Collected Essays of George Orwell

by George Orwell

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Politics, Classics

295 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 25, 2019

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

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

RANKINGS:

PERFECT:
1. Shooting an Elephant [10/10]
2. A Hanging [10/10]

NEAR PERFECT:
3. Politics and The English Language [9/10]
4. Why I Write [9/10]
5. Wells, Hitler, and the World State [9/10]
6. Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels [9/10]
7. Charles Dickens [9/10]
8. Such, Such Were the Joys [9/10]
9. Some Thoughts on the Common Toad [9/10]
10. Looking Back at the Spanish War [9/10]
11. Notes on Nationalism [9/10]
12. Inside the Whale - a review of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” [9/10]
13. Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool [9/10]
14. The Prevention of Literature [9/10]
15. Writers and Leviathan [9/10]
16. Reflections on Gandhi [8/10]
17. Benefits of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí [8/10]
18. How the Poor Die [8/10]
19. The Spike [8/10]
20. Antisemitism in Britain [8/10]
21. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius [8/10]
22. The Art of Donald McGill [8/10]
23. Bookshop Memories [8/10]

GOOD ESSAYS:
24. W. B. Yeats [7/10]
25. A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray [7/10]
26. My Country - Right or Left [6/10]
27. The Sporting Spirit [6/10]
28. Arthur Kessler [6/10]
29. Riding Down from Bangor[6/10]

JUST OK:
30. Rudyard Kipling [5/10]
31. In Defence of English Cooking [5/10]
32. Confessions of a Book Reviewer [5/10]
33. Marrakech [5/10]
34. In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse [5/10]
35. Decline of the English Murder [5/10]
36. Boys’ Weeklies [5/10]
37. Good Bad Books [5/10]
38. Raffles and Miss Blandish [5/10]

DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME:
39. Poetry and the Microphone [3/10]
40. Nonsense Poetry [3/10]
41. Books v. Cigarettes [2/10]

I partly disagree with (1) Orwell’s method of teasing out an author’s philosophical views from the author’s fictional work and (2) Orwell’s armchair archeology. His prose style, however, leaves nothing to disagree with.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is nearly 1400 pages long and contains a variety of essays collected over the career of George Orwell, including book reviews, political editorials, and various miscellaneous writings, some of which are fragmentary.  Whether or not you will enjoy reading this will depend on how relatable the author is to you and how willing you are to put up with the author's strident anti-religious and leftist worldviews.  My own view of the man and his thinking is somewhat ambivalent--his socialist worldview is idiotic (by definition) as is his hostility to godly morality, but he is remarkably clear-sighted about the cant and errors of the political orthodoxy of the left that he was associated with through his career.  If he is idiotic when making predictions or talking about what is desirable, he is at least acceptable as a critic of other leftists whose dishonesty and lack of consistency he accurately but fiercely skewers.  If this is something you can get behind, then this book will be of at least some value given its massive length.  There was a lot that I disagreed with in the book, but there is much from these pages that remains relevant to contemporary political analysis given the leftist bias of many who consider themselves to be thinkers.

This book is divided chronologically and represents a selection of the author's nonfiction prose writing from 1928 to 1949.  The early writings contain a lot about the Spanish Civil War and book reviews and the author's defense of his political decisions .  Eventually the author's hostility to authoritarian politics comes out, and by 1943 the author is writing a column of personal essays called "As I Please," which is pretty much the dream assignment for any writer, to get paid to write as one pleases.  The author explores other writers from the point of view of a peer and has a lot of comments to make about the dishonesty of leftists seeking to appeal to working class voters by promising them that socialism will improve their standard of living when it will only lower it to the horrific global norm.  As the book continues on there are more and more political commentaries and fewer and fewer book reviews, but towards the very end there are some writings about Ezra Pound and a fragementary defense of Evelyn Waugh that are both very interesting materials.  Only someone with a high degree of intestinal fortitude is going to tackle all of this book, but by picking and choosing among titles of essays that sound interesting someone could amuse themselves without spending weeks reading this book as I did.

