making up stories and holding imaginary conversations. Looking back, Orwell conjectured that his writing interests “were mixed up with the feelings of being isolated and undervalued” (CEJL I, p. 1). From the ages of 17 to 24, he attempted to abandon writing. But knowing he had a facility with words, he returned to literary work, desiring to create “enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings … full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound” (CEJL I, p. 3). His first novel, Burmese Days was “that kind of book.” Orwell speculated that, aside from needing to earn a living, there are four great motives that drive people to write: 1. Sheer egoism, the desire to be smart, talked about, remembered after death, live their own lives, and prove their worth to others, especially those who snubbed them in childhood. 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm, the desire to share an experience, express oneself in pet words and phrases.

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Writers 3. Historical impulse, the desire to record facts for posterity. 4. Political purpose, the desire “to push the world in a certain direction” and influence people’s social and political attitudes. Orwell defined his own purpose as the desire “to make political writing into an art” (CEJL I, p. 6). He listed his motivations to write as wanting to expose a lie, draw attention to a fact, and get a hearing for his ideas. Looking at his own work, he realized that he produced his worst books when he lacked a political agenda and his writing devolved into “purple passages” and “sentences without meaning” (CEJL I, p. 7).

Mr. Whymper (Animal Farm, 1945) Mr. Whymper is a “sly-looking” solicitor who agrees to serve as an intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world. Needing items the farm cannot produce independently, Napoleon announces that Animal Farm will engage in trade with humans. Whymper, seeing potential commissions, agrees to work with Napoleon. He visits Animal Farm every Monday. To counter rumors that Animal Farm is suffering from famine, Napoleon orders that empty bins be filled with sand and covered with grain to impress Whymper. Animals once told to avoid contact with humans are instructed to tell Whymper that their rations have been increased. Whymper informs Napoleon that a neighboring farmer Mr. Frederick paid him for timber with forged banknotes, an event that leads to the Battle of the Windmill (see The Battle of the Windmill).

Mrs. Wisbeach (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) At the start of the novel the protagonist Gordon Comstock lives in a boarding house at 31 Willowbed Road presided over by Mrs. Wisbeach. She imposes strict rules on her gentlemen lodgers, forbidding them to make tea in their rooms. Comstock had to wrestle with her to get a kitchen table for his room to use as a desk. Mrs. Wisbeach is embittered by her tenant’s writing because he does not like his cluttered table to be “tidied up.” Like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Comstock is always under scrutiny. A suspicious matron, Mrs. Wisbeach forbids boarders from entertaining female guests and goes through their mail before delivering the letters. Ever watchful, she prowls the hallways and stairs, hoping to catch lodgers doing something forbidden. Symbolically, Mrs. Wisbeach supplies Comstock’s room with an aspidistra, a plant Gordon repeatedly tries to kill without success.

“Writers and the Leviathan” (essay, 1948) In this essay Orwell addressed the dilemma writers face living in a political age. Like people on a sinking ship who cannot avoid thinking about being on a sinking ship, people in 1948 cannot avoid politics in an era of concentration camps, atomic bombs, war, and Fascism. Effective political action requires organization and party solidarity, which clashes with the independence and freedom of thought needed by writers to be honest. “To accept political responsibility now,” he argued, “means yielding oneself over to orthodoxies and

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You ‘party lines’” (CEJL IV, p. 409). The modern writer lives in “constant dread” of offending “public opinion within his own group.” The orthodoxies of the Left are problematic because their ideology “was evolved by people who had no immediate prospect of attaining power” (CEJL IV, p. 409). The Left, according to Orwell, endured three “big bumps” challenging their beliefs. The Russian Revolution drove them to view the Bolsheviks as Socialists even though in practice they violated Socialist values. Accepting the Soviet regime led to “a sort of schizophrenic” thinking, condemning human rights abuses by the Right and justifying or ignoring human rights abuses by the Soviets. The second bump was the rise of Fascism which showed that nationalism trumped class consciousness. The third bump was the Left achieving power. The crisis the Labour Party faced in 1948 was “fighting against its own past propaganda.” Left-wing parties were anti-imperialist but never explained what giving up the Empire would mean. Workers were told they were “exploited” but were not told “the brute truth” that they were also “exploiters.” Britain’s standard of living depended on exploiting people of color in colonies and creating captive markets. Giving up imperialism would mean lower wages and higher prices at home, something no Leftist government can impose on its supporters. “To accept an orthodoxy,” Orwell observed, “is always to inherit unresolved contradictions” (CEJL IV, p. 411). This poses problems for writers because accepting an ideology and “group loyalties” are “poisonous to literature, so long as literature is the product of individuals.” The writer in a political age has to strike a delicate balance. “When a writer engages in politics,” Orwell advises, “he should do so as a human being, but not as a writer.” He can give lectures, canvass voters, distribute leaflets, even fight in civil wars to support a party but “never write for it.” Orwell justified his thesis because he sees it as the only option, telling writers that “to lock yourself up in an ivory tower” is impossible and to yield to a party machine or group ideology “is to destroy yourself as a writer” (CEJL IV, p. 413).

