Explanatory Notes

Shooting an Elephant

First published in New Writing, 2 (Autumn 1936); reprinted in Penguin New Writing, 1 (November 1940), and in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker, 1950).

3 Moulmein: Orwell was posted to Moulmein, the third largest town in Burma, between April and December 1926. There is no definite evidence confirming that he shot an elephant during this period.

4 in saecula saeculorum: ‘world without end’.

in terrorem: Latin for ‘into/about fear’; a legal threat, usually one given in hope of compelling someone to act but without resorting to a lawsuit or criminal prosecution.

‘must’: a state of frenzy in a male elephant or camel.

mahout: an elephant driver or keeper.

5 a black Dravidian coolie: a labourer drawn from the dark-skinned people of south India and Sri Lanka. ‘Coolie’ was a generic term for those who did a low level of unskilled physical labour.

9 dahs: a dah is a type of knife or sword used in Burma.

Coringhee: a reference to Indians (mainly Telugu) from southern India who emigrated to colonial Burma (now Myanmar) across the Bay of Bengal.

Charles Dickens

First published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Gollancz, 1940); reprinted in Critical Essays (London: Secker, 1946).

10 the burial of his body . . . a species of theft: Dickens had left instructions that his funeral should be private, involving no public ceremony; in agreeing to his burial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, his family ‘yielded to the desire of the nation’. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 582.

Chesterton wrote his Introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens’s works: as part of the revival of Dickens’s reputation in the early twentieth century, all of his novels were reissued in the popular Everyman Library between 1907 and 1911, each with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton; the introductions were then collected and published in 1911 as Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific man of letters who wrote a vast amount of critical non-fiction; he later became best known for his Catholic apologetics and his ‘Father Brown’ stories about a Catholic priest who is also an amateur detective.

10 Mr T. A. Jackson: Thomas Alfred Jackson (1879–1955), a working-class intellectual who was a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and later the Communist Party of Great Britain; his Charles Dickens: Progress of a Radical was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1938.

Nadezhda Krupskaya . . . Lenin: Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), the wife of the Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin, published Memoirs of Lenin, which appeared in English translation in 1930.

The Cricket on the Hearth: this was the third of Dickens’s ‘Christmas Books’, published in 1846.

Bechhofer Roberts . . . Dickens’s treatment of his wife: C. E. Bechhofer Roberts (1894–1949) published This Side Idolatry in 1928.

11 Gissing: George Gissing (1857–1903), novelist, published Charles Dickens: A Critical Study in 1898; The Immortal Dickens was published posthumously in 1925.

In Oliver Twist . . . Dickens attacked English institutions: Oliver Twist (1838), Hard Times (1854), Bleak House (1853), and Little Dorrit (1857) were four of Dickens’s best-known novels, each criticizing some aspect of contemporary society.

Mr Creakle . . . Serjeant Buzfuz: Creakle is the tyrannical headmaster of the school to which the young hero is sent in David Copperfield (1850); Buzfuz is the counsel for the plaintiff in the Bardell v. Pickwick case in Pickwick Papers (1837).

12 Plornishes . . . Peggotty’s: the Plornishes are friends of Little Dorrit, living in Bleeding Heart Yard; a member of the working poor, Mr Plornish is constantly engaged in, or at least seeking out, employment, yet the family live hand to mouth and teeter on the edge of poverty. The Peggottys are a family in David Copperfield: Daniel is a Yarmouth fisherman; Clara, his sister, is the housekeeper of David Copperfield’s family home; Ham, the Peggotty’s orphaned nephew, is a fisherman and boat-builder.

Bill Sikes, Sam Weller, and Mrs Gamp: Sikes, a character in Oliver Twist (1838), is a thief and murderer; Weller is Mr Pickwick’s servant in Pickwick Papers; Mrs Gamp is a comic, not always sober, character in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844).

Charles Reade: Charles Reade (1814–84), playwright and novelist, was best known for his novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861).

13 Our Mutual Friend: Dickens’s last completed novel (1865).

Bounderby’s will . . . Hard Times: Josiah Bounderby, a callous manufacturer, is one of the central characters in Hard Times (1854).

Macaulay . . . ‘sullen Socialism’: the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59) wrote in his journal for 12 August 1854, the day the serialization of Hard Times concluded in Household Words: ‘One or two passages of exquisite pathos and the rest sullen Socialism.’ G. O. Trevelyan (ed.), The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), ii. 307.

Gradgrind: in Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind is a representative of Utilitarianism, caricatured as a mechanical belief in facts and figures.

Squeers or Micawber: Wackford Squeers is the cruel teacher at Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby (1839); Mr Micawber is a chronically impecunious character in David Copperfield.

14 Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge: Mr Samuel Pickwick is the central character of Pickwick Papers, and the founder of The Pickwick Club. Elderly, wealthy twins Ned and Edwin Cheeryble employ Nicholas Nickleby in Dickens’s novel of the same name. Old Martin Chuzzlewit, the grandfather of Young Martin Chuzzlewit, is a wealthy gentleman made misanthropical by the greed of his family. Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly character in A Christmas Carol (1843), whose parsimony and lack of charity are transformed after he is visited by the three ‘Ghosts of Christmas’.

15 Mick Walker and Mealy Potatoes: in David Copperfield, two of the boys working at Murdstone & Grinsby’s warehouse alongside David when he is a child.

Stephen Blackpool: the innocent workman who is falsely accused in Hard Times.

Sam Tappertit: an aspiring and anarchic apprentice to a locksmith in Barnaby Rudge (1841).

16 Dickens deals with revolution . . . in two novels, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities: Barnaby Rudge is set at the time of the Gordon Riots of 1780, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set at the time of the French Revolution of 1789.

17 The Scarlet Pimpernel: a romantic novel of 1905 by ‘Baroness Orczy’ set during the French Revolution, featuring the daring exploits of an elusive English aristocrat.

18 Sydney Carton . . . Defarge: Sydney Carton, an English barrister, is guillotined after having secretly substituted himself for one of the main characters, Charles Darnay, who had been condemned to death by a revolutionary tribunal. Ernest Defarge, one of the most zealous of the revolutionary leaders, proves nonetheless to be partially restrained by notions of loyalty; his wife, Madame Defarge, is one of the most bloodthirsty enthusiasts for the guillotine.

21 The Fairchild Family: The History of the Fairchild Family by Mary Martha Sherwood was a series of best-selling children’s books in the nineteenth century (Part One was published in 1818, Parts Two and Three in 1847), focusing on Emily, Lucy, and Henry’s realization of their ‘human depravity’ (original sin) and their need for redemption.

22 Doctor Blimber’s Academy . . . Noah Claypole and Uriah Heep . . . Salem House, and Dotheboys Hall . . . Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt: Dr Blimber’s Academy is a school for boys in Brighton, ‘a great hot-house, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work’, in Dombey and Son (1846–8); Noah Claypole in Oliver Twist is a skinny charity boy in Fagin’s gang, who, at the start of the novel, is an apprentice in Mr Sowerberry’s shop; Uriah Heep, a clerk and moneylender, is one of David Copperfield’s antagonists, notable for his cloying faux-humility, constantly making reference to his own ‘’umbleness’ and sycophancy; Salem House is the boarding school run by the ruthless Mr Creakle that David Copperfield is sent to after he bites his mother’s husband Edward Murdstone; Nicholas Nickleby is sent to teach at Dotheboys Hall, a school with no holidays and no trips home for the abused pupils of Mr Wackford Squeers; Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt runs an evening school attended by Pip in Great Expectations (1861).

23 Blake . . . ‘I wander through each charter’d street’: William Blake’s poem ‘London’, published in Songs of Experience in 1794, can be taken to suggest that the experience of living with the city’s industrial conditions might encourage a revolution on the streets.

24 Wells: H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a successful writer in several genres including a series of novels of lower-middle-class life. Orwell discusses Wells at greater length in his essay ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’ (pp. 115–20).

25 Dedlock, Wardle and Haredale . . . persecuted Catholic: Sir Leicester Dedlock is a pompous aristocrat in Bleak House (1853); Mr Wardle, a character in Pickwick Papers notable for his hospitality and his marriageable daughters; Geoffrey Haredale, a Catholic gentleman, is a central character in Barnaby Rudge.

Circumlocution Office: the name given to a government department in Little Dorrit, satirizing the interminable delays endemic to bureaucratic government.

26 Tite Barnacle: in Little Dorrit, Tite Barnacle is a senior official in the Circumlocution Office.

Smilesian line: Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) wrote several best-selling works of self- improvement, of which the most celebrated was Self-Help (1859), emphasizing the importance of ‘character’.

Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle . . . Major Bagstock . . . Colonel Chowser and Doctor . . . Bumble: in Bleak House, Parliament is in crisis as Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle jostle for position; in Dombey and Son, Major ‘Joe’ Bagstock is a sinister, blue-faced old soldier who arranges the marriage of Dombey to his rival, Edith Granger; in Nicholas Nickleby, Colonel Chowser ‘of the Militia—and the race-courses’ is an incidental guest at Ralph Nickleby’s dinner party; Doctor Slammer, ‘surgeon to the 97th’, is a minor comic character in Pickwick; in Oliver Twist, Mr Bumble is the spiteful and pompous beadle of the poorhouse in which Oliver grows up.

Lady Tippins! Mrs Gowan! Lord Verisopht! The Honourable Bob Stables! Mrs Sparsit . . . The Tite Barnacles! Nupkins!: in Our Mutual Friend Lady Tippins is a falsely aristocratic (her late husband was knighted in mistake for somebody else), gluttonous, and boastful dinner guest of the Veneerings; in Little Dorrit, Mrs Gowan is the widowed mother of Henry Gowan, a courtly old lady who lives in Hampton Court and disdains and patronizes the Meagles family; Lord Verisopht is a friend of Mulberry Hawk in Nicholas Nickleby who plots to humiliate Kate after she rejects Hawk’s advances; Honourable Bob Stables is the ‘poor relative’ of Sir Leicester Deadlock in Bleak House who hopes for a government post; Mrs Sparsit is Bounderby’s housekeeper in Hard Times, who was born into money and a high-ranking family but has ‘come down’; for Tite Barnacle, see note to p. 26 on previous page; George Nupkins Esq. is the prattling magistrate at Ipswich in Pickwick Papers.

