Search Results for: the lion and the unicorn

“Brilliant – this writer has mastered the essay form and this one really packs a punch.” Vicky Spratt, author, housing correspondent for The i, and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge

“When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling.” So begins George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, written in 1941 [1]. But where is the British nation now? (Not unusually, as Orwell admits, he is conflating England and Britain. [2]

It might help if we first define Britishness. The writer of the Docu-Drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Gwyneth Hughes, suggested of the sub-postmasters depicted, ”They’re so British, aren’t they? Everybody involved is British to the core,” [3] depicting their nationality as linked to an ability to discern injustice. It seems strange to suggest that the thoughts and feelings of over sixty million vastly different people, many of whom profoundly dislike each other, can be boiled down to a shared personality. How would you summarise Britain? 

In 1941 Orwell called Britain a nation of “shopkeepers at war.” [4] Let’s consult our modern-day oracle: Google. Try typing in Britain is a nation of… 

The first suggestion [5] I received was shopkeepers. Proof of Orwell’s description still being relevant? Just look at all our boarded-up shops and consider how reliant we are on online shopping. [6] 

To define our Britishness we must look at another suggestion: Immigrants. [7] Britain has become far more multicultural than in Orwell’s lifetime. What we derive from foreign arrivals is integral to our culture and national identity. Chicken tikka masala, a dish invented in Britain by immigrants, is oft-cited as Britain’s national dish. [8] [9] And which of us could do without the Italian pizza or pasta? Along with the cuisines they bring, immigrants are central to our public consciousness. The Somali-born Mo Farah’s Olympic triumphs won him BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Rita Ora and Dua Lipa, both from Kosovan refugee families, are just some of the immigrant British singers dominating our charts in recent years. Let’s not forget how crucial immigrants are to staffing our NHS and care systems. Twenty-first-century Britain is a multicultural, inclusive country where anyone can succeed. Right? 

Apparently not. In November 2023, the Times published an article by Matthew Syed, headlined “Migration is being used to enfeeble us,” [10] suggesting that immigration was being driven by “an autocratic axis of nations,” seeking to weaken Britain. 

“Immigration is destroying the British economy,” according to a recent Telegraph article, ‘Immigration is destroying the British economy’. [11] Spare a thought then for Luxembourg, which has 3.5 times the level of foreign-born nationals than the UK. [12] Luxembourg’s GDP per capita of £118,919 [13] warns Britain (£37,452 [14]) just what a menace immigration is to a nation. 

With University College London research showing that immigration benefits the British economy, [15] why do 63% of Brits believe immigration is too high? [16] Orwell suggests that “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie.” [17] Indeed, in the 2016 EU referendum, Leave received its highest support in working-class, deprived areas. [18] The belief that immigration is to blame for the lack of opportunities and increased anti-social behaviour in their areas is pervasive. 

So who benefits from this belief? 

As usual, it’s the rich. Orwell suggested that “there is not one paper in England that can be straight-forwardly bribed with hard cash,” [19] This was optimistic, and rather than bribery, nowadays billionaires simply buy newspapers, allowing them to control the message the public is given. [20] They can also use their riches to leverage influence over politicians and parties. [21] It suits them if immigration is blamed for our societal ills. No need to mention how the rich benefit from the austerity policies and neoliberalism which entrench inequality. [22] 

Mass immigration is not something new. It did not start with our entry to the EU or the arrival of the Empire Windrush. [23] 

Orwell’s Britain was also shaped by mass migration. Much of it can be traced to the instability caused by our slave trade [24] and our empire. [25] When British immigrants are accused of taking away opportunities from others, they can rightfully argue, “We are here because you were there.” [26] 

But historically, many Brits have left the country to seek new opportunities or escape the conflict and poverty that permeated much of the British Isles. [27] A decline in emigration from the UK in recent decades, with rising living standards [28] giving less reason to emigrate (at least until recently), is a success story. Britain has entered a rare period in which there are consistently more people moving to Britain than leaving it. [29] Why should that be a bad thing? 

British emigrants Andrew Carnegie and John Muir’s successes in America are justifiably celebrated in Britain. So why the struggle with accepting those born elsewhere as a key part of the British nation? (Exceptions are made for those whose families are white and rich, eg New York-born Boris Johnson.) 

Frankly, we need to realise that Britain is not a medieval castle to protect. 

An old-fashioned view of other nationalities is as strong now as when Orwell bemoaned “the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life.” [30] But his idea of a malevolent agenda against Britain is neither true nor useful as an excuse. Relative to our size and economy, Britain still has an outsized role in the cultural world, the UN and NATO. These roles are largely based on our historic power and will diminish as the world decolonises. [31] 

Our island location once gave us an advantage in seafaring and by extension wealth-building and slave trading. 

But as maritime dominance has proved impossible to maintain [32], we are perhaps a little isolated on our small island. 

Dean Acheson’s suggestion in the 60s that “Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role” [33] still seems relevant today. Indeed, 32% of Brits think our empire is something to be proud of, one of the highest among the imperial nations polled. [34] We built our identities, values, and economy on a world where we could exploit the resources and people of other nations. When that rotten edifice crumbled to the ground we were lost. [35] Britain needs to define itself by a new future, not with celebrations of our morally clouded past. 

Orwell suggested, “England is outside of European culture.” [36] And even before Brexit, many in Britain were ambivalent at the idea of other countries influencing us. [37] Our politicians’ reluctance to integrate further into Europe and constant badmouthing of “European bureaucrats” [38] shockingly led to us being sidelined! [39] This first cycle of self-harm completed, rather than admitting that our jingoism and old-fashioned mindset had created needless damage and seeking to repair it, Britain doubled down. In the EU referendum, we were told “We don’t need the EU anyway.” [40] All that was needed to miraculously rescue the country was to “Believe in Britain,” [41] and “Bring back the Blitz Spirit!” [42] If only life were that easy. Pulling yourself out of the world’s largest common market may have felt like the shock therapy Britain needed, but according to the impartial public body, the Office for Budget Responsibility, Brexit has harmed Britain’s trade and industries. [43] 

So what of our future? Orwell struck a note of optimism in concluding, ”The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.” His optimism seemed to be warranted after the war. In his final years, Orwell witnessed the creation of the NHS and the Welfare State. There was hope that a more peaceful, fairer Britain would emerge from the ashes of the war. Orwell passed away in 1950 before the full flourishing of these ideals. 

Never mind, after Thatcherism and austerity, our welfare state has been well and truly shaken up. Let’s hope Orwell has enough space to turn in his grave. 

In 2024 we have a country where young people can’t get housing, [44] poverty is rising, [45] and our NHS is on the verge of collapse. [46] 

So Orwell’s final lines in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” still seem apt, “We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backwards.” [47] 

It’s time to challenge a political class that tells us that austerity is necessary, that cutting immigration is the key to solving our problems. There’s a generation of young people who want to change things for the better, to have a country to be proud of. We have to keep believing that’s possible. 

[1] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941)

[2] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius ( London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[3] Radio Times Awards Issue Radio Times,10-16th February 2024, pg7 

[4] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[5] See Appendix

[6] M. Sweeney, The Guardian, John Lewis boss calls for royal commission to save UK high streets | Wilko | The Guardian Acessed 11th September 2023 

[7] See Apendix 

[8] R.cook, The Guardian, Robin Cook’s chicken tikka masala speech | Race | The Guardian Acessed 9th November 2023 

[9] The Spice Odyssey Chicken Tikka Masala | Britain’s National Dish | Butter Chicken | Murgh Makhani — The Spice Odyssey Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[10] M.Syed,The Times Migration is being used to enfeeble us, so it’s clear what we have to do (thetimes.co.uk) Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[11] P. Ullman, The Telegraph Immigration is destroying the British economy (telegraph.co.uk) Acessed March 3rd 2024

[12] The Statistics PortalGeographical distribution of immigrants – Statistics Portal – Luxembourg (public.lu) Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[13] The World Bank GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) – Luxembourg | Data (worldbank.org) Accessed 4th march 2024 

[14] The World Bank GDP per capita (current US$) – United Kingdom | Data (worldbank.org) Accessed 4th March 2024 

[15] C. Dustmann, T. FrattiniThe Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK | UCL Department of Economics – UCL – University College London Accessed 4th March 2024 

[16] Yougov Do Brits think that immigration has been too high or low in the last 10 years? (yougov.co.uk) Acessed 5th March 2024 

[17] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius ( London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[18] M. Goodwin, O. Heath, Joseph Rowntree FoundationBrexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities | Joseph Rowntree Foundation (jrf.org.uk) Date accessed 21st April 2024

[19] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[20] R. Neate, The Guardian‘Extra level of power’: billionaires who have bought up the media | The super-rich | The Guardian accessed 5th April 2024

[21] R. Merrick, The Independent Conservatives branded ‘party of billionaires’ as one-third of UK’s richest people donate to Tories | The Independent | The Independent accessed 5th April 2024

[22] K. Farnsworth, Z. Irving, London School of Economics Austerity politics, global neoliberalism, and the official discourse within the IMF | British Politics and Policy at LSE accessed 5th April 2024

[23] C. Grant, English HeritageThe Story of Windrush | English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk) accessed 5th April 2024 

[24] The Palgrave Handbook of South–South Migration and Inequality, Palgrave MacMillian The Enduring Impacts of Slavery: A Historical Perspective on South–South Migration | SpringerLink accessed 5th April 2024 

[25] M. Greenwood, Manchester University Global Social Challenges | The Impact of the Past: How British Colonialism Affects the Modern World (manchester.ac.uk) accessed 5th April 2024

[26] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Quoted in Empireland by S. Sanghera, (Penguin, London, 2021)

[27] The Migration Museum Migration MuseumThe last great exodus from Britain? – Migration Museum accessed 5th April 2024 

[28] C.H FeinsteinNational Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom. 1855-1955. Studies in the National Income and Expenditure of the United Kingdom, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972) 

[29] Full Fact What’s happened to migration since 2010? – Full Fact accessed 5th April 2024 

[30] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941)

[31] T. Janoski, British and French political institutions and the patterning of decolonization British and French political institutions and the patterning of decolonization (Chapter 11) – The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State (cambridge.org) Date Acessed 11th April 2024

[32] D. Axe, Reuters Commentary: What the U.S. should learn from Britain’s dying navy | Reuters Date Acessed 11th April 2024 

[33] R. Deliperi, Dean Acheson’s Observation of Great Britain in 1962 Dean Acheson’s Observation of Great Britain in 1962 (e-ir.info) Date Acessed 11th April 2024 

[34] M. Smith, Yougov How unique are British attitudes to empire? | YouGov accessed 1st May 2024 

[35] Paul Beaumont Brexit, Retrotopia and the perils of post-colonial delusions, Global Affairs, 2017

[36] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[37] M. Skey, London School of EconomicsBritish attitudes towards Europe are being shaped by new ways of thinking about identity and place | British Politics and Policy at LSE acessed 1st May 2024

[38] British Euroscepticism as British Exceptionalism on JSTOR 

[39] I, NGUYêN-DUY, Sovereignty and Europe – The British Perspective » L’Europe en Formation, 2012, issue 2 

[40] D.Bertheksen, The Critic Britain is better off outside the Single Market | Derrick Berthelsen | The Critic Magazine accessed 1st May 2024 

[41] S.Sweeney, Brexit Institute Believe in Britain: The Simple Message that Won Brexit Still Works Wonders for Boris Johnson – Brexit Institute (dcubrexitinstitute.eu) date acessed 3th April 2024

[42] Channel 4-Youtube (2336) Brexit Blitz spirit: Why does it always come back to the war? – YouTube date acessed 3th April 2024 

[43] Office for Budget Responsibility Brexit analysis – Office for Budget Responsibility (obr.uk) 

[44] DePaul Depaul UK – Generation rent: Young people and the housing crisis date accessed 11th April 2024

[45] Joseph Rowntree Foundation UK Poverty 2024: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK | Joseph Rowntree Foundation (jrf.org.uk) Date Acessed 23rd January 2024

[46] National Centre for Social Research Public attitudes to the NHS and social care | National Centre for Social Research (natcen.ac.uk) Accessed 27 March 2024 

[47] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

Appendix- additional sources consulted 

Immigration is destroying the British economy (telegraph.co.uk)

UK economy is addicted to immigration but there is long-term treatment | Larry Elliott | The Guardian

White British school children ‘could be a minority within 40 years’, study claims | Daily Mail Online

Dave Vetter on X: “The Sunday Times today published in its opinion pages what appears to be a variant of Great Replacement theory, the conspiracist fantasy that lies at the heart of several extreme right-wing ideologies🧵 https://t.co/CCzmSaYnmm” / X

Mo Farah’s experience highlights need for safe routes for all asylum seekers (bestforbritain.org)

Stir-fry now Britain’s most popular foreign dish – Mirror Online

About — Very British Problems

What other lobbying scandals have there been in British politics? | Lobbying | The Guardian

THE FUTURE WE WANT – OYP THEME 2020

Orwell’s own writing was profoundly concerned with social change, the relationship between past, present and future, and what this means for the individual. His most celebrated and revisited work Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a chilling dystopian vision of the future which still unsettles and provokes today. But this dark vision was rooted in his belief that a better, more equal world was achievable, a belief which inspired him to make the journeys, both imaginative and real, which produced classics like The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, as well as essays like The Lion and the Unicorn, which looked forward to the recreation of England after the Second World War.

All ‘favourable’ Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness… It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast.

(‘Can Socialists Be Happy?’, 1943)

 

POLITICAL TURMOIL

George Orwell wrote because he wanted to change the world. In 1946, Looking back on his journey to becoming a writer, Orwell claimed that his main motivation was ‘political purpose’. Orwell defined ‘political purpose’, in the widest possible sense as a ‘desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’. Today, Orwell’s desire to push the world in a certain direction has inspired writers and campaigners across the world, whether in politics, journalism or civil society, as well as countless individual readers.

But it was also the turbulent times he lived in which made George Orwell the writer he was. Orwell was writing during two of the most momentous decades of the twentieth century, the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-forties, when the kind of society people should strive after were fiercely contested. As conflict spiralled around the globe, powerful ideologies like fascism, communism and socialism reshaped politics, and scientific and technological progress opened up new scope for human action, writers and commentators believed that the world was on the brink of a disorientating multitude of possible futures.

ORWELL THE ACTIVIST

What George Orwell wrote was a direct result of the actions he took. His investigations into homelessness in London and Paris, and the life of the labouring poor in the north of England, made him a fierce critic of inequality. In 1936 George Orwell went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the ‘International Brigade’, socialists from across the world who were committed to supporting the Republican government: what he learnt about the activities of the Soviet-backed Communist Party in Spain led him to write Homage to Catalonia.  He returned to England (only just escaping with his life) and in the 1940s took part in the Second World War, working for the BBC to promote the British view of the war in India, which was then part of the British Empire.

If his experience in the 1930s made Orwell a political writer (he once said that ‘every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or directly, against totalitarians and for democratic socialism, as I understand it’) it was his experience of ‘total war’ in the 1940s convinced him that revolutionary change was possible in the United Kingdom, and argument which he made in his essay, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (subtitled ‘Socialism and the English Genius’).

ORWELL AND UTOPIA

Although a committed socialist, George Orwell was often sceptical of the motivations behind grand claims to transform society. In many of his essays, Orwell asked perceptive questions of the utopian visions which many of his fellow reformers, inspired by rapid technological advances and optimistic visions of human nature, were caught up in. “All ‘favourable’ Utopias,” Orwell wrote, “seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness.” What, Orwell wanted to know, would the future really be like when it came?

As the dark visions of revolutions ‘gone wrong’ in Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) suggest, Orwell was not confident that change is always for the better. Yet these novels were also born out of a conviction that the futures they described did not have to happen, if ordinary people were vigilant and defended the values they believed in. Orwell described Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its dark vision of a bureaucratic state, the denial of objective truth and crushing of individual freedom as a ‘warning’. “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one,” he said when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. “Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

READ: Dorian Lynskey, ‘1984 at 70’

WATCH: 1984 Live: Dramatized live reading of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, featuring actors and members of the public alongside prominent writers, journalists and broadcasters who, like Orwell, have grappled with issues of free speech, history and propaganda.

• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1936)
• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1942)
• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling

One of the greatest of modern British writers was an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, and returned to the East to work after leaving school. Empire, and the relation between those in authority and those under authority, became one of the principal themes of his writing, both in journalism and in fiction. He lived by his pen, and made a name as an author of strong political convictions. Many of his stories and phrases have embedded themselves in the English language and the consciousness of its users, even of those who have never actually read his work. Both admired and hated in his own lifetime, his genius made him a spokesman and a symbol in the great ideological contentions of modern times, and after his death he was considered not only an important writer, but also but a particular embodiment of the character of his country.

Well actually, not one of the greatest of modern British writers. Two of the greatest of modern British writers.

Orwell and Kipling emerge – and I think are beginning to emerge, even in the academic discourse of English literature – as giant figures, or twinned heraldic animals like the lion and the unicorn, of modern British writing. And though our first instinct is to think of them as opposites, the curious similarities between them proliferate. Both of them were patriots, though highly critical of their fellow-countrymen and frequently of their government. Both were public intellectuals who used their writing to raise political consciousness. Both loved animals and wrote books about them, and both had a strong feeling for the English countryside.