“You and the Atom Bomb” (essay, 1945) Orwell’s Tribune article appeared two months following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Orwell speculated how the atom bomb would change history. Had it been as easy to make as an alarm clock, the bomb would have altered the “whole trend of history” by erasing distinctions between great and small nations and reducing the power of governments over individuals. Given the complexity and expense of developing the bomb, Orwell believed that the new weapon would intensify the trends that dominated the 20th century. Assuming that the Soviet Union would develop atomic weapons within a few years, Orwell predicted the world would be dominated by two or three super powers and their empires. Anticipating the Cold War, Orwell observed that nuclear weapons would “put an end to largescale wars” while “prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’” (CEJL IV, p. 10).

Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich (see We)

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Appendix A: On Literature, Language, Politics and Life A Selection of Quotations by George Orwell ON HIS WRITING Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it…. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. —“Why I Write,” 19461

ON NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centalised economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere. —Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract), 19492

WRITERS AND POLITICS When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer. I do not think that he has the right, merely on the score of his sensibilities, to shirk the ordinary dirty work of politics. Just as much as anyone else, he should be prepared to deliver lectures in draughty halls, to chalk pavements, to canvass voters, to distribute leaflets, even to fight in civil wars if it seems necessary. But whatever else he does in the service of his party, he should never write for it. He should make clear that his writing is a thing apart. —“Writers and the Leviathan,” 19483

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Appendix A

ON THE DECLINE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE A man may to take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. —“Politics and the English Language,” 19464

THE AMERICAN INFLUENCE ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE …on the whole American is a bad influence and has already had a debasing effect…. For though American produces vivid and witty turns of speech, it is terribly poor in names for natural objects and localities. Even the streets in American cities are usually known by numbers instead of names…. We are justified in regarding the American language with suspicion. We ought to be ready to borrow its best words, but we ought not to let it modify the actual structure of our language. —“The English People,” 19435

RULES FOR GOOD WRITING 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. —“Politics and the English Language,” 19466

FEAR OF THE MOB Fear of the mob is superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. —Down and Out in Paris and London, 19337

IMPERIALISM AND THE LEFT Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat of plate of strawberries with cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 19378

LEFT WING PARTIES 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

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Literature, Language, Politics, Life internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. —“Rudyard Kipling,” 19429

PATRIOTISM Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist. —“The Lion and the Unicorn,” 194210

NATIONALISM All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by “our” side. —“Notes on Nationalism,” 194511

SOCIALISM Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193712 Socialism means justice and common decency. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193713 The Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an efficient world. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193714 The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so…. Still more unfortunately, it includes … the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-waterin-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of “progress” like blue-bottles to a dead cat. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193715

TECHNOLOGY AND MODERN LIFE We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193716 …there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193717

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Appendix A The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug—that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habitforming. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193718 In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.; and on the other hand there would be a constant demand for the things the machine cannot produce. But meanwhile the machine is here, and its corrupting effects are almost irresistible. One inveighs against it, but one goes on using it. Even a bare-arse savage, given the chance, will learn the vices of civilisation within a few months. —The Road to Wigan Pier, 193719 In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. —“Pleasure Spots,” 194620 For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions—in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane—is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals. —“Pleasure Spots,” 194621