This book represents the maximal sort of insight that can be expected from someone who reasons from the wrong premises regarding politics and religion and builds upon a faulty worldview.  Yet there are still insights to be found here.  The author notes that already in the 1940's fascist a useless term of abuse because of the ambiguity of what it refers to, and leftists still use it today to diminishing returns as a term of abuse for anyone who is less insane and wicked than they are.  Likewise, the author has some intriguing comments to make about the relationship between politics and the writer and some thoughtful discussions of his own life, including some abusive experiences in education.  A great deal of the work is written trying to navigate between his patriotism, his leftist politics, and his fears and longings regarding this world and his total lack of belief in the world to come.  The book also dwells long on the subject of reading and writing, and there are some hilarious comments here related to his book reviews and the cost of a book habit as opposed to a drinking or smoking habit.  With so much material here, a reader who likes reading about a leftist but Nathanish person writing about writers and readers and politics will find something to appreciate even with serious disagreement concerning the author's perspective.

[Bremer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), better known as George Orwell, was an English writer. Although he was an accomplished essayist, he gained his fame through later works such as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

He was born in India but grew up in England. When he was eight years old, his parents sent him off to a private prep school in Sussex. As a young adult in the 1920s, he served as a member of the Indian Imperial Police. After Blair resigned from his post in Burma, he tramped around London and Paris. He set out as a wanderer, sometimes without any place to stay, recording the daily struggles of the poor.

He wrote enough to get by but didn’t find much acclaim until years later. During different periods of his early adulthood, he picked hops in a field, washed dirty dishes in fancy restaurants, taught teenagers at a private school, and clerked in a bookshop.

Ever since the publication of his first book (Down and Out in Paris and London), which was seen as too scandalous for the time, he wrote under the pseudonym of George Orwell.

In 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, he volunteered to fight in Spain. He joined up with the communists and anarchists and socialists, among other leftist groups, in opposition to fascist powers.

During a battle on the front, a sniper shot him in his throat, almost killing him. While recovering from his wounds, he was forced to flee to France after conditions around him became too unsafe (Soviet propaganda turned against the militia he once was a member of). After many dissenters were repressed, Blair became disillusioned with intellectuals who supported the Soviet Union. Throughout his life, however, he deepened his commitment to democratic socialist principles.

Blair wanted to fight against the Nazis in WWII, but the British army rejected him due to his poor health. He accepted a position at the BBC instead. While there, he contributed a minor part to the propaganda campaign against the fascists. Eventually he quit so he could work on literary pieces for the Tribune, a democratic socialist magazine.

During different periods in his life, Eric Blair worked as a dishwasher, novelist, journalist, schoolteacher, bookshop clerk, and soldier. He was a tramp on the muddy roads of England, a lieutenant in the trenches of Spain, and wrote about it.

His writings exposed the brutal inequalities in authoritarian systems. As a result, his ideas were seen as too subversive. In some countries, his novels were banned and burned. People caught with his words were put in prison.

Blair had his blind spots as well. Some scholars have criticized his racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes. Yet many of his experiences were so impactful that he was forced to confront his own prejudices.

He felt a lot of guilt, for instance, as a privileged white man in the service of the British empire. During his employment with the Indian Imperial Police, he had to take on the compromised role of an authority figure. He was seen as an outsider, as part of an occupying force, oppressing the poor of another country. The more that he adhered to the duties expected of him, as if he were performing before the locals, the more ashamed he felt. After five years as a police officer, after witnessing the direct effects of imperialism, he quit his position.

He later disguised himself as a tramp, voluntarily living in destitution, so that he could learn more about those in extreme poverty. While many in the lower classes had no way out of their unjust circumstances, he could escape. Even though his family were “lower-upper-middle class,” (as he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier), he still had socioeconomic opportunities that others didn’t have.

After his time in Burma, though, he had changed. He wanted to write authentic stories about the downtrodden. He often took the side of the poor laborer who struggled for higher wages, of the vagabond who roamed the countryside, of the hopper who slept next to other workers in a tin hut, of the miner who toiled in the coal mine.

Blair was known for being a sharp critic of injustice. He looked through the biases of ordinary living to find truths that most were afraid to admit. He attacked authoritarians in every guise, despising those who wanted power for themselves while hiding their true intentions behind propagandistic language. Despite their claims of morality, many ideological groups imposed their order through violence and censorship.