Both were men of principle, but they were also realists in the sense of a non-theoretical empiricism. They were both impatient with orthodoxy and theory. Orwell’s disgust at W. H. Auden’s glib phrase about “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” – “It could only be written,” Orwell said, “by a person to whom murder is at most a word” (XII, 103) – reminds me a little of Kipling’s rage at liberals like “Pagett M.P.” who pontificated about India without bothering to learn about it [1]. Both attitudes, to be sure, have something of the smugness of a man of the world, playing the trump card of experience.

Importantly – this is part of what makes them modern – both had a global vision. Though Orwell at one point kept a village shop, and Kipling for years impersonated a country gentleman at Burwash, they were the opposite of provincial. Both of them were exasperated by British (English?) insularity. “What do they know of England, who only England know?” was Kipling’s lament that his neighbours knew and cared so little about their achievements, and obligations, in the wide world. Orwell agreed about the ignorance. He pointed out that most ordinary people at home had no idea or understanding of the fact that their whole economic way of life depended on Britain’s “coolie empire” overseas. His words, though brutally phrased, have a resonance for those of us who enjoy a more modern form of globalization. “We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue” (XIII, 153). This comes from his Horizon essay on Kipling (1942), one of the best he wrote.

Kipling and Orwell were citizens of the world. But the origin of this cosmopolitanism was rather different in their two cases. For Kipling, it was a function of empire. He travelled all over it, he came to think of himself as its bard, and though he was an acute observer of its local differences, he also found it everywhere the same. The empire he knew or imagined was a world network of power, hierarchical relationships, security and welfare. Globally diffused, it had little to do any more with the European island that had given birth to it. Sometimes when he speaks of it, he makes it sound like the United Nations. Empire was something the African bushman and the Himalayan hillgirl and the Irish infantryman had in common. It was, at its most exalted, a global moral force. At its core, of course, for Kipling, was the authority and duty of white people, the “white man’s burden”. Kipling’s empire was a vision of the world, a global Utopia, but it was a racially understood and organized world, under white government. Like his friend Cecil Rhodes, he continued to hope that the United States would re-federate with the British Empire (perhaps after a handsome apology on both sides?) and rule the world.

Orwell, of course, did not recognize that empire in the least, except as a foreshadowing of the terrible warring superpowers envisaged in Nineteen Eighty Four. His own global vision derived from his socialism, which is always a kind of internationalism. That was what gave him a feeling of kinship with the Italian militiaman he describes meeting in the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia; and it was that sense of the world that had brought him to fight with the POUM militia in Spain, among people with whom, admittedly, he had very little in common and whose speech he could hardly understand. It was the betrayal of that internationalism, first in Barcelona and later everywhere else, that most disgusted him about Stalin and the regime he ruled in a country that had the word “socialist” in its name. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Orwell and Kipling were globalists. There was nothing narrow about either of them. They could see the whole picture.

The similarities are intriguing. The differences, of course, were polar. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person,” Orwell writes (XIII, 151). Kipling was an imperialist – though not a fascist (his outlook was “prefascist”, says Orwell carefully). Orwell was anti-imperialist; in fact his entire politics was erected on the emotional experience of his service in Burma as a policeman of the British Empire, and it was when he came to understand the relation between that, and what he saw and experienced in Spain, that the Orwellian politics emerged in its mature form. He was prepared to argue that some of what empire did was for the good: what it was, however, was indefensible.

There were personal and aesthetic differences as well as ideological ones. Kipling was brilliant and precocious, doing some of his best work in his twenties. He had his unhappiness, but I think he never doubted his imaginative and creative powers. He would not have understood Orwell’s gloomy statement that writing a book was like undergoing an illness. Orwell’s genius was entirely prosaic, he was a slow starter, diffident and often clumsy, always disappointed with his own work, the kind of writer for whom every book was doomed to be, in T. S. Eliot’s words, a different kind of failure. I don’t know that Kipling ever read anything written by Orwell. When Orwell criticizes Kipling’s work, he objects to his ideas, but also repeatedly to his vulgarity, and this is a complaint that probably has its roots in Eton rather than on the road to Wigan Pier. But one thing that the 1942 essay shows very clearly is that Orwell knew Kipling’s writing very well indeed. [2]

This is hardly surprising. For a boy of Orwell’s class and generation, and especially for one whose father actually worked for the Government of India, Kipling was the author of childhood. First The Just So Stories, then the Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies, Kim, Stalky and Co…. Not just a favourite on the nursery bookshelf, Kipling was the author of childhood for the sons (daughters too) of empire in a wider sense; they experienced the world through his eyes, and Kipling’s books helped them to see and relate to the important things in their environment – animals, the natural world, home, parents and other adults, jokes and games, friends, school, and later more abstract issues, like duty, work, country, masculinity and femininity.

When the young Eric Blair, fresh from school, went to Burma to serve in the police, he was going to a place that Kipling had more or less invented for the benefit of his fellow-countrymen: they knew about the Orient, and Orientals, through him. Leonard Woolf, who belonged to the generation between Kipling and Orwell, went to work as a colonial official in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1904, and found the place uncannily familiar. It was Kipling country. Woolf said he could not decide whether Kipling had been brilliantly accurate in his description of the British in the East, or whether by now the British in the East modelled themselves on Kipling’s characters. [3]

Orwell too must have felt a sense of déjà vu in the “Kipling-haunted clubs” of British Burma. Kipling is a ghostly background figure in “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”, and above all in Burmese Days. The racist mediocrities who hang out in the club at Kyauktada are Kipling characters, stripped of the glamour and charm with which Kipling invested them. But Veraswami, the comically pro-British Indian doctor, is a variation on a theme by Kipling too, and so is the wily and corrupt U Po Kyin. As for the central character Flory, his local mistress, his white fiancée, his enjoyment of the jungle, his sporting activities, his close friendship with an Indian, his moment of heroism during a riot, his disgrace, and his eventual suicide, all have identifiable precedents in Kipling. One thing you do not find in Kipling, though, is the central theme of Burmese Days, an Englishman in the East who has lost his faith in empire.

A knowledge of Kipling helps us to understand Orwell, for no writer was more important to him, as an influence, example, and antagonist. In some sense Orwell’s whole life was a conversation, or quarrel, with Kipling. He seemed to acknowledge this when he wrote, when Kipling died, “I worshipped [him] at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him” (X, 409).

But a knowledge of Orwell also helps us to understand Kipling, in a number of ways. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot talks about how, when a new literary work appears on the scene, every existing work is modified by it and the whole scene subtly rearranged. Thus, we can’t really read Kipling’s stories of the Raj in the same way once we have read Burmese Days. Though Kipling’s words are unchanged, the Orwell novel has changed how we read them.

Kipling, who died in 1936, did not know that the empire he loved would disappear within a lifetime. So in a sense we know more about the British Empire than Kipling did, because we know what was to happen to it. The one thing Kipling seems not to have been able to imagine was an alternative to empire. But if we know Orwell, we know the work of someone who devoted his whole writing lifetime to answering the question of what such an alternative might look like, and how – and how difficult it would be – to achieve it.

Notes

Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Clarendon Press), George Orwell (Writers and their Work series), and co-editor, with Julia Kuehn, of A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong University Press). He is also a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.

First published by Finlay Publisher

George Orwell demonstrated that the strongest writing almost always comes from a place of personal experience and direct observation. Through the last year, we’ve all been locked down. Many of us feeling like we know our towns, villages, streets and local parks better than ever before. With this year’s theme, it’s our goal to support you to think hard about your local environment, encourage you to trust your observations and use the authority you have to report and write creatively on the changes you’d like to see to create a better society, starting with what’s on your doorstep.

Scroll down for our resources and interactive ways to engage with the theme – and some suggested reading to spark ideas. In the meantime, we better start with George Orwell himself.

George Orwell and thinking small

Orwell provides an example of a writer who addressed, in the clearest terms, the major political issues of his day, from economic injustice at home to imperialism and totalitarianism abroad, while also taking deep pleasure in the things which make places and people unique. As a columnist for the magazine Tribune he would write about war in Europe one week, and English cookery the next. His belief in the importance of seeing for oneself was not limited to taking an active part in history, as he did in the Spanish Civil War and the Road to Wigan Pier: it was an everyday injunction. It was only by paying close attention to what is ‘in front of one’s nose’ that the ordinary citizen could equip themselves to resist the barrage of political propaganda they are subject to and see more clearly what steps were necessary to make the world a better place.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

In Front of One’s Nose, George Orwell

“I write… because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Why I Write, George Orwell

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

Coming Up for Air, George Orwell

Here are some examples of essays from The Orwell Foundation library, where Orwell starts small:

• In Front of Your Nose
• Some Thoughts on The Common Toad
• A Good Word For The Vicar of Bray
• The Lion and The Unicorn (1941)
• In Defence of English Cooking (1945)

The Need for a New Direction – Prompts

The world feels overwhelming at the moment. A pandemic, the looming threat of the climate crisis, increasing inequality, and the rise of big data seem insurmountable due to the sheer magnitude of the problems we face. At the same time, the urgency of these threats is galvanising young people like you into action but where do you start when these issues seem incomprehensibly large?

To get you started, you might want to consider:

• What does your support network look like? (is it a person, is it online, where is it?)
• What do you most like about where you live? What makes it unique?
• Think about your daily routine. Which bits do you look forward to, which bits could be better and who/what could help you improve your day-to-day?
• Go for a walk and examine the built environment and nature around you. What do you see? What is worth protecting? What steps can be taken to ensure that future generations can value the environment?
• Research the street names in your local area, who or what is represented? What’s interesting/disappointing/exciting about that?
• Many young people feel pessimistic about the possibility of changing the future. What do you think is the cause of this pessimism, and what steps can be taken by young people to regain their agency?
• The pandemic has increased our reliance on digital spaces and communities. Digital spaces can bring us together, provide entertainment, joy and help us learn, but constant connectedness also raises concerns about privacy, status anxiety and mental health. How do you relate to the online world? What problems can you identify with digital spaces? What could be done to address them?

Resources and reading

We’ve teamed up with writers, journalists and experts to create a series of resources around specific topics relating to this year’s theme: each resource includes an introduction to the topic and more prompts to get writing and researching, from creative writing to football.

Stories From the Ground Up: Local Journalism

• Learn about the importance of local journalism, and get some tips for trying your own, from the team at The Bristol Cable.

Politics, Football and Place

• Football teams are rooted in places, but that link is being shaken by globalisation. Wyn Grant, author of Political Football, explores the implications.

Ways into Creative Writing

• in a series of videos and prompts, poet Miriam Nash will help you play get writing about the places you know.

In addition, we are creating a reading list below for you to explore how to approach this question. We will update this list throughout the course of the prize, but your reading doesn’t have to be limited to it: be inquisitive and critically engage with news items and articles you read.

Climate Change and Local Action

Read

• Our very own Climate Change resource
• Pupils draft their own climate bill as anxiety grows over lack of guidance for schools, Louise Tickle, Guardian
• Policy Actions – 33 actions local authorities can take on climate change – Friends of the Earth
• ‘The Bristolian 17-year-old campaigning for racial justice in climate change movement’, Priyanka Raval, (The Bristol Cable)
• Author Q&A Daisy Hildyard – (Big Issue North)
• This small German town took back the power – and went fully renewable, Bertie Russell (The Conversation)

Listen

• The Climate Question Podcast: Introducing The Climate Question (BBC Sounds)

Orwell Youth Prize Inspiration

• Orwell Youth Prize Writing ‘Our Body Has A Virus’, collaborative poem from Orwell Youth Prize ‘Future Forum’ – March 2020

Education

Read

• ‘Just Change’ – Tyne & Wear Citizens – by Luke, Park View School
• ‘Summer on the Farm’ – Sharon Hendry, (The Sunday Times)
• How “cradle-to-career” schools provide all-round support and tackle inequality, Victoria Hirst, (The Conversation)
• Daisy Christodoulou ‘What skills will be needed in the economy of the future?’ (Blog)

Listen

• The Untold Podcast, ‘The School and the Depot’ (BBC Sounds)

Orwell Youth Prize Writing

• Orwell Youth Prize Writing ‘Knifepoint’, Jessica Tunks (OYP 2020)
• Orwell Youth Prize Writing ‘Teeth’, Silke Dale Brosig, (OYP 2019)
• Orwell Youth Prize Writing ‘The Aptitude Test Kid’, Nadia Lines (OYP 2019)

Public Spaces

Read

• The National Trust – Report on colonialism and historic slavery
• ‘Haringey street could be renamed La Rose Lane’ – Simon Allin, (Enfield Independent)
• ‘London becomes the world’s first national park city, committed to giving people access to nature’, Edward Trunch (The Conversation)
• ‘What difference would it make?’ – Jo Glanville (London Review of Books Blog)
• ‘Covid has finished off the old high street, but we can replace it with something better’, Owen Hatherly (The Guardian)

Listen

• Arts and Ideas Podcast ‘The Post-Covid City’ (BBC Sounds)

Watch

• Watch: The 2020 Orwell Lecture ‘Decolonising the Wonder House: Orwell Empire and Museum’ Tristram Hunt

Place and Identity

Read

• Mass Observation Project – Recording Everyday Life in Britain
• Black Lives Matter in Rural England (BBC news)
• The dark side of rural England’ James Bloodworth (UnHerd)
• ‘John Clare, poet of the Somewheres’ – Mary Harrington (UnHerd)
• ‘Irreversible Shift’ – This should be a single issue election, Omar Robert Hamilton (n+1)
• ‘Integrate, migrants are told. But can they ever be good enough for the likes of Blair?’ – Aditya Chakrabortty (The Guardian) – Shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2020
• ‘The Necessary Death of Orwell’s England’ Nick Cohen, Standpoint
• ‘A Portable Paradise’ – Poem by Roger Robinson
• ‘The Missing’ – Poem by Roger Robinson
• ‘London’ – Poem by William Blake

Listen

• Art and Ideas Podcast: ‘Individuals and Community’ (BBC Sounds)
• Witness Black History podcast – ‘The Battle of Lewisham’ (BBC Sounds)
• ‘United Kingdom’ Podcast by Zing Tsjeng (BBC Sounds)
• ‘A North West Story’ – ‘Have you heard George’s Podcast’ (BBC Sounds – Listen to more of George’s podcasts too!)
• ‘Landscapes, Real and Imaginary’ (BBC4 Start the Week)

Watch

• Anywhere but Westminster, John Harris and John Domokos (The Guardian)
• Darren McGarvey’s Scotland
• Britain on Film Map – (British Film Institute)
• ‘There is another way to Essex’ – (A review of ‘Excellent Essex’ by Gillian Darley)
• ‘Nowt but a fleeting thing: a young farmer’s fight for survival’ Guardian and Joseph Rowntree Foundation Documentaries (The Guardian)
• Roger Robinson talks about his work – T.S. Eliot Prize
• Nairn Across Britain – BBC iPlayer

Orwell Youth Prize Inspiration

• Orwell Youth Prize Writing, ‘Brick Lane: A Case Against Social and Ethnic Exclusion in Britain’, Asher Gibson (OYP 2019)

Work

Read

• ‘These furloughed pub staff are providing fresh food and hope to families in need’ – Hannah Vickers (The Bristol Cable)

Listen

• Podcast (Tech Tent) Tech and working life (BBC Sounds)

Orwell Youth Prize Inspiration

• Orwell Youth Prize Winning Writing, ‘IN WHICH PAPA (A SAILOR) GOES DEAD’, Irma Kiss Barath (OYP/YPN Political Poetry Prize)

Housing

Read

• ‘Public housing needs radical reform’, Matthew Thompson (The Conversation)

Listen

• Podcast: The House I Grew Up In (BBC Sounds)

Orwell Youth Prize Inspiration

• Orwell Youth Prize Writing, ‘Streets in the Sky’ Rosaleen Tite Ahern (OYP 2020)
• Orwell Youth Prize Writing ‘Designing for Distance’ Madeleine Hobern (OYP 2020)

Daily Life & The Self

Read

• Joan Didion ‘On Keeping a Notebook’

Listen

• Podcast ‘In Our Time: Authenticity’ (BBC Sounds)
• Podcast ‘The Digital Human: Connections’ (BBC Sounds)

Orwell Youth Prize Inspiration

• OYP writing ‘I lost my innocence in a hospital room, and no-one handed it in’, Hannah Hodgson

Local Democracy

Read

• ‘From Paternalism to Participation: How one London borough dealt with the Covid crisis and built a new collaborative institution’ Neal Lawson, Compass (2020)
• ‘Local Actions for Global Problems: Climate Change, communities and changing mindsets’ Luca Tiratelli, New Local
• ‘Left behind – life beyond the London Bubble’ James Bloodworth (UnHerd)
• ‘Hate globalisations? Try localism, not nationalism’, Kevin Albertson, (The Conversation)

Writing Advice (new writing, short stories, writers discuss their work)

Read

• New Writing North
• Our writing resources:
  • Guide to Style
  • Guide to Form
• Also remember that all youth prize winners and runners up from 2019 and 2020 gave their own writing advice, visible in interviews at the bottom of their pages

Listen

• Podcast ‘Short Story’
• Podcast ‘The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed’

Watch

• Watch: The Orwell Prize Shortlist Conversations

If you have any further questions, suggestions, or thoughts, please get in touch with Alex Talbott, alextalbott@orwellyouthprize.co.uk

A FAIR SOCIETY? OYP THEME 2019

George Orwell is one of the world’s most influential writers, the visionary author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four and his eyewitness, non-fiction classics Down and Out in Paris in London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. During his life, and through his writing, Orwell was a fierce critic of totalitarianism and advocate for social justice.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

George Orwell, Why I Write (1946)

By the time of his death in 1950, he was world-renowned as a journalist and author: for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain) and poverty (tramping in London, washing dishes in Paris, visiting pits and the poor in Wigan); for his political and cultural commentary, where he stood up to power and said the unsayable (‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’); and for his fiction, including two of the greatest novels ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His clear writing and political purpose have inspired and influenced countless journalists, authors and others, of all political persuasions and none, in the generations since.