OBSERVATIONS The choice before human beings is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands. —“No, Not One,” 194122 Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. —“Politics and the English Language,” 194623 England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. —“The Lion and the Unicorn,” 194124 When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. —“The Art of Donald McGill,” 194125 A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. —“The Lion and the Unicorn,” 194126 One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence. —“Letter to Richard Rees,” 194927 A humanitarian is always a hypocrite. —“Rudyard Kipling,” 194228 Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. —“Reflections on Gandhi,” 194929

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Literature, Language, Politics, Life Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. —“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali,” 194430 …love … sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. —“Reflections on Gandhi,” 194931 All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. —“Why I Write,” 194632 AT 50, everyone has the face he deserves. —“Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook”33

• Notes 1. “Why I Write.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. I, pp. 5–6. 2. Letter to Francis A. Henson (extract). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 502. 3. “Writers and the Leviathan.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 412. 4. “Politics and the English Language.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, pp. 127–128. 5. “The English People.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. III, pp. 28–29. 6. “Politics and the English Language.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 139. 7. Down and Out in Paris and London. Berkeley, 1961, p. 120. 8. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 136. 9. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 187. 10. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 103. 11. “Notes on Nationalism.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. III, p. 369. 12. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, pp. 144–145. 13. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 149. 14. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 158. 15. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 153. 16. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 90. 17. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 99. 18. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, p. 169. 19. The Road to Wigan Pier. Harcourt, 1961, pp. 170–171. 20. “Pleasure Spots.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 80. 21. “Pleasure Spots.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 81. 22. “No, Not One.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 170. 23. “Politics and the English Language.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 139. 24. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 75. 25. “The Art of Donald McGill.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p.164. 26. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 61. 27. Letter to Richard Rees, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 478. 28. “Rudyard Kipling.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. II, p. 187.

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Appendix A 29. “Reflections on Gandhi.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 463. 30. “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. III, p. 156. 31. “Reflections on Gandhi.” The Collected Essay, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 467. 32. “Why I Write.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. I, p. 7. 33. “Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Harcourt, 1968. vol. IV, p. 515.

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Appendix B: Writing and Research Topics 1. Discuss the various ways that George Orwell can be defined or identified as an author. Is he primarily a political commentator, an advocate for an ideological point of view, or a British novelist? 2. Orwell scholars have debated whether many of his most famous essays, such as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” should be considered short stories because there are no reputable records of him witnessing or participating in these events. Does it matter whether the events described actually happened? Why or why not? 3. Critics have questioned the validity of Orwell’s experiences as a tramp and a “down and out” because he chose this lifestyle and could return to the middle-class whenever he wanted. Did having this option invalidate his observations of poverty? Did going hungry and being homeless himself teach Orwell more about poverty than studying it from a distance or simply interviewing the poor? Why or why not? 4. What impact did Orwell have on the English language? Why are his eighty-year-old essays still taught in college composition courses? Can you identify specific principles Orwell followed? 5. Consider the observations Orwell made about tramps in the 1930s. Are his comments about the poor valid today? Why or why not? Are today’s homeless different? 6. How did Orwell’s personal experiences as a police official in India shape his view of British imperialism? How did he use his novel Burmese Days to express his sentiments? Consider the running debate the protagonist John Flory has with his Indian friend Dr. Veraswami. What is he trying to reveal by having the Englishman condemn British rule and the Asian defending it? 7. Discuss the importance of Elizabeth Lackersteen to John Flory in Burmese Days. How does the arrival of a young Englishwoman affect Flory? What mistaken assumptions does he make about her? What is she seeking in a husband? Why was Flory’s relationship with a Burmese woman unacceptable for her? Had they been able to marry, would she have provided the kind of relationship Flory sought? Why or why not? 8. Orwell considered A Clergyman’s Daughter his worst novel. Does the character of Dorothy Hare seem credible? Is her fear of sexuality awkwardly drawn or exaggerated? Do you find her attack of amnesia believable? Why or why not? 9. Is Dorothy Hare a too poorly drawn or naïve character to discuss the loss of religious faith? Would Orwell’s novel be stronger if it centered on a more highly educated, more independent protagonist, such as a chaplain or a nun? Why or why not? 10. Why does Dorothy Hare return to live with her father, even though she has lost her religious faith? Does she really have no other option? 11. What does the aspidistra symbolize to Gordon Comstock? How does Orwell use it as both a symbol and a comic plot device?

