Orwell’s essays nearly all first appeared in periodical form and were then reprinted in volumes of his essays, some of which were published during his lifetime, some posthumously. In many cases, an essay might additionally be published in an American periodical version or in some similar form. When Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell compiled the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, published in 1968, they worked from the original British periodical versions, but they added this important rider:
As anyone who has ever done any journalism or book-reviewing knows, this means that the text which appears here may well be slightly, if not very, different from the text which Orwell originally wrote. Editors cut, printers make errors which are not thought of as very important in journalism, and it is only when the writer wants to reprint his pieces in book form that he bothers to restore the cuts, correct the errors and generally prepare them to survive in more lasting form: the reader therefore should bear in mind that they might well be very different if Orwell had revised them for re-publication. Both to these previously printed essays and journalism and to the hitherto unpublished articles and diaries we have given a uniform style in spelling, quotation marks and punctuation.
When Peter Davison produced his monumental twenty-volume edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell in 1998, he prefaced it with the general claim that his research had revealed that ‘all current editions of Orwell have been mutilated to a greater or lesser extent’. His edition attempted to reproduce Orwell’s texts in the form in which they originally appeared, without imposing a consistent house style, but Davison acknowledged that he had in fact made numerous small changes to correct ‘gross errors’, remove ‘deformities and typographical errors’, and adjust paragraphing, hyphenation, and other details of layout. In other words, there is no unanimity on what might count as the ‘definitive’ text of any of Orwell’s essays, even if one believed that such a thing were possible. All kinds of small interventions, not all of them consistent with each other, have been made by various editors and publishers along the way.
This World’s Classics volume aspires to provide usable and authoritative texts of the essays; it does not attempt to document this complex textual history. Details of first publication are given at the head of the Explanatory Notes for each essay. The versions published here are taken from the last editions to appear in Orwell’s lifetime, which means from the essay collections Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) and Critical Essays (1946), or from the original periodicals for essays not republished in those volumes. (The collection Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950), which Orwell was planning at the time of his death, has also been consulted for these latter pieces.) But in all cases I have incorporated the corrections of later editors where these seem indisputably justified. Oxford University Press has then further imposed its house style in such matters as abbreviations and punctuation.
I owe thanks to Ronne de Bruin and Marjet Derks of Radboud University for help in scanning the texts and to Kate Schneider for some invaluable research assistance. I am also grateful to Peter Clarke, Adrian Poole, Helen Small, and John Thompson for some characteristically searching yet encouraging comments on the Introduction.