Sir Mulberry Hawk . . . Harthouse: Sir Mulberry Hawk is a lecherous nobleman in Nicholas Nickleby; James Harthouse in Hard Times is a well-born young man who comes to Coketown with the aim of getting into Parliament.

27 Major Pendennis and Rawdon Crawley: Major Pendennis is the uncle of ‘Pen’, the young hero of Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis (1850); Rawdon Crawley is the ne’er-do-well young officer who marries Becky Sharp, the principal character in Vanity Fair (1848).

Podsnap . . . Skimpole: John Podsnap is a character in Our Mutual Friend, who is convinced that England is the best of all possible countries and the rest of the world is an inferior mistake; in the OED ‘Podsnappery’ refers to ‘the characteristic behaviour or attitudes of Dickens’s Mr Podsnap; insular complacency and blinkered self-satisfaction’. Harold Skimpole is a parasitical aesthete, a serene-faced sponger who claims to know nothing of ‘the world’; he compares himself to a child, though in fact he is manipulative and entitled.

28 the Quarterly Review of the ’thirties: along with the Edinburgh Review (Whig) and the Westminster Review (Radical), the Quarterly Review (Tory) was one of the dominant political periodicals of the 1830s.

Charles Kingsley, Tom Hughes: Charles Kingsley (1819–75) was a novelist and social reformer who promoted the ideas of ‘manliness’ and ‘muscular Christianity’; Thomas Hughes (1822–96) was a novelist who supported similar ideals, notably expressed in his novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).

I say to you . . . shown you to be so: from ‘Memorials of Gormandizing’, published in Paris in 1841 using one of Thackeray’s regular pseudonyms, M. A. Titmarsh.

29 Gide’s Retour de L’URSS: the French author André Gide (1869–1951) visited the Soviet Union and wrote a somewhat disillusioned account of the experience, published as Retour de l’URSS in 1936.

30 Sam Weller is a valet!: see Chesterton, ‘Pickwick Papers’, in his Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: Dent, 1911).

It is Never Too Late to Mend: Reade’s novel, published in 1854, painted a strongly critical picture of conditions in prisons.

31 Forster’s Life: John Forster (1812–76), one of Dickens’s closest friends, published his biography in three volumes in 1872–4.

32 No words . . . settled him speedily: from an autobiographical fragment written in 1845–6; see Johnson, Charles Dickens, 32–3, 41.

jeune premier: the (usually handsome) principal young male singer or actor.

Biddy Wopsle, Lizzie Hexam, Sissie Jupe . . . Little Dorrit: Biddy Wopsle is an orphan in Great Expectations whose Great Aunt brings her ‘up by hand’ and uses Biddy to manage the transactions in the general shops that she owns; in Our Mutual Friend self-sacrificing Lizzie Hexam attempts to help her brother, Charley Hexam, to escape their impoverished living; in Hard Times, Sissy [sic] Jupe is the daughter of a circus performer who embodies the virtues of imagination, and eventually uses it as a force to gently wear down Mr Gradgrind and topple Mr M’Choakumchild; Amy Dorrit, or ‘Little Dorrit’ as she is known, is born and raised in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in London; she is presented as tender-hearted, humble, and practical.

Rachel in Hard Times:Rachael [sic], a factory worker who was childhood friends with Stephen Blackpool’s belligerently drunken wife, loves Stephen herself; selfless and long-suffering, she looks after Stephen’s widow when he dies.

33 The People of Clopton by Andrew Barton: George Bartram, The People of Clopton: A Poaching Romance (London: Unwin, 1897). Orwell appears to have misremembered the author’s first name.

The Three Clerks and The Small House at Allington: novels by Anthony Trollope, published in 1857 and 1864 respectively.

Meredith (Rhoda Fleming): George Meredith (1828–1909) published Rhoda Fleming, a novel with a farmer’s daughter as its central character, in 1865.

A Shabby Genteel Story: Thackeray’s ‘A Shabby Genteel Story’ was published in 1840.

34 Oh, Master Copperfield . . . that moon herself: the first part of the quotation is from chapter 25 of David Copperfield, and the second part from chapter 39.

35 Malvolio: the presumptuous but ultimately poignant steward in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

36 Vages . . . give her up with readiness: from ch. 56 of Pickwick Papers, entitled ‘An important conference takes place between Mr Pickwick and Samuel Weller, at which his parent assists—an old gentleman in a snuff-coloured suit arrives unexpectedly’.

37 ‘common man’ . . . highbrow at that: Orwell is referring to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), whose central character is Leopold Bloom, an advertisement canvasser.

Orley Farm: the plot of Trollope’s novel Orley Farm (1862) revolves around a contested will.

38 Household Words . . . All the Year Round: Household Words was a weekly periodical started by Dickens in 1850; in 1859 it was incorporated into its successor All the Year Round which Dickens edited until his death in 1870.

40 Leech’s illustrations to Surtees: R. S. Surtees (1805–64), journalist and novelist, was best known for his sketches of the sporting misadventures of Mr Jorrocks, a series that may have been the inspiration for Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Several of his later books were illustrated by John Leech.

As Gissing remarks . . . stage-coach: ‘Never is Dickens more joyously himself than when he tells of stage-coach and posting-vehicles. He tried his hand at a description of the railway, but with no such gusto, no such success. His youth belonged to the prelocomotive time, the time of jolly faring on English roads—jolly in spite of frost and rain, and discomforts innumerable.’ George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, in Collected Works of George Gissing, ed. Simon J. James (Grayswood: Grayswood Press, 2004), 38.

42 Mr and Mrs Snodgrass . . . Harthouse, Harry Gowan, Richard Carstone, Wrayburn: in The Pickwick Papers, Mr and Mrs Snodgrass are friends of Pickwick; Mr Snodgrass is reputed to be a great poet among his friends and acquaintance, although ‘we do not find that he has ever written anything to encourage the belief ’. For Harthouse, see note to p. 26. Harry (Henry) Gowan is an affable but careless gentleman in Little Dorrit. In Hard Times, Richard Carstone is an orphan who stands to potentially gain a fortune in the Jarndyce case. Eugene Wrayburn is an upper-class barrister, often a guest at the Veneerings’ dinner parties, where he takes up an indifferent posture; although he is well educated and polished, he is chronically lazy and careless.

Charles Reade . . . Hard Cash: Reade’s Hard Cash, a ‘sensation novel’ exposing the scandal of lunatic asylums, was published in 1863.

43 Bulwer Lytton: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) was a politician and writer, especially of historical fiction. Forster’s biography recounts how Bulwer-Lytton persuaded Dickens to provide a happier ending for Great Expectations than he originally intended.

45 ‘Ye Mariners of England’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: the first was a poem by Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), and the second a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

George Gissing . . . always of Todgers’s: see Gissing, Dickens, 140. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Todgers’s is a commercial boarding house located near the Monument in London.

45 A music-hall comedian: Davison suggests that ‘Orwell probably had in mind Bransby Williams (1870–1961), “the Hamlet of the Halls”, whose impersonations of Dickens’s characters and incidents were popular in music-halls and on records’ (CW xii. 57).

46 the Elephant and Castle version of Sweeney Todd: Tod Slaughter leased the Elephant and Castle Theatre from 1922 and put on a series of Victorian melodramas—revivals of Sweeney Todd, Maria Marten, and Jack Shepherd. See Jeffrey Richards (ed.), The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema 1929–1939 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2000), 144.

Next day . . . the patients: The Pickwick Papers, chapter 32.

47 A cert Thracian . . . wine did not kill me: the source of this story has not been identified.

48 Marryat: Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848) was a naval officer and novelist; two of his best-known books for children were Masterman Ready (1841) and The Children of the New Forest (1847).

50 Miss Mowcher: in David Copperfield, Miss Mowcher is a travelling hairdresser, well acquainted with Steerforth, whom David is staying with in Yarmouth. Initially self-described as ‘volatile’, she is unintentionally responsible for arranging Steerforth’s first meeting with his future victim, Emily—she runs away from Yarmouth amidst gossip about this disaster. However, when she confesses to David, her manner is totally transformed, and she comes across as a rational, down-to-earth ‘little person’, who performs an entertaining, foolish manner in order to be hired as a hairdresser. She later catches the villainous Littimer fleeing from the docks to go to London after robbing an employer, and has him arrested.

51 ‘chose to work in a circle of stage fire’: John Ruskin, Unto This Last: Four Essays on the First Principles of Political Economy (1862; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 171.

Smollett’s: Tobias Smollett (1721–71), novelist and critic, best known for The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771).

Manon Lescaut, Salammbo, Carmen, Wuthering Heights: the titles of novels by Antoine-François Prévost (1831), Gustave Flaubert (1862), Prosper Merimée (1845), and Emily Brontë (1847) respectively.

Aldous Huxley . . . ‘a gigantic dwar f’: Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a writer and all-round intellectual figure; D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), a novelist and poet; Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), a French novelist.

52 Pierre Bezoukhov: Peter Bezoukhov, usually referred to as Pierre, is the central character of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869).

Bloom . . . Pécuchet, Mr Polly: central characters in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), and Wells’s The History of Mr Polly (1910) respectively.

on a cigarette-card: according to Davison, ‘John Player and Sons issued two series of cigarette cards entitled “Characters from Dickens” in 1913; they reissued these as a single series in 1923’ (CW xii. 57).

Frank Fairlegh, Mr Verdant Green . . . Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures: Francis Edward Smedley (1818–64), Frank Fairleigh, or Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil (1850); ‘Cuthbert Bede’ (Edward Bradley (1827–89) ), The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, a trilogy (1853–7); Douglas Jerrold (1803–57), Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures (1846).

53 Dubliners . . . Portrait of the Artist: James Joyce published Dubliners, a collection of short stories, in 1914, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and the highly experimental Finnegans Wake (1939).

‘You will remember . . . the comfort of it’: the quotation comes in a letter from Dickens to Edward Dickens, ?26 September 1868, repr. in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Katharine Tillotson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xii. 187–8.

54 Thackeray’s Laura: Laura Bell is a character in Thackeray’s novel The History of Pendennis (1850) who eventually marries the eponymous hero of the story.

55 Swift . . . Defoe . . . Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert: these are all major writers (mostly novelists) to whom Orwell frequently returned in his essays: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), Henry Fielding (1707–54), ‘Stendhal’ (pseudonym of Henri Beyle (1783–1842) ); William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63); Gustave Flaubert (1821–80).

Boys’ Weeklies

First published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays and in slightly shortened form in Horizon (March 1940); reprinted in Critical Essays.

56 Daily Mail . . . News of the World: the Daily Mail was (and is) a popular daily paper first published in 1896; the News of the World was a popular Sunday paper published between 1843 and 2011.

packets of Players: John Player and Son, a tobacco firm, made several brands of cigarette, the most popular of which was ‘Player’s Navy Cut’.

Tit-Bits: Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books, Periodicals, and Newspapers of the World, more commonly known as Tit-Bits, was a British weekly magazine founded by George Newnes in 1881; it mostly collated an eclectic mix of materials that had already been published elsewhere, and was sold at one penny.

the Oracle, Secrets, Peg’s Paper: these papers, which flourished in the interwar years, were aimed at working-class girls and were principally preoccupied with the question of romantic prospects; see Penny Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines For Girls Growing Up In England, 1920–1950 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 45.

Aldine Boxing Novels, the Boys’ Friend Library, the Schoolgirls’ Own Library: the Aldine Publishing company issued cheap, short, ‘libraries’ of pulp fiction, including horse-racing, boxing, and football stories. The Aldine Boxing Series followed the adventures of fictional British boxers who were either from the middle class or who, despite being from the respectable working class, behaved in ways remarkably similar to middle-class ideals of working-class behaviour. Over eighty were published between 1924 and 1932. The Boys’ Friend Library was published by the Amalgamated Press from 1906 until wartime paper shortages ended its run in 1940. It largely reprinted stories that had appeared in the Amalgamated Press story papers, including adventures, school stories, sporting tales, historical fiction, crime and science fiction. The first series of the Schoolgirls’ Own Library ran from November 1922 until June 1940 (the second series ran from 1946 to 1963); it reprinted stories from popular girls’ papers of the time.

57 Exchange and Mart . . . Matrimonial Times: all of these papers had a limited, practical focus: for example, Exchange and Mart (1868–) was a journal devoted to listing goods for sale and trade/bartering, while Matrimonial Times (1891–) was a paper devoted solely to marriage, containing hundreds of personal advertisements.

ten papers . . . all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co: Gem (1907–40); Magnet (1908–40), each containing a long school story about the boys of Greyfriars School; Modern Boy (1928–39); Triumph (1924, merged into The Champion in 1940); The Champion (1922–55); Wizard (1922–63, merged with Rover); Rover (1922–73); Skipper (1930–41); Hotspur (1933); Adventure (founded 1921, absorbed into Rover in 1961).

Chums and the old B.O.P.: the first iteration of Boys’ Own Paper was a story paper published from 1879 (it eventually closed in 1967), with adventure stories, notes on how to practise nature study, sports and games, puzzles, and essay competitions. It promoted the British Empire, and from the 1890s concentrated on boys from wealthier backgrounds. Chums was started in 1892 as a weekly newspaper for boys, modelled on and in competition with Boys’ Own Paper; its most popular serials included ‘The Iron Pirate’ by Max Pemberton and ‘Treasure Island’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. Chums also sponsored the British Boy Scouts and the British Boys Naval Brigade/‘Sea Scouts’ (a rival to Baden Powell).

58 Eton or Winchester: both are leading ‘public schools’ (i.e. private schools) in England; Eton College was founded in 1440, and Winchester College in 1382.

Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee: Sexton Blake was a fictional detective who first appeared in 1894 in the second issue of the Union Jack Library of High-Class Fiction. Like Sherlock Holmes, he had consulting rooms in Baker Street, but was more of an action hero than his counterpart. His companion is Tinker, a young boy from the streets (together with his bloodhound, Pedro). Nelson Lee, Blake’s rival, created by ‘Maxwell Scott’, the pseudonym of Dr John Staniforth, first appeared in ‘A Dead Man’s Secret’ in The Halfpenny Marvel in 1894. Also a detective, his boy-assistant is ‘Nipper’, a street urchin who is rescued from a life of crime.

The stories . . . every week: neither Orwell’s original assertion nor his later correction in the footnote are exactly right: nearly all the stories were written by one person. Charles Hamilton (1876–1961) used the pen-names ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’ (and occasionally some others) when writing his school stories; he contributed 1,380 of the 1,683 stories in Magnet, the others being the work of some twenty-five substitute writers. After Orwell’s essay had appeared in Horizon, Hamilton, writing as ‘Frank Richards’, wrote a response which was published in Horizon, May 1940.

60 Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes: for Blake, see note to p. 58; ‘Tarzan’ was the name given to the English aristocrat who had been reared by the great apes in the African jungle in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s best-seller Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Sherlock Holmes was the brilliantly cerebral yet humanly eccentric detective in a series of stories and novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) published between 1887 and 1927.

St Winifred’s and Tom Brown’s Schooldays: F. W. Farrar, St Winifred’s, Or The World of School (1862); Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). Both novels are set in public schools.

61 Gunby Hadath, Desmond Coke: John Edward Gunby Hadath (c.1880–1954) was the author of Schoolboy Grit (1913) and other school stories; Desmond Francis Talbot Coke (1879–1931) was the author of The House Prefect (1908) and other books for children.

O.T.C.: Officers’ Training Corps, an army cadet force established in many public schools.

Stalky and Co.: a volume of schoolboy stories published in 1899 by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936).

‘Greyfriars’ is probably taken from Thackeray: the fictional public school in The Newcomes (first published in 1854–5), based on Thackeray’s time at Charterhouse, is called ‘Grey Friars’.

62 a few years ago I was a teacher . . . myself: Orwell taught at The Hawthorns, a small private school for boys, in Hayes, Middlesex, in 1932–3, and at Fray’s College, Uxbridge, Middlesex, for a term in the autumn of 1933.

65 ‘knut’ . . . ‘masher’: the OED defines the former as ‘a fashionable or showy young man’, and the latter as ‘a fop of affected manners and exaggerated style of dress who frequented music-halls and fashionable promenades and who posed as a “lady killer” ’.

Lord Peter Wimsey: the name of the detective in a series of crime novels by Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957).

67 conchy: a conscientious objector, or one who refused military service (more usually spelled ‘conchie’).

71 H. G. Wells . . . Jules Verne: for Wells, see note to p. 24; Jules Verne (1828–1905) was a French novelist, whose books combined adventure with popular science, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

elementary education since 1909: from 1909 the Higher Elementary Schools (for those who could defer school-leaving until the age of 15) were expanded and the curriculum reformed, combining general studies (English Literature and Language, Elementary Mathematics, History, and Geography) with a ‘special side’ responding to local circumstances and the needs of local employers.

74 Sax Rohmer: a character in the novels of Arthur Henry ‘Sarsfield’ Ward (1883–1959), which featured the master-criminal Dr Fu Manchu. Respectable middle-class magazines, tabloids, and comics all spread stories of ruthless Chinese ambitions to destroy the West. After the First World War, cinemas, theatres, novels, and newspapers broadcast visions of the ‘Yellow Peril’ machinating to corrupt white society.

Trotsky . . . of recent controversies: Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) played a leading part in the Russian Revolution (1917) and was a commander of the Bolshevik forces in the ensuing civil war (1918–22); in this period he was a close associate of Lenin and was hailed as one of the founders of the Soviet Union, but he was later driven out of Russia by Stalin, who had him murdered in Mexico in 1940.

76 Ruby M. Ayres . . . written: Ayres (1883–1955) was a popular writer of romantic fiction who wrote an advice column in Oracle for many years.

Navy League: the Navy League was founded in 1895 to encourage interest in, and support for, Britain’s navy as the bulwark of the country’s position in the world.

77 Sapper and Ian Hay: ‘Sapper’ was the pseudonym of Herman Cyril McNeile (1888–1937) who wrote adventure stories featuring his popular hero ‘Bulldog Drummond’. Ian Hay ( John Hay Beith) (1876–1952) was the author of, among other books and plays, widely read accounts of the achievements of British troops in the First World War.

Daily Telegraph and Financial Times: the Daily Telegraph (established in 1855) was, and is, a morning daily newspaper much read by the more conservative members of the middle class; the Financial Times (established in 1888) was, and is, a morning daily paper which focuses on business and finance, exercising considerable influence among the leaders of those worlds.

78 Lord Camrose: William Ewart Berry (1879–1954), knighted in 1929 and made a viscount in 1941, owned a large newspaper empire which included both the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times.

Daily Herald: a daily newspaper, published in London from 1912 to 1964 (although it was weekly during the First World War). It was published in the interest of the labour movement and supported the Labour Party.

79 Chapaeiv: a film made in 1935 and directed by the Vassiliev Brothers; the film glorified the achievements of its Soviet hero.

the Reds are angels . . . the Whites demons: in the civil war which followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, the ‘Reds’ were the Bolshevik or revolutionary forces and the ‘Whites’ their conservative counter-revolutionary opponents.

Inside the Whale

First published in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (London: Gollancz, 1940); not reprinted in Orwell’s lifetime.

80 Henry Miller’s novel, Tropic of Cancer, appeared in 1935: Henry Miller (1891–1980), American writer, lived in Paris in the 1930s, writing about his life there, especially his sexual life, in an autobiographical novel, Tropic of Cancer, which was actually first published in 1934.

T. S. Eliot . . . not . . . in fashion at the moment: T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Herbert Read (1893–68), Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), John dos Passos (1896–1970), and Ezra Pound (1885–1972) were all authors who made their mark in the 1920s as part of the impact of literary ‘modernism’, and so Orwell is treating them as being out of fashion by the mid-1930s.

‘Quand je serai lancé’: roughly, ‘when I shall be launched’ or ‘when I make it’.

81 Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr: Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) published the novel Tarr in book form in 1918.

Black Spring: published in 1936, this consisted of ten autobiographical stories.

