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Decline of the English murder and other essays
- GenresNonfiction
Paperback
Published January 1, 1975
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About the author
George Orwell
1,338 books51.4k followersEric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 14, 2025
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/decline-of-the-english-murder-and-other-essays-by-george-orwell/
It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.
“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.
I had read “A Hanging” previously. "A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation." A very vivid, short piece.
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,
"One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."
“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.
“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.
"For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him."
“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.
“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.
"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."
“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.
"In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish."
I got the most value out of “Notes on Nationalism“.
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests."
He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.
Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together. An interesting bit of self-reflection, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:
"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content.
It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.
“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.
I had read “A Hanging” previously. "A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation." A very vivid, short piece.
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,
"One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."
“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.
“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.
"For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him."
“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.
“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.
"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."
“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.
"In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish."
I got the most value out of “Notes on Nationalism“.
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests."
He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.
Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together. An interesting bit of self-reflection, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:
"All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content.
April 30, 2025
i have been reading this book on and off on the train to work since last year; the amount of time it took me to read it is not a reflection on the quality of the book but rather on how much i hate being on the train to work. although some of these pieces are perhaps a little longer than they should be (Dickens and Donald McGill), it is, on the whole, a most enjoyable collection, and i don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Orwell was one of the greatest minds of his generation. i really, really enjoy the way he thinks about things:
"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. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience...So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects an scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself" (186).
it's politics and it's poetry and it's just, above all, really good, and every other sentence or so he says something so striking that you get lost in your own thoughts about it for a while and forget that you're meant to be turning the page.
"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. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience...So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects an scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself" (186).
it's politics and it's poetry and it's just, above all, really good, and every other sentence or so he says something so striking that you get lost in your own thoughts about it for a while and forget that you're meant to be turning the page.
June 3, 2025
I read this after 'The Clergyman's Daughter' (novel, 5 stars) given my desire to understand his personal narrative which is not without controversy. Some of the essays can come across as a little supercilious but his pieces 'Nationalism' and 'Why I Write' are super - eminently readable and ever trenchant for today's reader.
Read
December 22, 2024Feels wrong to give a random collection of essays a star rating because they were unrelated. Still, there are some really interesting bits - one on Dickens, another on early 20th-century hospitals, and Orwell's reflections on why he writes. Thoroughly recommend.
August 19, 2024
Fantastic little set of essays.
Love how timeless they are and still pertinent today
Love how timeless they are and still pertinent today
February 6, 2025
His prose style is spare and the points incisive, great
January 5, 2026
I think these essays were oddly (and somewhat ineffectively) grouped. I also ran into my usual problem of lacking the historical/cultural context for fully appreciating many of them. That being said, I am really keen on Orwell’s style—he avoids extraneous and needlessly embellished language.
“The Benefit of Clergy” was the most impactful for me and had a few really great lines. One was about the importance of being able to hold two opposing ideas true. It was in the context of Dali being a horrible person…but yes!!! The other is as follows: “Any life viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
“The Benefit of Clergy” was the most impactful for me and had a few really great lines. One was about the importance of being able to hold two opposing ideas true. It was in the context of Dali being a horrible person…but yes!!! The other is as follows: “Any life viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews