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The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell A
Reassessment 1st Edition Stephen Ingle Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Stephen Ingle
ISBN(s): 9780415357357, 0415357357
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 3.07 MB
Year: 2006
Language: english
The Social and Political
Thought of George Orwell

From the playing fields of Eton College to the slums of Wigan and the
battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell led a unique life
that found expression in a prose style of uncompromising brilliance.
Stephen Ingle captures this range of social experience and political
vision in this fascinating new study, showing that although Orwell is
often read as a socialist, he is best understood as a moralist and
imaginative writer. This new reading, supported by detailed and
thorough analysis, enables the reader to explore key topics such as:

• the myths of working-class socialism

• socialism, family values and poverty
• the threat of totalitarianism
• patriotism and imperialism
• the nature of revolution
• power and the Intellectuals.

This is a stimulating new view of one of the most influential figures of

the twentieth century.
This book will be of interest to students of political history, politi-
cal theory and literature, as well as keen readers of George Orwell’s
writing.

Stephen Ingle is Professor at the Politics Department, University of

Stirling. His main academic interests are in the relationship between
politics and literature and in adversarial (two party) politics, especially
in the UK.

http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield
Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
1 Hayek and After 11 Classical Individualism
Hayekian liberalism as a research The supreme importance of each
programme human being
Jeremy Shearmur Tibor R. Machan

2 Conflicts in Social Science 12 The Age of Reasons

Edited by Anton van Harskamp Quixotism, sentimentalism and
political economy in eighteenth-
3 Political Thought of André Gorz century Britain
Adrian Little Wendy Motooka

4 Corruption, Capitalism and 13 Individualism in Modern

Democracy Thought
John Girling From Adam Smith to Hayek
Lorenzo Infantino
5 Freedom and Culture in Western
Society 14 Property and Power in Social
Hans Blokland Theory
A study in intellectual rivalry
6 Freedom in Economics Dick Pels
New perspectives in normative
analysis 15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of a
Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier, Critical Social Theory
Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and A Critique of Giddens, Habermas
Alain Trannoy and Bhaskar
Nigel Pleasants
7 Against Politics
On government, anarchy and order 16 Marxism and Human Nature
Anthony de Jasay Sean Sayers

8 Max Weber and Michel Foucault 17 Goffman and Social

Parallel life works Organization
Arpad Szakolczai Studies in a sociological legacy
Edited by Greg Smith
9 The Political Economy of Civil
Society and Human Rights 18 Situating Hayek
G. B. Madison Phenomenology and the neo-liberal
project
10 On Durkheim’s Elementary Mark J. Smith
Forms of Religious Life
Edited by W. S. F. Pickering, W. Watts 19 The Reading of Theoretical Texts
Miller and N. J. Allen Peter Ekegren
20 The Nature of Capital 31 Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social
Marx after Foucault Science
Richard Marsden A Critique of Gadamer and
Habermas
21 The Age of Chance Austin Harrington
Gambling in Western Culture
Gerda Reith 32 Methodological Individualism
Background, history and meaning
22 Reflexive Historical Sociology Lars Udehn
Arpad Szakolczai
33 John Stuart Mill and Freedom of
23 Durkheim and Representations Expression
Edited by W. S. F. Pickering The Genesis of a Theory
K. C. O’Rourke

24 The Social and Political Thought 34 The Politics of Atrocity and

of Noam Chomsky Reconciliation
Alison Edgley From Terror to Trauma
Michael Humphrey
25 Hayek’s Liberalism and Its
Origins 35 Marx and Wittgenstein
His Idea of Spontaneous Order and Knowledge, morality, politics
the Scottish Enlightenment Edited by Gavin Kitching and
Christina Petsoulas Nigel Pleasants

36 The Genesis of Modernity

26 Metaphor and the Dynamics of Arpad Szakolczai
Knowledge
Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart 37 Ignorance and Liberty
Lorenzo Infantino
27 Living with Markets
Jeremy Shearmur 38 Deleuze, Marx and Politics
Nicholas Thoburn
28 Durkheim’s Suicide
A Century of Research and Debate 39 The Structure of Social Theory
Edited by W. S. F. Pickering and Anthony King
Geoffrey Walford
40 Adorno, Habermas and the
29 Post-Marxism Search for a Rational Society
An Intellectual History Deborah Cook
Stuart Sim
41 Tocqueville’s Moral and Political
30 The Intellectual as Stranger Thought
Studies in Spokespersonship New liberalism
Dick Pels M. R. R. Ossewaarde
42 Adam Smith’s Political 44 Counter-Enlightenments
Philosophy From the eighteenth century to the
The invisible hand and spontaneous present
order Graeme Garrard
Craig Smith
45 The Social and Political Thought
43 Social and Political Ideas of of George Orwell
Mahatma Gandi A reassessment
Bidyut Chakrabarty Stephen Ingle
The Social and Political
Thought of George Orwell
A reassessment

Stephen Ingle
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2006 Stephen Ingle
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ingle, Stephen.
The social and political thought of George Orwell : a reassessment /
Stephen Ingle.
p. cm.—(Routledge studies in social and political thought ; 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–415–35735–7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Orwell, George,
1903–1950—Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature—
Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Literature and society—
Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Political fiction, English—
History and criticism. 5. Social problems in literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PR6029.R8Z71165 2005
828′.912309—dc22
2005018904

ISBN10: 0–415–35735–7 (Print Edition)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–35735–7
To the memory of one James Ingle and to the future
health and happiness of another James Ingle.
Contents

Acknowledgements xi

1 In search of Orwell 1

2 The shadow of imperialism 28

3 The poor, the workers and the ‘decency myth’ 46

4 To the barricades and back 69

5 Family and nation 92

6 Two plus two equals four 114

7 Orwell, socialism and the soul of man 140

8 Orwell’s social and political thought 162

Notes 183
Bibliography 211
Index 219
Acknowledgements

I have been teaching in the areas of politics and literature for a number
of years and have been fascinated especially by the work of George
Orwell. In the early 1990s I began work on a book on Orwell and
thought at the time that my interest in him would be satisfied.
However, George Orwell: A Political Life, published by Manchester
University Press in 1993, left me feeling that I wanted to say more than
the essentially hybrid format of that book had allowed me to say about
his political ideas. In 2003, Orwell’s centenary year, I was invited to
give a number of papers on aspects of Orwell’s thought and was dis-
ingenuous enough to imagine that these could easily be brought
together to make a book. Routledge were good enough to express an
interest in the project, and so I immediately began to work on my
individual papers. But of course I discovered that a great deal more
work had to be done on each, and gaps between them, too, had to be
filled. I am very grateful to those at Routledge who expressed an inter-
est in the original project and to those, especially Harriet Brinton, who
bore with me when it became clear that the task would be more
difficult than originally envisaged.
I would also like to express my gratitude to two friends, Claire
Lightowler and Stanley Kleinberg, who read most of the original draft
– in fact, in Stanley’s case, all the original draft. Their comments were
very helpful and caused me frequently to rethink my approach. I am
not a good proofreader; in fact, if I were any younger I would have
been classified as dyslexic. In those days, however, that option was not
available – only indolence. It has been my great good fortune to have a
friend who is a meticulous proofreader and I am most grateful for the
help that John Stewart offered and gave. Finally, my wife has been
enormously and unstintingly supportive of my work. This project
would not have been possible to complete without her help. All of
these people are partly responsible for the successful completion of
what follows, but only I am responsible for its deficiencies.
Stephen Ingle, Stirling, May 2005
1 In search of Orwell

That Trotskyite with the big feet.

(H. G. Wells)

‘It’s the pigs I remember most. Napoleon, Squealer – especially Squealer

– and when I look round the Chamber, there they are.’ So said a back-
bencher in response to a survey on Labour MPs’ reading habits.1
He claimed that his politics had been decisively shaped by reading
Orwell. For his own part, Orwell acknowledged the influence of other
writers. The world would have been perceptively different, he said, if
H. G. Wells, the hero of his youth, had not existed.2 This is a substan-
tial claim to make in respect of any individual, especially a writer, and
yet it is a claim that might be advanced equally seriously on behalf of
Orwell himself. There is no comparison between the amount that the
two writers published, or indeed between the length of time over
which both were writing. Wells established an international reputation
comparatively early in his career, went on to write some seventy novels
and short stories as well as two extremely widely read world histories
and a celebrated textbook on biology, met and claimed to have influ-
enced a number of world statesmen and worked productively into his
eighties. Orwell, on the other hand, achieved fame only near the end
of his life, died at the age of forty-six after several years of debilitating
ill-health, had the ear of no politicians or statesmen and wrote only
nine major works (two of which he subsequently sought to suppress)
and a number of seminal long essays (one of which he sought to
suppress). On the face of it, then, any claim that Orwell might have
changed the world would appear to be fanciful. But only a little
digging would allow a fuller, and different, picture to emerge.
Orwell’s books have earned twice as much as all the writers on
Secker and Warburg’s entire list (including Gide, Kafka, Mann and
2 In search of Orwell
Colette), says Jeffrey Meyers.3 Three of his works – Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four – have been made
into popular films. Much of Orwell’s enduring reputation was the
consequence of his anti-totalitarian, and specifically anti-Stalinist,
polemics. When he originally took this stance it was by no means
popular or expedient. From the Spanish Civil War onwards, Orwell
had difficulty getting some of his more partisan writing published.
Animal Farm was a case in point: because the book was so clearly
aimed at Stalin and his regime, and because until 1945 the USSR was
such an important ally in the war against Hitler, it was difficult to
rouse publishers’ interest on either side of the Atlantic. When the
Western allies broke with their former brothers-in-arms, this graphic
fable of Soviet brutality suddenly became very apposite and T. S. Eliot’s
earlier judgement regarding its political inappropriateness was turned
on its head.4 The publication a few years later of Nineteen Eighty Four
could scarcely have been better timed. Nineteen Eighty Four was
recently described as ‘the canonical text’ of anti-communism, ‘the key
imaginative manifesto of the Cold War’.5 The book, together with
Animal Farm, was translated into more than sixty languages, the two
selling more than forty million copies between them. Nineteen Eighty
Four received the supreme populist accolade, abridgement for the
Readers’ Digest. In a survey of university-bound students in Britain
and the United States, Nineteen Eighty Four was amongst the most
‘personally significant books’.6 In 1983 a Harris Poll discovered that
no fewer than 27 per cent of Americans claimed to have read Nineteen
Eighty Four – wishful thinking perhaps, but at least indicative of the
book’s reputation with the American public. In the first six months
of 1984 itself, 301,000 copies of Nineteen Eighty Four were sold in
Britain alone, together with 132,000 copies of Animal Farm. In the
USA in the same year the novel was selling 50,000 copies a day. But
some twenty years after the passing of that totemic year and twelve
years after the end of the Cold War, the centenary of Orwell’s birth
brought a number of biographies, a small and generally distinguished
cluster of hagiographies,7 new editions of all his major works, tele-
vision profiles and international conferences. The following year the US
National Council of Teachers sponsored a nationwide reading and
discussion project on Nineteen Eighty Four.
No doubting, then, the extent of Orwell’s influence on the English-
speaking world and the significance of his contribution to Western
morale in the Cold War. No doubting either the extent to which his
critical stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was taken out of context:
Orwell was trying to save the world for socialism as he understood it,
 In search of Orwell 3
and not for Western capitalism or for right-wing individualism. The
enthusiastic adoption of Nineteen Eighty Four by the right-wing
John Birch society8 would have infuriated Orwell beyond measure,
though his many opponents on the Left might have felt vindicated.
Even worse for Orwell’s amour propre perhaps would have been
Rupert Murdoch’s claim, in a lecture to the Centre for Independent
Studies, that, in the struggle between free markets and totalitarianism,
it was News International that had kept alive Orwell’s ‘crystal spirit’.9
Orwell’s popularity did not disappear with time, even after the col-
lapse of the Berlin Wall. More than half a century after they were
written, Orwell’s books are still much in demand. In fact in 2005
London’s Royal Opera House put on a production of Lorin Mazel’s
opera Nineteen Eighty Four, whose themes, according to the com-
poser, were ‘seemingly ever more relevant’. Why is his social and
political thought still so influential? What is the nature of Orwell’s
influence? This book constitutes an attempt to address these questions
by means of a detailed analysis of Orwell’s social and political thought.
Where to begin? The obvious starting point must surely be a consider-
ation of some of the main products of the ‘Orwell industry’, the key
commentaries on and biographies of Orwell that have emerged since
his death. Our focus is on Orwell’s social and political thought, and so
we will not be much concerned with the details of his life, except where
they bear directly upon his thought. In reviewing some of the key
commentaries and biographies, not only will we extract important
insights into our subject, but we will introduce the main themes to be
explored in the body of this study. The continuing popularity of a
writer dismissed by some as simply one of the most martial of the Cold
Warriors implies that there must be something more to Orwell than the
good fortune of being the right person in the right place at the right
time with the right message for the Right.

1
Sir Bernard Crick, Orwell’s first and, according to Julian Symons,
definitive biographer, agreed to undertake that task because he wished
to acknowledge, to celebrate, Orwell’s success in achieving his goal of
making political writing into an art. Sir Bernard would have warmed
to the kind of political writing that Orwell wished to make into an art:
what Orwell called democratic socialism. Indeed, Crick called Orwell
a supreme political writer ‘both for what he said and how he said it’.10
However, the biography shows clearly that Crick was primarily inter-
ested in what Orwell had to say rather than in how he said it. Had he
4 In search of Orwell
chosen, Crick could have concentrated more on Orwell’s works as
literature, but his interest was principally biographical and his explor-
ation of Orwell’s life was undertaken to enrich our understanding
of his politics. Crick set himself the task of coming as close as he
could to understanding Orwell through observing his life closely.
Acknowledging the shortcomings, as he saw them, of psychological
analysis – ‘none of us can enter into another person’s mind’11 – he set
out systematically to gather and corroborate the available evidence.
Unlike a number of biographers who followed him, for example
Michael Shelden, who left no stone wittingly unturned,12 Crick was not
much concerned with what Samuel Johnson called ‘domestic priv-
acies’, primarily because he had concluded that Orwell had no great
secrets to hide and that, anyway, they would not have impacted greatly
on what Orwell had to say.13 This strategy seems to amount to fighting
with one’s arm tied behind one’s back. We cannot know that Orwell
had no secrets that might have affected his work without first carefully
looking. Abstemiousness can be a virtue when we choose not to
include some secrets merely because they are titillating, but it can also
turn out to be a vice if we decide not to include some secrets that might
have provided a clue to some action or event because they might
impugn the integrity of the subject. An a priori decision not even to
consider such things, however, can surely only be regarded as a vice in
a biographer. Crick was quite clear in his own mind that the most
important thing about Orwell was his supreme ability to render the
spirit of democratic socialism as art, but he gave more attention to the
socialism than the art. Crick has argued that Orwell scholars who see
their subject as, for example, a Christian socialist, or as a Trotskyite,
are actually finding in Orwell chiefly a reflection of their own political
preferences, whereas Crick assures us that as a matter of fact, when all is
said and done, Orwell was a plain Tribunite socialist. Quod erat
demonstrandum? Even so, we should not give up the attempt to
categorise Orwell’s social and political thought as objectively as we
can, and in any case I do not believe that Orwell was a Tribunite
socialist, and I shall try later to show why. Crick’s main contribution
to Orwell scholarship was to provide a carefully crafted portrait of
the man, skilfully set within the background of the main events and
ideas of his times.
Sir Bernard was by no means the first of Orwell’s biographers.
Orwell himself sought to prevent the writing of a biography (an odd
thing for a man with no ‘secrets’, a man whose own writing was so
patently autobiographical), but he was not successful, for a number
appeared. Lionel Trilling included a perceptive chapter on Orwell in
 In search of Orwell 5
his 1955 book The Opposing Self, and he entitled it significantly
‘George Orwell and the Politics of Truth’.14 Orwell, like Cobbett, to
whom he is often compared, did not dream of new kinds of men but
contented himself with ‘the old kind’ of man, and passionately wanted
for these men ‘freedom, bacon and proper work’. Trilling declared that
Orwell was what he wrote: he acted out his beliefs in the world and so
could be considered, in short, a virtuous man. This theme of virtue
became a leitmotiv for many who wrote about Orwell, including Crick
himself; we shall return to it. For Trilling, Orwell’s virtue as a writer
lay in his not being a genius, in his ‘fronting the world with nothing
else than [his] simple, direct, undeceived intelligence’. Although this
analysis is consistent with Trilling’s picture of the man and the writer
being one and the same, it is not of itself convincing. In 1989 a per-
sonal, annotated copy of Down and Out in Paris and London, which
Orwell had sent to an old flame, Brenda Salkeld, came to light. Michael
Shelden read the annotations with care and his conclusions throw a
different light on the relationship between the man and his work. ‘It is
the moment in Orwell’s career when we can see the split. As Eric Blair
he is saying “George Orwell said this, but I as Eric Blair felt this.” He
had seized upon a way of creating himself as Orwell, of hiding Blair
almost perfectly for the rest of his life.’15 Eventually ‘Orwell’ came to
represent what Rodden called a ‘persona of such style and simplicity
. . . the Common Man arguing plain Common Sense’.16 From 1930
onwards, then, Blair (Orwell-the-man) had begun to create a fictional
character, Orwell-the-writer, a device which, as Raymond Williams
put it, enabled him to get inside the experiences he was writing about.
‘Orwell’ was to remain Orwell’s finest literary achievement, one that
as it blossomed would transform his prose style and allow his politics
to develop. (I had the pleasure of spending a weekend in the house of
Orwell’s nephew Henry Dakin some years ago. It was as clear as could
be that the George Orwell I knew from his writings and the Eric Blair
he knew as an uncle were quite different men. My man was Trilling’s
‘Orwell of the undeceived intelligence’, a literary contrivance that
enabled its creator to champion the values of ordinary people.) In
response to Trilling, then, to say that Orwell was what he wrote, whilst
not entirely wrong, is to miss a trick. Nevertheless, Trilling’s picture of
Orwell as common-sensible, forthright, virtuous and truthful has
been influential.
In 1961 Richard Rees, formerly editor of The Adelphi for whom
Orwell frequently wrote, and a long-time friend, wrote a biography
poignantly entitled George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Vic-
tory.17 Rees also wrote a biography of Simone Weil, for whom much
6 In search of Orwell
the same title would have been appropriate, and he argued about
Orwell, as he would about Weil, that a concern for justice and an
understanding of the balance of society made him ready to add his
weight to the lighter scale, to change sides. Rees offered as an example
Orwell’s championing of the industrial working-class, especially the
unemployed, but he could have chosen Orwell’s joining the Partido
Obrero de Unification Marxista (POUM) militia when fighting in the
Spanish Civil War. Although he scarcely knew enough about the situ-
ation for this to have been an entirely conscious decision, there seems
to have been something quite natural about his siding with the party
that would be treacherously attacked by its former allies and then
generally demonised. As we shall see, when Orwell returned to Britain
he declared that his championing of POUM’s cause, which earned him
the distrust and enmity of a number of former friends, was prompted
not so much by the belief that POUM was right as that it was unfairly
treated. This fire for justice was fanned by a general disregard for his
personal safety. Orwell’s attitude towards his own health seems to
represent a disdain for the sensible and comfortable in favour of the
dangerous and uncomfortable in pursuit of his mission. His decision to
live on Jura towards the end of his life is a specific example. Here was a
man who was tubercular and who had been told that he needed easy
access to a good hospital and the benefit of a dry climate, so he made
for one of the most inaccessible parts of the Inner Hebrides, to live in
what Rees described as ‘the most uninhabitable house in the British
Isles’.18 Orwell wrote to his friends in London that the journey was
quite easy really, though they would have to walk the last eight soggy
miles. But he completed Nineteen Eighty Four there.
Rees found it difficult to account for Orwell’s fame. As we have
seen, he was hardly prolific. His lack of an informed knowledge of
philosophical and psychological issues limited the scope of his writing;
and his style, Rees suggested, was nothing like as brilliant as Joyce’s.
For Rees, then, Orwell’s cult status could be explained only by his
personal appeal, ‘the man he was’. Plausible though this might have
sounded in 1961, it can hardly account for his continuing popularity
half a century later. Neither, as we stressed, can the timeliness of his
anti-totalitarian political stance. Nevertheless, Rees did try to elabor-
ate on the kind of man he took Orwell to be: he reminded us of
Orwell’s description of Dickens in his celebrated essay as a man
who was ‘generously angry . . . a nineteenth century liberal, a free
intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all those smelly little
orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’.19 Orwell could
have been describing himself, said Rees. There is something in what
 In search of Orwell 7
Rees says, though the concern with equality that marks out the socialist
was more central than the concern with individual liberty that marked
out the liberal. However, there was nothing generous about Orwell’s
anger, even though he might have placed on record his inability to hate
Hitler.20 His criticism of his opponents, especially on the Left, was
often vicious. A request from the New Left Review seeking authors’
responses to the Spanish Civil War drew this unpublished reply from
Orwell: ‘By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender that I am preserv-
ing specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when
he squirms for shame at having written it . . . I shall rub it in good and
hard.’21 Later Orwell met and formed a friendship with Spender, who
asked how Orwell could have attacked him without knowing him.
Orwell responded that he had not ‘exactly’ attacked him but might
perhaps have used the phrase ‘parlour Bolsheviks’ (in fact fashionable
pansies), and that knowing someone made it difficult to criticise them.
He seems nevertheless to have managed in Cyril Connolly’s case
without too much difficulty: his criticism of his friend’s novel The
Rock Pool was devastating.22 Orwell said he wanted to retain the right
to be intellectually brutal,23 though his frequent criticisms of the
‘nancy poets’ would score more highly for brutality than intellect. No
critique of Orwell himself, from a representative of any of the smelly
orthodoxies he detested, was more splenetic or vindictive than his own
critique of W. H. Auden – that ‘sort of gutless Kipling’ – and especially
of his poem ‘Spain’.24
So, Orwell was not a generously angry man. On the other hand, the
opprobrium that settled on his reputation after it was disclosed that
Orwell had provided a list of ‘fellow travelling’ public figures to the
security services seems largely unearned. A headline in The Guardian
during his centenary wondered whether he hadn’t been a government
stooge.25 More damning was the charge that Orwell had supplied the
list to his old friend Celia Kirwan to secure what might be called
romantic favours. As a matter of fact, at the time he compiled the list
Orwell was too ill even to receive visitors, let alone plan unlikely
amorous adventures.26 The purpose of the list had been to identify
those whom it would not have been appropriate to consider for pro-
British propaganda purposes, and it contained, along with Chaplin,
Michael Redrave, E. H. Carr and the Labour backbencher Tom
Driberg, the name of Hugh McDiarmid, the stridently anti-English
Scottish Nationalist. None of these made any secret of their sym-
pathies and they were well known to the security services. Nevertheless,
Orwell gave the matter a lot of thought and made no bones about
providing the information. All things considered, it is not surprising
8 In search of Orwell
that Richard Rees called Orwell a good hater. In more general terms,
however, Rees confirmed the view of Orwell as truthful and virtuous,
and added that his chief concern both as a writer and a man was
with moral values.
An acquaintance who knew Orwell for a long period of time was
fellow Etonian Christopher Hollis. A Catholic convert, Hollis was the
Conservative MP for Devizes from 1945 to 1955, and he wrote A
Study of George Orwell on his retirement from Parliament. Hollis’
approach to his subject provides an excellent example of Crick’s point,
that those who write about Orwell actually write about themselves;
it was Kingsley Amis who noted that Hollis could not resist drawing
Orwell very much in his own image. Hollis’ Orwell, then, is at heart a
Conservative and a Catholic fellow-traveller, of whom he concluded:
‘Orwell never doubted that man was fundamentally a moral being
and that this world was a testing place.’27 His Orwell was a sub-
conscious Christian with a deep sympathy for the conservative ideals
of tradition and organicism.
Another important biography appeared in the following decade,
with an evocative title, George Woodcock’s The Crystal Spirit.28
Woodcock and Orwell had remained on good terms despite the for-
mer’s pacifism, which made them ideological opponents during the
war. Woodcock regarded Orwell as a far more complex character than
he liked to present himself: Woodcock describes him as ‘in his own
way a man of the left’,29 an ‘ambivalent anarchist’,30 a radical indi-
vidualist (à la Hazlitt)31 and a Swiftian Tory dissenter.32 Indeed, in his
essay on Swift, as Woodcock shows, Orwell displayed a Tocquevillian
fear of public opinion. ‘When human beings are governed by “thou
shalt not”, the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity:
when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason” he is under
continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same
way as everyone else.’33 No wonder, then, that conservatives, anarch-
ists, Trotskyites, socialists and liberals found encouragement in his
work; but as Woodcock shrewdly observed, they must all be missing
something. Woodcock’s Orwell, then, was essentially a complex figure
whose politics reflected a series of ‘highly idiosyncratic’ reactions to
the experiences of life34 but who lacked any ideological frame by which
he might readily be identified. This is only part of the story, because we
know that Orwell, more than most of us, actively chose the experi-
ences to which he responded ‘idiosyncratically’. Perhaps his years in
Burma were a terrible mistake (though in retrospect even this is open
to doubt), but he chose to enlist. He chose to go down to the ‘bedrock
of Western civilisation’ on his return from Burma, chose to go to the
 In search of Orwell 9
north of England, to fight in Spain, and finally to wrestle with his
last book in greater discomfort and solitude than was strictly neces-
sary. And to a considerable degree he chose his responses to these
experiences. Although Woodcock argued that these responses did
not offer ideological coherence, they did sustain a consistent moral
force. Woodcock’s contribution to the depiction of Orwell is not
radically different from Trilling’s or Rees’, though in specifically polit-
ical terms it is significantly different to Crick’s: Orwell was always an
outsider and ‘at the most an unwelcome guerrilla on the flank of the
regular army’.35
An early US analysis of Orwell’s work, though not a biography,
was Robert A. Lee’s Orwell’s Fiction.36 This was no hagiography.
‘In many ways’, says Lee:37

Orwell was the antithesis of what his admirers hold him to

be: strains of orthodoxy and conservatism often outweigh his
vaunted radicalism; meanness of spirit is often apparent in the
man admired for largeness of vision. His often remarked rancour
towards socialists and his not-so-thinly veiled distaste for the
real people whose abstract causes he championed are part of
the antidemocratic strain in his writing that . . . is indisputable.

