Orwell – the new life, by DJ Taylor, Constable, 960 pp, £14.99, ISBN: 978-1472132987
Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor, Yale University Press, 224 pp, £18.99, ISBN: 978-0300272987
‘To read him and write about him is one of the greatest satisfactions I know,’ writes DJ Taylor of George Orwell. The evidence concurs. Orwell – the new life is his second take on the Orwell biography while Who is Big Brother? is his second deep dive into the writings of this ever-compelling author. In addition, several of Taylor’s other books – Bright Young People, The Prose Factory and The Lost Girls – while not directly about Orwell, concern his times, the people he knew and his interests. It all makes for a considerable output, running to several thousand pages and with no sense of short measure, of material being spread too thin, say, or recycled.
This new biography, for example, is no mere makeover of its predecessor (George Orwell – the Life, published for the author’s centenary in 2003), more a systematic upgrade, drawing on, among other sources, the recent and pioneering work by Sylvia Topp (Eileen – the making of George Orwell, 2020) and Masha Karp (George Orwell and Russia, 2023) not to mention the ever-fascinating material that Darcy Moore keeps bringing to light (see www.darcymoore.net). I am pleased, however, that Taylor has retained the earlier book’s format, with the narrative periodically interrupted by a reflective mini-essay on a relevant Orwell theme. These include his lifelong thing about faces (‘At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves’), his rodent anxieties, his diaries, and his various insensitivities, notably regarding gay men and Jews. Of the former, Taylor writes, ‘Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell.’ Of the latter, he is frank that his man was capable of questionable comment, at least up to the early 1940s, when a growing awareness of the extent and outworking of Nazi antisemitism appears to have chastened him.
There is plenty in the New Life that was new to me. I did not know, for instance, that it was Mabel Fierz who smuggled Orwell’s copy of Ulysses into England. Fierz had believed in the floundering Eric Blair when few others did and did more than just about anyone to get him published. Orwell’s sense of writerly inadequacy on reading Ulysses may have been what pushed him once and for all away from the naturalistic novel, at which he was unremarkable, to political writing, where he was, right from the start, an assured and distinctive voice. It is thanks to this political turn that Orwell, as Taylor puts it, has ‘managed to colonise the mental world both of his own age and the ones that followed’.
Other parts of the Orwell story have been expanded considerably for the new biography. The David Holbrook episode, for instance. Holbrook, who had participated in the Normandy landings and would go on to have a lengthy and distinguished career as a writer and educator, was the partner of Susan Watson, childminder to Orwell’s infant son, Richard. But he was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, then at its Stalinist apogee. When he and Susan visited Orwell on Jura, Holbrook’s politics and the fact that he was ‘carrying on with [the] nursemaid’ led to a chilly reception. Orwell fretted that his visitor was a loyal Party man sent to spy on him (or worse) although the nearest Holbrook actually came to espionage seems to have been a furtive speed-read of the manuscript of what would become Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he rated as disappointing. Susan, for her part, vexed Orwell’s over-protective younger sister, Avril. The couple was shortly sent back to London where Holbrook would work the experience into an unpublished novel, The Inevitable Price, in which Orwell becomes Burwell, a snob, a bore and a neglectful father.
Who is Big Brother? has its own surprises. Taylor offers good evidence, for instance, that Orwell voted Tory in 1931, for Sir Gervais Rentoul, one of the founders of the 1922 Committee. Rentoul’s successor, fellow-Tory Pierse Loftus, would be satirised as Blifil-Gordon in A Clergyman’s Daughter (this despite Orwell’s assurances to Victor Gollancz that the character – ‘a docile deadhead on the back benches’ – was ‘quite imaginary’). Interestingly, Loftus was Irish-born and a Catholic (another Orwell trigger). More galling still, at least as far as Orwell was concerned, his son Murrough had gone to Ampleforth College where he took for a time to writing poetry (see A Sword Unearthed, by Murrough Loftus, The Shakespeare Head, 1934 … or perhaps not). This too provided grist to Orwell’s unsparing mill. In A Clergyman’s Daughter he gives the ‘quite imaginary’ Blifil-Gordon a similarly fictitious son, ‘Walph’, one of those ‘moneyed young beasts’ who write about nothing in particular.
(If Murrough Loftus’s poetry has slipped from view, he would manage a walk-on part in history when, as a junior officer in the British army, he was tasked with guarding Rudolf Hess following the latter’s unexpected arrival in Scotland in May 1941. According to Peter Padfield’s Hess – the Fuhrer’s Disciple (1991), the Deputy Fuhrer offered to confide some great secret to Lieutenant Loftus and was greatly put out when Loftus told him he would need to talk it over with his father – ‘a friend of Germany’. Later still, Murrough would be created a peer of the unrecognised micro-Kingdom of Redonda, which put him in fine, Orwellian company, Victor Gollancz, Martin Secker, Julian Symons, and Henry Miller having been similarly ennobled.)
Orwell took to writing seriously – that is, with a view to making his living from it – in the mid-1920s when he threw in his job with the Indian Imperial Police and went to Paris. This was when he started to have work accepted for publication and, by the time of his return to England, could reasonably say that he was a writer. Indeed, from around 1930 until his death twenty years later, there is scarcely a day in his life that is not accounted for by some or other piece of writing, whether essay, book review, letter or diary entry. (The relevant volumes of the Complete Works comprise ten imposing books with an eleventh since compiled and the makings of a twelfth already largely gathered.) It is the time before Orwell became a committed and published author that remains something of a mystery. It is a mystery in three parts – childhood, Burma and Paris.
Paris first. Although Down and Out in Paris and London is generally grouped with The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia as an Orwell ‘documentary’, it differs from those two later books in that it was never intended as either memoir or reportage. It is fictionalised autobiography and, as such, neither a comprehensive nor an entirely reliable account of Orwell’s time in that city. Absent from it are Orwell’s favourite aunt, Nellie Limouzin (a socialist, women’s suffrage campaigner, published author, and member of the feminist drama group the Pioneer Players), and her partner Eugene Adam, a writer, socialist and Esperantist, both of whom were resident in Paris when Orwell was there. Nellie was especially supportive of her nephew both at this time and later. He was a regular visitor at her home and, indeed, probably lived there, at least for a time. (That she lived in Paris was surely a factor in Orwell’s own decision to go there and try his luck at writing). Through Nellie, he met writers and political activists and it seems probable that it was these introductions that led to some of his earliest publications, including in Le Progrès Civil and Henri Barbusse’s Monde. It is inconceivable that she would have let her nephew slip into actual poverty, especially if, as Orwell claimed in the book and elsewhere, his financial crisis was down to his having been robbed. More plausible, I think, is that Orwell, keen for material, actively sought out the dishwashing experience. This would have made it much the same as his English tramping expeditions, his stint as a hop-picker, his night in the cells, and his time in the sordid Wigan tripe shop, all of which he likewise endured voluntarily.
Whatever the truth, Down and Out in Paris and London fictionalises only a small part of the time Orwell spent in the French capital. What did he do the rest of that time, some eighteen months? For one thing, he would, thanks to Nellie and Eugene, have had considerable exposure to the left and its ideas. Adam was an early leftist sceptic of the Russian Revolution and, as Masha Karp has convincingly argued, this may have been the first time Orwell, who had himself been something of a lefty at Eton (‘both a snob and a revolutionary’ is how he put it on reflection), heard the case against Bolshevism. Taylor notes that it was during this period that Orwell first came briefly under secret state surveillance when, according to his Special Branch file, he tried to become Paris correspondent for the British Communist Party’s paper Worker’s Life, later the Daily Worker and currently the Morning Star. If Orwell did make an approach to the communists, this could have been the basis for the episode in Down and Out when he is almost scammed by a group claiming to run a communist paper.
That Orwell was in Paris at all was a result of his having cut short his career with the police in Burma. He would later write that, through his Burma experience, he had come to hate imperialism and hate himself for the part he had played in it. When he visited Burmese prisons, he later wrote, he always thought that he belonged on the other side of the bars. It pulled him up sharp the day an American missionary (‘a complete ass but quite a good fellow’) pitied him for the type of thing that his line of work required him to do, in this case supervising the harassment of a prisoner. But if that was what was on his mind, he generally kept it to himself. As Taylor notes, those who knew Orwell in Burma remembered him as ‘a highly conventional young man who seems to have made a positive virtue of his inconspicuousness’. Moreover, when he finally came home in 1927, it was because he had been ill and was owed some time off. According to Taylor, Orwell arrived back with an engagement ring and the intention of marrying Jacintha Buddicom, his teenage crush. But Jacintha was off living her own life (which would include, in time, befriending the elderly Aleister Crowley, occultist, ‘drug fiend’, supporter of the Spanish Republic and also peer of the Redondo realm). Had Jacintha been home, Taylor wonders, might she and Orwell have married, returned to Burma and lived unexceptional lives as part of the colonial ruling class?
Was Orwell’s conventionality during his own Burmese days more than superficial? And was he more part of the establishment than he later claimed? From Maung Htin Aung, a Burmese historian, diplomat and academic, comes an enduring story that puts Orwell in a bad, imperialistic light as well as illustrating the difficulty of establishing the facts of the author’s less documented years. Writing in 1970, Htin Aung describes how, in November 1924, at around four o’clock in the afternoon (he is that precise), he and some fellow undergraduates from Rangoon University saw Orwell, in police uniform, at the Pagoda Road Railway Station. He was apparently on his way to catch the train for the Gymkhana Club, a cricket club on Mission Road whose membership was drawn almost entirely from the colonial elite. As Orwell was walking down some steps, a schoolboy, one of a group, bumped into him, causing him to fall. Angry, Orwell raised his cane and went to hit the boy on the head, then, as if he had quickly thought through the implications, struck him instead on the back. Incensed by what they had seen, Htin Aung and some of his friends boarded Orwell’s train and had it out with him until he reached his stop.
Aung’s account was first published in the journal Asian Affairs, although he had, a few years before, included it in a talk he gave to the Royal Central Asian Society. It was subsequently included in the 1971 anthology The World of George Orwell. The incident is reported in several of the Orwell biographies, sometimes departing from the version published. Taylor, for instance, who includes it in both The Life and The New Life, writes of Orwell being jostled by a group of schoolboys, then lashing out at this group, striking several boys, not one. Others (Alok Rai and John Newsinger) have written not only that it was a group of boys that jostled Orwell, but that Htin Aung was part of it. Of the Orwell biographers who mention the incident, only Jeffrey Meyer, in Orwell – Wintry Conscience of a Generation, is dismissive of the account. I think Meyer is right to be sceptical. While it is entirely possible that Htin Aung saw the incident he describes and that he and his friends took the man with the cane to task, how sure could they be that that man was George Orwell? In order for the students to have known that the police officer was Orwell, they would have had to have known, or have been told, that his name was Eric Blair and remembered that name for at least ten but more like twenty years until Orwell became widely enough known for people to learn that he was Eric Blair writing under a pseudonym.
Some cite Orwell’s own writings as evidence that Htin Aung’s story is factual. Again, in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, he (or, rather, the fictionalised version of him that narrates the story) comments on how aggravating he found many Burmese people on account of the small ways they would try to get one over on him, such as tripping him up on the football pitch. And in The Road to Wigan Pier, he frankly admits to having hit Asian servants, adding ‘nearly everyone does these things in the East, at least occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking.’ That is an unsettling admission, indicative of how in step he may have been with the ways of the colonial caste. There were bullying colonial officials and he himself, by his own admission, could sometimes be a bully. But that need not mean he was the particular bully that day at the Pagoda Road station.
More significant, arguably, is Burmese Days itself. The novel features an incident that is very similar to what Htin Aung said he witnessed in 1924. Ellis, one of several obnoxious Europeans in the story, assumes he is being mocked by a group of Burmese schoolboys and in response strikes one of them across the head with a cane, blinding him. Here, Orwell might, conceivably, have been fictionalising his own experience with the schoolboy at the railway station. But it is at least as possible that it is this fictional incident (and the other material I have mentioned) that led Htin Maung, over time, to conclude that the man he saw at Pagoda Road back in 1924 was Orwell.
Orwell is alleged to have administered at least one other beating – when he supposedly laid into the writer Rayner Heppenstall some time in the 1930s. The Heppenstall assault has been seen to add weight to the Htin Aung anecdote, the two together inspiring an enduring Orwell-as-psycho narrative). Orwell, Heppenstall and the Irish author Michael Sayers had been sharing a flat in London. Orwell was a little older than the other two and this seems to have caused some friction. Heppenstall, especially, liked to live it up, keeping late hours, often arriving home drunk and noisy. It was on one such evening that an exasperated Orwell allegedly punched him unconscious then took a shooting stick to him.
Like Htin Maung’s story Heppenstall’s emerged some years after the event when Orwell was dead. It too is generally accepted by Orwell’s biographers although here it is DJ Taylor who suggests that it should not be taken at face value. Heppenstall includes the anecdote in his 1960 memoir Four Absentees though he had published a version of it five years earlier. It has the edge over Htin Aung’s reminiscence, which it precedes in terms of publication by at least a decade, in that it is corroborated by independent witnesses. These were Mabel Fierz, who apparently saw Heppenstall the day after, and Michael Sayers. Sayers lived long enough to give an interview to Gordon Bowker when Bowker was researching his own 2003 Orwell biography. Here, Sayers comes across a little upset at the way things turned out. He had taken Orwell’s part, he said, to the extent that he never spoke to Heppenstall again. And he had thought that he and Orwell had become close in a relationship he now described as almost homoerotic. It was therefore a surprise when he learnt that Orwell and Heppenstall had reconciled. Given that they reconciled – they were friends for the rest of Orwell’s life – it is possible that the beating was not quite as extreme as Heppenstall later made out.
Finally, the Orwell childhood. How was it for him? The early, pre-school part of it seems to have been positive. Eric Blair was an exceptionally gifted child – half-scholarship to the aspirant prep school St Cyprian’s, King’s Scholar to Eton; Taylor is surely correct in placing him among the most intelligent of his generation. Orwell himself typically played down his own precocity and what hints he gives of it are given incidentally, yet they are enough to confirm Taylor’s assessment. That Orwell was familiar with Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ at age four, for instance, and sufficiently impressed by it that he wrote his own poem about a tiger – with chair-like teeth – words his mother dutifully transcribed. At eight he was reading Gulliver’s Travels, no mean achievement even if it was, as Bernard Crick speculates, an abridged children’s edition. If Orwell’s mother, like Stephen Spender’s, kept him from children who were rough, she also encouraged and inspired him. As did Auntie Nellie. (Only in recent years has the importance of these cultured and progressive-minded women to Orwell’s development – in childhood and after – begun to be recognised).
Formal education ended this idyll, assuming Orwell’s own account is to be trusted. In ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, he gives a grim assessment of St Cyprian’s. Here, he says, he was, among other torments, never allowed to forget that he was attending on reduced fees, ‘living on my bounty’ as the school’s owner and headmaster, Wilkes, put it. This was a school, wrote Orwell, whose pupils soon got to know the class system and their position in it. According to Orwell, family income was even a factor in corporal punishment – no boy, he surmised, was ever caned if his father earned more than £2,000 a year. St Cyprian’s, as he describes it, was a cruel, toxic and unsanitary environment in which pupils were bullied not just by their classmates and their teachers but by Flip, the headmaster’s wife, who was the school’s main manager.
Taylor considers ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ in some detail in both of these books, concluding it to be ‘an odd piece of work altogether … remorseless, self-pitying’. It ‘grinds inexorably on’, he comments, and is artful, drawing in part at least on the canonical accounts of schooldays misery from writers like Dickens. And Orwell had certainly had the time to work it up. If Cyril Connolly’s hostile account of the school, in the 1938 Enemies of Promise (an assessment he later recanted), was what first put Orwell in mind to write a prep-school memoir of his own, a decade would pass before he pitched it to his agent.