Blair wrote with a sense of wry humor, almost as a defense against his own disappointment. His opinions were unflinchingly honest. He believed that while people were so capable of progress, they were still susceptible to the dangers of totalitarianism.


Sources:

Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell: Novels, Memoirs, Poetry, Essays, Book Reviews & Articles: 1984, Animal Farm, down and out in Paris and London, Prophecies of Fascism... Frankfurt am Main, e-artnow, 2019.

Orwell, George | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. iep.utm.edu/george-orwell/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2022.

Woodcock, George. “George Orwell.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 8 Mar. 2019, www.britannica.com/biography/George-O....

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this collection about 10 years ago in a print edition and returned to it with anticipation. Didn't like it nearly as much this time. When it's crisp, it still crackles and amazes 70 and 80 years after the essays were written. But many of them are so British that they don't resonate with me as an American, and others are just too obscure to be of interest to anyone but a highly specialized professional.

Here's what I did like. The boarding school essay is pretty stunning. It's one thing to read a scathing satire of a British boarding school, but it's another to have someone tell you what it was like at age 8 or 10 to be a sickly, dreamy kid stuck in a sadistic, heartless environment. It's astonishing to me that masters of these schools were allowed to demean, beat, dominate, and starve children for a century, and that going through this crucible of cruelty was considered some sort of rite of passage that had benefits for anyone. Orwell tells with his unmatched ability to bring out hypocrisy (surely this is where he learned to detect it) how he was taught he sinned (masturbation) without even doing what he was accused of, nor even understanding what it was. Because one boy was masturbating, Orwell and other boys were lectured and beaten because it was assumed they were his colleagues. He also explains how you could sin without wanting to, genuinely without wanting to, in the upside-down-world of the school and its religious teachings.

The story about him as a policeman shooting an elephant is probably his most famous essay, and it's amazing. One of its strengths is its succintness, compared to the boarding school and Dickens essays. It's a remarkable confession --- that he did this cruel and probably unnecessary thing because he had to save face in front of the residents of the town where he was a member of the police force. Hypocrisy again, in the form of British rulers in India doing things to show they ruled the country, while at least in this case, they were ruled by the villagers who basically egged him on to kill the escaped elephant.

As for the Dickens essay, it's got great parts, but it's hard to follow because it's kind of contradictory and also is often about how other critics of Dickens saw him (and whether Orwell agreed or didn't). Orwell's main point is pretty interesting, and it goes something like this: Dickens was a social critic, for sure, but he never offered solutions to the problems he wrote about with such emotion. His solution, so to speak, was that people should be nicer to each other. This is in contrast to someone like Orwell, who believed that the system itself was warped, damaging, and, ultimately, would need to be overthrown. Orwell wrote from a point of social change, whereas Dickens wrote from a personal and emotional viewpoint. Orwell writes in a later essay that writing to change society was his greatest driver, and I think that's ok for him. But the works of Dickens are with us at a deep level today as well because he touches on our spirit.

The most surprising essay to me is about Henry Miller's book, "Tropic of Cancer," or was it "Tropic of Capricorn," whichever came first. This book is obscenity, and it was banned for years in many countries. I've thumbed through it, and it's offensive, impossible to believe, and pretty quickly dull. But Orwell is making me wonder if I should give it another try. He puts it squarely in the realist category of literature with Joyce and others, saying that it's how people really speak and think, and that this was a breathrough at the time that will change literature. Has it changed literature? Maybe, in the sense that it's pretty hard to censor anything now -- though Republicans are trying with their book bans across the country. But is it a good book? I'll have to see.

So, Henry Miller's enduring impact is one prediction Orwell made. Another is that society was becoming more selfish and nationalistic, and that this would lead to some type of implosion and reordering. Well, it's 80 years since he wrote those essays, and it hasn't happened. I guess that's consolation today, when we see the evil right-wing in the US doing exactly what Orwell decried about 1930s Spain, Germany, and Italy. Orwell participated in one war (Spain) and lived through two others (WWI and WWII). He saw death and destruction and cruelty and murder and hunger and fear. And he tried to warn us all that we have to break the systems that allow it to happen. His answer was Democratic Socialism, which is sort of what most European countries instituted in the 1960s and beyond. And it worked in a lot of ways with peace, prosperity, equality, etc. It's all being tested again now, and let's hope that Orwell's greatest fears don't come to pass.