82 Raffles or the Sherlock Holmes Stories: Arthur J. Raffles was a British fictional character—a cricketer and gentleman thief—created by E. W. Hornung, who between 1898 and 1909 wrote stories and adaptations about him and his fictional chronicler Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders. (See Orwell’s essay ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, pp. 145–57.) For Sherlock Holmes, see note to p. 60.

Wuthering Heights or The House with the Green Shutters: the first is a novel published by Emily Brontë (1818–48), writing as ‘Ellis Bell’, in 1847; the second a novel by ‘George Douglas’ (pseudonym of George Douglas Brown (1869–1902) ), published in 1901.

84 Geneva language . . . real-politik . . . open: Orwell’s metaphors here contrast, on the one hand, the efforts to establish the rule of morality in international affairs, represented by the Geneva Convention, governing the treatment of prisoners and the wounded in wartime, and the League of Nations, which was based in Geneva, and, on the other, a policy of realpolitik, the unabashed pursuit of national self-interest. In terms of fiction, therefore, ‘Geneva’ stands for the decencies and conventions observed in ‘respectable’ fiction, and ‘real-politik’ for the frank acknowledgement of the determining power of normally unavowed urges.

85 Voyage au Bout de la Nuit: a novel published in 1932 by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (in English translation in 1934).

Walt Whitman: the poet Walt Whitman (1819–92) was best known for his collection Leaves of Grass which he revised and augmented at intervals between 1855 and 1892.

86 Mark Twain’s Mississippi . . . Bret Harte’s Western gold-miners: Mark Twain was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), American novelist and humorist, who wrote many stories about life on the Mississippi, the best known being Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Bret Harte (1836–1902), American short story writer, published The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches in 1870.

86 Little Women, Helen’s Babies and Riding Down from Bangor: the first, published in 1869, was a novel by Louisa M. Alcott (1832–88); the second, published in 1876, was by John Habberton (1842–1921); the third was an American folk song, about which Orwell wrote in ‘Riding Down from Bangor’, Tribune, 22 November 1946.

Bedaux belts: this refers to a method, pioneered by the American engineer Charles Bedaux (1887–1944), for speeding up industrial production by setting output targets for individual workers.

87 Max and the White Phagocytes: the title of a book by Miller, published in 1938.

88 All Quiet . . . Somme: these were all books about the war, mostly published several years afterwards. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929); Le Feu by Henri Barbusse (1916); A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929); Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington (1929); Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves (1929); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon (1930); A Subaltern on the Somme by ‘Mark VII’, pseudonym of Max Plowman (1927).

The Booster: a monthly magazine that ran from 1937 to 1939; Miller was one of the group of writers who edited it.

89 Meredith’s . . . Proserpine: George Meredith’s ‘Love in a Valley’ was published in his Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of the Earth in 1883; ‘Garden of Proserpine’, by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), appeared in his Poems and Ballads, published in 1866.

Housman . . . ‘With rue . . . roses fade’: A. E. Housman (1859–1936), poet and classical scholar, published A Shropshire Lad in 1896, from which the two quoted stanzas are taken.

90 Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson: Richard Jefferies (1848–87), writer and naturalist, celebrated rural England; William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) wrote extensively about the natural world in fiction and other genres.

Grantchester: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ was a poem by Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) first published in 1912, and republished in 1914 and Other Poems (1915). It includes the lines: ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? | And is there honey still for tea?’

Strephon or Corydon: the name of the shepherd whose lament for his lost Urania forms the opening of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. ‘Strephon’ (or ‘Corydon’) was thereafter adopted as a conventional name for a rustic or pastoral lover.

Sheila Kaye-Smith: Kaye-Smith (1887–1956), novelist, set a sequence of novels (published between 1908 and 1923) in rural Sussex.

91 Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy: John Masefield (1878–1967), poet and novelist, published Everlasting Mercy in 1911, a long narrative poem telling of the fall and redemption of its central character, Saul Kane.

Theocritus: a Greek poet of the early third century bc; his Idylls celebrate the life of shepherds and rustics, becoming a source for many later versions of pastoral.

The sun burns . . . but not for thee: these passages are all from Housman, A Shropshire Lad.

93 Auden–Spender group: W. H. Auden (1907–73), Stephen Spender (1909–95), Louis MacNeice (1907–63), and Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–72), young poets who were fashionable in the 1930s, were sometimes referred to collectively as ‘the Auden gang’ or ‘MacSpaunday’.

E. M. Forster: Edward Morgan Forster (1879–1970), novelist, published four novels by 1910, and then his masterpiece, A Passage to India, in 1924. (Contrary to the implication of Orwell’s phrase, Forster had begun the novel before the war.)

Yeats: the best work of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and dramatist, is often thought to fall into two main phases: his romantic and mythological ‘Celtic’ poems in the years before 1914, and the darker, more concentrated poems of his ‘late’ period from the mid-1920s to his death.

Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells, Norman Douglas: George Moore (1852–1933) was an Irish novelist whose major works were published between 1883 and 1914; most of the novels by the Polish-born Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) were published between 1895 and 1915; Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), novelist, published a sequence of novels between 1902 and 1918, with one significant later success in Riceyman Steps (1923); Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), writer in various genres, published many novels between 1895 and 1916, plus The World of William Clissold in 1926; Norman Douglas (1898–1952), travel writer and novelist, fits Orwell’s description slightly less well than the others, publishing his one successful novel, South Wind, in 1917.

Somerset Maugham: William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), novelist and playwright, published seven novels between 1897 and 1948, as well as numerous works in other genres.

Squire ruled the London Mercury: Sir John Collings Squire (1884–1958) was the founding editor of the anti-modernist literary periodical, the London Mercury, from 1919 to 1934.

Gibbs and Walpole: Philip Gibbs (1877–1967) and Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) were both immensely popular novelists in the interwar years.

94 Hardy . . . the Dynasts: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was a novelist and poet; The Dynasts, a vast ‘epic drama’ in verse and poetic prose, appeared in three volumes 1904–8.

Sweeny Agonistes: Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes (1932) is a fragment of verse-drama satirically addressing working-class life.

94 Antonine Emperor: the Antonines were four Roman emperors who ruled between ad 138 and 192: Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Commodus. Orwell implies that they carried out the defence of the empire with less than full conviction.

the Etruscans: a people who lived in Etruria in central Italy in pre-Roman times.

95 Punch: Punch, or the London Charivari was a weekly humorous magazine that ran from 1841 to 2002.

96 taedium vitae: weariness of life.

Told by an Idiot: a novel published in 1923 by Rose Macaulay (1881–1958).

97 Of Human Bondage: Somerset Maugham’s most successful novel, published in 1915; the book enjoyed a higher reputation in Orwell’s time than it has subsequently.

Modern Poetry: Louis MacNeice’s Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay was published in 1938.

New Signatures: an anthology of the work of the ‘new’ poets of the Auden generation edited by Michael Roberts in 1932.

98 Isherwood . . . Philip Henderson: Christopher Isherwood (1904–86), novelist and scriptwriter, was a collaborator of Auden’s; John Lehmann (1907–87), poet and editor, was particularly notable for his editing of volumes of New Writing 1936–41; Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908–92), novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist, biographer, is best known for his children’s book The Fair to Middling (1959), also briefly a member of the Communist Party; Edward Upward (1903–2009), novelist, was a close friend of Isherwood, and for a while a member of the Communist Party; Alec Brown (1900–62) was a translator and author whose early work, like The Honest Bounder (1927), grappled with antebellum Europe from a left-wing perspective; Philip Henderson (1906–77), man of letters and publisher, was assistant editor of Everyman’s Library from 1929 to 1932.

‘a sort of gutless Kipling’: this description appears in The Road to Wigan Pier (Oxford World’s Classics, 2021), CW v. 170.

Kipling’s ‘ If’:  ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was published in 1910.

Newbolt’s Play Up . . . Game!: these lines are from Sir Henry Newbolt’s (1862–1938) much-anthologized poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (1897).

‘You’re leaving . . . it’s up to you boys’: this is the opening line of ‘Poem No. 10’ in Day-Lewis’s The Magnetic Mountain (1933).

99 (Spender, Trial of a Judge): Spender’s Trial of a Judge (1938) is a five-act play in verse allegorizing conditions in Nazi Germany.

Upward . . . a writer must either be actively ‘Left’ or write badly: a view implicit in, for example, Upward’s political allegory Journey to the Border (1938).

100 Borkenau . . . The Communist International: Franz Borkenau (1900–57) was an Austrian writer and publicist; having been an active agent of the Communist Party of Germany from 1921 to 1929, he resigned from Comintern and the KPD, repulsed by the excesses of Stalinism. His book The Communist International (London: Faber, 1938) is a history of non-Russian communism. The Third International (1919–43), also known as The Communist International, had been founded by Lenin to promote the ideals of Communism worldwide.

101 Popular Front: a broad coalition of left-wing or anti-Fascist parties, especially in the years 1935–9.

Left Book Club: a publishing venture founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936 to commission and make available books that analysed current affairs from a left-wing perspective; it was dissolved in 1948.

Churchill . . . Daily Worker: in the 1930s Winston Churchill was a somewhat maverick Tory who opposed the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler; the Daily Worker was the Communist newspaper which could, despite its great hostility to Churchill on other grounds, at least have approved of his anti-Fascist stance.

102 Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis: Evelyn Waugh (1903–66), novelist, converted to Catholicism in 1930; Christopher Hollis (1902–77), schoolmaster, university teacher, author, and Conservative politician, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1924.

Anglo-Catholicism . . .Trotskyism: ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ was a movement within the Anglican Church, particularly influential in the 1930s and 1940s, which emphasized continuity with the early Church rather than the Protestant repudiation of Rome; Trotskyism referred to those who followed Trotsky’s insistence on the continued priority of ‘permanent revolution’ on an international scale rather than the Stalinist orthodoxy of ‘Socialism in one country’. Orwell’s comparison suggests that both movements were ways for their respective adherents to believe they were remaining faithful to an earlier, purer inspiration than that now considered the ruling orthodoxy.