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Appendix B 12. What is Gordon Comstock trying to prove by staging his “money-strike”? Is he driven by idealism or masochism? He condemns capitalism but rejects Socialism as an alternative. Why? 13. Examine Gordon Comstock’s wealthy friend Ravelston. What point is Orwell making about Socialists? Is Ravelston meant to be a comic stereotype of the guilty liberal? Do you see parallels between Comstock’s friendship with Ravelston and John Flory’s relationship with Dr. Veraswami in Burmese Days? 14. Is Gordon Comstock an effective character to explore poverty during the Great Depression? Can readers have sympathy for someone who voluntarily leaves a steady job when millions of men and women were being laid off? 15. Gordon Comstock takes the position that he cannot hold down a good job and be a poet. Is this a realistic stance? Why does he assume working for two pounds a week instead of four puts him in a better position to launch a literary career? Why does he fail to write? 16. What similarities can you draw between Dorothy Hare and Gordon Comstock? Do both characters return to their starting points unchanged? 17. How does Orwell’s examination of conditions in northern England in The Road to Wigan Pier differ from his personal experiences in Down and Out in Paris and London? What shocked Orwell the most about the lives of coal miners? How did Orwell use documents like worker pay stubs to support his observations? How did he use personal observations to dramatize the hardships miners faced? 18. In Orwell’s view why did Socialism fail to attract more followers during the 1930s? How did Orwell characterize Socialists? Why did he consider them a “dreary tribe” of “cranks” and eccentrics? Why did he believe that progressives were likely to alienate workers rather draw them to embrace Socialism? 19. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell described in graphic detail the squalid conditions miners endured in shabby two-room cottages lacking plumbing and modern appliances but pointed out that many didn’t like the council houses rising up to replace the slums. Why did people find larger houses with bathrooms and backyards undesirable? What was lacking? 20. In Orwell’s view what role did inexpensive luxuries like candy and movies play in stemming revolution in Britain during the Great Depression? 21. Why did Orwell decide to go to Spain? How did the reality of the Spanish war differ from his expectations? 22. How did Orwell’s experiences in Spain influence his view on language, media, and the truth? 23. Some critics objected to Orwell’s use of the first-person narrator in Coming Up for Air. Is George Bowling an effective spokesman for Orwell’s views? Can a character be both an “Everyman” figure and an insightful observer of his or her era and society? 24. George Bowling states that he is less afraid of the coming war in Europe than he is of what he calls the “after-war” of concentration camps, food queues, and loudspeakers telling you what to think. Is Bowling’s after-war a precursor to the world Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four ten years later? 25. George Bowling assumes his parents would consider him a success because he sells insurance, owns a suburban home, and drives a car. Why does he feel trapped? What is missing in his life? 26. Why is Bowling disappointed when he returns to his hometown? Is it realistic that he would assume Lower Binfield would remain intact and unchanged after thirty years? 27. Is Bowling’s dislike of the modern world driven more by politics and the fear of war and dictatorships or by a distaste for modern technology and commercialism? 28. How does the accidental RAF bombing in Lower Binfield serve as a glimpse into the future? What do you make of the official’s remark that the results of the bombing, which killed several British civilians, were “disappointing”? 29. How did Orwell’s wartime service making propaganda broadcasts for the BBC shape his views of language and politics? How did the experiences influence the themes he developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