On this page, we’ll introduce some of the ideas which Orwell wrote about which could offer some inspiration for your own take on this year’s theme. You can also find links to Orwell’s own writing on The Orwell Foundation website (with thanks to the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books).

Race, Nation and Empire

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in 1903, which was then part of the British Empire. He was born to a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family and a father who served the British Empire. Orwell’s own first job was as a policeman in Burma (today’s Myanmar). Orwell resigned from service while on leave in England in 1928.

In his first novel Burmese Days and striking essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, Orwell reflected on his own experiences of colonialism. He argued that the British Empire was a destructive force both for the people it governed and the colonialists themselves. Orwell also wrote that after his work for the British Empire he ‘began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed.’

Orwell remained a trenchant critic of the British Empire throughout his life. He also warned against the rise of nationalism and sought to examine the causes and effects of ‘nationalist’ thinking on people’s understanding of society.

• READ Orwell’s essay ‘Shooting An Elephant’
• READ Orwell’s essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’

Economic Injustice

‘The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

After returning to England Orwell set out to become a writer. Although he was from a comfortable background, in order to report on poverty and economic deprivation he wanted to experience it for himself as far as possible. He therefore made various expeditions ‘down and out’ in London, living as a ‘tramp’, which he described in his essay ‘The Spike’. Later, Orwell took jobs as a dishwasher in restaurants and cafes in the centre of Paris. Orwell’s non-fiction work Down and Out in Paris and London described these experiences and asked searching questions about attitudes to people without work or in low paid, insecure labour.

In 1936 Orwell travelled to England’s industrial heartlands in the north, where many people were experiencing great hardship following the Great Depression. In The Road to Wigan Pier, part social reportage, part political polemic, Orwell described what he had seen and learnt. As ever, Orwell wanted to experience people’s living and working conditions for himself and wrote vividly about the life of coal miners and their families.

In the second part of the book, Orwell made a controversial and highly-influential argument about why campaigners at the time were struggling to win support for their vision of a fair society. He argued that many campaigners for social justice misunderstood the emotional lives of the people they wanted to help, concentrating too much on promoting their own political doctrines and dogma. Instead, he argued in favour of ‘common decency’ and a sense of fairness. Orwell expanded on these themes in his wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn‘, which argued for a ‘new form of Britishness’.

• WATCH Orwell’s Down and Out: Live, The Orwell Foundation’s dramatized live-reading of Down and Out in Paris and London, which features the testimony of people who have experienced homelessness and rough-sleeping in the UK today
• READ The Road to Wigan Pier diaries, a blog of Orwell’s personal diaries from 1936

Freedom and Totalitarianism

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

As an author, George Orwell is probably best known for his powerful, stark depictions of totalitarianism in his parable Animal Farm and dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Animal Farm, inspired by the history of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship, Orwell depicted how a movement which was begun with ideas of fairness could be distorted into something very different. Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final novel, imagines a society in which the pressures of war and the power of the state have made even the idea of values like fairness impossible.

• WATCH 1984: Live, The Orwell Foundation’s dramatized, unabridged live-reading of 1984, read by actors, writers, journalists and members of the public at Senate House in 2017
• READ ‘The Freedom of the Press‘, Orwell’s proposed introduction to Animal Farm

We hope teachers will find the Orwell Youth Prize programme a valuable way of introducing students to writing independently, as well as Orwell’s own work. But there are many other ways of using Orwell in the classroom.

Whatever your subject  – politics, English, history, citizenship, drama to name but a few – whatever the age group – the Orwell Foundation website also has a wealth of additional resources about Orwell and his work These are available free to everyone, regardless of whether you or your school are currently involved with the Youth Prize.

Our resources include works by George Orwell, works about George Orwell and video of events run by the Orwell Prize on politics and literature. Below we provide a useful guide to material that might be of particular interest in the classroom; much more is available through the publishers of Orwell, Penguin and Harvill Secker, and the works below are reproduced under copyright of them and the Orwell Estate and with their kind permission.

Works by Orwell

There is a dedicated webpage for each of Orwell’s six novels – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and of course Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – and three major non-fiction works – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

Additionally, a selection of other essays and short works (including poetry) by Orwell is available.

There are also three blogs of diaries written by Orwell:

• 1938-42, includes eyewitness accounts of the Blitz and the run up to WWII (as well as Orwell’s time in Morocco and his experiences of keeping animals and growing vegetables…)
• Hop-picking (1931), follows some of Orwell’s tramping exploits and his experience of picking hops in Kent, which many urban workers and their families would do in the summer
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), includes Orwell’s research for the book of the same name

Works about Orwell

Our Big Brother The Orwell Foundation has links to analysis, reviews and other material based on Orwell’s life and work; the most relevant to individual novels and diaries should already be linked to from the relevant novel and diary pages.

Orwell and Journalism

In July 2022, the Orwell Youth Prize teamed up with University College London Special Collections and the Orwell Archive to run a summer school for Year 12s on ‘Orwell and Journalism: In Pursuit of Truth’. As part of this project, we also produced online resources, designed for students in Years 12 and 13, on Orwell’s work as a journalist and how his life experiences informed his work:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/collections/special-collections/schools-and-outreach/orwell-archive-free-school-resources

The written resource also includes materials from the Orwell Archive, while the short film includes background about Orwell’s life and his journalism and writing style, as well as insights from contemporary journalists Marianna Spring, Stephen Armstrong and Max Daly.

Orwell Foundation events

Many of our Orwell Foundation events based on Orwell’s life and work and might be useful. These include:

• events comparing Orwell and Dickens (2009 and 2010)
• events comparing Orwell and Kipling (2011 and 2012)
• an event comparing Orwell and Waugh (2010)
• Chris Durlacher on producing George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (with the original here)
• Orwell’s son Richard Blair in conversation with biographer D. J. Taylor.

The Orwell Youth Prize also filmed our own exclusive interview with Richard Blair, which you can see here. Additionally, there are events based on themes Orwell wrote about (such as 2012’s ‘Poverty then and now, Orwell and his successors’), events about political writing more generally (such as ‘Autopsy of a Story’ with three shortlisted journalists dissecting their work and debates like ‘What makes a good political novel?’ with a critic and political novelists), and many events discussing different aspects of politics and society.

Below are a few examples of works, or combinations of works, which could work particularly well in the classroom or workshops. They have been selected based on the depth of what we have available, but also the sorts of exercises that they could be used for (e.g. comparing source material with the finished product) and curriculum relevance.

The Diaries

For historical source analysis – especially World War II – we have Orwell’s 1938-42 diaries. These also include other interesting contemporary sources, or links to them, such as a public information leaflet on masking windows in July 1939. Most striking are the newspaper articles Orwell references (and which the Diaries blog includes) in the approach to war, summer 1939, e.g. the surprise as the Nazi Soviet Pact is signed in August 1939.

These could help pupils improve their reading of historical sources, contribute to their historical understanding and be used to stimulate wider discussion. Orwell’s diaries can also be read as preparatory work for his longer essays and work, which could be an engaging way of comparing rough drafts with finished products.

For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier diary and Orwell’s other notes (e.g. Barnsley) were obviously kept with The Road to Wigan Pier in mind. Orwell’s Morocco diary (September 1938 to March 1939, part of the 1938-42 diaries) provides the basis for the essay ‘Marrakech’, while the Hop-Picking diaries are used for Down and Out in Paris and London, A Clergyman’s Daughter and essays including ‘Hop-picking’, ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘The Spike’ (and the links from the Hop-Picking blog include newsreel and other materials).

A simple question would be: how does Orwell turn this material into essays and books? More complex questions might touch on the motivations, ethics and effects of this editing is. This extract from chapter one of Wigan Pier could be a starting point, as is this Observer article, which considers Orwell’s fact and fiction, and articles by Orwell winners, Timothy Garton Ash and Neal Ascherson on journalist Ryszard Kapuściński.

Individual essays that could prompt discussion – a few suggestions

Orwell wrote a number of compelling, accessible essays about language and literature: what do we think of Orwell’s rules? What should the role of literature be?

• Why I Write
• Politics and the English Language
• The Freedom of the Press
• The Prevention of Literature
• Inside the Whale

Eyewitness/descriptive essays: how does Orwell use imagery and other techniques?

