The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters Of George Orwell, Volume 4 1945-1950

The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters #4

by George Orwell

A record of a great writer's nonfiction work and an evolving picture of the last years of his life, during the time when he published Animal Farm and 1984. "A magnificent tribute to the probity, consistency and insight of Orwell's topical writings....A remarkable self-portrait" (Alfred Kazin, Book World). Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus; Index.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Politics, Journalism, Classics, Literature, History

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Eric 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.

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t think of any more news. It is a beautiful spring, with everything in bloom very early. The railings around the parks have not been restored, but the statues are returning to their pedestals. London looks as shabby and dirty as ever, but even after an interval of a year the cessation of the black-out is still an acute pleasure.

As Orwell himself often observed, the conditions of war make it hard to make good art, and so this this volume covering 1945-1950 has the feeling of rebirth. It contains many of his best essays: “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (my favorite), “Politics vs. Literature,” “Politics and the English Language,” “Such, Such Were the Joys,” “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” “Reflections on Gandhi.” All of these happen to be his essays that, while they are about political concerns, also branch out to more universal themes: psychological freedom, the nature of art, the nature of progress, and the process of living itself.

This passage, from the essay on Gandhi, sums up Orwell’s outlook perfectly:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

There is a lot of topical subject matter in this volume as well, largely focused on the USSR, the United States, and the atom bomb. Orwell’s predictions for the future are pretty hit or miss, but they still serve as a portrait of a time when many people—Orwell included—really believed that atomic warfare would dramatically reshape the world and maybe end civilization entirely. His writing on this topic, especially 1984, may well be part of the reason that didn’t happen. He’s also self-aware enough to observe:

And before writing off our own age as irrevocably damned, is it not worth remembering that Matthew Arnold and Swift and Shakespeare—to carry the story back only three centuries—were all equally certain they lived in a period of decline?

The end of this volume is very sad, as Orwell spent the last couple years of his life in and out of the hospital with tuberculosis. During this time he was devoting most of his energy to 1984 so the essays dry up and we get mostly his letters to friends. He tried to keep up a good front, but it was pretty obvious that he was declining rapidly. For Orwell to die at 47 was a huge loss, and I will always wonder what he would have thought the of second half of the 20th Century.

A note on this 4-volume series: I love Orwell’s nonfiction and consider it his best writing, so I wanted to find a relatively complete set of his essays and articles. I found this series to be very well edited, with a good narrative flow, and a lot of great material—the classics, plus much that I hadn’t seen in any other collections. I read it over the course of a couple years, but once I started each volume, I read it straight through. Apparently there is a 12-volume Complete Nonfiction, but the consensus seems to be that it’s a bit too much, and that this is the one to get. I'll no doubt turn to it often and read it again in full at some point.

[Ivana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having a fever gave me the perfect exuse to spend entire yesterday's afternoon reading this book. I'm happy that I had the opportunity to finish it. This is the fouth volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell(1945-1950) and it must be the final one because he did die in 1950.

How frustrating that my laptop turned down last night just as I was finishing the review for this!Jebi ga.

What I like about Orwell is that he is what I call an active intellectual (and even though I'm pretty sure that such an expression doesn't exist, in my mind it means somebody who thinks with his own head.)

It is not that I always agree with him... (Is it me or does he have a touch of catholic phobia? I'm not talking about his negative reviwes on catholic writers or that "one cannot be a catholic and a grown- up" statement. After all everyone should be able to have an opion about any religion without being considered an offender. One should be able to say I think this religion is silly and that is that. However, Orwell's constant mentioning of the catholic church in every possible political context and attributing it with political power that is doesn't (and cannot) have seem to be out of place. One would conclude that the catholic church rules the world. That just doesn't seem to make any sense. All religion have an amount of political power but I don't think that it can be said for any religion that it holds all political power)


Nevertheless, I do think he is the best essayist of his age. In particular, I don't know anyone who has written so sensibly on political matters and put things so planely.


About 600 pages (my edition) provides us with some of his best writing and about a three hundered (my estimation I haven't actually counted them) letters show much of his personal life. It is touching how he managed to think and work till the very end.