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Writing and Research Topics 30. What did the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 reveal about the nature of Communism and totalitarianism in Orwell’s view? How did it influence his depiction of Oceania’s shift from waging war with Eastasia to Eurasia in Nineteen Eighty-Four? 31. Why did Orwell believe in 1940 that Britain would have to abandon capitalism for Socialism in order to defeat Hitler? How did his views change as the war progressed? 32. What conclusions does Orwell draw about how politics has shaped the English language? What common faults or defects does he identify? How do these features lead to “corrupting thought”? What rules does Orwell offer to write effectively? Are his suggestions still valid today? 33. In Orwell’s view what stance does a writer have to take to be politically active while maintaining personal independence? 34. How important is the theme of nature in Orwell’s writing? In Burmese Days John Flory finds solace in the exotic Asian jungle, a joy he attempts to share with Elizabeth. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, and Nineteen Eighty-Four couples find the outdoors, even in winter, more conducive to their lovemaking than the comforts of civilization. What does Orwell find disturbing about the idyllic resorts he describes in “Pleasure Spots”? 35. What parallels can be drawn between John Flory in Burmese Days and Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four? 36. Is Animal Farm a satire on the Russian Revolution or totalitarian regimes in general? 37. Animal Farm takes place in England with animals as feature characters. The novel never uses the words Socialism or Communism and does not include any references to actual political events or personalities. Why did many publishers decline to release the book while the Soviet Union was fighting the Nazis? Why did one editor believe that depicting the pigs as the leaders of the farm would offend the Soviets? 38. Is Orwell saying in Animal Farm that all revolutions are bound to fail and lead to different forms of injustice and exploitation or is he saying that any revolution can be corrupted by greed and avarice? 39. Can a direct parallel between Trotsky and Stalin be made with Orwell’s depiction of Snowball and Napoleon in Animal Farm? 40. What do the following characters represent in Animal Farm—Boxer, Benjamin, Mollie, and Squealer? How would you characterize their human counterparts? 41. Orwell’s original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. Can this be considered a more fitting title? While being interrogated in the Ministry o Love, Smith is called “the last man” by his tormentor. What does O’Brien mean by this statement? 42. Why does the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four adopt a puritanical attitude about sex and refuse to let couples marry if they show any signs of affection toward each other? 43. How does the Party use distractions like pornography and lotteries to control the proles? Could arguments be made that social media is having the same effect on people today? 44. How does the Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four differ from Nazism and Communism and other previous forms of totalitarianism? 45. What explains the enduring popularity of Orwell’s last two novels?

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Bibliography Primary Sources: Editions of Orwell Cited NOVELS Animal Farm. Harcourt, 1946. Burmese Days. New American Library, 1963. A Clergyman’s Daughter. Harcourt, 1936. Coming Up for Air. Harcourt, 1969. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Harcourt, 1956. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harcourt, 1949.

NON-FICTION The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (CEJL; 4 vols.). Harcourt, 1968. Down and Out in Paris and London. Harcourt, 1961. Homage to Catalonia. Harcourt, 1962. The Road to Wigan Pier. Berkeley, 1961.

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Index Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 29, 57, 132 American English 82, 182 American motion pictures 18, 150 Ampleforth (Nineteen EightyFour) 29 Animal Farm (animated motion picture) 35 Animal Farm (dramatic adaptions) 35 Animal Farm (musical adaptation) 36 Animal Farm (novel) 1, 3, 4, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29–34, 36, 39, 40–41, 42, 47, 55–56, 63, 73, 85, 88, 94, 98–99, 109, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 140– 141, 143–144, 161, 165–167 Animal Farm (television movie) 36 Animalism (Animal Farm) 36, 161 “Antisemitism in Britain” 36– 37 “The Art of Donald McGill” 37–38 “Arthur Koestler” 38–39 aspidistra (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 39 atomic bomb 118, 178, 180 Battle of the Cowshed (Animal Farm) 31, 32, 39–40, 47, 99 Battle of the Windmill (Animal Farm) 40, 85, 179 “Beasts of England” (Animal Farm) 30, 36, 40–41, 124, 141 “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” 41 Benjamin (Animal Farm) 42, 48

Big Brother (Nineteen EightyFour) 29, 42, 50, 52, 57, 87, 97, 99, 100, 125, 128, 129, 130–135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 149, 160, 163– 165, 169, 170, 176 Blair, Ida (mother) 5, 6 Blair, Richard (father) 5, 6, 7, 17 Blair, Richard Horatio (adopted son) 21, 25, 26 the book (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 42–43, 87, 97, 132, 133, 142 “Bookshop Memories” 43 Boris (Down and Out in Paris and London) 43, 74, 76, 138, 142 Bowling, George (Coming Up for Air) 44–45, 46–47, 49, 63–69, 79, 80, 83, 90, 109, 119, 147, 162 Bowling, Hilda (Coming Up for Air) 44, 46, 65–66 Bowling, Joe (Coming Up for Air) 46, 120 Bowling, Samuel (Coming Up for Air) 46–47 Boxer (Animal Farm) 31, 33, 40, 42, 47–48, 63, 167 “Boys Weeklies” 48–49 Bozo (Down and Out in Paris and London) 50, 76–78 Britain in WWII 111–118 British Communist Party 13, 15, 19, 81, 87, 91, 98, 109, 111–112, 114, 115, 118, 148 British culture 109–110 The Brookers (The Road to Wigan Pier) 50, 154, 155 The Brotherhood (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 50–51, 139, 164 Brownell, Sonia (second wife) 11, 23, 26, 34, 51 Buddicom, Jacintha 5

