Essays

This collection gathers the essays, journalism, and reviews of George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), spanning two decades from 1928 to 1949. Selected and introduced by the literary critic John Carey, the volume presents Orwell as primarily an essayist and political thinker whose nonfiction writings reveal him more fully than his novels do. Carey's introduction distinguishes the confident, democratic literary persona of "George Orwell" from the reportedly prickly, diffident private man Eric Blair, and identifies Orwell's central moral concept as "decency," a term combining democratic fellow-feeling with a public-school sense of fair play.

The earliest pieces, written in the late 1920s and 1930s, establish Orwell's characteristic method: immersing himself in uncomfortable realities and reporting on them with plainspoken precision. "The Spike" (1931) describes a night in a workhouse casual ward, documenting the dehumanizing routine of compulsory baths, inedible food, and enforced idleness. "A Hanging" (1931) recounts witnessing an execution in Burma, where Orwell served for five years as an officer in the Imperial Police. The condemned prisoner's instinctive act of stepping aside to avoid a puddle on the path to the gallows triggers Orwell's recognition of what it means to destroy a conscious human life. "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), his most famous early essay, presents the defining parable of his anti-imperialism: forced to kill an elephant he does not want to kill because a crowd of two thousand Burmese expects it, Orwell discovers that the imperial ruler destroys his own freedom. "Marrakech" (1939) uses vignettes from French Morocco to expose the psychological mechanism by which colonial peoples are rendered invisible to their rulers.

By the mid-1930s, Orwell had left Burma, lived deliberately among the poor in Paris and London, and begun his career as a literary journalist. His criticism from this period attacks the corruption of book reviewing and critiques Marxist literary criticism for its intellectual dishonesty. The Spanish Civil War, in which Orwell fought in 1937 with the POUM militia, a non-Stalinist Marxist group, proved the pivotal experience of his life. "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (1937) argues that the Spanish Republican government fears its own revolutionaries more than it fears Francisco Franco, the Nationalist military leader, and that the Communist Party functions as a counter-revolutionary force suppressing workers' gains while the British left-wing press conceals what is happening.

The major essays of 1940 represent Orwell at his most ambitious as a literary critic. "Charles Dickens" examines Dickens as a moral rather than political critic of society, someone who attacks institutions without proposing alternatives, believing that decent behavior is the only real remedy. "Boys' Weeklies" analyzes cheap adventure papers as ideological documents, finding that they present a frozen Edwardian world of public-school values and xenophobic stereotypes to working-class readers with no left-wing alternative available. "Inside the Whale" traces English literary history from the Georgian poets through the aestheticist writers of the 1920s to the politicized writers of the 1930s, concluding that the American novelist Henry Miller's passive acceptance of experience represents the only honest literary stance in a world drifting toward totalitarianism.

"The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941), Orwell's most ambitious political pamphlet, argues that England can survive the war only by undergoing a Socialist revolution. Part one defines English national character through its gentleness, legality, anti-militarism, and emotional unity across class lines, describing England as a family "with the wrong members in control." Part two contends that private capitalism has been proven unworkable by the war. Part three proposes a six-point program including nationalization of major industries, limitation of incomes, educational reform, and Dominion status (self-governing status within the British Empire) for India. Throughout, Orwell insists that patriotism and Socialism are not merely compatible but mutually necessary.

The wartime essays on literature and culture, including pieces on the poet Rudyard Kipling, Leo Tolstoy, and the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, examine how to judge art whose political implications one finds repugnant. Orwell consistently argues that aesthetic merit and moral decency are separable, that it is wrong to dismiss a writer because one opposes the writer's politics, yet that artistic talent must not serve as an excuse for moral irresponsibility. "The Art of Donald McGill" (1941) analyzes seaside postcards as expressions of the pleasure-seeking, anti-heroic side of human nature, arguing that this harmless rebellion against virtue serves a necessary social function. "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1942) contains Orwell's most explicit warning about the falsification of history, arguing that if totalitarianism prevails, objective truth will cease to exist and lies will become the permanent historical record.

From 1943 through 1947, Orwell wrote eighty installments of a personal column called "As I Please" for Tribune, a left-wing weekly. These columns range across anti-Semitism, Anglo-American relations, the corruption of language, the pleasures of gardening and junk shops, and the persistence of class snobbery. They always return to Orwell's core concerns: the defense of intellectual honesty, the critique of power-worship, and the insistence that ordinary decency matters more than ideological correctness.

The major essays of 1944–1946 address the defining problems of the postwar world. "Notes on Nationalism" (1945) classifies varieties of nationalist thinking, from neo-Toryism and Zionism to Communism and pacifism, arguing that nationalism is the dominant intellectual disease of the age. "Politics and the English Language" (1945) diagnoses the decay of English prose as both cause and effect of muddled political thinking, proposing six rules for clearer writing and arguing that linguistic reform is a necessary step toward political regeneration. "The Prevention of Literature" (1946) contends that totalitarianism is fatal to prose because prose requires emotional sincerity, which is impossible under a regime that demands continuous alteration of beliefs.

"Politics vs. Literature" (1946), an examination of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, argues that Swift's worldview is reactionary and barely sane, yet the book remains a masterpiece, proving that greatness in art has nothing to do with moral correctness. "Why I Write" (1946) declares that since 1936 every line of Orwell's serious work has been written against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, with the goal of fusing political purpose and artistic purpose.

The late essays grow increasingly concerned with the Cold War and the prospects for democratic Socialism. "Toward European Unity" (1947) argues that the only hope for civilization lies in a federation of Western European Socialist republics but admits the odds are against survival. "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1947) uses Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare to explore the conflict between the religious desire to escape earthly life and the humanistic commitment to it, concluding that one must choose between God and Man. "Such, Such Were the Joys," Orwell's memoir of his childhood at a preparatory school called St Cyprian's, recounts the beatings, snobbery, and pervasive guilt that shaped his lifelong hatred of authority and his conviction that the rules of the world made it impossible to be good.

The collection closes with "Reflections on Gandhi" (1949), which acknowledges Mohandas Gandhi's courage and political shrewdness while arguing that his teachings are incompatible with the humanistic belief that earthly life is worth living, and with Orwell's response to the Bollingen Prize controversy over the poet Ezra Pound, in which Orwell defends awarding a poetry prize on aesthetic grounds while insisting that Pound's Fascist and anti-Semitic opinions must not be whitewashed. These final pieces crystallize the principle governing the entire collection: One must hold simultaneously in mind the demands of truth and the demands of decency, acknowledging both without sacrificing either.