John Jr.’s Reviews > George Orwell: English Rebel > Status Update

Colls on Orwell on Dickens: “In A Tale of Two Cities [Dickens] is alert to the aristocracy as a class who dug their own graves, as he is alert to the Jacobins as a class who dug other people’s.”

In the late 30s, after publishing Homage to Catalonia, Orwell wrote a novel called Coming Up for Air. Though I'd never even heard of it, Robert Colls's discussion makes a good case that it "represented a major turn in his point of view."

Of Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, Robert Colls writes, “Early in the book he says terrible things about people, as harsh as you could get in talking about the degenerative poor. In the very next paragraph, however, as if recoiling from his own brutality, Orwell identifies with them and even says that they identified with him” (pages 50–51).

“George Orwell, the most significant British political writer of the twentieth century, did not even have a consistent politics. In his old school slang, he was a ‘scrub’: someone who liked to do what is not done.” (page 9)

I expect soon to be reading a biography of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, written by an acquaintance of mine, so I’m dipping into an ARC of this book that I picked up a while back. I’m not committed to reading the entire book.