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Burmese Days 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 26, 52–55, 79, 83, 88, 104, 105, 106, 107, 120, 121, 123, 165, 170, 171, 172, 177, 178 the cat (Animal Farm) 55–56 “Charles Dickens” 56–57 Charrington, Mr. (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 57, 124, 131, 132 Cheeseman, Mr. (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 57, 123, 125 Chestnut Tree Café (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 57–58, 100, 134 childhood 168 Churchill, Winston 115, 116, 117, 178 A Clergyman’s Daughter 4, 10, 12, 45, 58–62, 71, 72, 79, 88, 89–90, 96, 137, 152, 160, 161, 169, 173, 174 “Clink” 62–63 Clover (Animal Farm) 33, 47, 48, 63, 125, 126 Coming Up for Air (novel) 4, 5, 9, 17, 26, 44–46, 49, 63–69, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 109, 119– 120, 147, 162 Coming Up for Air (television) 69 Comstock, Gordon (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 4, 39, 43, 45, 57, 64, 69–71, 82, 83, 90, 100–104, 105, 123, 126, 127, 150–151, 174, 179 Comstock, Julia (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 70, 71 “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” 71–72 Connolly, Cyril 5, 6, 11, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 34, 51, 104 Creevy, Mrs. (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 60–61, 72, 152– 153, 169

Index Daily Worker 15, 91, 93, 114 Dali, Salvador 41 “Defense of the Novel” 72–73 Dickens, Charles 56–57 the dogs (Animal Farm) 32, 73, 126–127 Doublethink (Nineteen EightyFour) 73 Down and Out in London and Paris 8–10, 11, 13, 21, 26, 43, 50, 73–79, 88, 96, 108, 138, 141, 142, 153 Eastasia (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 140 Ellen (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 79 Ellesmere Road, West Benchley (Coming Up for Air) 79 Ellis (Burmese Days) 53, 79–80, 122 Elsie (Coming Up for Air) 45, 65, 67, 80, 120 English language 82, 127–128, 145–146, 182 “The English People” 80–82 Erskine (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 82–83 Eton 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 21 Eurasia (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 140 European Club (Burmese Days) 52–54, 79–80, 83, 84, 105, 122, 171, 172, 173, 177 facecrime (Nineteen EightyFour) 83 fear of the mob 182 Flaxman (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 64, 83, 127 Flory, John (Burmese Days) 4, 52–55, 80, 83–85, 105–108, 120–122, 165, 170–173, 177 Franco, Francisco 15, 91, 92, 93, 94, 113 Frederick (Animal Farm) 85 Freedom Is Slavery (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 85 Gandhi, Mahatma 151–152 Gem 48–49 “George Gissing” 85–87 Goldstein, Emmanuel (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 42, 50, 57, 87, 91, 97, 128, 130, 131, 132, 139, 169, 170 Gollancz, Victor 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 24, 30, 55, 66, 78, 87–88, 108–109, 141, 153, 158–159

“A Hanging” 88–89 Hare, Charles (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 58, 60, 62, 89, 152, 160, 169 Hare, Dorothy (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 4, 45, 58–62, 71, 72, 79, 89–91, 137, 152, 161, 169, 173–174 Hate Week (Nineteen EightyFour) 91, 142 Hemingway, Ernest 22, 43 Henley 5 Hitler, Adolf 37, 49, 66–67, 87– 88, 97, 98, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 126, 129, 138, 147, 148, 151, 177, 178 Homage to Catalonia 4, 16, 18, 22, 91–95, 118–119 “Hop-Picking” 95–96 “How the Poor Die” 8, 96 Ignorance Is Strength (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 96–97 imperialism and the Left 182 Indian Imperial Police 3, 6–7, 161–162 INGSOC or English Socialism (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 42, 140, 143 Inner Party (Nineteen EightyFour) 97 “Inside the Whale” 97–98 Jones, Mr. (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 39, 42, 73, 98–99, 125, 167 Julia (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 51, 57, 87, 99–100, 124, 131–132, 134, 139, 148, 160, 164–165 Katha, Burma 7 Katherine (Nineteen EightyFour) 100, 131, 164 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (motion picture) 105 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (novel) 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 39, 43, 45, 57, 62, 64, 69, 71, 82, 83, 88, 90, 100–105, 109, 123, 125, 127, 150, 151, 163, 174, 179 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (television) 105 Ko S’la (Burmese Days) 105 Koestler, Arthur 38–39 Kyauktada (Burmese Days) 105–106 Labour Party 18, 23, 26, 74, 87, 91, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 180 Lackersteen, Elizabeth (Burmese

