This is the fourth volume of the Folio Society’s Reportage box set of George Orwell’s non-fiction works. The first three volumes are his three non-fiction books: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia, the final two, of which this is the first, are collections of essays. At the time of writing this review I’ve already started D.J. Taylor’s biography Orwell, so I’ll wait until I review that to describe the man himself, but needless to say Orwell is one of, if not the, most influential political writers of the 20th century. This volume of essays includes some famous pieces, one of which The Lion and the Unicorn is almost a mini-book in itself. I’ll review the essays that interested me the most one by one rather than talking about the book as a whole.
A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant both describe events that occurred during his five years in Burma as an imperial policeman. A Hanging is unusually non-Orwellian in style, a rather baroque, but quite excellent description of hanging a Burmese man. It’s quite hideous in its mundane facts; the way the man meekly walks to the scaffold, the grimy courtyard of the gallows. Orwell finds himself horrified by the act of taking another human life. Shooting an Elephant is similarly damning of colonial authority. He describes his hatred of the Burmese and how they hated him in turn, while at the same time having to play the authoritarian administrator and kill a now harmless elephant. It’s interesting that, while Orwell was bitterly opposed to British imperialism, it never became his core political project. Despite his 5 years in Burma he was always more interested in the plight of the British poor rather than the much larger number of imperial subjects. I suppose he thought that the onset of socialism in the UK would inevitably lead to independence for the empire?
Hop Picking and Clink both describe his adventures amongst the London and Home Counties poor. Hop Picking tries an as-told-by dumbed down style which lacks authenticity and comes across as rather patronising. But the essay is a good description of what Hop Picking must have been like in the thirties. It was seen as a poor family’s summer holiday, which goes to show how grim life must have been back in London, if ten-hour, back-breaking work on a farm counted as a rest! Also fascinating that it’s in the area of Kent where I grew up. He travels through Ide Hill and Sevenoaks before landing a job on a farm near Maidstone. Clink is written in the more familiar journalistic Orwell style of Wigan Pier and Catalonia. A funny description of Orwell attempting to get himself into prison and failing thanks to the light-touch of the British criminal justice system. Heartening how friendly the 1930s bobbies are.
Bookshop Memories is a classic case of being careful about what you wish for, as Orwell finds his love of books turning to disdain when faced with them by the thousand. His short essay on Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party reveals the kind of socialism Orwell preferred. He disdained the incremental cautious tinkering favoured by the Parliamentary Labour Party, preferring the all-out revolutionary overthrow of private-property and capitalism espoused by the ILP. He was only a member for a short while, falling out with them at the beginning of WWII because of their anti-war stance. The essay My Country Right or Left is a condemnation of conscientious objectors. Orwell thinks the fight against Nazi Germany more important than any principled objection to war. Also included is a review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where he points out that Hitler transparently listed his totalitarian objectives in print and that there is no question that he should be resisted.
I enjoyed the unexpected long essay on Boys’ Weeklies. These were cheap magazines with titles like Gem and Magnet that featured ongoing serials about public schoolboys or tales of derring-do in the empire and during WWI. They were hugely popular, oddly among poorer boys as well as the public schoolboys themselves. Orwell thinks they are establishment propaganda and wonders if a socialist boys’ magazine would be possible - it wasn’t it seems. Fascinating how the cheap magazine was such a ubiquitous feature of the thirties with titles covering almost every niche interest.
Another long essay, Inside the Whale, is about the state of British literature between the wars. Orwell was a great admirer of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which is the cornerstone of the essay. Orwell strikes a very familiar pose to any modern Guardian reader when he writes:
What is quite obviously happening, war, or no war (WWII had just broken out), is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships.
Such progressive opinions echo away down the decades, and still today, almost a century later we have people like columnist George Monbiot constantly talking of “late stage capitalism”, as if capitalism is in terminal decline. Yet if Orwell could have time travelled 80 years into the future he would have found laissez-faire capitalism alive and thriving, and liberal-Christian culture (in the broad sense) still the dominant world ideology. The lesson is obviously never to make predictions - especially about the end of capitalism!
The Lion and the Unicorn takes up perhaps a quarter of the volume. He wrote it in 1940 when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany. He starts the essay with a long paean to the British character and the island itself. Orwell is both intensely patriotic and anti-fascist, but also convinced that British capitalism was not only doomed but responsible for the defeats that had led to the country’s present peril. He insists that the only way Britain can win against Germany and Italy is by instigating a socialist revolution and installing a government which takes full control of the economy. He thinks capitalism is doomed, simply because he is convinced a planned economy is more efficient. I suppose to some extent he was vindicated, first by the centralised government control of war production, even if it didn’t take actual ownership of the companies concerned, and later by the landslide Labour victory in 1945 which led to widespread nationalisation. In the long term of course he was wrong; capitalism survived and flourished and the nationalisation was rolled back in the 1980s.
Orwell is iconoclastic, always clear in his opinions. He writes brilliantly and persuasively. It’s no wonder that he stands as such a giant of political thought. Of course with the hindsight of nearly a century, it’s easy to see where he misses the mark, but at the time he must have appeared prophetic. No wonder he was so admired and hated in equal measure. His refusal to toe the line of any party or ideology but instead work from first-principles of truth and human decency mark him out as a truly great man.