• Shooting an Elephant
• A Hanging
• The Moon Under Water

Orwell’s essays about politics and ideas (these could be particularly useful in 20th century history – WWII; The Cold War; decolonization etc):

• In Front Of Your Nose
• You and the Atom Bomb
• Reflections on Gandhi
• In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse
• My Country Right or Left
• The Lion and the Unicorn

He was also a master at writing about the particular to make a more general point:

• The Art of Donald McGill
• Food, for example – what does it tell us about politics/society?

Other:

• Books vs Cigarettes – the London Word Festival once did an event which reimagined the ‘Books vs…’ contest for the 21^st Century.

Reviews of authors on the curriculum

Orwell’s best-known pieces of criticism include his essays  on Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling; lesser-known reviews include an essay on W. B. Yeats.

Works about particular novels

We have a wealth of background material on all of Orwell’s works, many of which are curriculum stalwarts.

• for Nineteen Eighty-Four we have Orwell’s essays about language, politics and culture, works by others adapting it, reviews and analysis which could all give a fresh perspective
• for Animal Farm we have essays concerned with similar themes, Orwell’s proposed prefaces, reviews, analysis and the stories behind the rejections and adaptations

Related works by others

We have pieces about other works contemporary to Orwell. For example, how does Orwell’s reportage in Down and Out (e.g.) compare to other similar works? How was it received by similar authors? And how do Orwell’s dystopias/representations of politics compare to others? (Not least those, like Zamyatin and Koestler, whose works he reviewed.)

We have some material on adaptations. How have others adapted Orwell and his work? For example, Mike Radford and the BBC on Nineteen Eighty Four, Chris Durlacher on adapting Orwell’s life, the story about the cartoon film of Animal Farm. How would you adapt Orwell?

And we have pieces by those inspired by Orwell. How have others followed in Orwell’s footsteps? For example, Emma Larkin in Burma, Stephen Armstrong and others to Wigan. How would you approach a similar project?

English Language Practice Papers

We have prepared these GCSE AQA-style exam practice papers to give you a helping hand – and to promote the Orwell Youth Prize (registered charity 1156494).

Scripts – which would allow performance

Many radio scripts by Orwell exist, such as adaptations of Animal Farm and various fairy tales. These can be found in the Orwell Archive and in editions of the Complete Works.

However, online we have a Christmas edition of his radio poetry programme, Voice as well as his own poetry. We also have a short one scene piece by a young Orwell called ‘Free Will’. There is also one chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, set in Trafalgar Square, which is written entirely in dramatic form.

Winner of the Orwell Youth Prize 2017 (Senior Prize)

That was the question answered by Britain on 23rd of June 2016, which was simple, but only in its binary sense. What is more complex, however, is on what principal a single leave vote rested: was it a vote against a varied international relationship which has existed since 1066? Against a federal bureaucracy? Or a vote resisting the ‘more equal equals’ in authority? All or even none of these may be true representations but, whatever the reason, why then did the -not so special- relationship of ours come to an end?

Neither the media, nor poll indications predicted the ‘leave’ result, but a closer examination of the constitution of the British people (if such generalisation is at all possible) might explain it. Furthermore, reading Orwell’s ‘England your England’ from his collection The Lion and the Unicorn – might explain the inevitability of last summer’s result.  Perhaps the British way of life and the traditions it is built upon are in some ways incompatible with European culture and this has only been exacerbated by the workings of the EU. Here, we now fall back on a separate question of greater importance: what gives us this unique identity which is so incompatible with European thought?

In ‘England your England’, Orwell acknowledges the dislike for the English still seen today: “There is a sort of back-handed admission of …. dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life”.  In many countries, this would be due to colonialism, but Europe was never a stomping ground for red coats and cavalry charges. Britain was in fact just more successful at this than its French, Dutch and Spanish counterparts. This historical competition and superiority of the seas and commonwealth has certainly left an everlasting strain on our continental relationship. Undoubtedly this rivalry had placed a heavy emphasis on the benefits of the union.

The largely conservative values which define our culture and which society holds are also vastly different to any European culture, right or left wing. From our traditionally more right of wing leanings to a more One Nation approach, our subtle differences can also be as trivial as the private nature of our culture. A substantial amount of truth can be taken from Orwell’s comments on the phrase “nosey parker” which bears more insult here than in other more open European cultures. This autonomous approach is seen in many Englanders’ pride of their nation along with our slightly more capitalist, opportunity over relief style politics. Orwell acknowledges this culture in this line: “Boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities”. This more subtle confidence and pride could be source of criticism of British temperament. This confident and reserved approach could for many non-Englanders illustrate a “smug” nature to the British identity, clashing with the “eccentricities” of their cultural personalities.

More of these conservative values can be seen in the more prevalent peace in our land compared to the continent. Britain does not have an experience of trundling its aristocrats off to the guillotine in tumbrils, nor, with some largely unsuccessful exceptions, rising up in revolutionary fervour to overthrow the ruling class. Even when Charles Stuart was beheaded in 1649 this was more of a reaction to him, and not a mandated change away from a ruling class. Its fallout of increased parliamentary powers was more of an evolution than a rebellion – a very conservative reaction.

Similarly, Britain was an early adopter of the concepts of decentralisation of powers. While Europe was in turmoil during the 1830s, Britain passed the Great Reform Act and even earlier than this, most famously The Magna Carta, which was the first treatise of its kind. Although Britain has been through numerous bloody internal struggles, the system itself – unlike the countless French constitutions – has only been truly overhauled once and there is little social precedent for change, no comparison, and arguably no reason. This has led to decades of peaceful rule and an ingrained sense of fairness and justice which –as Orwell argued- is stronger than any societal differences brought about by class, and gives the British identity an ingrained respect of the –usually- well-ruling – establishment. Touching pre-emptively on the E.U, as seen even to this day, with the Brexit Supreme Court ruling, and dating back to 1215, the concept of the law definitely being above the State meant that any attempt of removing sovereignty from Westminster would have resulted eventually in a backlash, such as has been seen during the referendum.

Our long independence from foreign-forced rule also contrasts with a more metropolitan approach of European nations. In many European states, due to sheer ease of movement, migration and war has allowed multitudes of culture to mingle and disperse across the European Continent. In recent years this has led to Europeans being more used to accepting foreign persons and cultures. As seen with the relative lack of segregation in Europe in the 1960s compared with British uneasiness with Caribbean immigration and more recently the accommodation of over 1 million refugees in Europe relative to only a few thousand in Britain, it is evident that European societies are far more flexible to adaptation and influence, compared to the tradition British way of life – thus making any forced cultural links difficult to hold on to.

These principles have a unifying power and are illustrated by Orwell’s explanation of “national loyalty” in ‘England Your England’ which is not just stronger than “Socialism” but, according to Orwell “is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism. The English working class are outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habit”. Our societal respect for rule and fairness, matched by our individual habits and national pride, sets traditional Britain apart from more fluid, metropolitan and liberal Europe even before the European Union tries to join both cultures inseparably together.

The E.U.’s functionality has never before come under so much scrutiny. The establishment of the Union was a necessity:  war was a constant threat in Europe and ensuring stability and political cooperation was paramount. Labour and resources were at a premium throughout the second half of the twentieth century but, with the advancements in globalisation, containerisation and connectivity, the demand from within Europe for these commodities had weakened. Further, the desperate need for prosperity had diminished, indicated by the plateauing of many European economies and therefore the need for cooperation within Europe is now one of convenience for the UK as opposed to a necessity. This fact has allowed arguments of principle and ideology to gain prominence against practical economic drivers (which were already reducing in size after a long, hard recession) and increased democratic scrutiny or arguments based on migration so intrinsic to the strength of the E.U.

A relevant example of British self-determination of identity can be seen in the debate on personal identification. The reaction on the continent and on our mainland to the introduction of EuropeanEconomicArea ID cards was black and white in comparison, with the idea struck down in Britain as soon as it was proposed in 2005. As Orwell explains in ‘England your England’: “The English are in process of being numbered, but their impulses are in the other direction”. He foreshadowed this conflict of approaches from exactly the same line of thinking as the “nosey parker” analogy, emphasizing the incompatibility of a less intrusive conservatism style of government from a more centralised union. Ironically the only 3 EEA countries that do not to require such cards are Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, three tradition, conservative domains, not in the E.U.

The expectations of government are of key importance when understanding how the E.U exacerbates disparities in already differing cultures. Simple principles of government here in Britain are essential to any Briton, especially in England where patriotism is strongest. The notions that Brussels can potentially infringe on an Englander’s rights without the respect of British law or even commission an army without parliamentary consent is probably the single biggest threat posed constitutionally to a Briton. Therefore on June 16^th, the argument of fairness and democracy should have been expected to have been given significant weight by a voter over arguments of peace, cooperation or even economic stability.