Even Orwell’s being wounded in Spain was seen by Lee to be ‘per-

versely satisfying’ because it gave him a badge showing him to be on
the side of the oppressed. It enabled him to say without fear of contra-
diction that not merely had he sought to comprehend tyranny and
dramatise it in his literature, but he had actually fought it in Spain.38
Perhaps, if Orwell had been killed – which he so nearly was – Lee
would have seen this as especially perverse. Although Lee clearly
admired Orwell’s writing, especially Animal Farm, his picture of
Orwell was far more ambiguous: it portrayed a political thinker whose
principal ideas were ‘thematically limited and parochial’.
More generally critical of Orwell was Raymond Williams, who, in
1971, managed to damn his subject with faint praise in a short book
in Fontana’s Modern Masters Series.39 He saw Orwell’s going off to
Burma as very conventional (for the son of an Imperial civil servant),
and so too was his stay in Paris (for an aspiring writer). Orwell’s
position in the social hierarchy, lower-upper-middle-class, gave him a
‘double vision, rooted in the simultaneous positions of dominator and
dominated’.40 This double vision was compounded by Orwell’s ana-
lytical shortcomings. True, through his response to his experiences, he
could conjure up a ‘climate’ of injustices, but this missed out the
10 In search of Orwell
important analytical component, and as Williams concluded, ‘a social
structure is not a climate’. Williams claimed that Orwell imagined
class differences to be principally about accent, food and clothes and
that he managed to sell this lie to a whole generation, an argument so
perverse as to be simply not worth pursuing. Even where Williams
acknowledged Orwell’s integrity as a witness, he still saw him in his
early career as an outsider with ‘no social function’. Williams’ point
was that to opt for literature instead of politics, and this is indeed
what Orwell claimed to have done, was to put oneself into a com-
partment which by definition ‘has no direct concern with social
reality’.41 On this reading, to seek detachment in the sense of abjuring
smelly little orthodoxies is to choose to cut oneself off from social
reality and thus opt for political impotence. Nevertheless, Williams
acknowledged Orwell’s political commitment in Spain and called
Homage to Catalonia Orwell’s most important and moving book.
From Williams’ perspective, Orwell was now too committed – to
revolutionary socialism. But during the Second World War Orwell
abjured revolution and, in Williams’ cutting phrase, ‘reverts to type’.
The apotheosis of this reversion to type was Nineteen Eighty Four,
in which, whatever Orwell said himself, ‘all modern forms of repres-
sion and authoritarian control’ were attributed to a single political
tendency, socialism, which Orwell misrepresented.42 We shall be con-
sidering these points at greater length later, but to conclude for the
present: Williams applauded Orwell’s ultimately successful attempts
to write about his experiences from the inside but castigated his
lack of understanding of the economics of class exploitation. Orwell’s
fixation on the potential evils of totalitarianism prevented him from
addressing the new contradictions of developing capitalism. Hence
Orwell helped to prepare the mainstream Left for post-war accom-
modation to capitalism by virtue of his pessimism. So it seems that
in opting for literature over commitment Orwell had not, after
all, chosen political impotence. Williams cannot have it both ways.
Williams’ picture, on the whole, is not a flattering one. He depicted
Orwell as a species of bourgeois ingénue who flirted unsuccessfully
with and finally forsook socialism.
In 1972 Stansky and Abrahams produced an Orwell biography
whose title, The Unknown Orwell, excited expectations which, to
some degree at least, were realised.43 We discover more about Orwell’s
childhood and school days, but the apparent discrepancies between
Orwell’s own later accounts and those of people who knew him, or
indeed his own letters home, were by no means resolved. Many of the
former were taken by the authors at their face value, his prep school
 In search of Orwell 11
bedwetting for example, whereas his letters showed ‘the ordinariness
of schoolboy life in so ordinary a fashion – with a full quota of jolly
chaps and ripping games of footer’.44 By and large the authors
accepted Orwell’s own conclusion about his days at St Cyprian’s, that
they gave him ‘an economic explanation of affection and society’.45
Orwell at Eton was pictured as being rather aloof, without close
friends, and also without any great academic aptitude; after three years
he was placed 117th out of 140 in his year. The authors were per-
suaded that Orwell’s choice not to try to go on to university was a
sensible one. For Crick and others the decision was more problem-
atical. For our purposes, the matter is of consequence only to the
extent that a decision between a university education and a career in
the Imperial Police would have a profound consequence on the kind of
writer he would become. Given his very average academic perform-
ance and his tutors’ lack of enthusiasm concerning the further pursuit
of his education, a career in the Imperial Police made sense if only as a
pis aller, but perhaps Orwell was truly fired by the prospect of follow-
ing in his father’s footsteps and ‘going East’. For several reasons,
then, his decision to join the Imperial Police made sense. In the devel-
opment of Orwell’s social and political thought, the decision would
have profound consequences. Stansky and Abrahams’ book has little
to say about the development of Orwell’s career or his politics, and
at the end we might feel that the unknown Orwell has remained, if
better known, still enigmatic.
There have been, over the years, a number of assessments of Orwell’s
work that have been only tangentially biographical, one of the best
being an early one, Jeffrey Meyers’ George Orwell: The Critical
Heritage.46 What was particularly useful about this book was that
most of the contributors knew Orwell and knew his age, and both
were still reasonably fresh in their minds. This volume, if generally
rather laudatory in tone, nevertheless brought together a wide range of
critical comment and was generally more illuminating than the same
editor’s Reader’s Guide, published in the same year.
One of the most comprehensive and scholarly treatments of Orwell’s
political influence, published in 1989, was John Rodden’s The Politics
of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’
Orwell, to which I have already referred. This still provides the fullest
account of Orwell’s relevance to the modern age, and Rodden deals in
considerable depth with the differing responses to Orwell’s social and
political ideas in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It is
an impressive achievement, but perhaps more for the breadth of the
scholarship on which it is based than for any particular insight into
12 In search of Orwell
Orwell’s thought. It is strange nevertheless that the later biographies
do not refer more to Rodden.
Orwell’s reputation, as we have seen, did not survive unscathed.
One of the most comprehensively critical analyses of aspects of the
man and his politics was Inside the Myth, Orwell: Views from the
Left.47 Of the contributions to this collection, the most trenchantly
critical were two on Orwell’s treatment of women and women’s issues,
by Beatrix Campbell and Deirdre Beddoe. Their themes were taken
up in the last of the older works on Orwell that I shall turn to, if
only briefly: Daphne Patai’s The Orwell Mystique: A Study of Male
Ideology,48 which was published in the same year, 1984. Patai was
trenchantly critical of Orwell’s ‘traditional notion of masculinity,
complemented by a generalised misogyny’.49 My reference is brief
not because I regard Patai’s book as short-sighted in its reductionist
interpretation of Orwell’s thought, though I do, nor because I think
the feminists’ case against Orwell50 is weak, but rather the opposite:
because I think the case is irresistible, even if Christopher Hitchens
tried half-heartedly to resist it.51 Newsinger, whose work we shall
shortly be discussing, was obdurately, and to my mind mistakenly,
defensive of Orwell: if Orwell were really so convinced of male
superiority, he argued, this would have made him a conservative, or
even a fascist. If that were true for Orwell, then it would have been true
for half of the contemporary Labour Party and most Tories would
have been fascists. Stephen Spender later said that Orwell despised
women and thought of them generally as inferior.52 Kay Ekeval,
with whom Orwell had an affair, also noted Orwell’s ‘ultra masculine
tendencies’. Though he enjoyed their company, Orwell did not think
women to be ‘a force in life’.53 I profoundly disagree, however,
with Patai’s assertion that Orwell used his ‘generalised misogyny’
consciously for broader political purposes, to signal to liberal and
conservative intellectuals that he was ‘safe’, one of them, a man who
would not ‘rock the boat’. There is no evidence to suggest that Orwell
wished to soften his political stance to make it more appealing, and
it is hardly conceivable that he of all people would have selected mis-
ogyny as his means had he made any such attempt. However, from a
feminist perspective, Orwell’s position was even more condemnable;
he simply was not intellectually interested in women. This is an
important consideration, and we shall have cause to return to it
on several occasions.
I now want to turn to some of those books that came out in anticipa-
tion of, or were timed to coincide with, the centenary of the writer’s
birth in 2003. I shall be selective for, as Stefan Collini observed,
 In search of Orwell 13
in some cases the ‘new facts’ do not add much to our understanding
and simply ‘do not justify the bold conclusions which [are] derived
from them’.54

2
The first is John Newsinger’s Orwell’s Politics, published in 1999.55
This book, to coin a phrase, does just what it says on the tin. It is a
systematic account of the development of Orwell’s political thought, in
fact, according to Bernard Crick, as good an account as we are likely
to get in this generation. It is particularly valuable in providing the
political background to Orwell’s work; indeed, it does so more suc-
cessfully than any of the biographies, and so it deserves our detailed
attention. On the other hand, it can be said to have one major draw-
back: Newsinger does not consider Orwell as an imaginative writer.
That is to say, he does not concern himself with the crucial fact that
Orwell’s primary motivation was to write, and where literary integrity
came into conflict with political commitment, Orwell’s primary alle-
giance was to the former. A study that fails to recognise this fact is
bound to be correspondingly deficient, as the following small example
shows. Animal Farm is commonly regarded as the greatest political
satire since Gulliver’s Travels. Newsinger devoted three pages to it. I
have already conceded that the author was very clear about his
appointed task, and this did not include analysing Orwell’s status as an
imaginative writer or its implications. But Orwell was an imaginative
writer, and, as we shall discover, imaginative writers have an unusual
relationship to politics.
Newsinger’s analysis begins with Orwell in Burma, and he attempts
to make sense of Orwell’s changing attitude towards imperialism. We
shall be considering what he has to say in more detail later, but he
recognised that Flory’s view of the Empire in Burmese Days, as being a
despotism motivated by theft, did not represent Orwell’s final judge-
ment. Orwell became convinced finally that, whatever its faults, the
British Empire was a lesser evil, and Orwell’s views were not static.56
We shall have the opportunity to pursue this debate in detail in
Chapter 2. On his return to Britain, Orwell went ‘down and out’, says
Newsinger, quoting Orwell, to absolve himself from the stain of the
exploitation associated with imperialism. But Orwell went down and
out with his pen, as a writer, and not as a volunteer social worker. He
went, in part at least, to garner new experiences. And to very good
effect: it was because Orwell had earned himself a reputation as one
who could write tellingly about the poor that Gollancz approached
14 In search of Orwell
him to undertake a survey of working-class life in the north of
England.57 But Gollancz was to get more than he bargained for. In the
second half of Road to Wigan Pier, the book that grew out of Orwell’s
diaries of his six weeks in Yorkshire and Lancashire, he ‘unleashed a
sustained idiosyncratic diatribe against the British left’. (Newsinger’s
words.)58 A more favourably disposed commentator likened that
second half to ‘a brick through the window of the upper class party
faithful’.59 Unlike many on the Left, Newsinger seems willing to for-
give Orwell, but only because his ‘theoretical understanding of the
crisis of British capitalism and of the socialist alternative was weak’.60
Particularly difficult to forgive was Orwell’s rumbustious, take-no-
prisoners style. The image of middle-class socialists ‘flocking towards
progress like bluebottles to a dead cat’61 was trenchant, vituperative,
unfair and unforgettable.
When Newsinger discussed Orwell’s experiences in Spain, he was
especially assiduous at filling in the crucial political background, point-
ing out to the reader, for example, via Trotsky, that in its early days the
Spanish Revolution achieved even more than the Russian. Newsinger
rightly concluded that Spain convinced Orwell that to be anti-fascist
one had to be anti-capitalist,62 which is to say revolutionary. Just as he
had earlier imported his ‘imperialist’ model into his analysis of British
society, so when he returned from Spain he imported his Catalonian
model: ‘only revolution can save England’, he was to write.63 More-
over, Orwell concluded with some justification that leading British
left-wing intellectuals were almost exclusively pro-communist, so that
he found it very difficult to put across the revolutionary point of view
publicly. As late as 1942, in his essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish
War’, Orwell wrote that the question confronting the Left in Spain was
essentially the same as that confronting the Left in Britain in its struggle
with the fascists: were ordinary people to be allowed to live fully
human lives or were they not?64 But as Newsinger showed, the question
proved to be no simple one, and when Britain was under grave threat
Orwell was quick to jump to its defence and to discard the pacifism that
had led him to take out his brief membership of the Independent
Labour Party. When he first joined the Home Guard, Orwell urged all
socialists to do the same, and to turn that body into a ‘democratic
guerrilla force’. Although Crick suggests that the Home Guard did
indeed acquire a political dimension,65 the idea of its becoming a guer-
rilla force out to establish a socialist republic surely belongs to another
world. Orwell had miscalculated fundamentally the revolutionary
potential of the wartime situation, as he later admitted. Nevertheless,
he contributed a short work, The Lion and the Unicorn, to a series
 In search of Orwell 15
known as Searchlight, which was aimed at bringing international
socialism to terms with (British) nationalism. Newsinger argues that in
this extended essay Orwell established a feasible ‘third way’ between
reform and revolution. I hope to show later that this is wishful think-
ing. Even Newsinger agrees that the essay Orwell wrote two years later,
The English People, constituted a ‘pretty decisive repudiation of the
revolutionary politic [of] less than three years earlier’.66
Before the end of the war in Europe, Orwell owned up to his mis-
calculations about the importance of revolution to the war effort. He
had been consistently wrong. Yet he continued to think himself con-
sistently right in his anti-Stalinism; indeed, he was already working
on Animal Farm, a book characterised by Newsinger as an assault on
Russian communism ‘from a Trotskyite “in the wide sense” point of
view’.67 I shall try later to argue that it is hard to envisage a sense wide
enough to make such a description appropriate. Newsinger quotes a
letter from Orwell to the editor of Partisan Review in which he wrote:
‘You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself: there is no
such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.’68 Newsinger went on to quote
Orwell’s ‘enigmatic but vitally important’ comment on Koestler’s
novels Darkness at Noon and The Gladiators: ‘all revolutions may be
failures but they are not all the same failure’.69 This sententious, even
cryptic, aphorism offers an example of the manner in which an
imaginative writer operates. Newsinger understood it to be an import-
ant observation, but he was not certain what it meant and Orwell did
not go on to elaborate. We would not allow a political thinker such
latitude. But its meaning can be shown by example, and the most
appropriate example also shows that Orwell was wrong: in fact,
Koestler was well aware that not all failures are the same. His Spartacus
attempted to make his own failed revolution a nobler failure by
refusing the Roman General Crassus’ offer of flight to Alexandria. He
symbolically drained his wine: ‘One must not leave any dregs . . . So
that one may hand it [the chalice of revolution] in a clean state to the
Next One who will come.’70 But the last word was with Spartacus’
counsellor, the Essene, who came close, surely, to capturing the essence
of Orwell’s own final verdict on the nature of revolution: ‘Man comes
and man is gone, and knows nothing of the fate of his fathers and has
no knowledge of the future of his seed. The rain falls into the river and
the river drowns in the sea, but the sea becomes no greater. All is
vanity.’71 This seems to offer a suitable valediction for the history of
the revolution on Animal Farm, whose animals, after all, had made
their own revolution, only for it to fail, in every sense.
Newsinger turned next to Orwell’s last book with a disarming: ‘What
16 In search of Orwell
of Nineteen Eighty Four?’ What indeed. Newsinger turned on Orwell’s
critics, especially Raymond Williams, who had failed to acknowledge
that Orwell was not attacking British socialism, by pointing out that
Williams had decided that by the time he wrote Animal Farm, Orwell
had ceased to be a socialist. Ironically, several pages further on in the
same work, Williams justified as necessary what he called the ‘harsh
discipline’ of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime. A revealing com-
parison, Newsinger pointed out: Pol Pot’s Killing Fields did not invali-
date his claim to be a socialist but Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four was
more than enough to disqualify him.72 For Newsinger, Nineteen Eighty
Four had been written primarily to alert the British managerial class to
the excesses of totalitarianism; these were the people Orwell had sought
to engage with The Lion and the Unicorn. His last book, however, was
hijacked by its own international success, achieving, as we have noted,
iconic status in the rhetoric of the Cold War, and so Orwell’s own
intentions simply ceased to signify. Newsinger’s chapter title consti-
tuted an attempt to restore the balance: ‘A Doctor Treating an All but
hopeless Case’. This indicates what Newsinger took to be Orwell’s view
about the future of the West; ironically, it was also how the medical
world felt about Orwell. Newsinger’s Orwell died an enemy of tyranny
and a fighter for a better world. Was he at his death a ‘Tribunite socialist’
à la Crick? Certainly not, says Newsinger, he was a literary Trotskyite:
someone who debated the ideas of the revolutionary Left within a
fictional framework.73 Unfortunately, Newsinger did not elaborate on
this definition. As I said at the outset, he was primarily interested in
Orwell’s political thought and not in his status as an imaginative
writer, but was Orwell, as Newsinger suggests, a Trotskyite? John
O’Callaghan was right to refute Crick’s assertion that ‘the nature and
spread of fascism’ were Orwell’s major concerns after 1936.74 It is
undeniably the case that Orwell devoted far more time to criticising
Stalin’s Russia than he did to criticising Hitler’s Germany, or indeed
fascism generally, as would befit a Trotskyite. It is also true that some
of Orwell’s more general beliefs were held by Trotskyites and that he
remained as great a foe of Stalin’s Russia as any Trotskyite. We shall
consider this question in more detail later, but in directing the reader
predominantly to Orwell’s revolutionary-left side, Newsinger
redressed the balance of our picture of the writer.