Now, perhaps an average reader will not want to read all of it. So, here is my list of essays that I (for whatever reason) think you shouldn't miss:

V.I. E (very important essays):

" Revenge is Sour"
" What is Science"
" Good bad books"
" Freedom of the Park"
" The Sporting Spirit"
" The Prevention of Literature"
"Review of We by E.I. Zamyatin"
" Pleasure Spots"
"Politics vs Literature: An examination of Gulliver's Travels"
" How the Poor Die"
"Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle"
"Review of the The Soul of Man under Socialism"
" Review of Potrait of an Antisemite by Jean-Paul Sartre"
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"
" Reflections of Gangi"
" Conrad's Place and Rank in English Letters"
" The Question of the Pound Award"
" Such, Such were the Joys"

[Julio On Hiatus · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But surely you don't want a Carthaginian Peace? Well, as I recall, we haven't had much trouble from the Carthaginians since! To which I would reply, 'No, but we've had a great deal of trouble from the Romans'".--- George Orwell continued to stir, spear, and provoke in his essays and letters from the end of World War II until his death. On Gandhi: "Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent." In this collection, Orwell ponders, inter alia, what a world dominated by the United States with its A-bomb will be like, jots down notes for "1984" to mail to friends, and, in general, sees a gloomy future of failed capitalism and fake socialism, from the Labourites to the Stalinists.

[Dimostenis Yagcioglu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Orwell's essays, book reviews and letters has been an amazing experience. I've learned a great deal about Orwell's life, his ideas, his personality, his daily struggles, his fight with tuberculosis which at the end was the cause of his death, and more importantly about the global and British politics and culture of the period 1945-1950.

I have also learned how he wrote 1984 (it was a difficult process because of his illness), which theories or models he was influenced by while writing it (James Burnham's, especially as they are presented in his books entitled The Managerial Revolution, Suicide of the West, and The Machiavellians) and, finally, that Orwell wasn't fully satisfied with the novel when he finished it.

In terms of language, Orwell practiced, to a great extent, what he preached in his essay "Politics and the English Language," which is included in this collection. His English is clear, simple, accessible, and effective.

I highly recommend this volume and the entire series to anyone interested in good English prose, and in 20th-Century politics, history and culture.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is easy to get so caught up in the reviewing and criticism of other people’s works that we forget the implications of criticism. In one sense, all literary criticism is profoundly unethical. We take the works of another person and we often find them wanting in at least some respects.

Lest we forget, these works are a reflection of the individual who produced them, and in critiquing their works we are to some extent offering a judgement on that person, based on our own values. Even if we confined that criticism to the quality of the writing, we are making a judgement about that person – their choice of language, and their manner of expression.

However, the reality is that most of us are unable to resist offering some kind of comment about the content of the work as well as the style. Those comments reflect our own values, some of which are influenced by the age in which we live.

I was struck by this while reading Orwell’s essay on Gulliver’s Travels, in which his analysis of the book’s flaws reflect the political realities of his age, which in turn have changed today. I first read it when I was at university. In one passage, Orwell likens the world of the Houyhnhnms to that of totalitarian states, even in their willingness to pressure people by means of ‘persuasion’, rather than coercion. In the margin, a student or lecturer had protestingly wrote, ‘Come on, George!’ This shows how the criticisms of yesterday seem harder to swallow in a later age.

Orwell’s essay on Tolstoy and King Lear reflects the same pattern, and he is unable to resist opposing Tolstoy’s pacifist principles as being another form of authoritarianism, an attitude that Orwell had strongly felt (perhaps with some justice) during the War.

For writers of critical reviews, there can be a certain glee in denigrating a writer’s work. It is a kind of cathartic revenge for reading something that the reviewer loathed, and it is not always a pleasant response. In the end, a critical review is little more than an opinion.

We see this clearly when we read negative or lukewarm reviews of something that we love. The review inspires outrage in us, and a feeling that the reviewer is being unfair. To some extent that feeling is justified since the reviewer is only expressing a personal dislike, but is doing so in language that seems designed to spoil everyone else’s enjoyment of the item under review.