103 Tomorrow . . . the boring meeting: these lines are quoted from the 1937 pamphlet publication of Auden’s poem ‘Spain’; when Auden reprinted the poem in book form in Another Time, he altered the line about the ‘necessary’ murder. For the possible relations between this revision and Orwell’s repeated criticism of Auden, see Davison’s note in CW xii. 114.

Enemies of Promise: Cyril Connolly (1903–74), Orwell’s contemporary at prep school and Eton and a lifelong friend, published this partly autobiographical study in 1938.

104 Were I to deduce . . . their development: the passage occurs in chapter 24, ‘Vale’.

purge-and-Ogpu: OGPU was the acronym of the early security and political police of the Soviet Union, the forerunner of the KGB. It was responsible for the ‘corrective’ labour camps, the surveillance of the population, implementation of the forced collectivization of agriculture and the deportation of kulaks (wealthy peasants), and the staging of show trials of ‘enemies of the people’.

104 first Five-Year Plan: adopted by the Soviet Union in October 1928, this set ambitious targets to increase the production of industrial and agricultural commodities, to develop heavy industry and collectivize agriculture, and to ‘build socialism’. It was ruthlessly implemented by Stalin.

106 the subject of war: this questionnaire has not been identified.

107 The Scholar Gypsy . . . final stanza: Matthew Arnold’s long poem ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ was published in 1853; Orwell is referring to the final stanza in which the scholar-gypsy is urged to flee from contact with modern life in the way the ancient ‘Tyrian trader’ fled from the worldly Greeks. Orwell characterizes the simile as ‘defeatist’, though the stanza’s injunction to the scholar-gypsy (not quoted by Orwell) to withdraw from contact in order to preserve ‘thy glad perennial youth’ could equally be read in a more positive light.

Barries and Deepings and Dells: J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), Warwick Deeping (1877–1950), and Ethel M. Dell (1881–1939) were all prolific and immensely popular writers in the interwar years.

diaries of Anais Nin . . . have not been published: Anaïs Nin (1903–77), novelist and diarist, was at one point Miller’s lover; her diaries were eventually published in the last decade of her life.

The Dream of Philip the Second: Huxley’s essay ‘Meditation on El Greco’ was published in his collection Music at Night in 1931.

108 Herman Melville: Melville (1819–91), American novelist, published Moby Dick, or The Whale in 1851.

‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’: from Job 13:15. The continuation of the verse, not quoted by Orwell, hits a rather less self-abnegating note: ‘But I will maintain mine own ways before Him’.

109 Upward . . . Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint: Edward Upward, ‘Sketch of a Marxist Interpretation of Literature’, in C. Day-Lewis (ed.), The Mind in Chains (1937), a collection of essays by left-wing writers.

110 Edgar Allan Poe: Poe (1809–49), American writer, published a number of morbid or Gothic tales in the 1840s, of which the three mentioned by Orwell are among the better- known.

Julian Green’s Minuit: Julien [sic] Green (1900–98) was born in Paris to American parents and became a prolific novelist in French; Minuit (Midnight) was published in 1936.

111 They sang of . . . the human heritage: the passage is quoted in MacNeice, Modern Poetry, 15.

Ten years later . . . tidying it up: MacNeice, Modern Poetry, 13.

Prufrock . . . Hindenburg Line: T. S. Eliot’s first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in June 1917. Several Allied assaults were made in 1917 on the German defensive system known as ‘the Hindenburg line’, though a final breakthrough was not achieved until September 1918.

The First Hundred Thousand . . . Boys in the Trenches: Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand, Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of ‘K(I)’ (1915); Horatio Bottomley (1860–1933), described as ‘politician, entrepreneur, and swindler’, founder of the weekly newspaper John Bull, published Letters to the Boys in the Trenches early in the war.

113 Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel: Durrell (1912–90), novelist, poet, and travel writer, had published The Black Book in Paris in 1938, a work heavily influenced by Henry Miller; he later became best-known for his Alexandria Quartet (1957–60). Fraenkel (1896–1957) had a lengthy correspondence with Miller, published in 1939 as Correspondence Called Hamlet.

managed to prevent me from getting hold of it: Miller’s novel, Tropic of Capricorn, was published in France in 1939, but was banned for obscenity in the UK and the USA.

Obelisk Press: founded in Paris by Jack Kahane (1887–1939), the Obelisk Press published works considered too unpopular or too risky by mainstream publishers, including books by Miller, Cyril Connolly, James Joyce, and Lawrence Durrell.

Wells, Hitler and the World State

First published in Horizon (August 1941); reprinted in Critical Essays.

115 Guide to the New World: Wells collected a series of his newspaper articles and published them under the title Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1941); the quotations are from pp. 121, 27, and 31–2 respectively.

116 Sankey Declaration . . . tendency: John, Viscount Sankey was a leading judge and, from 1929 to 1935, Lord Chancellor; in 1940 he chaired a committee that drew up a ‘Declaration of Rights’, a precursor to the later ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ sponsored by the United Nations.

117 Left Book Club . . . Scotland Yard . . . Peace Pledge Union . . . the Navy: for the Left Book Club, see note to p. 101; Scotland Yard was the London headquarters of the police; the Peace Pledge Union was a pacifist campaigning organization that supported conscientious objectors and worked to bring an end to war; the Royal Navy was at this date still believed to be the strongest in the world and Britain’s main line of defence. Orwell’s point, of course (one he emphasized at every opportunity), is that the high principles of the two ‘progressive’ organizations are only possible because they benefit from the protection of the police and armed forces.

Trotsky, Rauschning, Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler: for Trotsky, see note to p. 74; Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982), German writer of Nazi propaganda; Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), German theorist of Aryan racial superiority; Ignazio Silone (1900–78), Italian novelist and political writer; Franz Borkenau (1900–57), Austrian sociologist and political writer, admired by Orwell, who reviewed several of his books; Arthur Koestler (1905–83) was a Hungarian-born writer who moved from ardent Communism to ardent anti-Communism, best-known for Darkness at Noon (1940); see Orwell’s essay ‘Arthur Koestler’ (1944), CW xvi. 391–402.

117 Outline of History: H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, subtitled either ‘The Whole Story of Man’ or ‘Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind’, first appeared in an illustrated version of twenty-four fortnightly instalments beginning in November 1919, and was published as a single volume in 1920.

118 controversy . . . between Wells and Churchill . . . at the time of the Russian Revolution: following a visit to Soviet Russia, Wells had written an article that was partly sympathetic to the ambitions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Churchill, a confirmed anti-Bolshevik, attacked Wells in the pages of the Daily Express for his deluded views. See Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 327–8.

Jacobite restoration: in the decades after James II had been forced to flee the country in 1688, those who attempted to restore the Stuarts to the throne were known as ‘Jacobites’ (from ‘Jacobus’, Latin form of James).

119 Horace: Latin poet of the first century bc, celebrated above all for his odes and satires.

the Wright brothers . . . fifty-nine seconds: in December 1903 in North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first manned, powered flights in a heavier-than-air craft, the second flight lasting fifty-nine seconds.

120 The Iron Heel . . . Brave New World . . .The Shape of Things to Come: The Iron Heel was a dystopian novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908; Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, appeared in 1932; Wells published The Shape of Things to Come, a work of scientific and political speculation, in 1933.

The Art of Donald McGill

First published in Horizon (September 1941); reprinted in Critical Essays.

121 Woolworth’s: the name of a chain of high-street stores, found throughout Britain (the first opened in 1909), selling a wide variety of everyday items at low prices; the business declined in the later part of the twentieth century and finally closed in 2009.

Who Donald McGill is, I do not know: Donald McGill (1875–1962) was the real name of the designer; Orwell may have been cautious here following his remarks in ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ about the existence of ‘Frank Richards’.

122 Max Millerish style: Max Miller (1895–1963) was a music-hall comedian, often billed as ‘the Cheekie Chappie’.

124 the ‘knut’ or ‘masher’: see note to p. 65.

A.R.P.: Air Raid Precautions. This was the title of a committee, started in 1924, becoming a department of the Home Office in 1935, concerned with measures to protect the civilian population from aerial bombardment. During the Second World War it was responsible for such matters as gas masks, the building of air raid shelters, evacuations of people, and blackout requirements.

125 Anderson shelter: small air-raid shelters built in the gardens of individual houses at the instigation of Sir John Anderson (1882–1958), who was the minister with responsibility for civil defence in 1938–9 and, from the outbreak of war, Home Secretary.

Esquire . . . La Vie Parisienne: Esquire (1933– ) was, and is, an American monthly magazine for men featuring a sophisticated style and pictures of scantily clad young women, cultivating an image of affluence and refined taste. La Vie parisienne, a French weekly magazine published between 1863 and 1970, was a mildly risqué erotic publication, combining short stories, veiled gossip, fashion banter, and comment with art nouveau/art deco style cartoons and full-page illustrations.

127 Sunday Dispatch: a popular weekly newspaper published between 1801 and 1961; from December 1939 to July 1940 it provided a page of jokes written by Max Miller. Miller was renowned for risqué jokes and innuendo on stage: much of his material was considered too ‘blue’ for broadcasting.

128 the Sancho Panza view of life: Sancho Panza is Don Quixote’s comic but loyal retainer in Cervantes’s famous romance.

Miss Rebecca West: Rebecca West (adopted name of Cicely Isabel Fairchild) (1892–1983) was a journalist, writer, and critic.

Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus, Holmes and Watson: these pairs of characters figure in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet; a whole series of ‘Jeeves’ novels by P. G. Wodehouse; Joyce’s Ulyssses; and the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stories by Conan Doyle respectively.

129 blood, toil, tears and sweat: in addressing the House of Commons on 13 May 1940, shortly after having become prime minister, Winston Churchill declared: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” ’

130 there is a just man . . . die before thy time: Ecclesiastes 7:15–17.

Rudyard Kipling

First published in Horizon (February 1942); reprinted in Critical Essays.

131 this selection of Kipling’s poetry: Orwell’s essay takes as its starting point T. S. Eliot’s edition of A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, published in December 1941.

131 ‘Recessional’: Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’ was published in 1897, marking Queen Victoria’s jubilee.

132 pukka sahib: a term used in India to refer to a genuine or correct ‘master’ or member of the (white) ruling caste.

hubris: ‘in Greek tragedy, excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis’ (OED).