3
In the year 2000, Jeffrey Meyers brought out Orwell: Wintry Con-
science of a Generation,75 described by one reviewer as the new
 In search of Orwell 17
authoritative biography. I shall not discuss this book, however,
because comprehensive and well written as it is, it adds very little that
is distinctive or new to our knowledge or understanding of Orwell’s
social and political thought, and anyway it was destined soon to be
overtaken by two biographies that appeared in Orwell’s centenary
year of 2003. The first of these was Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell.76
Unlike Newsinger, Bowker confronted Orwell’s literary status head
on. In his first sentence he tells us that Orwell was a writer of great
power and imagination, was indeed ‘one of the greatest writers of the
twentieth century’. The decisive ingredient of Orwell’s reputation, he
went on, was his writing ability; he created a ‘window pane of tran-
spicuous prose’.77 However, Bowker’s interest, we soon discover, was
not focused on Orwell’s transpicuous prose; rather he was predomin-
antly concerned to explore the ramifications of some of the ambiguities
concerning Orwell’s life and his reputation. The latter was character-
ised by his ‘crystalline honesty’ but the former by a ‘deceptive streak’.
Orwell had a partly repressed dislike of women; he possessed a deeply
ingrained religiosity that hardly fitted with his vaunted atheism; his
marriage was a rather loose one, each partner tolerating the other’s
infidelities (though Eileen did much more tolerating than George did).
In short, Orwell was not what he seemed. Bowker provided details of
Orwell’s family background, which are not relevant to our purposes,
except to say that it is worth remembering that this supposedly quint-
essential Englishman was actually qualified to have represented France
on the rugby or soccer field. His mother was half French.
Bowker claims to have thrown light upon something of a mystery in
Orwell studies: his rampant anti-Catholicism, strong enough to be
remarked on by a number of his acquaintances. Now, it is known that
as a young boy Orwell attended his sister’s convent school. According
to Bowker, though others have assumed that this was an Anglican
establishment, it can only have been a Catholic convent run by French
Ursulines. If he is right, then Orwell was taught as a lone boy in a
Catholic girls’ school run by nuns. This might account for the fact that
he acknowledged a well-developed consciousness of sin by the age of
eight and subsequently acquired his dislike of women.78 Orwell’s sub-
sequent days at his prep school, St Cyprian’s, unlike these earlier
experiences, have been very well turned over and drawn upon by bio-
graphers, but Bowker emphasised more than most the great effect
that the writings of H. G. Wells had upon the growing boy. It was
a wonderful experience, Orwell said later, to be included as a boy
in a conspiracy that foretold the shape of things to come.79 Bowker
also noted how admired an English teacher the despised Flip (the
18 In search of Orwell
headmaster’s wife) was: she had a passion for simple and clear prose.
However exaggerated Orwell’s later picture of St Cyprian’s might have
been, it is clear that he disliked it increasingly and did not trouble to
hide his dislike. As his contemporary Cyril Connolly wrote: ‘I was a
stage rebel, Orwell a true one.’80
At Eton Orwell did not stand out academically or indeed in any
other way. One contemporary described him as having a face like a
hamster, another as ‘a bit of a bastard’.81 He had no close friends but
pursued his love of reading, consuming the works of Bernard Shaw
and discovering the writing of Jack London. Bowker repeats the story
in which Orwell and Runciman (the future historian) got their revenge
on a senior boy who had been unpleasant to them by making his image
in candle wax. Orwell had wanted to pierce it with a pin but Runciman
insisted on only breaking off a leg. Soon after, the older boy broke
his leg: indeed, within a year he had died of leukaemia. Perhaps this is
one of those secrets that is worth knowing. It throws some light
on Orwell’s paranoia later in life: one of the reasons Orwell gave to
Richard Rees for adopting a nom de plume was that his enemies could
do him a mischief by using magic if they knew his real name.
Bowker suggests that Orwell proposed to his childhood sweetheart
Jacintha Buddicom before setting off for Burma, but that she rejected
him and he left disconsolate. It is true that much later, when they had
re-established contact, Orwell had chided Jacintha with blighting his
life, hinting that he had gone out to Burma to forget her, thus ‘out-
raging’ his true nature, but he could not have been serious. He was
only eighteen at the time and we know that he was set on joining the
Imperial Police. It is possible, however, that over a period of time
Orwell had concocted a future for himself and Jacintha but had omit-
ted to inform her of his plans, and so had been stung by her rejection.
Bowker uncovered more Orwellian secrets in Burma, claiming that
Orwell indulged himself with Burmese women to a greater extent than
earlier biographers allowed, and he hinted at affairs with the wives of
absent colleagues. At one of his less salubrious postings, Katha,
Bowker tells us, one of Orwell’s superiors, on a tour of inspection,
denounced him in the club as a disgrace to Eton.82 If true, this is another
secret that helps us better to understand the enigma of Orwell the
Empire builder, as described by his visiting Etonian friend Christopher
Hollis and others, and Orwell the scourge of the ‘Pox Britannica’.
Orwell took sick leave in 1927, following a bout of dengue fever and,
as we know, quitted the Service on his return to Britain. Burma had
been a mistake, but then, as Bowker discerningly observed, Orwell
might already have conceived of making failure his métier.83
 In search of Orwell 19
Orwell told his distraught family that he intended to write for a
living, and we know that he was well read so far as British, French and
American leftist writers were concerned. There is no indication, says
Bowker, of his having read Marx, except for the Communist Manifesto,
but in any case there is no indication either that at this stage in his
career he saw himself as becoming a political writer. His stay in Paris
turned out to be very fruitful, thanks chiefly to his well-connected Aunt
Nellie Limouzin. Back in London, Orwell continued his tramping
missions and was also introduced to an older woman, Mabel Fierz,
with whom he had an affair: another important secret. It was Mabel
who bullied the literary agent Leonard Moore, of Christie and Moore
in the Strand, to take Orwell on. It was she who, when Orwell’s manu-
script of Days in London and Paris was rejected by T. S. Eliot, took it
personally round to Moore and insisted he read it and get it published.84
Although Bowker does not significantly add to our knowledge of
Orwell in Spain, his judgement on Homage to Catalonia bears repeat-
ing. It was, he said, ‘not just a work of shining integrity, but the clearest
expression of Orwell’s version of socialism . . . the quintessential
expression of Christian socialism’.85 Bowker’s account of Orwell’s
career through the Second World War is conventional, though he does
remind us that as a war correspondent in Europe Orwell was to meet
many celebrated intellectuals, including Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold
Acton, A. J. Ayer, André Malraux and Ernest Hemingway. Ayer is
said to have remarked that Orwell appeared not to care much for
philosophy, a deceptive impression thought Bowker, since ‘a key philo-
sophical argument’ lies at the heart of Nineteen Eighty Four.86 In fact,
there are several such arguments, though as we shall see it is not certain
that any is pursued rigorously or knowledgeably. I referred earlier to
Orwell’s paranoia. Bowker informs us that Orwell borrowed a revolver
from Hemingway for self-protection and later swapped Hemingway’s
rather inferior revolver for a Luger that he bought in London from the
owner of a newly established periodical, Polemic, for which he wrote.
Orwell explained to the owner that he feared he could be a target for
communist assassination.87 He later mentioned to a friend, Geoffrey
Gorer, that he thought that Gollancz might arrange to have him killed
and he tried to find out more, from Warburg, about how Trotsky had
been assassinated.88 Bowker tells us that Orwell carried a large hunting
knife around London at this time. Ever since Barcelona, Orwell had
believed that he had cause to watch his back, and indeed a number of
political murders were carried out in Paris and in America around this
time. Given this frame of mind, Barnhill seems not so strange a choice
of home after all.
20 In search of Orwell
Bowker’s Orwell, unlike Crick’s, is not shorn of ‘domestic privacies’,
but for the most part they are used judiciously and add to our under-
standing of his work. Bowker is right to conclude that Orwell was
consumed by his own concerns, if only because he thought of them
as supremely politically important, and this tended to make him
unsympathetic regarding others’ concerns. This in turn led to a lack
of insight that left his novels one-dimensional. But the sheer force
of his imagination and the unequalled quality of his prose, says
Bowker, made him the great writer he had boasted, as a boy, that he
would become.89
The last biography I want to refer to is D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The
Life, winner of the Whitbread Biography Award for 2003.90 Elegantly
written, it covers much the same ground as Bowker, and if I refer only
to those details and points of discussion omitted by Bowker, this is not
because I consider it a lesser work. Taylor gave more emphasis to
Orwell’s early concern with what he calls ‘displaced religious sensi-
bility’, that is the channelling of religious sentiment into merely social
relationships with the decline of organised Christianity. How did tradi-
tional concern with the afterlife translate into concern with the fate of
the world after our death? Orwell’s major foray into these matters was
the novel A Clergyman’s Daughter,91 the acknowledged aesthetic
failure of which should not obscure his deep concern with the subject
matter, spiritual belief and Christianity as a value system. Taylor’s
perspectives on Orwell’s northern pilgrimage and the Spanish Civil
War do not constitute departures from accepted wisdom, but they
contain additional insights. For example, we learn that after several
weeks spent in Yorkshire and Lancashire Orwell pined for the south
but had to make do with a long weekend in Bramley with his sister;
that the working-class author Jack Hilton, whose advice on the trip
Orwell had sought, concluded that Orwell had ‘wasted money, energy
and wrote piffle’;92 that in Spain Orwell spent 115 days on the Aragon
front trying half-heartedly to take impregnable positions and regarded
this time as ‘one of the most futile periods of my life’.93 Taylor points
out that those who knew him in Spain thought that Orwell had little
political consciousness, hence his readiness, if they would have him, to
join the International Brigade.94 More poignantly, he tells us that even
in the socialist paradigm of the POUM militia Orwell could not bring
himself to use the communal wine bottle, the porrón, but had to ask
for his own cup.95 Shades of Miss Mayfill. We are also reminded of
Orwell’s story of his sheer horror at being asked to drink from a com-
munal beer bottle that was making its way around a railway carriage,
from working-class mouth to mouth: ‘I felt certain I should vomit.’96
 In search of Orwell 21
Later Taylor referred to Orwell’s skills as a carpenter, of interest to us
because of Orwell’s claim that working with our hands formed an
important part of our consciousness.97 Orwell knew the son of a
timber merchant, through whom he had acquired some cherry wood
to make bookshelves. The son was invited to inspect the finished art-
icle. His judgement: ‘awful beyond belief!’ The wood had been painted
white and the shelves ‘curved like a hammock’.98 If Taylor’s judgement
on Orwell gave preference to his political achievements, he was never-
theless well aware of Orwell’s literary achievements. He referred to
something that Orwell had said to Sonia Brownell at one of Cyril
Connolly’s dinner parties: one should never write anything that a
working man could not understand. Orwell achieved this, and it is the
mark of his genius, to which everything else in his life, more or less,
was sacrificed.
Finally, the most significant development in recent Orwell studies
was unquestionably the publication in 1998 of Peter Davison’s twenty-
volume collection of Orwell’s published and unpublished work.99 The
great advantage that Davison’s labours afford the scholar is not merely
that he has brought together the corpus of Orwell’s work, including
some pieces not previously readily available, but that he included
responses invoked by some of the essays and journalism, adding a new
dimension to our understanding of Orwell’s work in these genres.
We take from these more recent additions to Orwell studies a more
complex picture than the earlier work suggests, but none, not even
Newsinger’s, considers the extent to which and the manner in which
Orwell’s polemics were shaped by his literary talents and ambitions.
This completes our survey of a selective sample of some of the
major biographies and commentaries on Orwell. I want now to draw
together some of this material to form a picture of Orwell that might
enable us to answer the question with which we began; why has
Orwell been so influential, and indeed why is he still so influential?
Judging by what we have discovered, there appear to be three prima
facie reasons for Orwell’s continuing international status. The first is
that his political message was not only strong but enduring and applic-
able far more generally than to the Cold War world – indeed it
is applicable to the modern world where individual rights and basic
privacy are increasingly at risk from state vigilance. This is a theme,
explored in detail in Shelden but also in the later biographies, that has
assumed considerable importance in the modern age when govern-
ments suborn our liberties the better, they say, to protect them. It is no
coincidence that Michael Moore’s documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11
concluded with a lengthy quotation from Nineteen Eighty Four.
22 In search of Orwell
The second is that Orwell’s writing and, if Rees, Hollis, Spender and
others are to be believed, his life, promoted a moral view of the world,
based upon Trilling’s ‘freedom, bacon and proper work’ for all – a
morality based on common decency. This picture of Orwell has been
reinforced by the frequency with which his personal moral status, his
integrity, was referred to. Jennie Lee, the Labour politician, wrote:
‘The only thing I can be quite certain of is, that up to his last day
George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice
his last worldly possessions – he never had much – in the cause of
democratic socialism.’100 Orwell’s personal integrity was weighed in
the balance by many critics when assessing his work – he was what he
wrote. In the modern age when many of the certainties of formal
religion, especially in the West, have been eroded by scepticism, relativ-
ism and technological development, there is a perceived need for some
moral system that can make sense of our changing world.
The third is that Orwell was a major writer whose work would
naturally outlive him and his times. His exquisite prose style, though
not brilliantly innovative like Joyce’s, was the product of a lifetime’s
struggle. Together with the sheer force of his imagination, this ‘tran-
spicuous prose’ provided us with several works that will last as long as
books are read. This dimension of Orwell’s legacy is the most widely
acknowledged but the least developed. In the very act of drawing
these distinctions concerning Orwell’s legacy, we become immediately
aware that they are likely to be closely interwoven, each contributing
to Orwell’s status. Interwoven then, but not indistinguishable. Rodden
argued in 1989 that Orwell was ‘alive today’ because the themes about
which he wrote were alive today, and this is equally true in the twenty-
first century.101 The ‘spectre of totalitarianism, the agonies of the Left,
the advent of the “media age”, the rise of the “organisation man” ’ all
these themes demand our attention and make Orwell relevant. But
what Rodden did not trouble to make clear is that what makes Orwell,
rather than some of his contemporaries, alive today is the quality of his
writing. Perhaps that was why his prediction, that Orwell’s centenary
in 2003 would be an exclusively academic celebration, turned out to
be so wide of the mark.102

4
In this account of Orwell’s social and political thought, we shall buck
the trend of earlier studies and explore the third dimension of Orwell’s
continuing reputation, his greatness as a writer. It was primarily his
last two works that established his reputation, and they provided a
 In search of Orwell 23
bridge to his earlier work. Here we find superlative essays, journalism
of the highest quality, documentary writing of sheer brilliance, and
novels that, for all their faults, contain memorably incisive passages.
He possessed the ability to bring the issues about which he wrote so
forcefully to our attention that we are obliged to take notice. Although
the biographers and commentators whose work we have discussed all
acknowledge, to varying degrees, Orwell’s status as an imaginative
writer, none, even Rodden whose focus was probably closer than that
of any of the others, seems prepared to take account of what this might
imply in terms of analysing Orwell’s social and political thought. In
shifting the traditional focus of Orwell studies more squarely onto
Orwell the writer, I am not abandoning the study of his politics. Quite
the opposite: this book is about Orwell’s politics. I wish to elucidate,
clarify and classify what it was that inspired Orwell to write. One
consequence of giving prominence to Orwell as primarily an imagina-
tive writer is that in analysing his social and political thought, it makes
sense to concentrate primarily upon his major works. In the next
chapter, then, we shall be looking at inequality and imperialism
primarily through Burmese Days and a number of the better-known
essays. In Chapter 3 we shall explore Orwell’s attitudes to poverty,
family and the working-class through Down and Out in Paris and
London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier. In
Chapter 4 we shall be considering Orwell’s views on the nature of
revolution, principally through Homage to Catalonia and Animal
Farm. In Chapter 5 we shall be examining Orwell the patriot, primarily
through The Lion and the Unicorn and Coming Up for Air. Chapter 6
will be concerned with Orwell’s reaction to the threat of totalitarian-
ism, principally through Nineteen Eighty Four, and essays such as No
Orchids for Miss Blandish. Chapter 7 will consider Orwell’s general
theories on the nature of socialism as a political and moral system. The
chief work studied here will be A Clergyman’s Daughter. Finally,
Chapter 8 will summarise Orwell’s socialism, categorise it and assess
its significance for modern social and political thought generally.
One last point before we begin. I believe it is essential, when discuss-
ing Orwell’s work, to try to make a distinction between the imaginative
and the non-fictional work. I have opted for imaginative and not
fictional as a descriptor because so much of his work is based on
personal experience and reportage and is therefore not strictly fic-
tional, and yet this material is filtered through perspectives that are
both aesthetic and political. We know that the diaries he compiled
when in Yorkshire and Lancashire, for example, were manipulated
and reordered for greater literary effect in the (therefore) essentially
24 In search of Orwell
imaginative Wigan Pier. The key to the distinction I wish to make is
intentionality. Where the intention is at least partly aesthetic, where
Orwell is consciously using his narrative and imaginative powers to
take us beyond the particular and to make a general, usually political
point, I class this as imaginative. Where the intention is rather to dis-
cuss the particular in an unadorned, factual manner, to describe dis-
crete events, I shall call this non-fictional. Again, let us take an example
from Wigan Pier. The picture Orwell painted of a young woman
unblocking a drain is described by the US scholar Ronald Thiemann as
‘realistic narrative at its best’.103 In fact, as we shall see in some detail,
that picture has been substantially edited from the original diary entry,
for aesthetic (and political) effect. Why attach importance to this dif-
ficult distinction? Because in non-imaginative writing, canons of
accuracy, objectivity, soundly based knowledge and judgement are of
primary importance, and Orwell was often wrong, biased and lacking
in knowledge. Michael Foot, who was, after Aneurin Bevan, general
editor of Tribune when Orwell was literary editor, suggested that
‘George Orwell’, the public persona, was a ‘consciously cultivated
alter ego.’104 As he gained in experience as a reviewer and essayist, this
alter ego came more to the fore and Orwell made a fetish of the hard-
hitting, straight-talking style that had helped to make his reputation.
This style had much to commend it. Eagleton, for example, spoke of
Orwell’s ‘Enlightenment conflation of truth, language, clarity and
moral integrity [which] may have involved some questionable epis-
temology, but politically speaking it is worth a lot more than the work
of those whose subversion of Western Reason is to write unintelli-
gibly.’105 Others saw in Orwell’s clean style a riposte to ‘opaque,
jargon-laden writing’ and ‘the treatment of the past as a collection of
fictional texts in history’.106 On the other hand, the clear, robust style
to be found in Orwell’s non-fictional work offers no guarantee of
impartiality, accuracy or special knowledge. He would frequently
begin an argument with:

‘Everyone who thinks at all . . .’