I am not sure how much should be read into that ten-year gap between the idea and the thing itself. (A similar period separates Orwell’s first thoughts of writing a dystopian fiction and the actual Nineteen Eighty-Four). It is possible that life and the world war got in the way – but Orwell may also have wanted to hold fire until he had achieved some kind of literary status, criticising the old school from a position of success and the authority it confers rather than from the point of view of a struggling author whose critique could be interpreted as the voice of sour underachievement.
On the evidence of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, St Cyprian’s seems to have left Orwell clinically depressed, if not traumatised, so much so that, more than thirty years on, the hurt is still raw. And yet both his sister Avril and Jacintha Buddicom remembered him happy and contented at precisely this time. Why the dissonance? Orwell, in the essay, by chance offers the following explanation: ‘A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien, underwater world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves.’ Relevant here, I think, is that by the time ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ was in its final form, Orwell was a father himself, an experience likely to have sensitised him to a child’s perspective. His first wife, Eileen, may also have influenced him. She had studied psychology to postgraduate level, specialising in child psychology and childhood imaginings. Certainly Orwell allows that much of his anxiety at the school was the anxiety of a child unable to see through adult bluff. Were he – his forty-something adult self – to time-travel back to the St Cyprian’s of the 1910s, he writes towards the end of the essay, he would in all likelihood see headmaster Wilkes and his wife ‘as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly climbing up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse’, about as frightening as a dormouse. But to the child he once was, they were authentically terrifying.
St Cyprian’s was an abusive place. How else should be described somewhere where children were routinely caned or flogged and, day in, day out, obliged to lead an ‘overcrowded, underfed, underwashed life’. Orwell recalls how, at the age of eight or nine, he was thrashed with a riding crop, and with such force that it broke. Latin, he writes, was more or less beaten into pupils, or encouraged into their resistant heads with a rap to the skull from a silver pencil, or they were kicked in the shins until it registered. Another former pupil, Sir Henry Longhurst, remembered being made to eat his own regurgitated porridge after he had reintroduced it to the bowl. Given all that, Orwell’s being frequently reminded that he was at the school through its owners’ charity, and that that charity could be withdrawn as readily as it had been granted, seems entirely probable. Nor is his suspicion that corporal punishment was meted out based on family income unbelievable. If St Cyprian’s was doing Orwell a favour then for some of his fellow pupils – those with family money or aristocratic titles, say – favour was in the opposite direction. It is unlikely that these would have been roughly punished.
Did ‘Such, Such were the Joys’ influence Nineteen Eighty-Four, or was it the other way around? The two works were written around the same time and, conceivably, one might have seeped over into the other. Orwell’s fretting that the headmaster had spies in the town who had seen him out of bounds is frequently cited as evidence of this. And there is possibly a touch of Nineteen Eighty-Four too in the case of Orwell’s fellow pupil, Hardcastle, whom Wilkes had ‘flogged towards a scholarship as one might do with a foundered horse’, and who afterwards wished he had had his thrashing before the exams, when it might, he said, have done him some good. If the same deference to oppression is found in Oceania (Parsons, say, who resolves to thank the authorities for catching him before his subversion took him over, and before they begin to kick it out if him) surely there is at least a little of it everywhere. The idea that school, with its hierarchies and everyday injustices, readies one for a world in which much the same can be expected is as plausible as it is obvious.
All in all, Orwell as self-mythologiser fares badly. The accessibility and availability of his writings, and the extent to which he has come under biographical and critical scrutiny inevitably work against any efforts he may have made in that direction. There is a bit of myth-making too in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, in which he moves himself a few notches down the social scale and downplays his antipathy towards Stalin. DJ Taylor notes something similar in a letter from Orwell to Richard Usborne that has recently come to light. Usborne was editor of the literary magazine Stand and had hoped Orwell might become a contributor. Orwell duly supplied some requested biographical information. He has never been a member of a political party, he tells Usborne, when, in fact, he had been a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) for around a year (1938-39) when the ILP was at perhaps its most revolutionary. Nor was Orwell’s membership nominal. It came after a year or so when he had been a kind of ILP fellow-traveller and after several years when he was under constant ILP influence. On account of his support for the party, Orwell was prepared to fall out with his publisher and much of the mainstream left. Not only does the ILP’s world view inform much of Orwell’s serious writing from this period, including Homage to Catalonia and Coming up for Air, he also put unpaid time into a pamphlet on socialism and war that set out the party’s distinctive position. The ILP was against all wars (aside from socialist revolution) on the grounds that even a war against Hitler would be an inter-capitalist affair from which socialists should stand well aside. And that was Orwell’s view as well. The unpublished ‘Socialism and War’ is the most conspicuous missing piece in his output; it is likely that he himself destroyed it once he changed his mind, and radically, about the war.