[Jack Fleming · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you read certain authors you have the undeniable sense of being in the presence of literary genius. Shakespeare, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Joyce. Though it is impossible not to admire these authors or revere their works it can be a little like standing before a great stone monument or feat of engineering. Impressive and even awe-inspiring but a little overwhelming and even disheartening at times. A reader can feel daunted in the presence of such greats and seek escape in more human figures. Fortunately for all of us George Orwell was not one of these writers. As the critic Lionel Trilling once pointed out, the genius of Orwell was that he was not a genius. Of the six novels which he published in his lifetime the first three, A Clergyman's Daughter, Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying are distinctly average in terms of plot, pacing, character and imagery. Only in his three later novels Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm and most famously 1984, did he find his feet as a writer. Of his nonfiction only Homage to Catalonia really gels, with the other pieces feeling slightly cobbled together, as they so often were, symptoms of Orwell's lifelong lack of money and need to publish in chunks. Nevertheless it would not be an exaggeration to say that Orwell was the most important writer of the twentieth century. Despite his lifelong struggle with poverty, ill health and troubles with finding familial comfort he wrote two of the most important anti-totalitarian novels of all time. These his Collected essays, though quite disparate in nature and uneven in tone, remain some of the most important documents of the struggle which defined the period in which he lived, that between Totalitarianism as represented by the Nazis and the USSR, and the kind of Democratic Socialism that Orwell gave his blood and brains to defend.

What explains Orwell's popularity and appeal? Firstly it is his originality. Few writers since Shakespeare have contributed so many words and ideas to the language. Newspeak, 2+2=5, Doublethink, The Thought Police. All these from a single novel! Then there is his choice of subject matter. He picked the biggest fights, with the biggest targets and won them all: Imperialism, Fascism, Communism. Orwell saw all of these evils for what they were, different sides of the same human impulse to control and to dominate, and called them out as such. Whenever a news story brings us the latest horrors in the world it is very often Orwell's words and language that they reach for. The people of North Korea, languishing under an appalling dictatorship, know well the evil of Big Brother, and if they have not already translated the book in secret into Korean they surely will eventually, and smile sadly with recognition at the world that Orwell had ominously foreseen some seventy years before, just as the hermit state was coming into existence in fact.

However, as these essays testify, the secret to Orwell's longevity lies in one simple fact. It was his moral and intellectual honesty. He simply could not and would not lie. His commitment to truth and clarity are uncomfortable at times both for him and for his political friends on the Left. It is a testament to Orwell's writing that people all across the political spectrum have attempted to co-opt him as one of their own. His stoic pragmatic Englishness appeals to a certain brand of conservative, despite his lifelong profession of adherence to socialist principles. Occasionally his political commitments come at the expense of fluency, and his writing, never elegant, can be workmanlike but is never anything less than absolutely lucid. Nevertheless they were an integral part of his character and his writing. He once admitted that the secret to his appeal lay in a "power of facing unpleasant facts." He had the unerring ability to say the unsayable and to call out the hypocrisy of his own side as ruthlessly as he would his enemies, and it makes his essays exhilarating and painfully honest. Even when he's writing on smaller topics, such as Pubs, Cigarettes, or how to make the perfect cup of tea, he still displays the same commitment to straightforward language and allowing the reader to see his thought process as it unfolded, that has made him so popular and will likely see him continue being as readable in the 21st century as he was in the 20th.