‘All people who are morally sound . . .’
‘Almost anyone who has travelled will confirm this . . .’
‘All the more thoughtful members of the British working-class
are . . .’
‘Question any thinking person. . . and you will usually find . . .’
‘Anyone who actually talked to working men at the time
would . . .’
‘A child of six would be able to see that . . .’
 In search of Orwell 25
‘Any soldier reading a book would . . .’
‘It is universally agreed that . . .’.

These sweeping claims would be followed by arguments that would

seldom bear them out. For example:

‘It is universally agreed that the working-classes are far more

moral than the upper classes;’107
‘No decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity.’108

This last preposterous assertion was marshalled against Vera Brittain’s

pamphlet Seeds of Change, in which she had opposed the carpet
bombing of German cities because, as she explained, the ‘unrestrained
infliction of cruelty’ might lead to general moral deterioration.109
Orwell claimed that talk of limiting war was ‘sheer humbug’. It seemed
no bad thing that others should be killed beside young men. Was
Brittain anxious to win the war or not? Later Orwell was to write: ‘it
seems to me you do less harm by dropping bombs on people than by
calling them Huns’. Under which canon, common sense, decency or
truthfulness, does this fall?
Orwell’s claims were sometimes simply banal. In arguing that the
British have no taste, he declared: ‘You could see more ugly things in
Oxford Street in half an hour than you could see among all the savage
tribes in the world.’110 This from a man who had hardly made a career
of globe-trotting. Again, writing about the New Statesman, he claimed:
‘I have . . . never . . . once found any coherent policy or constructive
suggestion.’ Not one – ever? There are many examples of Orwell being
taken to task for factual inaccuracy. In one ‘As I Please’ article, Orwell
took an edition of Common Wealth (the organ of Sir Richard Acland’s
new political party) to task for treating the important argument on
birth rates in ‘a slapdash way’.111 He made two specific points: the
German birth rate had been raised to ‘unheard-of’ levels under Hitler
and the same had happened earlier in Kemalist Turkey. A statistician
replied two weeks later saying that as a matter of fact Orwell was
entirely wrong about Germany and that there were no reliable sources
at all to support his claim for Kemalist Turkey. He concluded that
Orwell was right to call for the scientific treatment of such important
issues: ‘Many Tribune readers will hope, as I do, that Mr Orwell will
himself set an example.’ Indeed, many Tribune readers were upset by
what they took to be the frivolousness of some articles and the bias of
others. Frivolity, bias and inaccuracy are not negligible charges, but
one American Anglophile reader accused Orwell of bias, inaccuracy
26 In search of Orwell
and falsification in a piece on US soldiers in Britain.112 Orwell had
asserted, typically, ‘the general consensus seems to be that the only
American soldiers with decent manners are Negroes’. This generalisa-
tion was based upon an experience involving two drunken US soldiers.
His American critic accused Orwell of ‘taking advantage of an unpleas-
ant situation [from which he had generalised] to air one’s specious
knowledge of a subject’. How had Orwell arrived at his consensus?
In a scientific way no doubt, jibed the reader. But worse: Orwell specif-
ically referred to these soldiers attacking ‘perfidious Albion’. His
American critic wondered, as well he might have, how many GIs
would have had the use of such words!
Orwell’s dalliance with bias and lack of judgement, almost invariably
advanced with complete assurance and spleen, surfaces elsewhere. An
early champion of Henry Miller’s work, he nevertheless came to the
conclusion that ‘no more that is of any value will come out of Henry
Miller’.113 One Miller expert took strong exception to this, referring to
Orwell’s ‘insolent air of know-all and tell-all, which, coupled with his
excellent style and show of intelligence, is capable of persuading
innumerable readers that what he says is true’. Instead of reviewing
Miller’s latest book properly, Orwell, said the critic, chose to ‘parade
his knowledge in support of extremely silly generalisations’. The critic
praised Orwell’s prose but was offended by the no-nonsense, know-all
style. Another example I wish to consider is chosen because it is gen-
erally regarded as a model essay, indeed praised by some as one of the
best early examples of the new discipline of Cultural Studies, ‘Boys’
Weeklies’.114 Frank Richards, the begetter of many of the better-known
characters and the main target for Orwell’s criticism in the essay,
wrote a lengthy rebuttal of Orwell’s principal arguments, to which
Orwell did not respond.115 Richards had two main criticisms. The first
was that Orwell failed to do his homework and made some basic
factual errors. For example, Orwell had written that ‘Frank Richards’
had been writing too long to be one author. As a consequence, the
stories attributed to him ‘must be written in a style that is easily imi-
tated’. In fact, all the stories were written by Richards himself. Orwell,
said Richards, had proceeded from an ‘erroneous premise to an even
more erroneous conclusion’. Whatever the merits or demerits of the
style, Richards continues, it was his own and ‘if I may say so with due
modesty – inimitable’. Orwell had also accused Richards of ‘lifting’
words, and indeed characters, from other stories. Richards offered
evidence to disprove the charge. Finally and more substantively,
Orwell had stated that working-class characters enter into Richards’
stories only as ‘comics and semi-villains’. ‘This is sheer perversity on
 In search of Orwell 27
Orwell’s part’, Richards replied, ‘I would like Mr Orwell to indicate a
single sentence in which Frank Richards refers disrespectfully to the
people who keep him in comfort’. Orwell did not accept the challenge.
Critics and men of letters will disagree profoundly and it is in the
very nature of reviews and essays to be provoking and controversial.
Orwell did not habitually lie or seek to mislead in his essays and
reviews: far from it. But his prose, like a window pane, did not always
look out onto the truth. Lucidity, Asquith said once, is the enemy of
the man who has nothing to say. It is not a good friend to those who
readily forsake impartiality, good judgement and sound research in
their writing either.
One last brief example. In an unpublished essay entitled ‘New
Words’, Orwell assured us that ‘everyone who thinks at all’ knows that
the English language is deficient when describing mental acts. In pursu-
ing his argument, he declared: ‘I notice that many people never laugh
when they are alone.’116 Now Big Brother might say this, but it is
logically absurd for Orwell to venture such an opinion.
I trust I have made clear why I think it is important to distinguish
between Orwell’s imaginative and non-fictional work, and why, in
trying to elucidate the principal themes of Orwell’s social and political
thought, I shall be concentrating mainly on the former. However, as
well as major works that are readily identifiable as imaginative, I shall
also have recourse to discussing hybrid works of reportage in which
those canons of accuracy, objectivity, soundly based knowledge and
judgement may prove contentious. This issue cannot be ducked and is
best confronted in situ. So let us begin.
2 The shadow of imperialism

Better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.

District Superintendent Westfield, George Orwell, Burmese Days
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 228).

When Orwell sailed for Rangoon on the SS Herefordshire in October

of 1922 he was little more than nineteen years old. He had left Eton, an
environment about as different as one can imagine from the one he was
going to, just over a year before. The ambiguity concerning Orwell’s
motivation to go East has been touched on already and I have sug-
gested that a mixture of motives was almost certainly involved. A
friend at Eton, the future historian Sir Steven Runciman (Orwell’s
collaborator in the experiment in the Black Arts), was convinced that
Orwell had set his mind on going East fairly early. ‘He used to talk
about the East a great deal, and I always had the impression he was
longing to go back there. I mean it was a sort of romantic idea . . .’1
Romantic certainly, and in the full sense of that word: Orwell was not
two when he left India and his father was hardly the man to have filled
George’s head with colourful tales of imperial derring do. R. W. Blair
had devoted his life to an undistinguished and rather obscure branch
of the service, the opium department. It was the task of this depart-
ment to oversee the production, collection and distribution of Indian
opium to China. In his thirty-seven years with the Department, Richard
Blair rose from the position of assistant sub-deputy opium agent to
sub-opium agent (class one). Michael Shelden referred to the opium
trade as ‘one of the worst evils of the British Colonial system’ and as he
grew up in the privileged and sheltered atmosphere of Eton, Orwell
must have had some doubts concerning the nature of the specific
paternal contribution to the great imperial enterprise. Yet, however he
came by it, his ambition when leaving Eton was to join the Service. No
 The shadow of imperialism 29
doubt the expectations of both his parents, who regarded a career in
the Imperial Civil Service as highly prestigious, would have helped
to reinforce the romantic notions of the young Orwell. Moreover,
Orwell’s undoubted patriotism sought an outlet. Like many of his
generation, he regretted having ‘missed’ the First World War and he
did want to prove himself.
None of the biographers or commentators we have looked at
entertained the possibility that Orwell might have regarded his chosen
course of action, perhaps only subconsciously, as an excellent oppor-
tunity to gain experience from which to write. Yet everything we know
about Orwell speaks of the centrality of writing in his life and ambi-
tions. Why should it not have been included among his concerns and
ambitions in 1922? After all, we should not forget that Orwell had
read, and indeed written, more before the age of eighteen than befits
either a putative man of action or indeed an academic failure (his other
career possibility). Military experience in an exotic country was no
bad platform from which to write. And it seems that he did write,
though not a great deal, even when training in Burma, and later on
almost certainly made sketches for his first novel.2
Whatever attitude Orwell might have entertained on boarding the
Herefordshire, he could have had no notion of the reality awaiting
him. At the time, he was one of some ninety British police officers
responsible for maintaining civil order in a country that generally
despised its British masters. Newsinger reports that a revolutionary
nationalism had begun to make its presence felt in the 1920s,3 though
on nothing like the same scale as in India. According to Jacintha
Buddicom, Orwell very soon came to loathe his life in Burma.4 Others
tell a different story of these early years.5 Old Etonian Christopher
Hollis visited him in 1925 and found him to be a man divided between
the conventional imperial policeman and the radical critic of imperial-
ism. He told Hollis that freedom and liberty ‘don’t agree with nig-
gers’.6 As usual it becomes impossible to pigeonhole Orwell, and his
conversation with Hollis might have represented only the articulation
of a debate going on in Orwell’s own head, and he was confused. We
know that he took Middleton Murry’s journal The Adelphi, for
example, showing his radical credentials; but we also know that he
used some of its trendier articles for target practice.7 Orwell later
became convinced that his experience in the police had given him a
clear edge over other left-wing critics in understanding the problems of
empire. In Burmese Days Flory found it increasingly difficult to speak
his mind at the expat’s club because of his radical views; no doubt as a
young Imperial Policeman Orwell began to find himself in just the
30 The shadow of imperialism
same trap. Flory was lonely and homesick; so was Orwell. But for all
Orwell’s distaste of his life in Burma, Flory’s comment to Elizabeth,
that Burma could be paradise if one weren’t alone, only points up the
ambivalence to which I have referred. Orwell’s description of the train
journey northwards from Mandalay gives a further inkling of this
ambivalence. ‘White egrets stood poised, motionless, like herons, and
piles of drying chillis gleamed crimson in the sun. Sometimes a white
pagoda rose from the plain like the breast of a supine giantess.’8 He
was moved by the beauty of the country and the grace of its people,
and perhaps if he could have shared these rich experiences and his
misgivings with a close companion, such as Jacintha, life, as Flory
hinted, might have become quite different.
If we cannot be entirely certain about Orwell’s complex attitude
towards Burma or his job, at least we have his fiction to turn to, and
here we are on somewhat firmer ground. In his writings on Burma
Orwell sought to use his own experiences, worked on by a powerful
imagination, as a kind of metaphor for the whole imperial experience.
Later, I shall suggest, he began to construct a model of social and
political relations in capitalist society from the same metaphor, reflect-
ing the same ‘imperial’ nexus quite unambiguously. I wish to pursue
two objectives in this chapter. First, to tease out the constituent themes
of Orwell’s imperialist model and to examine it for consistency, and to
go on to consider briefly whether the model sheds any light on the
relationship between leaders and led, a relationship which exercises
political thinkers as much today as ever it did.9 Secondly and much
more briefly, I wish to make some comments upon what it was that
Orwell contributed to this debate as an imaginative writer which a
political philosopher or historian, for example, might not have done.
But first, and more substantively, we turn to the development of the
imperialist model.