Orwell’s 1939-40 retreat from the ILP-influenced anti-war position he had held for some two years is the part of his documented, writing life that has left the least trace. He shifted from being a revolutionary socialist opponent of the war to being a revolutionary socialist supporter of it. Most of the debate that must have occurred appears to have gone on in his own mind rather than on paper, save for some correspondence with the writer and ILP member Ethel Mannin, of which only Mannin’s side survives. (Mannin was dumbfounded that he could have undergone such a transformation, from anti-war to pro-; from wishing to sabotage the home front with writings he and the anarchist art historian Herbert Read would circulate in samizdat, to wanting to join up. Mannin, who had, with Orwell and others earlier signed a public declaration entitled ‘If War Comes We Shall Resist’, wrote that she was ‘bitched, buggered and bewildered’ by Orwell’s about-turn. In her correspondence she asks for an explanation: ‘for the luv of Mike write a few lines to lighten our darkness.’ Mannin herself, fearing prison for her anti-war polemics, went into exile in Connemara.)
The change of mind was something Orwell famously attributed to a dream that he had had on the night before the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact was announced. He wrote that he had that night dreamed that the war had already started and that his dreaming self was patriotically supportive of it. And, when he awoke, his waking self was of the same frame of mind. Wide awake, he knew that he was a patriot after all, that St Cyprian’s, which he had attended at something like peak Empire and in time of war, had done its work on him.
The Hitler-Stalin pact was signed on August 23rd, 1939 and was written up in the press the following day although several papers had already reported on the previous day that it was due to be agreed and had given an accurate overview of its content. Orwell notes these advance reports in his diary entry for August 22nd, and in the entries for subsequent days he senses that war has become increasingly probable. But he makes no reference to any dream or to his having changed his mind so suddenly and fundamentally.
The dream story is hard to believe but it is plausible that the war, and the prospect of defeat, invasion, or a long period of attrition, revived Orwell’s schoolboy patriotism. And if it did not revive it as promptly as he said it did – pre-declaration of war, in the summer of 1939 – it revived it soon enough. I think that Orwell realised, once the war was an actuality, he could not maintain his hard left opposition to it. But neither did he feel able to come right out and say publicly that he was now supportive. It was only in May 1940, when the war had ceased to be an uneventful ‘phoney war’ that might have been resolved diplomatically, that he began to hint publicly at a change in his outlook. And not until the end of that year, in ‘My Country Right or Left’, does he say unambiguously that he is for the war. That is where the dream story appears. The dream, he says, brought it home to him that his country – be it right or left, or right or wrong – was in a jam and that he had to support it. But there was no jam – no existential threat – facing the United Kingdom in August 1939 when Orwell claimed to have had his dream. Nor was there one that September when war was declared. But there was something like one by spring the following year, when France had fallen and invasion seemed a possibility. That, I think, is what Orwell was responding to when he went public in ‘My Country Right or Left’ and said that he was now supportive of the war.
Having had his own patriotism revived, Orwell came to appreciate the enduring power of nationality. It was, he said, what motivated people and in great numbers, and what was maintaining solidarity in the face of war. Only the suspect few held out against it – Communists, Catholic converts, and those moneyed young beasts who he believed hogged the literary limelight. Maybe HG Wells could not see that ‘nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty were much more enticing than the scientific rationalism that underpinned [Wells’s] own view of the world,’ but Hitler had worked it out. Orwell thought that Britian should take heed of that and develop its own patriotic (but democratic) socialism.