Furthermore, the theme of hypocrisy in British identity was also evident during this referendum. The fervent please to vote ‘Remain’ from almost all the business and political elite (from Branson to Blair) made little impact on ordinary people who perceived these ‘more equal equals’ to be motivated by self–serving interest. By contrast, the Leave campaign, fronted by political outsiders such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – won over the people by using their critics, eccentricities, and determination as relatable opposed to the line of opposing elite which were considered out of touch with the rest of society. Looking at the E.U, it is the pinnacle of what many Britons would believe to be bureaucratic elite without their best interests at heart. Here we see a trait of British identity in a distinct distrust in authority, needed to keep democracy in line.

Overall it is clear to see how these two cultures are split between their interlocking proximity and perspective and a set of established conservative principles and scepticism. These principles such as the role of government, the rule of law and personal freedoms have in England carried more weight that the physical benefits of continued cooperation and unification. The E.U has been a major success in Europe for the last 60 years but, as its influence over Britain becomes more ideological than practical, the differences between our two cultures, our identity and theirs, is exposed, with the E.U only acting as a docking rope to a now unknown ship up-anchored in a foreign port.

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His biography, Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. His new biography, Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023. D.J. Taylor is a member of the Orwell Council.

The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity. If you value these resources, please consider becoming a Friend or Patron or making a donation to support our work. You can find more work about Orwell in our library.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division.

Orwell’s five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there. Almost nothing is known of Orwell’s time in the province, other than that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). It also ruined his health. Although disillusioned by the Imperial ‘racket’ he had helped to administer, he left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return.

For the next five years he led a vagrant life. Some of this time was spent at his parents’ home in Southwold, Suffolk. There were periods teaching in private schools, living in Paris and masquerading as a tramp, the background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His professional alias, which combined the name of the reigning monarch with a local river, was adopted shortly before publication. His teaching career was brought to a close by a bout of pneumonia and at the end of 1934, having used a long, recuperative stay in Southwold to complete a second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he decamped to London to work in a Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and married his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences,Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Orwells began their married life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although the book’s second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on Socialism, Orwell’s political views were still not fully formed. The defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against Franco. He was wounded in the throat – the bullet passing within a few millimetres of his carotid artery – and was present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit-squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyist POUM militia, of which he had been a member. Spain made Orwell ‘believe in Socialism for the first time’, as he put it, while instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose: this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC’s atmosphere, he complained, ‘is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless’. In 1943 he secured a more congenial billet as literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he also contributed a column under the heading ‘As I Please’.

Animal Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was written by the middle of 1944. Publishers’ timidity, and the covert pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. By this time Orwell’s personal life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his sister Avril, determined to raise on his own.

Through his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel’s enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too late for its author. He was transferred to University College Hospital in September and died there on 21 January 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death he made an unexpected second marriage to Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Sitting down to read his obituaries on the day of his funeral, his friend Malcolm Muggeridge thought that he saw in them ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023.

Whatever your subject  – politics, English, history, citizenship, drama to name but a few – whatever the age group you teach – the Orwell Foundation website has a wealth of resources. These are available free to everyone, regardless of whether you or your school are currently involved with the Youth Prize. If you are interested in learning more about our workshops in schools, please get in contact with the administrator at admin@orwellyouthprize.co.uk.

Our resources include works by George Orwell, works about George Orwell and video of events run by the Orwell Prize on politics and literature. Below we provide a useful guide to material that might be of particular interest in the classroom; much more is available through the publishers of Orwell, Penguin and Harvill Secker, and the works below are reproduced under copyright of them and the Orwell Estate and with their kind permission.

Works by Orwell

There is a dedicated webpage for each of Orwell’s six novels – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and of course Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – and three major non-fiction works – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

Additionally, a selection of other essays and short works (including poetry) by Orwell is available.

There are also three blogs of diaries written by Orwell:

• 1938-42, includes eyewitness accounts of the Blitz and the run up to WWII (as well as Orwell’s time in Morocco and his experiences of keeping animals and growing vegetables…)
• Hop-picking (1931), follows some of Orwell’s tramping exploits and his experience of picking hops in Kent, which many urban workers and their families would do in the summer
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), includes Orwell’s research for the book of the same name

Works about Orwell

We have links to analysis, reviews and other material based on Orwell’s life and work; the most relevant to individual novels and diaries should already be linked to from the relevant novel and diary pages.

Orwell Prize events

Many of our Orwell Prize events based on Orwell’s life and work and might be useful. These include:

• events comparing Orwell and Dickens (2009 and 2010)
• events comparing Orwell and Kipling (2011 and 2012)
• an event comparing Orwell and Waugh (2010)
• Chris Durlacher on producing George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (with the original here)
• Orwell’s son Richard Blair in conversation with biographer D. J. Taylor.

The Orwell Youth Prize also filmed our own exclusive interview with Richard Blair, which you can see here. Additionally, there are events based on themes Orwell wrote about (such as 2012’s ‘Poverty then and now, Orwell and his successors’), events about political writing more generally (such as ‘Autopsy of a Story’ with three shortlisted journalists dissecting their work and debates like ‘What makes a good political novel?’ with a critic and political novelists), and many events discussing different aspects of politics and society.

Below are a few examples of works, or combinations of works, which could work particularly well in the classroom or workshops. They have been selected based on the depth of what we have available, but also the sorts of exercises that they could be used for (e.g. comparing source material with the finished product) and curriculum relevance.

The Diaries

For historical source analysis – especially World War II – we have Orwell’s 1938-42 diaries. These also include other interesting contemporary sources, or links to them, such as a public information leaflet on masking windows in July 1939. Most striking are the newspaper articles Orwell references (and which the Diaries blog includes) in the approach to war, summer 1939, e.g. the surprise as the Nazi Soviet Pact is signed in August 1939.

Thesecould help pupils improve their reading of historical sources, contribute to their historical understanding and be used to stimulate wider discussion. Orwell’s diaries can also be read as preparatory work for his longer essays and work, which could be an engaging way of comparing rough drafts with finished products.

For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier diary and Orwell’s other notes (e.g. Barnsley) were obviously kept with The Road to Wigan Pier in mind. Orwell’s Morocco diary (September 1938 to March 1939, part of the 1938-42 diaries) provides the basis for the essay ‘Marrakech’, while the Hop-Picking diaries are used for Down and Out in Paris and London, A Clergyman’s Daughter and essays including ‘Hop-picking’, ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘The Spike’ (and the links from the Hop-Picking blog include newsreel and other materials).

A simple question would be: how does Orwell turn this material into essays and books? More complex questions might touch on the motivations, ethics and effects of this editing is. This extract from chapter one of Wigan Pier could be a starting point, as is this Observer article, which considers Orwell’s fact and fiction, and articles by Orwell winners, Timothy Garton Ash and Neal Ascherson on journalist Ryszard Kapuściński.

Individual essays that could prompt discussion – a few suggestions

Orwell wrote a number of compelling, accessible essays about language and literature: what do we think of Orwell’s rules? What should the role of literature be?

• Why I Write
• Politics and the English Language
• The Freedom of the Press
• The Prevention of Literature
• Inside the Whale

Eyewitness/descriptive essays: how does Orwell use imagery and other techniques?

• Shooting an Elephant
• A Hanging
• The Moon Under Water

Orwell’s essays about politics and ideas (these could be particularly useful in 20th century history – WWII; The Cold War; decolonization etc):

• In Front Of Your Nose
• You and the Atom Bomb
• Reflections on Gandhi
• In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse
• My Country Right or Left
• The Lion and the Unicorn

He was also a master at writing about the particular to make a more general point:

• The Art of Donald McGill
• Food, for example – what does it tell us about politics/society?

Other:

• Books vs Cigarettes – the London Word Festival once did an event which reimagined the ‘Books vs…’ contest for the 21^st Century.

Reviews of authors on the curriculum

Orwell’s best-known pieces of criticism include his essays  on Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling; lesser-known reviews include an essay on W. B. Yeats.

Works about particular novels

We have a wealth of background material on all of Orwell’s works, many of which are curriculum stalwarts.

• for Nineteen Eighty-Four we have Orwell’s essays about language, politics and culture, works by others adapting it, reviews and analysis which could all give a fresh perspective
• for Animal Farm we have essays concerned with similar themes, Orwell’s proposed prefaces, reviews, analysis and the stories behind the rejections and adaptations

Related works by others

We have pieces about other works contemporary to Orwell. For example, how does Orwell’s reportage in Down and Out (e.g.) compare to other similar works? How was it received by similar authors? And how do Orwell’s dystopias/representations of politics compare to others? (Not least those, like Zamyatin and Koestler, whose works he reviewed.)

We have some material on adaptations. How have others adapted Orwell and his work? For example, Mike Radford and the BBC on Nineteen Eighty Four, Chris Durlacher on adapting Orwell’s life, the story about the cartoon film of Animal Farm. How would you adapt Orwell?