[Razi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very interesting and sums up Orwell's thoughts on many subjects including literature, democratic socialism, popular magazines, Fascism and patriotism to name but just a few.
Orwell emerges as a democratic socialist, who was against authoritarian political ideologies, a believer in freedom of thought. He despised the British political Establishment, the Conservatives (hadn't anything good to say about any of them including Churchill) and was not very hopeful about the Fabian socialists of the Labour Party either.
Orwell believed that the WW2 was the War of English Revolution as it would usher in democratic socialism in Britain. The post-war establishment of the British welfare state and control of corporations, regulations weakening of the Conservative Establishment proved him right. Looked from this angle, Margaret Thatcher emerges as a counter-revolutionary who rolled back the gains made by a generation who fought in the bloody battlefields of WW2 and came back to liberate their country from Conservative rule, ousted Churchill and established a Labour government that ushered in over a quarter century of social mobility and welfare reforms. This revolution was never televised, nor was its end at the hands of Thatcher and Blair.
There are some heart-touching moments from his early school days at St Cyprian's, a prep school in East Bourne where Orwell spent some very unhappy years from the age of eight onwards.
On the whole a very rewarding read that gives a good understanding of the thought-process of the writer of 1984 who is now being claimed by the same people against whom he fought and took a bullet to his neck.

[Jane Fudger · Rating 4 out of 5]

George Orwell was a well known essayist and this collection highlights 41 of his best essays.Essays such as The Spike, Bookshop Memories, Marrakech, Looking Back to the Spanish War were turned subsequently expanded into books [ Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, Burmese Days and Coming Up For Ait]
The remainder of the book relates to dicussions about authors/poets and his political views . In respect of the former I really enjoyed his views on Dickens, H G Wells, Rudyard Kipling and W B Yeats He also discussedTolstoys dislike of Shakespeare which was entertaining
The only problem with the book is his political essays, although I am not a politician and do not follow a particular party I found his views obtuse and sardonic and his ideas unworkable even for the time he was writing.. Nevertheless the views are well written.

[Ralph Lehman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up after having read The Road to Wigan Pier. The honesty that I found so refreshing in Wigan Pier came through throughout these essays as well. Whether he was relating his experienced in India (Shooting an Elephant) or in prep school, postcards or war correspondence, Orwell could bring a unique perception to what many may have considered the ordinary. With our perspective, looking at Orwell's body of work we can see streams of thought developing, both within certain essays and through his body of work, that culminated in his perceptive Animal Farm and his prescient 1984. That he developed this thoughts while seemingly immersed in his times is remarkable. Any aspiring essayist can learn much from his body of work, as can anyone interested in thinking critically of our society and its institutions.

[Drew Penrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating to read the thoughts of a clearly insightful and thorough essayist on the media and issues of the 1930s and 40s. Many of the ideas are still extremely relevant today.

[Walter Bowne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing.

[Kim Symes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lesson in clear, analytical prose

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I've gone for the five stars, but four and a half would be more accurate. This book was recommended to me by someone who had been a student at Oxford: at the beginning of her course she was told to read this book in order to learn how to write essays. I find this quite surprising now, having read it, as the type of essays I wrote at Uni had to be full of quotes and references to scholarly articles. These essays are nothing like that. They are journalistic - one man's reflections on a particular issue. This collection covers a wide range of subjects, each of which is intelligently analysed and dissected. Topics include: boys' comics, saucy postcards, political language, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, a couple of memoirs of school life and even one about toads. Each time, Orwell's approach is open-minded and analytical. He digs beneath the surface of things to see what rules and assumptions lie beneath. For example, a common theme for the saucy postcard joke is the wedding night. Orwell sees that this indicates and reinforces a culture in which marriage is 'profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event in the average human being's life.' It is this type of observation that reveals an anthropological approach, and confirms an impression I'd formed of Orwell after reading Down and Out in Paris and London - ie that he is more of an ethnographer
The collection covers many years from the late '30s to the early '50s, but feels very contemporary at times, particularly in its discussion of left/right politics, totalitarianism and the impossibility of remaining honest in the context of party politics.

[Pedro Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Orwell is brilliant. A few years after reading 1984 and Animal Farm, I heard Orwell's true genius was in his political analysis. After reading over 1000 pages of his essays, I can only bow before this literary giant. There's perhaps no greater testament to Orwell's mastery of the polemical arts than the fact that people from all over the political spectrum can recognise his prescience. Unfortunately, his essays contain plenty of warnings which have gone ignored by our elites since his death. The unlucky generations of the coming centuries will dearly share the cost of that feigned ignorance. Orwell lives on.