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) sets out what that might look like. It is remembered today for its sentimental talk of old maids cycling off to church and mill girls’ clogs on the cobblestones of somewhere grim up north. Eileen called it socialism for Tories, a sharp summing up of what the book proposes – a decidedly revolutionary socialism in one country but based on a traditional patriotism and with traditional institutions preserved. In The Lion and the Unicorn, Britain will have an economic set-up along the lines of East Germany in the 1970s – the state will own everything of any productive value, it will plan the economy, it will somehow arrange that there is approximately enough money in circulation to buy back the goods that have been produced, and it will harmonise rates of pay to smooth out the extremes. There will be no market economy and no class system, either in the socio-economic sense (since there will be no individual ownership of productive assets such as factories or farms), or in the cultural sense. Orwell here warms belatedly to technology and the suburbs in which, he says worker, petit bourgeois and technocrat are already living side by side and becoming classless.
In Orwell’s envisaged socialist society, democracy will remain, along with those things that make it meaningful such as free speech. And the legal system will be unaffected: a traitor like Lord Haw Haw will still be hanged, but not until he has had a fair trial. Imperialism will be repudiated but the former empire kept on as a voluntary union of self-governing socialist dominions.
Orwell would shortly accept that he had overestimated the revolutionary potential in Britain in the 1940s and, indeed, there is much in The Lion and the Unicorn that has not been properly thought through. Where are the socialists that are going to make it happen going to spring from – socialists that have not already found their home in the existing parties. But it is not as far-fetched as it seems with hindsight. It was written in a time of great crisis when the prospects for sudden, radical change were arguably greater than usual. Orwell’s vision of the Home Guard, for instance, as a kind of revolutionary militia was not some fanciful idea of his own. As Taylor notes, the Home Guard training centre at Osterley Park was initially run by Tom Wintringham and Hugh Slater, both of whom had been in the International Brigade and were, at the very least, fellow-travellers of communism. At Osterley, they offered guerrilla training and proposed, as the Home Guard motto, ‘A people’s war for a people’s peace’. This was a long way from the world of Captain Mainwaring and it lasted until the government felt confident enough to put a stop to it, which was around mid-1941, around the same time The Lion and the Unicorn was in press.
If Orwell’s enthusiasm had got the better of him, realism was soon restored. In the later war years and after he would focus on the challenges socialism would bring. These included the considerable time it would take to get from the present situation to pure socialism when all goods would flow free as tap-water – a century he at one point reckons will be needed before the socialist cornucopia begins to work. Nor will this be a pleasant transition. It will be hard slog all the way. He envisages the work effort and ethic this socialist project will impose and imagines the negative toll it will take on literature and culture in general –who will be free to write fiction when scarce labour must be deployed where it is most needed to serve the common good? And then there is, for him, the greatest problem of socialism, that by placing all of that power in the hands of so few, there is a real risk that that few will be tempted to govern dictatorially.
That is the message of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm alike. The former projects a United Kingdom after around two decades of a socialism that has gone increasingly awry, while the latter allegorises the Russian Revolution. But look again. As DJ Taylor points out, in allegorising that revolution, it relocates it to rural England, specifically the Wind in the Willows England of Orwell’s childhood, that Indian summer of the pax Britannica before the Great War put an end to it and to all certainties. The revolution in Animal Farm is an English revolution and the socialism it establishes, an English socialism that descends into an English dictatorship. Orwell who, in The Lion and the Unicorn had himself envisaged an English revolutionary socialism, projects, in both of his dystopias, its darker possibilities.
The best of literary critics, like the best of literary biographers, find new insights in the familiar and send you back to that source material to read it afresh. DJ Taylor is among the best. No one seriously interested in Orwell can ignore his achievement.
1/2/2025
Martin Tyrrell is under contract to Athabasca University Press to complete a book entitled Orwell’s Wars—from Class War to Cold War. He is currently editing Máirín Mitchell’s 1937 Storm Over Spain for republication later in 2025.