However, fair or not, such judgements are unavoidable. Everyone who reads a book is an amateur critic of some sort. We all feel a like or dislike of the book based on our own subjective prejudices, all the worse when expressed as if those complaints represent some kind of objective truth. I am guilty of it, and perhaps you are too.

George Orwell is guilty of it as well, but we can at least admire his attempts to be even-handed. Orwell recognises that a book can be aesthetically good, even when it does not reflect his own opinions. Indeed, Orwell has some criticism to spare for most of his favourite writers whilst still expressing his enjoyment of their works.

One thing that is clear from Orwell’s writings is that he had an immense love of reading and good literature. Overall, his tastes are fairly sound. The writers that he extols are still read today, and it is only occasionally (e.g. with Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter) that he is down on a work that is now accepted as a classic, though his criticisms are justified.

Some of this even-handedness extends to Orwell’s attitude to important political figures. After years of denigrating Gandhi in private letters, we finally get to see his public thoughts in an essay. On the whole, the essay is complimentary, though Orwell’s distaste of many aspects of Gandhi’s character is still visible. While Orwell remained sympathetic to the ruling Labour Party, he is still capable of handsomely complimenting Winston Churchill.

For Orwell, the greatest moral qualities (if one is to judge from his non-fiction) are courage and honesty. It is more important for a writer or prominent person to express their genuine opinions and beliefs than it is for him to agree with them, and he will compliment his worst political enemies if they are at least sincere.

In that sense, Orwell prefers a conservative, Catholic or politically apathetic person who openly admits their prejudices or selfishness, than a pacifist or communist sympathiser who changes their opinions to match the policies of the Soviet Union.

It is far more reprehensible to argue the exact opposite opinions to those you held last week for motives of political expediency, or to judge a person’s artistic worth by political criteria than it is to honestly hold the wrong opinions.

There is also an unwavering commitment to democratic socialism, combined with a hatred of the totalitarian ideologies that were then so strong. Orwell was pessimistic about the future, fearing imminent use of nuclear bombs, but still thought the world was worth fighting for. It is slight comfort to us now that this pessimism was misplaced, and offers us a little hope against the worst pessimistic predictions of our own age.

Indeed, if I had to give this book an alternative title, I would call it The Road to 1984. Orwell’s concerns about communism (unchanged since the 1930s) are strongly evident in this book, and we can see his fears about the damage that politics does to language or about how the world may become divided into three blocs. Both of these ideas would find their way into 1984.

There are plenty of allusions to the writing of 1984 in Orwell’s letters. Orwell seemed convinced that his ill health had ruined the book, and that he would have made the ending a little more hopeful if he had the chance. I doubt that the ending would have been much better if he had, but I suppose we will never know.

In fact, Orwell’s work on a full-scale novel is all the more remarkable, because this was a period of ill health for him. The road was not just to 1984. The letters record his fight with tuberculosis, and it is hard not to feel sadness after reading four volumes of his non-fiction, dating back to the 1920s. It is almost like watching a lifelong friend die.

The number of essays and reviews begins to thin out and to be replaced by letters, many of them dealing with Orwell’s health. We watch him struggling with his illness. Sometimes he seems to feel better and more hopeful, but we know that he is going to lose this fight.

Finally, a few months before his death, the letters disappear too, and we are left with only a few notes relating to articles that Orwell had wanted to write, but was prevented by poor health. The voice of one of the twentieth century’s greatest left-leaning liberals had been silenced forever.

We will never know what he made of the re-election of the Conservatives in the 50s, the greater sexual freedoms of the 60s, the economic slump of the 70s, the resurgence of capitalism in the 80s and the collapse of communism in the 90s.

It would be impossible to agree with all of Orwell’s opinions or to like all aspects of his personality, as glimpsed in his non-fiction. However, there is more to admire than deplore. George Orwell was not a hero, and he would never have wished anyone to see him as one. However, he demonstrated the honesty, fairness and courage that he so much admired in others. The world was better for having men like him during an age when freedom was under threat.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

some of his greatest hits are here, incl. "Reflections on Gandhi" and "Such, such were the joys" concerning his school days, "Politics and the English language," "confessions of a book reviewer", etc. etc.