133 The Light that Failed: Kipling’s autobiographical novel was published in 1890.

a Gatling gun: patented by R. J. Gatling in 1862, this was a multi-barrel weapon, the precursor of the later machine-gun.

the Japanese: Japanese forces invaded and largely overran Malaya in early 1942.

‘box-wallah’: originally a term used to describe small-scale travelling merchant peddlers in India, so called because of the large boxes in which they carried their merchandise; the term could be generalized to indicate anyone engaged in commercial activity.

134 ‘making mock . . . while you sleep’: a line from Kipling’s poem ‘Tommy’, first published in the Scots Observer in 1890, collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892.

the highbrow and the blimp: the terms ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, to designate intellectual levels, came into general currency in the 1920s; Colonel Blimp was ‘a pompous, obese, elderly character invented by cartoonist David Low’ (OED) in the late 1930s, though use of the noun to refer to complacent, reactionary figures may have predated that.

Indian Civil Servant: until 1947, India was largely administered by a small cadre of British officials recruited into the Indian Civil Service (ICS) by competitive examination.

E.M. Forster: see note to p. 93; Forster was critical of aspects of imperial rule and sympathetic to Indian demands for independence.

135 Cecil Rhodes: Rhodes (1853–1902), South African politician and businessman, was an ardent advocate of the expansion of British imperialism, particularly in Africa.

Blackwood’s: Blackwood’s Magazine was a monthly periodical, founded in 1817 as a Tory rival to the Whig Edinburgh Review; in the course of the nineteenth century it published many leading literary figures, but by the period to which Orwell refers, the journal had become a byword for traditionalist or conservative opinions.

‘flannelled fools . . . oafs at the goal’: lines from Kipling’s poem ‘The Islanders’ (1902).

Eton and Harrow . . . Cup-Tie Final: the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow, two leading public schools, was held at Lord’s cricket ground in London and was a highlight of the upper classes’ social season; the ‘Cup Final’ was the culminating match of association football’s knockout competition, held at Wembley stadium in London, which traditionally provided a grand ‘day out’ for the (largely working-class) supporters of the two teams.

‘Stellenbosch’: the title of Kipling’s poem, published in 1903, refers to the name of a town in South Africa; a note to the poem says: ‘The more notoriously incompetent commanders used to be sent to the town of Stellenbosch, which name presently became a verb.’

136 Barrack-Room Ballads: a volume of poems, largely about the ordinary British soldier in India, published in 1892.

So it’s knock out your pipes . . . married to a whore: the stanzas are from ‘Follow Me ’Ome’ and ‘The Sergeant’s Weddin’ ’ respectively.

137 ‘What have I done . . . my England?’: a line from ‘For England’s sake’, by W. E. Henley (1849–1903), another enthusiast for empire.

‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’: the phrase occurs in the story ‘Drums of the Fore and Aft’, in Wee Willie Winkie (1890).

‘I came to realise . . . torments he endured’: from Kipling’s autobiographical fragment, Something of Myself, published in 1937.

I ’eard . . . it was me!: from Kipling’s poem ‘That Day’, first published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895, and collected in The Seven Seas (1896).

An’ now . . . stiff an’ slow: from Kipling’s ‘The ’eathen’ (or in some later versions ‘The Four Guardsmen’), first published in McClure’s Magazine, September 1896, then collected in The Seven Seas.

138 ‘Forward the Light Brigade!’ . . . someone had blundered: from Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854).

Edmund Wilson . . . is just about to publish: Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) American author and critic, discussed Kipling in his essay collection The Wound and the Bow (1941); Orwell reviewed the book in The Observer, 10 May 1942.

139 Moore . . . Gissing . . . Hardy: see notes to pp. 93, 11, and 94.

Private Ortheris and Mrs Hauksbee: Private Ortheris, a small, tough cockney, is one of ‘the Soldiers Three’ introduced in the story ‘The Three Musketeers’ (1888), and reappearing in several later stories. Mrs Hauksbee is a fictional character recurring in several short stories by Kipling, representing ‘the clever woman of the ruling classes’, the administrative elite of the British in India.

‘robots’ . . . laid hands on him: the word ‘robot’ was thought to have been introduced into general use by the Czech novelist and playwright Karel Čapek (1890–1938).

East is East . . . the Dane-geld: these lines appear in the following poems by Kipling: ‘The Ballad of East and West’; ‘The White Man’s Burden’; ‘The English Flag’; ‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’; ‘Mandalay’; ‘Dane-geld’.

‘killing Kruger with your mouth’: the line occurs in Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, written in response to the Boer War. Paul Kruger (1825–1904) was the president of the Transvaal and the political leader of the Boers.

140 the word ‘Huns’ for Germans: according to the OED, the derogatory use of ‘Hun’ for ‘German’ dated from the nineteenth century; Kipling first used it in 1902.

‘For I’m to be . . . Queen o’ the May’: from Tennyson’s poem ‘The May-Queen’ (1832).

New Statesman: a left-wing weekly, founded in 1913, which was particularly influential in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Although Orwell published in it from time to time, he crossed swords with the paper, and with its editor, Kingsley Martin, frequently citing it as the epitome of arrogant, bien pensant, left-wing opinion.

the political attitude implied in The Islanders: when published in The Times, 4 January 1902, ‘The Islanders’ generated considerable controversy. Prefaced by snippets of prose purporting to contrast the lack of training and preparation of the soldiers sent to fight in South Africa with the enthusiastic preparations for the coming season’s shooting on the game moors, the poem’s fury at the indifference shown to the fate of the common soldier was read as an affront to established values.

141 ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’: both poems, written in the earthy vernacular of the British common soldier of the period, were first published in 1890 and subsequently in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). In the first, an Indian water-carrier saves the life of the narrating soldier after he’s wounded in battle, only for the Indian then to be shot and killed; the soldier regrets the abuse he formerly showered on Gunga Din, acknowledging that he was the better man of the two. In the second, the execution of a British soldier in India for murder is staged as a cautionary spectacle, with his whole regiment paraded to watch the event.

For the wind . . . back to Mandalay!: from ‘Mandalay’, written and first published in 1890, and first collected in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses in 1892. Set in colonial Burma, its protagonist is a cockney working-class soldier, who, back in grey, gloomy London, is recalling feeling free in Burma, and having a Burmese girlfriend, who is now unattainably far away.

‘Felix Randal’ . . . ‘When icicles hang by the wall’: from, respectively, Hopkins’s poem and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V scene ii.

Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . as a novelist: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), American novelist, achieved worldwide fame with Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

‘The Bridge of Sighs’ . . . ‘Casabianca’: poems by Thomas Hood, Charles Kingsley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Bret Harte, Charles Wolfe, Leigh Hunt, Sidney Dobell, and Felicia Hemans respectively.

142 Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ . . . his broadcast speeches: in a broadcast of 3 May 1941, Winston Churchill quoted the last two stanzas of the poem ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61); it is not clear why Orwell refers to the title of the poem as ‘Endeavour’.

‘When all the World is Young, Lad’: the opening line of a poem by Charles Kingsley, entitled ‘Young and Old’, published in The Water Babies in 1863.

143 White hands . . . who travels alone: from Kipling’s ‘The Winners’. (In both the 1942 and 1946 versions of this essay, Orwell slightly misquoted the lines; they have been corrected here.)

‘the gods of the copybook headings’ . . . always return: from ‘The God of the Copybook Headings’ (1919).

144 épater les bourgeois: ‘to shock the bourgeoisie [the comfortable and respectable middle class]’; the phrase became a unifying cry for the French Decadent poets of the late nineteenth century, notably Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.

Wilde’s epigrams . . . cracker-mottoes . . . Man and Superman: Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Irish dramatist and wit, was famous for his epigrams. Man and Superman (1905) is a play by the Irish dramatist and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), to which a collection of ‘Maxims’ is appended.

Raffles and Miss Blandish

First published in Horizon (October 1944); reprinted in Critical Essays.

145 Raffles . . . one of the best-known characters in English fiction: Raffles was the central character in a sequence of books by the English novelist E. W. Hornung (1866–1921), beginning with The Amateur Cracksman (1899).

No Orchids for Miss Blandish: this was the first book, published in 1939, by ‘James Hadley Chase’ (pseudonym of René Brabazon Raymond (1906–85) ).

Arsène Lupin: a fictional ‘gentleman-burglar’ and master of disguise created in 1905 by Maurice Leblanc; depicted as a force for good operating on the wrong side of the law, he displayed similarities with Raffles, the archetypal gentleman thief.

Bunny: Raffles’s admiring assistant.

146 Charles Peace: Charles Peace (1832–79) was executed for murder.

Zingari blazer: I Zingari was (and is) the name of a socially exclusive English cricket club, founded in 1845, which has no home ground and so travels to all its matches (from Zingari, Italian for Gypsies).

Larwood . . . practised body-line bowling . . . ‘not cricket’: Harold Larwood (1904–95) was an English fast bowler, who on the tour of 1932–3 was ordered by his captain, Douglas Jardine, to bowl at the body of the Australian batsmen (rather than at the wicket), largely as a way of curbing the phenomenal run-scoring exploits of the leading Australian batsman, Donald Bradman. This caused a major furore, always referred to as ‘the bodyline controversy’.

146 cricket . . . is predominantly an upper-class game: this is one of Orwell’s wilder generalizations: cricket was, and is, played, at all levels of English society, with strong roots in the working class, especially in the north of England.

Great Expectations or Le Rouge et le Noir: Dickens’s Great Expectations was first published in All the Year Round between 1860 and 1861; Le Rouge et le Noir is the title of a novel published in 1830 by ‘Stendhal’ (psuedonym of Henri Beyle, 1783–1842).

147 Yes, a trooper . . . six horses!: the lines are from ‘Gentlemen Rankers’, included in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). Orwell misquotes: the (single) line reads: ‘Yes, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses’. A ‘ranker’ is a soldier in the ranks, i.e a private soldier not an officer; a ‘gentleman ranker’ attracted comment because such a person would normally have been expected to be an officer.