1
Burmese Days, Orwell’s first published novel,10 tells the story of a
middle-aged timber merchant John Flory and his relations with the
expatriate community in a small outpost in upper Burma, Kyauktada.
Flory is an archetypal Orwellian hero, an outsider whose status as such
is indicated by a disfiguring birthmark on one side of his face, a phys-
ical manifestation, it might be thought, of his alienation from society.
His friendship with an Indian doctor in the community earns him not
only the contempt of the expatriates at the local club but also enmeshes
him, unknowingly, in the machinations of a ruthlessly ambitious
 The shadow of imperialism 31
Burmese magistrate, U Po Kyin. The latter has a habit of taking bribes
from both sides in a dispute and then adjudicating cases strictly on
legal grounds. He had thus gained a reputation with the British and the
local Burmese for impartiality. This suited him, for even when a child
he had decided that his interests would best be served by fighting on
the side of the British, by making himself useful, perhaps indispens-
able, to the imperial rulers. His intention was to amass wealth and
influence in this role and then, at the end of his life, to endow pagodas
and do good works so as to ensure a comfortable reincarnation.
The expatriates’ club at Kyauktada had been advised to give mem-
bership to an Asian, as a manifestation of a new government initiative,
and U Po Kyin had set his sights on being that member. His only
competitor was the Indian doctor befriended by Flory, Veraswami,
and the magistrate set about discrediting the doctor, and in the end
Flory, in order to achieve his objective. As a sub-plot, Flory, too, had
an objective: to marry Elizabeth, the niece of the Lackersteens, an
attractive but small-minded young woman, who took Flory seriously
only after the departure from Kyauktada of an arrogant patrician mili-
tary policeman whom she vastly preferred. Flory’s marital prospects
were suddenly enhanced by his proving instrumental in putting down a
minor revolt which actually threatened the club and its members. His
equally sudden humiliation and disgrace was engineered by U Po Kyin.
Elizabeth spurned him and Flory took his own life. Without the sup-
port of his white friend, Veraswami was undermined by the magistrate
and U Po Kyin achieved his objective of membership of the club and
indeed all his other worldly ambitions (except that of becoming a great
benefactor before his death: we are left wondering, with his widow,
whether he had not come back on the earth as a rat or a frog). This is a
story without heroes, a story of mendacity, treachery and hypocrisy, of
racial and social repression and hatred. It is a story of the empire.
The story provides the author with the opportunity to expose the
imperial elite to ruthless analysis. Amongst the ex-pats was Ellis, an
intelligent and able timber executive who felt sincerely for all Asians ‘a
bitter, restless loathing as of something evil and unclean . . . any hint of
friendly feeling towards an Oriental seemed to him a horrible pervers-
ity’.11 Ellis’ feelings were roused to a fury by the government’s new
policy of encouraging the admittance of non-Europeans to clubs. He
found it unpalatable that Flory should befriend an Asian, go to
his house and drink with him, but the prospect of Flory proposing
Veraswami for the club completely infuriated him: ‘By God, he’d go
out with my boot behind him if ever I saw his black snout inside that
door.’12 Orwell makes it clear that Ellis’ attitude, though paranoid, was
32 The shadow of imperialism
not without some imperialist rationale: ‘Here we are’, he said, ‘sup-
posed to be governing a set of damned black swine who’ve been slaves
since the beginning of history, and instead of ruling them in the only
way they understand, we go and treat them as equals.’13 Indeed, his
attitude was not so very far from the axiom Orwell propounded to
Hollis, that freedom and liberty ‘don’t agree with niggers’.
Only the Lackersteens amongst the expats are as fully drawn as
Ellis. Mrs Lackersteen’s views on race relations in Burma signalled the
connection that Orwell began to make after his return to Britain
between overseas and domestic ‘imperialism’, though probably he
had already seen it whilst in Burma: ‘Really I think the laziness of
these servants is getting too shocking’, she complained. ‘We seem to
have no authority over the natives nowadays, with all those dreadful
reforms and the insolence they learn from the newspapers’, said
Mrs Lackersteen. ‘In some ways they are getting almost as bad as the
lower classes at home.’14 As for Lackersteen himself, he was shown to
be a drunkard and a lecher, part of an empire described by Flory as
cemented together by booze (perhaps not Orwell’s most apt metaphor).
Flory’s own political position was manifested primarily through his
discussions with Veraswami. The doctor argued that in building up the
infrastructure of the subject nations in terms of transport and com-
munications, irrigation, health, education and the legal system, the
imperialists had contributed to the well-being of those they governed.
They ‘set up hospitals, they combat plague, cholera, leprosy, small-
pox, venereal disease’.15 He went on to argue that if the British were
not consuming the resources of Burma, somebody else would, and far
more selfishly. British businessmen actually develop the resources of
the countries they control and British civil servants endeavour to run
them with justice. ‘At least you have brought us law and order. The
unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica.’16 ‘Bosh’, retorted
Flory, declaring his own position to be not so much anti-empire as
anti-humbug (a very Shavian position17). He, too, wanted to make
money but not to the extent of participating in the ‘slimy white man’s
burden humbug’.18 Let’s not pretend, he argued, that the white man
was in Burma to uplift the Burmese; he was there to rob them. Living
the imperial pretence ‘corrupts us . . . There’s an everlasting sense of
being a sneak and a liar that torments us and drives us to justify our-
selves night and day’.19 The whole business of empire, Flory con-
cluded, may be summed up as follows: ‘The official holds the Burman
down while the businessman goes through his pockets.’20 That, said
Flory, was the reality of the ‘Pox Britannica’.
On one level Flory surely deluded himself, for at base the humbug he
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
manual, and all the stops of which the sliders happened to be drawn
at the time would speak together. Thus our purpose of borrowing
one particular stop would be defeated. We must effect it thus: the
twin sliders will be closely contiguous, and will only be separated by
short pins of brass or iron let into the table, to prevent the friction of
actual contact. Thus the two holes which are to be brought into
connection are near to each other, and the communicating groove
will be short. If this is cut in the upper board itself it must be neatly
executed, and the bottom of the groove must be level and smooth.
Over each of the two holes within the groove so cut must be placed
a valve, consisting of a small piece of pallet leather covering the hole
completely, and rising with complete freedom by a hinge along its
edge, like the clacks of the bellows. Each pair of holes being
furnished with these valves the grooves are roofed in and the pipes
planted, as described in earlier pages of this book. On lowering one
of the keys the wind will affect the borrowed pipe only, since the
little valve will stop the twin hole and prevent the flow of air through
it into the channel. If the key corresponding to the same note be
pressed down on both manuals, then both the little valves will be
blown open by the wind; but if all the channels, grooves, and holes
be of ample size, so that there is no throttling of the wind, the
speech of the pipe will be entirely unaltered, since it will only receive
a given quantity of wind through the perforation in its foot, and this
wind will be of the same weight or pressure as before.
The borrowing grooves may be cut in the under surface of a
separate board, which will then form a roof or cover to the several
pairs of valves arranged over the holes on the upper surface of the
sound-board itself. Or this borrowing-board may be put together
with bars, cheeks, and an upper table like a light sound-board. The
essential point is that all the openings be of ample size, and that the
valves fly open widely at the slightest breath of wind, and close the
holes as promptly when the wind is withdrawn. If due attention is
given to all this no failure need be anticipated with the borrowed
basses.
We have proposed the lower key-board as "Manual I.," in accordance
with the German usage, and because that arrangement will facilitate
some of our mechanism, for instance, the pulling down by the
pedals of the bass notes. But lovers of old English organs, among
whom we must reckon ourselves, may prefer to make Manual I. the
upper manual of the two. A beautiful instrument of this class, built
by the late J. C. Bishop, stands in the chapel of Jesus College,
Cambridge, and was the gift of an accomplished amateur, whose
performances on it are still remembered.[4] The same gentleman
was the possessor of a chamber organ of exquisite tone by Bernhard
Schmidt, of such remarkable composition that it merits description
here. The lower manual, or Choir, had three stops, an Open
Diapason, a Stopped Diapason, and a Principal, all made of oak, and
of extreme delicacy and beauty. The upper manual, or Great, had
likewise three stops, all metal, namely, Stopped Flute, Fifteenth, and
Mixture of two ranks (19th and 22nd in the bass, 12th and 17th in
the treble). The Stopped Diapason could also be played upon this
manual by borrowing. A coupler united the lower to the upper at
pleasure, and then the "Full Organ" was produced upon the upper
manual with an astonishing effect of sprightliness and brightness.
Such an organ as this, with some changes (its key-boards were very
antiquated, and so high from the ground that the player was
perforce erect), might afford an admirable model for imitation.
[4] The late Sir John Sutton, Bart., author of "A Short Account of
Organs built in England from the Reign of King Charles II. to the
Present Time." Masters, 1847.

Let us add that if pedal notes of 16-feet tone are added to an organ
of this class, namely of two manuals, Great and Choir, only twelve
large pipes will be necessary, even though the compass of the pedal-
board be of thirty notes complete. This great economy of space and
outlay will be secured thus: 1st, by making the pedals pull down on
the chief manual throughout their whole extent as before; 2nd, by
adapting the twelve deep pipes to the lower octave of the pedals,
and by making their upper octave and a half pull down upon the
lowest keys of the second manual. A moment's reflection will show
that the 16-feet tone is thus obtained throughout the whole
compass, and no inconvenience whatever will ensue to the player.
The mode of introducing the large bass pipes, and of pulling down
as above, will be described before we conclude this work.
Still desiring to erect a chamber organ, and, therefore, to be chary
of space and cost, we must now show how the swell-box may be
included in our design.
We shall suppose that the organ has been completed so far as the
lower manual is concerned, with all that pertains to it, according to
the rules which have now been given at length and in detail. In
laying it out we must assume that care has been taken to give
increased size to the bellows, and to arrange the frame for the
reception of a second sound-board.
We feel it due as well to our readers as to ourselves to explain that
we confine ourselves in all that follows to a description of work done
by ourselves in our own workshop.
We shall place only three stops in our swell, which will have a
compass of forty-two notes, from Tenor C to top f. The stops will be
a Diapason in wood, partly stopped, and the rest open; a Flute of 4-
feet tone in wood, open throughout; and a Gamba of reedy quality,
in metal, of 8-feet pitch, but only descending to Fid. G., 3 feet, the
remaining notes being grooved to No. 1. This curtailment is greatly
to be regretted, but such imperfections are among the objections to
the swell-box, which would assume dimensions inconsistent with a
chamber organ if an attempt were made to give full compass to its
8-feet stops.
The sound-board for these three stops will be only 2 feet 9 inches in
length, and 1 foot in width; but the upper boards must have an
ample margin or surplus in both directions to afford support for the
box which will rest upon them.
This box must be made of thick stuff, say 1½ inch deal; it will
therefore be very heavy, and care must be taken to provide for its
weight in planning the frame. It should be put together with screws,
so that it can easily be taken to pieces for transit, and it is usual to
line the whole of its interior with sheets of thick brown paper,
applied with glue. It will be very convenient, if access can be had to
the back of the organ, to fit the back of the box with hinged doors,
or to make the back removable like a shutter; in this case the pipes
should be planted so as to present themselves readily to the tuner. If
access to the back cannot be had, then a space is inevitable in the
middle of the organ for a passage-board, on which the tuner may
stand, or at least place his foot, while he removes the front shades
in order to reach the pipes planted accordingly. In the swell-boxes of
church organs the sides of the box are generally fitted as doors;
then, the pipes being planted with the tallest in the centre,
diminishing in height to each end, half of them can be tuned at one
operation. When the pipes are thus planted, the top of the box will
slope towards each side from a central ridge, like the roof of a
house.

Fig. 50.

We cannot doubt that many of our readers have had, or may have,
opportunities of examining the construction of the shutters or
shades of a swell-box. We have sketched it, however, in Fig. 50. The
shades are 6 inches in breadth, and of the same thickness as the
rest of the box, and each shade turns on pins let into the ends of it
at a distance of 2 inches from its upper edge. These pins work in
notches cut in the cheeks of the box, so formed that any shade may
be easily lifted out and replaced. The edges of the shades are
bevelled to half a right angle so that they overlap when closed, and
the bevelled surfaces are faced with leather or cloth to shut in the
sound more effectually.
The mode of opening the shades, and so producing a
crescendo, is shown in Fig. 51. a, b, c are arms of oak,
morticed into the shades at the level of the pins, viz. 2
inches from the upper line; d e is a long rod or tringle of
wood, connecting all these arms by pins passing through
them and itself. It is evident that by drawing up this rod at
its top, or by pushing it up from below, we shall open all the
shades at once, and as they are hung on axes placed at
one-third of their breadth, they will close by their own
weight when released. The leverage by which this
movement is brought under the control of the player may
be safely left to the inventive powers of the reader. It is
usual to give promptness to the return of the swell-pedal,
Fig. 51.
and therefore to the closing of the shades, by attaching a
strong spiral spring to the pedal, and to some firm point in
the frame.
As the swell-box is at the back of the instrument, its key-action will
have to pass or cross that of the Great organ. The way in which this
will be effected must depend a little upon circumstances—for
instance, upon the length of the key-tails in the two manuals. If the
swell manual acts by squares and trackers, while the Great has
backfalls and stickers, the small trackers, being thin ribands of wood,
can be easily made to pass between the Great stickers. Or if the
swell-keys act on backfalls, these backfalls may be thinned down
behind the line of key-tails, so as to allow the stickers of the lower
manual to pass between them. This may be understood from Fig.
52, though that figure refers to another subject. The worst plan of
all is to make the lower stickers pass through holes or mortices in
the upper key-tails, since this prevents the removal of the upper key-
board without a disturbance of the whole action.

Fig. 52.

We believe that these constructive details contain in themselves the

grounds on which we based our advice to hesitate before including a
swell-box in the design for a small chamber organ. It has been made
apparent that it brings with it a considerable increase of bulk,
weight, and complication, and that it cannot possess the full
compass. We must add that if the bellows are worked by the foot,
the use of the swell-pedal at the same time is of course impossible.
The large swells of church organs owe their grandeur of effect to
their reed-stops; the trumpet, of which the oboe is a soft echo and
our little gamba a faint and humble imitation, the horn or
cornopean, and the double trumpet or bassoon, a stop of 16-feet
pitch. All reed-stops are quite beyond the range of amateur
construction, and each of the above will cost about £25 if purchased
from a good maker and made of first-class material. Beautiful as
such stops are when made and voiced by highly-skilled workmen,
they may easily be unpleasing and even offensive.
Let us add that the twelve notes of the swell manual, below Tenor C,
may be made to act on the lower manual by a "choir coupler" (see
next section, and Fig. 52); or, if there is a complete pedal Sub-bass
or Bourdon of twenty-five or more notes, the silent keys of the swell
manual may borrow the pedal notes from CC, 8-feet tone upwards.
An easy mechanical movement of squares and trackers will effect
this.
Two manuals imply couplers, though we greatly regret the incessant
use of these contrivances by modern organists.

Fig. 53.

We shall treat, very briefly, of couplers under three heads, viz. the
coupling of—

(a) Upper Manual to Lower Manual.

(b) Lower Manual to Upper Manual.
(c) Manuals to Pedals.

(a) The common Tumbler coupler is represented in Fig. 53. a is a

slender bridge, having as many notches as keys in the manual, and
fitted with short stickers called tumblers. These tumblers, or stickers,
are generally rectangular in section, and they must fit the notches
neatly but with freedom of motion; the notches are closed in by a
tringle of wood glued over them, thus forming a series of mortices;
and each sticker has a little pin, or a pair of pins, to prevent it from
falling out of its notch or mortice. Or, the tumblers may be made
from round rods, and may pass through round holes in the bridge.
They are well blackleaded in either case. Now if this bridge, with its
tumblers, is placed between the manuals near their hinder
extremities, if the length of the tumblers is equal to the interval
between the upper and lower key-tails, it is evident that on pressing
down a key of the lower manual the tumbler will push up the tail of
the corresponding key on the upper manual, and so on throughout
the full compass of both. To reverse this, and to leave the manuals
separate and independent as before, the bridge is made to take a
quarter of a revolution in sockets fitted to carry its ends, which are
rounded or turned in the lathe; the tumblers, by this partial
revolution, are then no longer perpendicular, but parallel to the key-
tails, as shown by the dotted lines in the figure, and cease to be
touched by them. On the whole, this is the simplest form of swell-
coupler.

Fig. 54.

The tumblers may also be placed on or off by causing the bridge to

slide between guides for a distance of 1 inch or 2 inches. When the
bridge is pushed back by drawing a stop-handle (which acts upon a
horizontal trundle with arms and traces to give the sliding motion),
the tumblers act on the key-tails; when it is drawn forward by
thrusting in the stop, they fall into a hollow cut in the key-tails, and
are too short to be of use. The hollow in the key-tails is bevelled,
and the inclined plane so formed is leathered and blackleaded (see
Fig. 54).