200

Days) 54–55, 84, 105, 106– 108, 121, 122, 173 Lackersteen, Mr. (Burmese Days) 105, 106–108, 121, 122, 137, 173 Lackersteen, Mrs. (Burmese Days) 106–108 “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” 108 Left Book Club 13–14, 44, 66, 87–88, 108–109 leftwing parties 182–183 “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” 109–110 “Literature and the Left” 110– 111 “Literature and Totalitarianism” 111 London, Jack 6, 8, 73, 128 “London Letters” 111–118 “Looking Back on the Spanish War” 118–119 Lower Binfield (Coming Up for Air) 119–120 Ma Hla May (Burmese Days) 52, 54, 84, 106–107, 120–121, 171 Ma Kin (Burmese Days) 121 Macgregor (Burmese Days) 53, 55, 80, 107, 121–122 Magnet 48–49 “Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester” 122 “Marrakech” 122–123 Maxwell (Burmese Days) 80, 123 McKechnie, Mr. (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 123 McNair, John 13, 14, 15 memory hole (Nineteen EightyFour) 123–124, 132 Millborough, Ellen see Ellen Miller, Henry 13, 17, 97–98 Minimus (Animal Farm) 124 Ministry of Love (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 124 Ministry of Plenty (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 124 Ministry of Truth (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 124–125 Mollie (Animal Farm) 63, 125 Moses (Animal Farm) 30, 125 Mother Meakin (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 125–126 Moulmein, Burma 7 Muriel (Animal Farm) 63, 126 Mussolini, Benito 49, 152, 178 “My Country Right or Left” 126 Myaungmya, Burma 7

Index Napoleon (Animal Farm) 30– 33, 36, 40, 41, 47, 63, 73, 85, 99, 124, 126–127, 141, 144, 165, 167, 179 nationalism 183 nature 45, 64, 67, 144 Nazi scientists 119 New Albion Publicity Company (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 127 “New Words” 127–128 Newspeak (Nineteen EightyFour) 128 Nineteen Eighty-Four (motion pictures) 136–137 Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel) 1, 4, 9, 25–26, 29, 42, 44–45, 46, 50, 51, 57, 63–64, 66, 68, 73, 83, 84, 85, 88, 91, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104, 105, 111, 119, 123, 124, 128–137, 139, 140, 141–142, 143, 144, 148, 159, 163, 168, 169–170, 171, 173, 176, 179, 181 Nineteen Eighty-Four (opera) 137 Nineteen Eighty-Four (play) 137 Nineteen Eighty-Four (television) 137 No Orchids for Miss Blandish 150 Nobby (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 59, 79, 96, 137–138 “Notes on Nationalism” 138– 139 the novel 72–73 O’Brien (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 29, 42, 50–51, 73, 85, 87, 97, 99, 130–134, 139–140, 143, 160, 164–165 Oceania (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 140 Old Major (Animal Farm) 30, 33, 36, 40, 47, 55, 63, 124, 125, 126, 140–141, 161, 165 Oldspeak (Nineteen EightyFour) 141 Orwell, George (pseudonym) 141 O’Shaughnessy, Eileen (first wife) 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22 O’Shaughnessy, Gwen (sisterin-law) 21 O’Shaughnessy, Laurence (brother-in-law) 11, 16, 17, 18 Outer Party (Nineteen EightyFour) 141–142