Piccadilly and the M.C.C.: Raffles lives in the Albany, an exclusive set of apartments in Piccadilly in central London (the apartments are sometimes known as ‘Paradise in Piccadilly’). The MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) is a private club with restricted membership, located at Lord’s cricket ground in London, which at the time was responsible for the rules of the game and much else.

148 John Thorndyke . . . Max Carrados: Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke is a fictional detective created in 1907 by R. Austin Freeman. He is described as a ‘medical jurispractitioner’— originally a medical doctor, he turned to the Bar and became what would now be termed a ‘forensic scientist’, subordinating everything to the pathological and scientific evidence. Freeman popularized ‘the inverted detective story’ where the criminal act is described in the exposition, and the interest lies in Thorndyke’s deciphering of it. Max Carrados is a fictional blind detective created by Ernest Bramah, detecting invisible clues with his heightened acute senses of touch and hearing. First published in 1914, the stories often appeared alongside (and were billed higher than) the Sherlock Holmes stories in Strand Magazine. See Rosemary Herbert, Whodunit?: A Who’s Who in Crime and Mystery Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 71, 12.

Peter Wimsey: see note to p. 65.

149 William Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary: William Faulkner (1897–1962), American novelist, published Sanctuary in 1931; it was the first of his novels to be commercially successful and it includes a graphic description of a violent rape.

récit: the narrative or descriptive aspect of a novel written in the authorial voice, as opposed to direct-speech dialogue which is given in the voices of the characters.

151 vae victis: ‘woe to the vanquished’.

152 Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief: a novel by James Hadley Chase, banned in 1942, full of sadistic sex and violence, about a woman forced into prostitution.

He Won’t Need It Now: a novel by James Hadley Chase, published in 1939, set in the gangster world of New York City and involving calculatedly nasty episodes of violence.

153 Al Capone . . . Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe: Al Capone (1899–1947) was an Italian-born US gangster who controlled a large underworld empire; Henry Ford (1863–1947), was a successful US businessman who founded the Ford Motor Co.; Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), Georgia-born Soviet political leader, was effectively dictator of the Soviet Union from 1928 until his death; Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe (1865–1922), was founder and owner of a large newspaper empire, including the Daily Mail.

Twain . . . Slade . . . Western desperadoes generally: for Mark Twain, see note to p. 86; Joseph Alfred ‘Jack’ Slade (1831–64), was a stagecoach and Pony Express superintendent of the American West and the archetype of the deadly Western gunslinger.

Wallace . . . The Orator . . . Mr J. G. Reeder stories: Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), prolific British novelist and playwright, enjoyed huge commercial success with his thrillers. The Orator (1928) is a collection of short stories featuring Scotland Yard detective O. Rater. The eponymous detective in the J. G. Reeder stories (1924–32) is a harmless-looking, easily under-estimated figure who works in the Public Prosecutor’s office.

154 Carlyle for the masses: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish writer, historian, and critic, wrote admiringly about Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great, and strong leaders generally. Orwell constantly attacked him for what he called, not altogether fairly, his ‘power-worship’.

155 Shaw’s admiration for dictators: in the interwar period Shaw expressed considerable enthusiasm for Mussolini and was not always as critical of Stalin as Orwell would have wished.

Carlyle, Creasy . . . German militarism: although it can hardly be said that Carlyle ‘bowed down before German militarism’, he took Prussia’s side in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 and received an honour from Bismarck for doing so. E. S. Creasy (1812–78), British historian best known for Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1852), wrote admiringly about military power.

156 Trollope’s novels . . . nineteenth-century capitalism: many of Trollope’s best-known novels are set in a rural and ecclesiastical world far removed from urban, industrial capitalism; Orwell is implying that they constituted a form of ‘daydream appropriate to a [capitalist] age’.

Quislingism: see note to p. 161.

Slim and Fenner . . . the G.P.U. and the Gestapo: Slim and Fenner are characters in No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Slim Grisson is the leader of a gang in Kansas City who falls for Miss Blandish, whom the gang had kidnapped and molested; Dave Fenner is the private detective hired by the Blandish family secretary, Mr Lucie, to help rescue Miss Blandish. The GPU and the Gestapo were the Russian and German secret police respectively.

156 Jack Dempsey: Dempsey (1895–1983), American professional boxer and heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926, was known for his aggressive fighting style and exceptional punching power.

Lord Nuffield: William Richard Morris (1877–1963), an English motor manufacturer and philanthropist who founded Morris Motors, was ennobled as Viscount Nuffield in 1938.

Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln (1809–65), sixteenth President of the United States, was widely revered among liberals across the world for his leading part in the abolition of slavery in the USA.

157 Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis; Niccolò Macchiavelli (1469–1527), author of The Prince, is sometimes referred to as ‘the founder of political science’. Orwell is suggesting that acceptance of the sovereignty of the human drives to sex and power had now become part of everyday life.

In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse

First published in The Windmill ( July 1945); republished in Critical Essays. The Windmill, an irregularly published periodical that appeared between 1944 and 1948, was edited by Reginald Moore and ‘Edward Lane’, the pseudonym of novelist and critic Kay Dick.

158 P. G. Wodehouse: P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), British comic novelist, dramatist, and scriptwriter, had enjoyed great commercial success in the interwar years, particularly for his series of stories about Bertie Wooster, an incompetent but endearing young aristocrat, and his self-effacing yet omnicompetent manservant, Jeeves.

Wodehouse . . . had agreed to do some broadcasts . . . an interview with Harry Flannery: the interview with Flannery was broadcast from Berlin to the United States on 27 June 1941; then five talks by Wodehouse were recorded and broadcast to both Britain and the USA in early August. At the time Orwell was writing, there was a lack of definite information about exactly what Wodehouse had done—hence Orwell’s ‘seems’.

Saturday Evening Post . . . in the internment camp: the Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, a widely circulating American weekly magazine, published thirty-seven of Wodehouse’s short stories and sixteen of his serialized novels.

159 uproar in England: Wodehouse was widely vilified as a ‘traitor’; Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, orchestrated the official attack, which was taken up in several newspapers.

‘worshipping the Führer’: William Connor wrote a regular column in the Daily Mirror, at the time the most popular daily paper, under the name of ‘Cassandra’.

161 the nature of Quislingism: Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945) was the Norwegian politician who led the pro-Nazi puppet government in Norway during the war; Ezra Pound (see note to p. 80) was an admirer of Mussolini and made broadcasts on Italian radio during the Second World War; John Amery (1912–45) was an extreme right-wing politician and admirer of Hitler, who made anti-British broadcasts from Germany during the war; he was executed for treason in 1945.

162 O. Henry: ‘Oliver Henry’, or ‘O. Henry’, was the pen-name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), American short-story writer.

in propria persona: ‘in his own person or his own name’—i.e. as himself.

163 Dulwich: Dulwich College, founded in 1619, was (and is) a well-known public school, situated in south-east London.

164 Julien Sorel to Stendhal: for Stendhal, see note to p. 146; Julien Sorel is the main character in his novel Le Rouge et le Noir.

165 Ian Hay: see note to p. 77.

the blasphemies of Baudelaire or James Joyce: Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), French poet, and James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist, had both been brought up as Catholics before using aspects of their Catholic heritage for what the orthodox considered profane purposes.

166 ‘knut’: see note to p. 65.

167 back to Fielding: Henry Fielding (1707–54), English novelist, was best known for his picaresque novel Tom Jones (1749).

Prometheus . . . Greek mythology: in Greek mythology, Prometheus, one of the Titans, was chained by Zeus to a rock, where an eagle preyed on his liver all day.

Barry Pain, Jerome K. Jerome, W. W. Jacobs, Kipling and F. Anstey: Barry Pain (1864–1928) was an English journalist and humorous writer best known for his ‘Eliza’ stories; Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927), comic novelist, is best known for Three Men in a Boat (1889); W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943) was the author of humorous novels, chiefly about workers in coastal communities; for Kipling, see note to p. 98; ‘F. Anstey’ (Thomas Henry Guthrie, 1856–1934) was an English humorous writer who contributed to Punch over many years.

Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon: Lardner (1885–1933) was a short-story writer notable for his command of American vernacular speech; Runyon (1884–1946) was a journalist and short-story writer, best known for his collection Guys and Dolls, the basis of a later hit musical.

168 Abyssinia, Spain, China, Austria, Czechoslovakia . . . ‘not our business’: the Italians under Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936; the right-wing nationalist army under Franco invaded Spain in 1936; the Japanese under a militaristic regime invaded China in 1937; Germany under Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939.

hardly any fighting . . . Chamberlain government: the period of comparative inaction between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the German attacks of May 1940 was known as ‘the phoney war’. Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) was the British prime minister 1937–40; as the war began to go badly for Britain, he was replaced in May 1940 by his leading critic, Winston Churchill.

169 Goebbels announced that Britain was to be ‘reduced to degradation and poverty’: (Paul) Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), was the Nazi Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945; his statement was published on 7 July 1940, the second day of the ‘Plymouth Blitz’, in the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, declaring ‘We will bring to England a revolution of blood and tears which as a punishment will reduce the British population to degradation and poverty.’

if they could polish Russia off quickly . . . the Americans might never intervene: Germany violated the Russo-German Pact, signed in August 1939, by invading the USSR in June 1941; the USA entered the war against Germany in December 1941.

170 Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts . . . ‘Cassandra’s’ articles . . . flourishing at that time: John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984), English novelist, journalist, and playwright, gave an influential series of radio talks in a homely style in 1940 under the title ‘Britain Speaks’; his broadcasts were thought to have made a significant contribution to strengthening the morale and determination of the civilian population. For ‘Casssandra’, see note to p. 159.

Beaverbrook: William Maxwell Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964), was a Canadian-born British financier, newspaper baron (proprietor of the Daily Express among other papers), and politician; he held various Cabinet posts during the Second World War.

Calcutta Derby Sweep: the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, founded in 1847, was the most prestigious horse-racing body in British India; its races were significant, high-status social events, above all its annual ‘Derby’. The Calcutta Derby Sweep refers to ‘the largest sweepstake in the world’ organized by the club, taking place throughout the 1930s.

corpus vile: ‘a living or dead body that is of so little value that it can be used for experiment without regard for the outcome; transferred, experimental material of any kind, or something which has no value except as the object of experimentation’ (OED).