Fig. 55.

The ram coupler, Fig. 55, acts in a way closely resembling the last.
Instead of tumblers, the bridge carries a set of short backfalls,
turning on a wire as usual, and cut at the free end into a circular
form. The sliding of the bridge brings these circular ends into
contact with the key-tails of both manuals, or places them in a
hollow cut in the keys, bevelled, leathered, and blackleaded as
before. The ram-coupler can be used between manuals arranged too
closely to admit of tumblers.
(b) It will facilitate our description of the choir-coupler and pedal-
couplers if we here point out that if a bridge with backfalls (or
squares) be made to rise or fall ½ inch or more at pleasure, the
action connected with it will be thrown into or out of gear at the will
of the player. If, in Fig. 32, for instance, the bridge g be made to rise
½ inch by drawing a stop-handle, the stickers e will then be too
short by ½ inch, or the pull-downs h will be too long in an equal
degree, and the manual will be silenced.

Fig. 56.

An easy way of making such a bridge rise and fall is shown in Fig.
56. The bridge a, which cannot be too solid and heavy, is held
between guides, c d, which are blackleaded and accurately adjusted.
At each end of the bridge is fitted a little roller or wheel of box-
wood, turning freely on a pin. To the frame below is fitted another
such roller, or two, as in the figure. Between these two or three
rollers, at each end of the bridge, an inclined plane of wood, e, is
made to traverse by means of a horizontal trundle and arms. It will
be seen at a glance that when the inclined plane is pushed between
the rollers by drawing or thrusting in a stop-handle, it lifts the bridge
between the guides and dislocates the action; when it is withdrawn,
the bridge resumes its place by its own weight, and the action is
again in order.
It is now easy to understand the construction of the remaining
couplers. The choir-coupler (Fig. 52, p. 152), has two bridges, x, y,
with two sets of short backfalls and communicating stickers. If the
bridges are fixed, then on depressing any key on the upper manual
its tail raises the backfall, which presses down the lower backfall,
which in its turn pushes up the tail of the lower key and causes the
note to be heard. If the upper bridge be made to rise or the lower to
fall ½ inch, then the keys are at once disconnected.
(c) The coupling of manuals to pedals is generally effected by rising
and falling bridges, carrying backfalls which push up the tails of the
keys. These bridges are arranged one above the other beneath the
keyboards in large organs with three or four manuals, each bridge
bringing its own manual into connection with the pedals by the
movement already described. One roller-board (the rollers are often
of iron for the sake of compactness) suffices for all the sets of
backfalls, and the stickers (in this case generally flat strips of wood)
pass through mortices cut in the tails of the lower keys to act upon
the tails of the keys to which they belong.
The reader will easily perceive from these hints how the pedals may
be made to act through their whole extent upon one of our manuals,
and through only a part of their extent upon the other manual, as
we have hinted at page 148. There will be two bridges, one over the
other, and a very little ingenuity will be required to plan the roller-
board so that the central C of the pedals shall pull down the lowest
C of the second manual (be it upper or lower), and thus give the
octave below (or 16-feet pitch) without additional pipes from that
note upwards. But this, perhaps, belongs to the subject of the pedal
organ, which we reserve for the conclusion of this book.
It is right to add here that in old-fashioned organs, both in England
and on the Continent (where many such instruments remain
unaltered), the manuals were made to couple by being drawn out or
pushed in about ½ inch. A spur or protuberance of wood was glued
to the upper part of the tail of each key, and a similar spur to the
under part of the tail of the key in the manual above. These spurs
had rounded ends covered with leather. On shifting one of the key-
boards backwards or forwards the spurs met each other, and the
coupling was effected. Or the spurs were glued under the front of
each key, immediately behind the beading of the key-frame, and
upon the upper surface of each key in the manual beneath it, and a
similar shifting brought about a like result. We see no objection to
this very simple old-fashioned arrangement strong enough to induce
us to discard it from consideration.
The common type of small church organ with Great and Swell
(throughout) would be vastly improved by the introduction of a
manual between the other two, having no stops of its own, but
coupled to both by such spurs. Instead of two qualities of sound,
namely Swell alone and Great and Swell combined (the incessant
use of the coupler being the inveterate habit of most players), we
should have three: Great alone, Swell alone, and combination of
Great and Swell. This obvious improvement could be introduced into
new organs or added to existing instruments at a very small cost.
There should be a coupler to connect this Combination Manual with
the pedals.
It is undeniable that the addition of a pedal organ with a Sub-bass
or Bourdon of 16-feet tone is a very important and valuable
improvement to any organ, large or small. It gives a dignified
cathedral-like solemnity and grandeur which every ear can
appreciate. We shall bring our treatise to a close by a few remarks
upon it.
1. The pipes will be made precisely like those of the Stopped
Diapason, of which they may be regarded as a continuation, and
they should be of stout material, the last four or five of inch stuff,
then three-quarters to the twelfth or thirteenth note above.
On the question of scale the most diverse opinions have found
favour of late years. A writer whose dicta are entitled to respect[5]
urges that the lowest pipe (CCC, 16-feet tone) should have the
enormous if not preposterous scale of 11½ by 13 inches inside
measurement, and that the next six pipes above it should be in
proportion. After that, he says, a smaller scale may suffice. It is clear
that if this ruling be correct we may dismiss the idea of introducing a
Sub-bass into our chamber organ. Mr. Hopkins, on the other hand,
prints two scales for 16-feet toned Bourdons, the larger of which
gives 6⅛ inches by 4⅝ as the inside measurement of the CCC pipe;
while the smaller gives 5 inches by 3⅜ for the same pipe. We may
safely adopt this larger scale of Mr. Hopkins; and we will only say
further that with our light 2-inch wind the mouths should be cut up
one-third of the width, or rather less, and the foot-holes should be of
ample size.
[5] Rev. F. G. Hayne, Mus. Doc., "Hints on the Purchase of an
Organ." Novello, 1867.
2. Their location in the organ must depend very much on special
circumstances. When they can be placed in a row at the back of the
instrument, their connection with the pedals becomes very simple,
two sets of squares with trackers running under the bellows being all
that will be necessary. If the room has abundance of height, the
back set of squares may act on a roller-board, and then the pipes
can be disposed symmetrically, the largest at each end.
3. The board on which they stand will not require a slider. It will be,
in fact, a wind-chest only, a long box of stout pine or deal, having
holes in its top countersunk to receive the pipe-feet. Under each
hole is placed a pallet or valve, held up by a strong spring, and
having a pull-down wire passed through a brass plate in the usual
way.
The aperture of the wind-trunk is in the lower board of this chest,
and over it, before the board is in place, is fitted a valve, faced with
leather, and made to slide to and fro between guides. An iron
spindle, turned to fit accurately in a brass collar, carries an arm
jointed to the valve by a connecting rod or trace; and outside the
chest it carries another arm, at right angles to this, jointed to the
draw-stop handle or its trace. We have, in fact, a trundle passing air-
tight through a collar, and by this simple contrivance we can shut off
the wind at pleasure from the chest. Other methods of effecting this
are in use, and may easily be devised. The pipes are very frequently
placed on both sides of the organ, to the right and left. In this case
the two chests will be at right angles to the manual chest or chests,
and the action will be less direct. But it will be readily arranged as
follows:—The pedal roller board will be long enough to act upon sets
of squares, carried on the organ-frame to the right and left of the
player, and at any convenient height. The other arms of these
squares act by trackers on roller-frames placed under the chests.
There are cases in which this roller-board will be better placed at the
back of the organ, the connection between it and the pedals being
by squares and trackers; and there are also cases in which a large
roller-frame lying upon the ground under the bellows may be made
to answer every purpose. Bell-cranks, or horizontal squares, may
also transmit the pressure of the foot on the pedal by other squares
and trackers to the pedal pallets in a manner analogous to that of
the draw-stop action, Fig. 49. There is abundant room for ingenuity
and contrivance in all these details; the essential points are strength,
quietness, and accessibility for repair or adjustment.
Some of our readers may be able to indulge in the luxury of a
second pedal stop. This should be a Violoncello in metal, of 8-feet
tone and length. In this case the pedal chest or chests will be
regular sound-boards, with sliders; or the Sub-bass may be on a
chest as already described, while the Violoncello may be on another,
with two actions.
We have only to add, that the power and effectiveness of small
organs may be increased by the contrivance called a "Terzo Mano"
(Third Hand), or octave coupler. Let us suppose that an ordinary
action has been fitted with backfalls in the usual positions. Then a
second bridge, rising and falling by a draw-stop, is introduced,
carrying skew backfalls which act on the pull-downs an octave
higher than the first set. Thus the key CC will take down the Tenor C
note, and so on throughout the scale. It is evident that the effect on
the ear will be nearly, though not quite, the same as if each 8-feet
stop had its corresponding 4-feet stop drawn with it. An Open
Diapason will sound like an Open Diapason and Principal; a Stopped
Diapason, like a Stopped Diapason and Stopped Flute, &c. To render
the illusion complete, the pipes should be carried up twelve notes
higher than the apparent compass of the key-board, that is to say, if
the key-board has fifty-four notes the sound-board should have
sixty-six grooves.
In a similar way the pedal Sub-bass may be made to play in octaves,
producing the effect of a Sub-bass, 16-feet tone, with a Flute-bass
of 8-feet tone added to it.
Of all such mechanical devices it must be said, finally, that neatness,
accuracy, and noiseless precision of action are the conditions
necessary to complete success.
 CHAPTER XIII.
VILLAGE CHURCH ORGANS.
Our labours have hitherto been exclusively directed towards the
production, in private workshops and by young workmen, of small
organs adapted for domestic use. That such organs should be of
varied character, and that they should represent the differing musical
tastes and unequal mechanical ingenuity and adroitness of their
unprofessional or self-taught constructors, is the legitimate outcome
of the circumstances assumed.
The case of organs for churches must be regarded from a different
stand-point. Designed for public use, and consecrated to lofty
purposes, they should reflect no private fancies or peculiar tastes;
should admit of no experiments or eccentricities; should be
distinguished by excellence of material, finished perfection of
workmanship, and solid stability of structure. We cannot, therefore,
recommend the construction of any church-organ in a private
workshop. The aim and object of this volume would be entirely
misconceived by any reader who should imagine that we encourage
such an ambitious attempt. However humble as to style of
architecture the church may be, however unpretending the scheme
for the organ may be, we must strenuously advocate the placing the
order for its erection in the hands of a well-established firm of
professional builders.
Guarding ourselves thus, we trust, against all possibility of
misconception, we shall endeavour in the following pages to offer
some suggestions on the subject of village organs, which may tend
to smooth away perplexities from the path of those who, without
any previous acquaintance with such matters, find themselves called
upon to exercise discretion, and pronounce decisive judgment on
estimates and specifications submitted to them by builders and by
musicians.
In using the term "Village," we refer less to locality than to
condition. We desire to be of service to the promoters of the
erection of an organ in those very numerous cases in which no
skilled player is resident in the place, and in which the new
instrument will inevitably be left to the modest efforts of a
schoolmistress or of a young beginner, on whose ability, moreover,
no greater demand will be made than that which is involved in the
accompaniment of simple chanting and psalmody. It is to the
dwellers in such quiet corners of the country that we would offer a
few rules or maxims, based, we hope, on principles, the soundness
of which will commend itself to their good sense.
Let us bring together, in a compressed form, a few of these maxims,
afterwards examining them in detail.
A village organ should be of simple construction, containing no
mechanism liable to sudden derangement. It should stand well in
tune, without attention, even though placed in a building exposed to
alternations of temperature and perhaps not free from dampness. Its
musical effects should be readily and obviously producible by any
person sitting down to it for the first time, and guided only by
experience gained at the harmonium or pianoforte. It should present
no facilities for ambitious attempts at executive display by
thoughtless aspirants. Its power, or volume, should be sufficient to
assert itself unmistakably in a full congregational chorus; and its
tone, or quality, should be that which long experience has shown to
be impressive and pleasing to the vast majority of listeners. Hence, it
will be capable of emitting no sounds which might be described by
any uneducated hearer as odd or curious. Lastly, let us add that its
case should be shapely, even if destitute of ornamentation.
Whole pages of disquisition may be saved if we proceed at once to
apply these maxims to the specification of the smallest and least
costly organ which we shall recommend for a village church: an
organ, namely, with four stops only.
1. Organ No. 1. The manual will be from CC to E in alt, 53 notes.
Remark.—The key-board is more sightly when its two extremities are
rendered similar by this omission of the top F. But the further
omission of the four upper notes would still leave a compass of 49
notes, amply sufficient for the accompaniment of voices.
2. Its stops will be these:—
(a) Open Diapason, metal throughout, or of metal from Gamut G,
with seven pipes of open wood below.
Remark.—These open wood pipes, when properly scaled and voiced,
have some advantages over metal for our present purpose, and may
be placed so as to close in the back of the case instead of panelling.
(b) Principal of metal throughout, being the octave of the Open
Diapason, to which it will therefore be made to conform as regards
scale and voicing.
Remark.—The two stops, (a) and (b), when played together, will
furnish the element of power, or loudness, to the organ.
(c) Stopped Diapason of wood throughout, or of metal with
chimneys from middle C to top; but not with a Clarabella of open
wood as its upper part.
Remark.—The metal Stopped Diapasons which have come down to
us from the days of Harris, and other old builders, are often of
exquisite beauty of tone. Modern builders are apt to neglect the
stop, and to treat it as a mere "Coppel," or vehicle for exhibiting the
qualities of imitative stops. We should be glad to persuade them to
make the upper octaves of oak, after the example of Schmidt.
(d) Stopped Flute of wood throughout, or of metal with chimneys as
to its three upper octaves. This stop pretends to no imitation
whatever of the well-known musical instrument, the Flute, but is
simply the octave of the Stopped Diapason, of which it should follow
the scale and voicing.
Remark.—The two stops, (c) and (d), when played together, supply
to the organ the important element of softness and tranquil
clearness; and when added to (a) and (b), they enhance the fullness
and volume of those stops, while correcting a certain crudeness or
tendency towards harshness. The Stopped Flute fulfils a further most
important office. When added to the two Diapasons (without the
Principal), it imparts not only a most pleasing silvery sweetness to
the tone, but gives a definiteness of pitch which will correct the
tendency of school-children to sing out of tune. This stop should,
therefore, on no account be omitted, or cancelled in favour of more
showy or conspicuous qualities of tone.
3. Be it carefully observed that the stops (a) and (b) can be made to
produce sounds of several gradations of loudness according to the
scale of the pipes, the pressure or weight of the wind, and the
character of the voicing. Their tone will be further affected by the
substance and quality of the pipe-metal. Let us confidently assume
that the order for the new organ will be given to no builder who
does not hold his art in such esteem as to be incapable of using
inferior and perishable materials. The metal should be tin and lead
only, in at least equal proportions; still better if the tin be three-
fourths, four-fifths, or seven-eighths of the whole alloy. The wind-
pressure should be light, as we desire that the feeder should be
easily worked by the foot of the player. The scaling and voicing must
be left to the judgment of a trustworthy builder, as they will vary
with the capacity of the church and the requirements of the singing.
Enough if we advise that, even in the case of the smallest church,
the two metal stops be of bold, out-speaking character, asserting
themselves distinctly, and having no tinge of the muffled or subdued
quality proper to chamber-organs.
4. The case of the organ, even if carving be entirely absent, may be
of graceful and pleasing outline by making the upper part, above the
level of the keys, overhang the lower part, or base, which encloses
the bellows.[6] This lower part need not be much wider than the
key-board itself, and about three feet in depth, from front to back. If
the upper part be five feet in width, it will overhang the base one
foot or a little less on each side, obtaining apparent support from a
pair of brackets. The total height, if the open bass pipes be set down
at the back, will not exceed nine feet; but the speaking front may be
well thrown up by the usual expedients if the church be lofty. We
strongly advise that these speaking front pipes be left of their
natural silver colour, which they will not lose if tin predominates
largely over lead in the alloy. For our own part, we are no admirers
of the chocolates, dark blues, and sage greens smeared upon front
pipes by way of decorating them. Too often, we fear, such diapers
are a cloak for very inferior metal, which would soon betray the
presence of antimony and other deleterious ingredients by turning
black if left unpainted.
[6] See the frontispiece of this book. Some charming but
elaborate designs will be found in the Rev. F. H. Sutton's "Church
Organs," published by Rivingtons. Folio. 1872.
The draw-stops will be most conveniently handled if arranged above
the keys, under the ledge of the book-board, as in the harmonium.
It will be well to place the Stopped Diapason and Flute on the left,
and the Open Diapason and Principal (which will be more frequently
drawn and shut off) on the right, leaving an interval of a foot or so
between the two pairs.
The cost of this four-stop organ, made of first-class materials, in a
case of stained deal or pitch-pine, should not exceed £80. A
provincial builder, who works with his own hands, might undertake it
for a smaller sum, but we cannot counsel a diminution of cost by a
lowering of the standard of the pipe-metal or by a resort to inferior
woods.
A hasty résumé of our design will show a close correspondence with
our initial maxims.
The organ is:—
1. Of simple construction, containing no mechanism liable to sudden
derangement.
2. It will stand well in tune, without attention, even for years,
especially if the smaller stopped pipes be of metal with chimneys.
3. A new player will be met by no special difficulty whatever.
4. As there is no "swell," there can be no exhibition, on the part of
the player, of the peculiar forms of bad taste to which that invention
lends fatal facility; and as there are no pedals, there will be no
lumbering and blundering attempts to play grand compositions never
meant for village churches.
5. Its power, or volume, will be ample for the accompaniment of the
ordinary congregational singing of two or three hundred persons,
and more than abundantly sufficient for the support of a rustic choir;
and it emits no sounds which can provoke criticism by singularity of
intonation, and which have not been found, by long years of
experience, to be invariably agreeable to all musical ears.
Organ No. 2. To the four-stop instrument just described, a
"Dulciana" might be added, at a further cost of about £10, less or
more, according to quality of pipe-metal, &c. Its compass will be
from Tenor C to top, or, still better, from B flat or a lower note, the
remaining sounds being obtained by grooving to the Stopped
Diapason. The Dulciana is of beautifully delicate tone, slightly nasal;
when played with the Stopped Diapason it gives a charming
clearness and sonority to that soft stop. When the Flute is added, we
have a true choir-organ quality, most useful in the accompaniment of
low and solemn music.
Remark.—Some builders or organists may recommend a "Salicional,"
or "Viola di Gamba," or "Keraulophon," in place of the Dulciana. All
these stops, when properly made, are of beautiful tone, but their
beauty is of a kind which soon satisfies, and then is apt to weary the
listener. They are therefore excluded from our village organ by one
of our maxims. The same sentence of exclusion must be passed
upon the class of stops known as "Lieblich Gedact," and rightly
introduced in large organs as alternatives for the Stopped Diapason
and Stopped Flute. "Their tone in the treble," says Mr. Hayne,[7] "is
so peculiar as to become wearisome, and a little of them goes a very
long way." The imitative Flutes, which have many different names,
as "Flauto Traverso," "Concert Flute," "Oboe Flute," and the like, find
their place in organs of much larger dimensions than our village
organ; and Harmonic stops, of every pitch and quality, are shut out
by their costliness, if not by the character of their tone, which is
unacceptable to some ears.
[7] "Hints, &c.," p. 14.
Organ No. 3. Perhaps greater loudness may be reasonably desired
when the village church is large and the singers numerous. This
accession of power will be gained by adding two more complete
ranks of pipes, namely, a Twelfth of three feet (nominal) and a
Fifteenth of two feet, both in metal. We cannot enter into
controversy with modern purists who object to the Twelfth. Enough
that its effect, when duly balanced, has been accepted as dignified
and elevating for centuries past. As it is never used without the
Fifteenth, the pipes of both may be governed by one slider, and in
this case the stop may be called "Mixture, ii. ranks."
The additional cost of the Twelfth and Fifteenth, with the necessary
enlargement of the sound-board and bellows, may be £20 or £25.
Organ No. 4. The stops which have been enumerated, with one or
two additions, might be distributed between two manuals, with great
advantage to the player, and without a violation of any of our self-
imposed conditions. Instead of suggesting the list of stops ourselves,
we give the names and distribution of those in the beautiful little
organ in the choir of Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, designed by
the late Sir J. Sutton, Bart., and built by the late J. C. Bishop, some
old wooden pipes by Schmidt being worked in.
Upper Manual, or Great Organ.
1. Open Diapason 8 feet.
2. Stopped Diapason 8 " tone
3. Principal 4 "
4. Twelfth 3 "
 5. Fifteenth 2 "
6. Tierce 1⅗ "
7. Mixture iii. ranks.
Lower Manual, or Choir Organ.
1. Open Diapason, wood 8 feet.
2. Stopped Diapason " 8 " tone.
3. Open Flute " 4 "
4. Stopped Flute " 4 " tone.
Such an organ could not be costly, as there is no swell-box, and as
large Bourdons or 16-feet Open Diapasons are absent, together with
couplers and all other complications. But perhaps it is luxuriously
large for a village church of average size. It might be somewhat
lessened thus:—
Organ No. 5.
Great Organ (Upper or Lower, as preferred).
1. Open Diapason 8 feet.
2. Hohl-flöte, wood 8 "
3. Principal 4 "
4. Stopped Flute 4 "
5. Mixture iii. ranks.
Choir Organ (Lower or Upper).
1. Stopped Diapason 8 feet tone
2. Dulciana 8 "
3. Gemshorn, a light Principal 4 " "
Remark.—The Mixture, No. 5, will be 15th, 19th and 22nd from CC
to middle B, and 8th, 12th and 15th onwards to the top.