The letters are funny sometimes (before email i wrote a lot of them, but i hope no one is going to save them and after I'm dead publish observations such as Orwell's "I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot" (p. 448, as he warmed up for a book review that indeed was pretty harsh), tedious sometimes (he very often encourages people to feel welcome to visit him at the remote home where he was trying to get over tuberculosis, never failing to advise giving him a week's notice so he could make the arrangements), but the essays and journalism are a terrific window into the mind of a hall of fame writer and thinker.

[Steve Gillway · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken me an awful long time to read this series. I read the first volume when I was at college and I find myself completing it at a similar age to Orwell when he died. Although it these things were written over 50 years ago, they still have the capacity to interest and invite some thought about the political siyuation now. For example, the review of Zamayatin's "WE" encouraged me to take a look at that book and be surprised that I was so ignorant of a fantastically important book. The letters help to humanise the writer and enable the reader to understand where his thinking came from. A great series a kind of alternative history to the early 20th century.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why did I have to read the LAST volume of this collection? Why did I put myself through the experience of moving through these 500 pages, feeling only the intense wish for more pages, because the last page means the end of Orwell's life at age 46 when he is still full of plans and ideas?

The actual answer to this question: this is the volume which contains Orwell's essay on toads. Highly recommended.

But I also loved engaging with Orwell's ideas on Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gandhi, anarchism and socialism and communism. Even when I don't agree with him, his ideas are worth confronting.

It's true Orwell suffers from a fascination with masculine robustness that typically melts into a sort of misogyny. It comes out in the boring female characters you see in Jack London's 'The Sea-Wolf', Joseph Conrad's 'Nostromo' (both authors admired by Orwell), or Orwell's own 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying.'

But whatever his faults, he's also a careful political and literary thinker and a careful writer, and I appreciated the ability to sink into his world that this book offers. (Though for reals: it's a sad experience to approach the end)

[Kathy Stinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend loaned me this book after Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” came up in conversation, and I expressed interest. His writing about his experience at boarding school sufficiently engrossed me that I went on to read more than a smattering of Orwell’s essays, letters, and book reviews, including all his “As I Please”columns for the Tribune. I had in the past read, of course, Animal Farm and 1984, with no idea that Orwell was such a prolific writer, that he’d written the brilliant and enduring 1984 while seriously ill, or that he died at the young age of forty-six. Coincidentally I read at the same time as reading about Orwell’s struggle with tuberculosis, the novel manuscript of a friend in which a young character dies with the same disease. Her fiction filled in the gruesome details Orwell would have suffered but omitted from his letters, though his ill health was mentioned often. I have often thought I’d like to reread 1984, since roughly 1984. Perhaps having read from this collection will at last spur me to do so. (Perhaps only because I’m realistic about how impossible it will be to get to all the books I would like to read.)

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fewer formal essays and more letters (it seems) than the previous volumes, but that made this one way more personal. Two brief essays here I don’t think I’ve come across in any of the shorter essay compilations, and which were particularly good - “Writers and Leviathan” and “In Defense of Comrade Zilliacus”. Orwell was very social and very politically involved to the end. Reading his letters from the hospitals and sanatoriums where he spent the last three years of his life while trying to finish 1984 were incredibly bittersweet. I would pay handily for a copy of the full notebook he kept in his last year, an excerpt of which is published here in the last five or so pages.

[Codfather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful collection of Essay's, letters and articles, which I think add a lot to the understanding and thinking of this great author, especially as he was in the process of writing 1984. A great deal has already been written below on this book and I feel there is not a great deal I can add.

What I would recommend is that you now go and read this , as if you enjoy his writing, then this background work will offer a real insight to the process of writing that marvellous book.

It is also worth noting that this really was a labour of love considering his terrible health situation.

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press]

"While [Orwell] is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, most of his writing derived from his tireless work as a journalist, and thanks to David Godine’s welcome reissue of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, which has been out of print for a decade, readers can find it all in one place. All of the author’s insightful, hard-hitting essays and journalistic pieces are here…the most complete picture of the writer and man possible."
—Eric Liebetrau | Kirkus Reviews

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love Orwell, you'll want to read this. This volume of Orwell's collected essays, journalism, and letters contains a few of Orwell's well known essays that I enjoyed reading for a second time, as well as a lot of journalism and letters covering all kinds of subjects. I kept this on my bedside table and slowly picked through it over the course of a year, but it was always interesting and I found a lot to admire in it.

[Alicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

These 4 volumes have been keeping me company for 5 months now. Literary critique, history and politics and personal memoir all gifted to you in the best examples of lucid prose you will find. I was sorry to read the last page, knowing there would be no more. I will miss you George.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did he do it? Even while suffering from tuberculosis? The intellectual range and sheer productivity represented here are astounding.

[Barry McGrath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some seem very old. Some seem very new.

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last of the volumes. More essays than letters, and even the essays are less personal and more political. Communism, which was a thread throughout the first three, really comes out in full force.

Still some primary source with interesting tidbits, like asking a correspondent whether he's torn up his ration book for clothes, and recounting how people don't really believe it. (They went off clothes rationing in 1949.)

Also stuff about hunger in Europe after the war, objecting to some nasty post-war trials, discussing Communist atrocities and how they were not to be discussed.

Essays on writing in general -- this is where "Politics and the English Language" appears -- and on various authors, sometimes vitiated by his blindspots (they can be amusing insights into Orwell, to be sure). Though at one point he observes that a book that opposes you makes you angry which is hard to see around, he doesn't observe that it is also likely to come across as falsified. (Socialist Realism is bad not only for the lack of conflict, but because it assumes the collective action problem out of existence, and beings without the collective action problem aren't human.) Actually, I think his best is his essay on Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare because there he comes to grip with the ideas and argues with them.

He wrestles with the Soviet views on literature and at one point observes he can feel more sorry for the persecutors than their victims because the victims at least have the clarity of knowing what is going on, where the persecutors are shocked and bewildered and unable to fathom why providing the best of everything to writers nevertheless does not produce the literature they desire. (Despite his Socialism, Orwell realizes that writers, at least, need some freedom to produce.)

He also had a bad shock from the atom bomb, which appears to have seriously shaken his views on progress. Nevertheless, he keeps arguing from the assumption that historical inevitability exists, and that he can discern it. I wonder how his views would have changed if he had lived to see the effects of the welfare state and the fall of Communism.

[Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth and final volume of George Orwell’s collected letters, essays and reviews, covering the period from 1945 through to Orwell’s death in January 1950 (though the last letter is dated October 1949). There’s much less journalism and opinion in this volume than previous ones; In Front of Your Nose consists largely of letters, which is understandable, since Orwell spent most of this period writing 1984 on a remote Scottish island, or slowly dying of tuberculosis in a hospital bed.

The dominance of letters is probably why I didn’t enjoy this volume as much as the last one; there are some brilliant essays in here, as you would expect from a writer at his peak, but I’d read most of them before in Shooting an Elephant. There was also something actually quite sad about reading the letters Orwell wrote in 1948 and 1949 as he was admitted to hospital; I knew he was headed for a slow and early death, but he didn’t know that, at least not until the end. The very last line in the book, drawn from a “Extracts From a Manuscript Notebook,” is:

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Which was perhaps a reflection on healthy habits and clean living (not that Orwell was in favour of either). He never reached 50, which is a great shame, because society was robbed of his insights into the post-war military-industrial complex, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, Thatcherism, and – if we were really lucky – the early 2000s and the Iraq War.
Nevertheless, even dying at a mere 46 years of age, Orwell was easily one of the most important writers of the 20th century. This four-volume set of his collected works is not for everyone, brimming as it is with personal correspondence and reviews of books that have long since vanished, but I greatly enjoyed reading it. I personally rate Orwell’s non-fiction better than his classic novels Animal Farm and 1984, and if you don’t at least read a few of his best essays, you can’t properly claim to have read Orwell.

[Abdulaziz Alfawzan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fourth and, alas, the final volume of Orwell's collected non-fiction writing, covering the end of 1945 after the conclusion of the war until Orwell's death in January of 1950 (although the final letter printed here dates from October of 1949). Orwell died of tuberculosis after being plagued much of his adult life with intermittant poor health and spending most of his last two years in sanatoriums.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

best Orwell book