And we have pieces by those inspired by Orwell. How have others followed in Orwell’s footsteps? For example, Emma Larkin in Burma, Stephen Armstrong and others to Wigan. How would you approach a similar project?

English Language Practice Papers

We have prepared these GCSE AQA-style exam practice papers to give you a helping hand – and to promote the Orwell Youth Prize (registered charity 1156494).

Scripts – which would allow performance

Many radio scripts by Orwell exist, such as adaptations of Animal Farm and various fairy tales. These can be found in the Orwell Archive and in editions of the Complete Works.

However, online we have a Christmas edition of his radio poetry programme, Voice as well as his own poetry. We also have a short one scene piece by a young Orwell called ‘Free Will’. There is also one chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, set in Trafalgar Square, which is written entirely in dramatic form.

Orwell was interested in faces. Above all, he was fascinated by their ability to convey the characteristics – the personality, in extreme cases the ideology – of what lay beneath the skin.

The poem inspired by the Italian militiaman who shook his hand at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona ends with the words: ‘But the thing that I saw in your face/No power can disinherit/No bomb that ever burst/Shatters the crystal spirit.’ One of the last things he wrote in his hospital notebook was the valedictory epigram: ‘At fifty, every man has the face he deserves.’ Primed to tell him about the mentalities they concealed, faces stared up at him from print. Whenever you read a strongly individual piece of writing, he believed, the features of the author could be glimpsed somewhere behind the page: not always accurate portraits, but a figurative projection. Reading Dickens, famously, he saw ‘the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry.’

It would be surprising, given the importance that Orwell ascribed to human features, if they didn’t merit lavish descriptions in his work. Each of his early novels opens with a shrewd little survey of the physiognomy of the principal character. These are not generally prepossessing. Even without his hideous birthmark, Flory in Burmese Days has a face grown ‘very haggard in spite of the sunburn, with lank cheeks and a sunken, withered look round the eyes’. Dorothy Hare in A Clergyman’s Daughter, on the other hand, sees in the mirror ‘a thin, blonde, unremarkable kind of face, with pale eyes and a nose just a shade too long: and if you looked closely you could see crows’ feet round the eyes, and the mouth, when it was in repose, looked tired.’ Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, catching sight of his reflection in the window of Mr McKechnie’s bookshop, divines that it is ‘not a good face. Not thirty yet, but moth-eaten already. Very pale, with bitter, ineradicable lines.’ The single exception to this rule, perhaps, is George Bowling – the least cast-down of Orwell’s 1930s creations – who decides that he ‘hasn’t such a bad face, really. It’s one of those brick-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes.’ Even Bowling, though, has just lost the last of his natural teeth.

And these, it should be pointed out, are Orwell’s heroes and heroine, the people with whom he sympathises and regards, in however complex a way, as emblems of himself. Turn to his minor characters and one might as well be inspecting a line of Victorian waxworks. Dorothy’s solitary companion at early morning Communion is the venerable Miss Mayfill, in whose ancient, bloodless face the mouth is ‘surprisingly large, loose and wet. The under lip, pendulous with age, slobbered forward, exposing a strip of gum and a row of false teeth as yellow as the keys of an old piano.’ If Miss Mayfill resembles an elderly bloodhound, Julia, Gordon’s sister, might be taken for a large, lumbering bird: ‘a tall, ungainly girl… with a thin face just a little too long – one of those girls who even at their most youthful reminds one irresistibly of a goose’. As for Lieutenant Verrall, the cavalry officer who supplants Flory in Elizabeth Lackersteen’s affections, however hard, brutal and fearless its contours, his face in the last resort is that of a rabbit. To move a bit deeper into the text, into its world of momentary glimpses and fleeting impressions, is to fetch up instantly in a chamber of horrors. ‘A bad face he had,’ Gordon thinks, looking out of the bookshop window at a browsing passer-by. ‘Pale, heavy… Welsh, by the look of him.’ ‘Corner Table,’ whose bland features stare down from the Bovex ad that Gordon so despises, has ‘an idiotic, grinning face, like the face of a self-satisfied rat’. Bloodhounds, geese, rabbits, rats: the seeds of Orwell’s anthropomorphic farmyard were sown many years before Animal Farm.

None of these faces – Flory’s, Comstock’s, Bowling’s – is recognisably Orwell’s own, although his friend Richard Rees believed that in describing Dorothy Hare’s features he was describing a feminised version of himself. At the same time, certain adjectives recur: ‘thin’, for example, and ‘pale’. Like their creator, Orwell’s characters look old before their time: even Rosemary’s freshness in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is somehow compromised by the two white hairs on her crown which she declines to pull out. Youthfulness, where it exists, is practically a guarantee of irresponsibility. Bowling’s retired public school Classics master chum Porteous, for instance, has a ‘thin, dreamy kind of face that’s a bit discoloured but might almost belong to a boy, though he must be nearly sixty’. Porteous, with his refusal to take Hitler seriously and his belief in the ‘eternal verities’, has never grown up.

With the possible exception of Verrall’s (‘a rabbit, perhaps, but a tough and martial rabbit’) none of these faces embodies or represents any kind of power. In some ways their weakness is a result of the detail lavished on them. Significantly, when Orwell came to describe faces – actual or fictional – with the ability to put millions of men on the march his language is much more abstract and imprecise. Big Brother’s head, which pursues Winston Smith from every hoarding and every telescreen, is simply ‘black-haired, black-moustachioed, full of power and mysterious calm’. The qualities that give the face its resonance, its capacity to command and subdue, hang in the ether. Confronted with a real-life tyrant, too, Orwell’s response is oddly unsatisfactory. There is a curious review of Mein Kampf, written in the spring of 1940, which discusses the standard publicity photographs of Hitler. It was, Orwell decided, ‘a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified.’ Most contemporary commentators were inclined to be a little less charitable than this, but Orwell had detected something in Hitler’s face to which he invariably reacted: self-pity.

All this raises the question of what Orwell thought of his own face, and what other people thought of it. Anthony Powell was not alone in detecting a resemblance to Doré’s version of Don Quixote – in fact Paul Potts’ affectionate 1950s memoir is entitled ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’. An East End woman who met him during his tramping days was reminded of Stan Laurel. In certain respects – a throwback to his Limouzin forebears – it was not an English face. Powell, again, noted the similarity to French workmen seem contemplating life in Parisian estaminets. Orwell himself was uninterested in, in fact downright indifferent to, his own personal appearance. Requests later on in his career for publicity photographs invariably ran into trouble. The problem was only solved in 1946 when his friend Vernon Richards was commissioned to take a portfolio of pictures in the flat (the camera eventually moves out into the surrounding streets) at Canonbury Square, Islington. And yet for all this indifference Orwell’s face is, to my mind, one of the most extraordinary things about him: extraordinary for the way it changes, and, ultimately, its almost complete separation from the template of youth. Place a picture of Thackeray in his white-haired old buffer phase next to Maclise’s portrait of the twenty-two-year-old club lounger and you can at least recognise the similarity of the facial lines. It would be possible to set the famous ‘Orwell at the microphone’ BBC photograph alongside Jacintha Buddicom’s childhood snaps without realising that they are the same person. ‘What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece?’ he asked in The Lion and the Unicorn. In Orwell’s case, not even a physical similarity.

The degeneration of Orwell’s features between childhood and young manhood is quite startling. The Eton pictures, even the solitary Burma Police shot, show a chubby, almost moon-faced boy. By the time of Dennis Collings’s Walberswick beach photograph of 1932 – he was then thirty-one – he looks forty. In the line of Spanish comrades snapped at an ILP summer school three years later he looks nearer fifty. Friends who picked up with him again in the 1930s after a decade and a half’s gap were shocked by this contrast: Connolly noted the gulf between the ravaged grooves of Orwell’s face and his own plump, cigar-smoking persona. And finally there are Vernon Richards’s photographs, the last-known photographs of Orwell in existence, taken in the Islington flat six months after the publication of Animal Farm. Encouraged by the presence of a friend – two friends, as Richards brought his wife, Marie-Louise – Orwell looks more relaxed than in any previous incarnation. Absorbed, kindly, still a little detached from the proceedings, he changes his son Richard’s trousers, types, rolls cigarettes, takes the child for a walk in his pram, examines a Burmese sword half-drawn from its scabbard and performs various manoeuvres in his workshop. In by far the most striking portrait he sits bolt upright and expressionless in his chair. It is an impassive, elongated face, the eyes fixed on everything and nothing. At forty-two, he could be any age between fifty and seventy-five, ‘full of power and mysterious calm’.

This excerpt is reproduced from Orwell: The Life (2003), by kind permission of the author.

________________________________________________________________________

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. David is a trustee of The Orwell Foundation.