ownlife (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 142 Paddy (Down and Out in Paris and London) 50, 76–78, 142 Parsons, Tom (Nineteen EightyFour) 91, 142–143 The Party (Nineteen EightyFour) 143 patriotism 183 Pilkington, Mr. (Animal Farm) 143–144 Pitchfield Farm (Animal Farm) 85 “Pleasure Spots” 144 “Poetry and the Microphone” 144–145 political language 145–146, 184 “Politics and the English Language” 145–146 “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” 146–147 Pollitt, Harry 13, 91 Porteous (Coming Up for Air) 67, 147 P.O.U.M. (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) 13, 14, 15, 16, 91–94, 135 poverty 73–78, 153–158 “The Prevention of Literature” 148 “The Principles of Newspeak” 128 private schools 153 proles (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 129, 130, 135, 144, 148–149, 164, 169 propaganda 4, 19, 20, 21, 32, 34, 35, 91–93, 110–111, 114, 116, 119, 124, 135, 145, 149, 152, 159, 163, 180 “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” 149 “Raffles and Miss Blandish” 149–150 Ravelston, Philip (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 83, 102– 103, 123, 150–151 Rees, Richard 151 “Reflections on Gandhi” 151– 152 “Revenge Is Sour” 152 Richards, Frank 48–49 Ringwood House Academy (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 60– 61, 72, 79, 152–153 The Road to Wigan Pier 12–13, 15, 50, 66, 88, 91, 109, 116, 153–159, 163, 182–184

201

Room 101 (Nineteen EightyFour) 99, 124, 159–160, 164 “Rudyard Kipling” 160 Rules for good writing 182 St. Athelstan’s (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 160 St. Cyprian’s 5, 6, 167–168 Semprill, Mrs. (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 59, 61, 89, 161, 174 The Seven Commandments (Animal Farm) 31, 32, 33, 36, 63, 126, 161, 165 Shakespeare, William 41, 108, 170 “Shooting an Elephant” 161– 162 Simmons, Katie (Coming Up for Air) 162–163 Slater, Hermione (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 163 Smith, Winston (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 29, 42, 44, 45, 46, 50–51, 57–58, 63, 73, 84– 85, 87, 91, 99–100, 119, 123, 124, 125, 128–134, 139–140, 142, 143, 149, 159–160, 163– 165, 168–169, 170, 171, 176, 179 Snowball (Animal Farm) 30– 33, 36, 40, 47, 73, 99, 126– 127, 141, 161, 165–167 Socialism 12, 19, 21, 23, 26, 39, 42, 71, 88, 101, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118, 140, 143, 150, 154, 157–159, 183 Spanish Civil War 91–93, 118– 119 “The Spike” 166 Squealer (Animal Farm) 30–33, 41, 47, 48, 63, 99, 126–127, 165, 166–167 Stalin, Josef 30, 32–33, 42, 47, 64, 66, 67, 98, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 127, 128, 129, 138– 139, 147, 150, 175–176 “Such, Such Were the Joys” 167–168 Syme (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 168 technology 96, 154, 156, 157, 177, 183–184 The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 42–43 Thomas, Sir (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 60, 72, 89, 169 Thought Police (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 169–170

Index thoughtcrime 85, 128, 129, 130, 143, 168, 169 “Tolstoy and Shakespeare” 170 totalitarianism 111 Twain, Mark 122 Two Minutes Hate (Nineteen Eighty-Four) 42, 66, 87, 130, 169, 170 U Po Kyin (Burmese Days) 52– 54, 83, 107, 121, 170–172 unperson (Nineteen EightyFour) 171 Veraswami, Dr. (Burmese Days) 52–55, 80, 83, 84, 171–172 Verrall (Burmese Days) 54, 107, 172–173

war crimes trials 178 War Is Peace (Nineteen EightyFour) 173 Warburton, Mr. (A Clergyman’s Daughter) 58–59, 61, 79, 90, 161, 173–174 Waterlow, Rosemary (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 39, 70, 71, 83, 102–103, 127, 174–175 Waters, Elsie see Elsie “W.B. Yeats” 175 We 175–176 Wells, H.G. 5, 6, 44, 65, 128, 177 “Wells, Hitler and the World State” 177 Westfield (Burmese Days) 177 “What Is Science?” 177

202

“Who Are the War Criminals?” 178 “Why I Write” 178–179 Whymper, Mr. (Animal Farm) 179 Wisbeach, Mrs. (Keep the Aspidistra Flying) 179 writers and politics 179–180 “Writers and the Leviathan” 179–180 writing 182 Yeats, W.B. 175 “You and the Atom Bomb” 180 Zamyatin, Evgeny Ivanovich 175–176