Perhaps we should not conclude without noticing one or two

objections to our plans.
First. "Organs cannot be properly played without pedals."
Most unquestionably true classical organ music cannot be played on
instruments with manuals only. But it was on such instruments that
the illustrious Handel, with his contemporaries and predecessors,
Croft, Boyce, Worgan, the blind Stanley, and a host of others,
delighted their audiences by their masterly performance. Pedals
were not added to English organs until the latest years of the
eighteenth century. The nineteenth was far advanced before the
pedal-board, of full compass, had come to be considered an
essential part of every organ.
Why should the effective management of organs without pedals be
among the lost arts? Why should not the clever manipulation of such
organs be practised by ladies, and by the modest players in villages,
to whom the preludes and fugues which echo through the aisles of
the cathedral must ever be a dead language? Why should the
cathedral player himself, fresh from his pedal fugues, deem it
beneath his dignity to draw sweet music, in a totally different style,
from an instrument on which Handel would have willingly displayed
his powers?
We were present on a certain occasion, many years ago, when the
late Professor Walmisley, of Cambridge, was asked to play on a small
and old-fashioned organ without pedals. The distinguished pedallist
and renowned interpreter of Bach's compositions did not turn away
with contempt. He seated himself, and charmed all who were
present by his ingenious extemporisation. The skill, and learning,
and resource of the true musician were never more conspicuously
displayed.
We see no reason whatever why such a bright example should not
be followed; and, while we yield to no one in appreciation of the
pedal-organ, and of the music proper for it, we hold that the typical
organ of the village church has no concern with these, and that no
greater demand should be made upon the executive powers of its
player than that which is made in the acquirement of a pure legato
style at the pianoforte or harmonium.
Second. "Why omit the Swell, the greatest improvement of modern
organs?"
The Swell-organ proper owes its effectiveness to its reed stops, and
these are one and all excluded from our village organ by the fact
that they require the frequent attention of a tuner. We grant,
however, that reedy stops of the Gamba class might take their place
in small organs; and we admit that our organs, Nos. 1, 2, and 3,
might be very easily enclosed in swell boxes, while a "Swell" might
take the place of a "Choir" in No. 5. Such alterations would have
many advocates, both professional and amateur.
In adhering resolutely to our plans, we must express the opinion
that the judicious management of the Swell is a gift rather than an
art. It is but occasionally, we think, that refined taste is made
evident by a sparing use of the tempting contrivance. Too frequently,
even in churches of high class and pretension, the tone of the swell-
organ, with its mechanical rise and fall, prevails from the beginning
to the end of the performance, until the ear longs for relief. If the
abuse of the Swell be thus common even in town churches, is it well
to trust an apparatus which may be so easily misunderstood to the
discretion of players in village churches?
Moreover, our village organ is for the accompaniment of singers. We
believe that many musicians will endorse our opinion that as an
accompaniment for singers the Swell-organ is misleading and
unsatisfactory. An accurate ear will often detect a slight difference of
pitch in the pipes of a small Swell-organ when the shades are closed
or suddenly opened. We have repeatedly heard the voices of the
men and boys, even in very good choirs, thrown out of tune by
injudicious persistence in the use of the Swell as an accompaniment.
The sense of discomfort and uncertainty was removed at once when
the player transferred his hands to the Choir-manual, with its quiet
and cheerful brightness.
It is for these reasons, and not from any want of appreciation of the
effect of the Swell in the hands of an educated and gifted performer,
that we counsel our village friends to turn a deaf ear to the praises
of the Swell which will doubtless reach them from many quarters,
and to rest content with genuine organ-tone produced by means
which do not lend themselves to abuse.
A few words may be added for the guidance of those who find
themselves entrusted with the care of old instruments.
The eighteenth century witnessed the erection, in the churches of
many country towns, of noble organs, honestly constructed by true
artists, men who disdained the use of inferior timber or of base
metal. A great number of these costly and beautiful instruments
remained unaltered, or at least uninjured, within the recollection of
the present writer, but demolition rather than restoration has been at
work during the last thirty or more years, and the plea which we
would put forward for the reverent preservation of the works of old
masters may now be opportune in but few and isolated cases.
Nevertheless, if it should happen to any of our readers to discover in
a village church, or in that of some quiet market-town, an organ by
Snetzler (1749), by his predecessors, or by his immediate
successors, ending with the Englands, father and son, we would
earnestly counsel a respectful treatment of the valuable contents.
An old picture may have long lain hidden in a lumber-room, with its
face to the wall; when brought into the light, and its merits
recognised by an expert, its possessor replaces the worm-eaten
stretcher and decayed frame by new wood, but he would indeed act
strangely if he permitted the house-painter to touch the precious
canvas with his brush.
Yet we have known many organs by the builders and of the period
indicated above, taken down and carted away; their pipes (in
Snetzler's case of nearly pure tin) sold for a trifling sum or thrown
into the melting-pot; and this wanton destruction has been justified
on the ground that the time is come for a "better instrument," that
the old organ is "screamy;" above all, that the belauded "Swell" is
wanting. Accordingly the modern builder meets the wishes of his
customers by providing an organ of the common-place type, and the
reign of Swell-coupler and Pedal Bourdon is duly inaugurated.
Surely a wiser course would have been this:—Carefully preserve
every pipe, and round out those which may be bruised by rolling
them on mandrils; insist on the inclusion of all these pipes without
any omission whatever in the new structure which the ravages of the
worm may have rendered inevitable; add to these original contents
(if funds permit) some modern ranks of pipes carefully voiced by an
accomplished artist to the same pressure of wind, and calculated to
support and balance the shrill high tones which the old organ
doubtless contains; repair the old case, and even retain the old key-
board if possible.
No doubt, in towns, where a succession of skilled players may be
found, the addition of a Swell-organ and of a pedal-organ, both most
carefully designed, scaled, and voiced, cannot justly be disapproved.
The instrument, thus reinstated, will be a most interesting link with
the past; will supply in itself a history of the progress of the organ-
builder's art, and will possess an individuality of tone which educated
listeners will appreciate, and which they fail to perceive in many or
most of the organs erected in the present day.

INDEX.

Action. (See KEYBOARD, PEDAL.)

Backfalls, 94
Bars of sound-board, 36
Bearers of ditto, 38
Bell-cranks, 129
Bellows, construction of, 73
Blacklead, 57
Blowing pedal and lever, 86
Boards, upper, 39
Borrowing in bass octave, 45, 145
Bourdon, 160
Brass, its employment, 63, 67
Bridge, 94, 157
Building-frame, 81
Buttons, leather, 96

Channels, 29
Choir-organ, 142
Clarabella, 25
Cloths, 96
Compass, of pedals, 135
Combination-manual, 159
Conducting-boards, 48
Conveyances, 51
Counter-balances for bellows, 78
Couplers, various kinds of, 152-157
Cuckoo-feeder, 79
Cummins, his invention, 75

Diapason, open, 44, 121

Diapason, stopped, 10
Dip of keys and of pedals, 103, 139
Drilling, 67
Double sound-boards, 112
Draw-stops, 127
Dulciana, 121

Engines, hydraulic, 79

Fan-frame, 101
Feeders, 79
Fifteenth, Flageolet, Flautina, 125
Flute, 125
Frame, building, 81

Gamba, 149
Gems-horn, 125
Great-organ, 147
Grooving, 45, 145

Key-boards, 102
Key movements, 97

Lathe, 5
Leather for pallets, 61

Manuals, 146
Manual and Pedal, their relation, 136, 139
Manual for combination, 159
Materials for sound-board, 7

Names of notes in scale, 10

Nicking. (See VOICING.)

Organ, Old English, 25, 147

Pallets, 61
Pedal-organ, 136, 160
Pipes, wooden, 14, 23
metal, 117
lengths of, 11, 15
plantation of, 30, 99
Principal, 44, 121
Pull-downs, 69

Rack-boards, pins, 42
Reed-stops, 153
Regulation, 126
Ribs, inverted, 75
Roller-board, 96
Running of wind, 50, 55

Scales for pipes, 16

Sliders, 29
Sound-board, construction of, 39
Spitz-flute, 125
Springs for pallets, 63
Squares, 95
Stickers, 95
Stops, methods of drawing, 127
Sub-bass, 160
 Swell-organ, box, 141, 150

Tablature, or nomenclature of notes, 10

Temperament, 125
Terzo Mano, 163
Trackers, 95
Trundles, wooden, iron, 131
Tuning, 126

Valves of bellows, 74, 77

Voicing pipes, metal and wooden, 120
Village Church Organs, 165

Wind-chest, 55
Wind-gauge, 122
Wind-trunks, 80
Wind-valve, or ventil, 162
Workshop, 2

THE END.

PRINTED BY J. S. VIRTUE AND CO., LIMITED, CITY ROAD, LONDON.

Transcriber's Notes:
Illustrations have been moved out of mid-paragraph.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Punctuation has been retained as published.
'Fig 29.' has been added to the illustration 'Sticker' on page 95.