171 drive him to retire to the United States . . . ashamed of ourselves: Wodehouse moved to the USA after the war, partly to avoid the continuing hostility in Britain; his innocence was belatedly acknowledged when he was knighted a few weeks before his death in 1975.

Notes on Nationalism

First published in Polemic (October 1945); not republished in Orwell’s lifetime.

172 Byron . . . in considerable profusion: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), makes this remark in Don Juan: Canto III (1821), xcvii. 57.

174 Russo-German Pact of 1939: see note to p. 169.

Peter Drucker: Peter Drucker (1909–2005), Austrian-born US-based theorist of corporations and the modern business world generally.

175 Kipling . . . Mayakovksy: for Kipling, see note to p. 98; Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a Russian poet who identified with, and celebrated, the Bolsheviks.

G. K. Chesterton: see note to p. 10.

Captain Liddell Hart and Major-General Fuller: Captain B. H. Liddell Hart (1895–1970) was a soldier, journalist, and author who enjoyed considerable standing in the 1930s and 1940s as a somewhat maverick authority on military strategy; Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966), soldier and author, was an authority on armoured warfare.

176 endless repetition . . . ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’: according to the Acts of the Apostles 19:34, this was the repetitive cry of the crowd, angry at St Paul’s disparaging remarks about the temple of Diana. Orwell is suggesting that Chesterton’s work is equally repetitive.

Chu Chin Chow . . . every-day life in Baghdad: Chu Chin Chow was an exoticized and eroticized adaptation (by Oscar Asche) of the Arabian Nights’ legend of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; its great popularity (2,235 performances between its opening night on 31 August 1916 and 22 July 1921) reflected the public’s fascination with Orientalism at the time.

Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara: ‘Lepanto’ (1911) is a historical ballad on the theme of the preservation of Christian civilization, celebrating victory by the Austrian-led allies over the Turks in a great sea battle in 1571; ‘The Ballad of Saint Barbara’ (1922) is set during the Battle of the Marne, in which two soldiers in a desperate situation recount the story of St Barbara (‘the saint of gunners’).

178 Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, D’Israeli, Poincaré, Beaverbrook: Orwell is emphasizing that none of these figures came from the heartlands of the countries they represented: Stalin was born in Georgia, Hitler in Austria, Napoleon in Corsica, de Valera in the USA, Poincaré in Lorraine (part of Germany from 1871 to 1919), Beaverbrook in Canada. Disraeli was neither an ‘outright foreigner’ nor from a ‘peripheral area’; he was Jewish, something Orwell accentuates by giving the form of the name used by Disraeli’s father though not by Disraeli himself.

Houston Chamberlain: Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), an Englishman, married to Richard Wagner’s daughter, became an ardent theorist of pan-Germanism, influentially expounded in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899).

Lafcadio Hearne . . . Carlyle: Lafcadio Hearn [sic] (1850–1904), British-born writer, settled in Japan, becoming a Japanese citizen and celebrating Japanese culture. For Carlyle (and Orwell’s exaggerated hostility to him), see note to p. 153.

Wells’s Outline of History: see notes to pp. 24 and 117.

180 Inquisition . . . Star Chamber . . . Sir Francis Drake . . . Reign of Terror . . . Mutiny . . . Cromwell . . . in ‘the right’ cause: the Inquisition was the institution within the Catholic Church in medieval Europe which oversaw processes, often involving extreme forms of torture, designed to eradicate heresy. The Star Chamber was an English court, controlled by the monarch, established by Henry VII in 1487, named after its star-studded ceiling; its importance increased during the reigns of James I and Charles I, when the court became a tool of royal oppression, seeking out and punishing religious dissent, and accepting evidence obtained by torture. Sir Francis Drake (1540–96) was an English sea captain, slave trader, naval officer, and explorer of the Elizabethan era, known for sailing round the world; he inaugurated an ‘era of conflict’ with the Spanish after claiming California for the English Crown and he played a leading role in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Reign of Terror refers to a period of violence during the French Revolution after the establishment of the First French Republic: terror was used as a tool of the revolutionary government, carrying out ruthless arrests and executions. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 involved a revolt by Indian soldiers against their British superiors, an uprising that was put down with marked brutality. Cromwell’s soldiers acquired a reputation for extreme cruelty in the course of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653. Cromwell himself was in command for the first year of the campaign, and responsible for atrocities such as the massacre at Drogheda.

Dachau and Buchenwald: two of the most notorious Nazi extermination camps; pace Orwell, it has to be said that knowledge of the Nazi policy of genocide did not become widespread in Britain until 1942, and awareness of the full horrors of the concentration camps only came with the highly publicized Allied liberations of 1945.

Ukraine famine . . . escaped the attention of . . . English Russophiles: the Ukraine famine in 1932–3 began in the chaos of collectivization, when millions of peasants were forced off their land and made to join State farms. The death toll across the Soviet Union included nearly 4 million Ukrainians who in some cases had been deliberately deprived of food. All discussion of the famine was actively repressed.

Spanish Armada . . . Russian Revolution . . . 1918: the Spanish Armada, a large fleet of ships sent by Philip II of Spain to invade England in 1588, was actually dispersed by bad storms and the actions of the English fleet; the Russian Revolution of 1917 in fact survived attacks by counter-revolutionary forces, establishing a Communist regime that lasted until 1991.

181 Chiang Kai-Shek . . . one of the heroes of the Left: Chiang Kai-Shek (1887–1975) was leader of the Nationalist or anti-Communist forces in China from 1928 until his defeat at the end of the Civil War in 1949, when he retreated to Taiwan and established it as an independent state.

Trotsky . . . Russian civil war: for Trotsky, see note to p. 74; he was the Commissar for War for the Bolshevik government, and the Bolsheviks’ victory in the civil war owed much to his organization and leadership.

Warsaw rising of August 1944: as Russian troops advanced on Warsaw, Polish resistance fighters began an uprising in the city against the German forces; it was alleged that the Russians delayed their advance until the Germans had suppressed the uprising so that they, rather than the independent Polish government in exile, could claim victory and take over the country.

German gas ovens in Poland: the Nazis established six extermination camps in Poland, where millions of Jews were murdered in the gas chambers between 1941 and 1945 (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka).

the Bengal famine: in Bengal in 1943 somewhere between 2 and 3 million people died of starvation, malaria, and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition; the majority of historians have seen the policies of the British government under Churchill, which gave priority to the war effort, as largely responsible for the scale of the famine.

182 Elton . . . Herbert . . . Young . . . Pickthorne . . . Tory Reform Committee . . . New English Review . . . Nineteenth Century and After: Godfrey, Lord Elton (1892–1973) was an author, broadcaster, and would-be politician. Alan P. Herbert (1890–1971), writer, humorist, politician, and campaigner for legal reform, represented Oxford as an Independent MP 1935–50. George Malcolm Young (1882–1959), civil servant and historian, was best known for Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936). Kenneth Pickthorn [sic] (1892–1975), historian and politician, was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a Conservative MP; though an academic, he was never a ‘professor’. The Tory Reform Committee was a group of Conservative MPs with special interests in social policy who urged the Government to take constructive action along the lines of the Beveridge Report. The New English Review was a short-lived periodical, featuring political opinion pieces from prominent Conservatives, including members of the Tory Reform Committee. The Nineteenth Century and After was founded as the Nineteenth Century in 1877, its title extended in 1901; originally a forum for high intellectual debate, by the 1940s it was rather stodgily conservative.

183 Voigt . . . Muggeridge . . . Waugh . . . Kingsmill . . . Eliot . . . Wyndham Lewis: F. A. Voigt (1892–1957) was a British journalist and author of German descent, most famous for his work with the Manchester Guardian and for his opposition to dictatorship and totalitarianism on the European continent; after the Second World War he championed what Orwell terms ‘neo-toryism’, regarding the maintenance of British imperial power as being indispensable to international peace and political stability. Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90), English journalist and satirist, was initially attracted by communism, then converted to Christianity and became a prominent critic of progressive causes. Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) was an English Catholic novelist of markedly reactionary views. Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949), critic and biographer, was perhaps best known for his anthology Johnson Without Boswell. For Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, see notes to pp. 80 and 81. Orwell’s lumping together of the disparate names in this paragraph does some violence to the real contrasts among them.

183 Hugh MacDiarmid and Sean O’Casey: ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve 1892–1978) was a Scottish poet, nationalist agitator, and Communist. Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) was an Irish dramatist who was for a period an ardent Irish nationalist but later became critical of the movement. It is not obvious that he really fits into Orwell’s classification in this paragraph.

185 Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts: for the Peace Pledge Union, see note to p. 117. ‘The Blackshirts’ was a name for the British Union of Fascists (because of their black uniforms), a political party in the United Kingdom formed in 1932 by Oswald Moseley. Membership declined as the party, increasingly radicalized, embraced Nazi-style anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, leading to violent clashes with opponents such as the 1936 Battle of Cable Street in the East End. It was banned by the British Government in 1940 after the start of the Second World War, due to fears its members might form a pro-Nazi ‘fifth column’.

Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism: here Orwell’s constant denunciations of Carlyle tip over into wild exaggeration.

the Battle of Britain: Singapore was captured by the Japanese in February 1942; British forces were driven out of Greece (Crete) in May 1941. The Battle of El Alamein, a victory for the Allied forces led by General Bernard Montgomery over the Axis forces led by General Erwin Rommel, was one of the turning points of the war. Figures for the number of planes shot down by both sides in the ‘Battle of Britain’ in the early autumn of 1940 vary, but it is now generally agreed that the British had the better of the exchanges, an outcome that may have helped deter Hitler from invading Britain.

186 Socialist Appeal: this was the name of two British Trotskyist newspapers associated with the Workers’ International League and the Revolutionary Communist Party, among whom Ted Grant was the leading activist and political theorist in the 1940s.

187 Elton . . . Pritt . . . Lady Houston . . . Pound . . . Lord Vansittart . . . Father Coughlin: for Elton, see note to p. 182; he was a devoted supporter of Ramsay MacDonald after he formed a ‘national’ government in 1931. David Nowell Pritt (1887–1972) was a former Labour Party politician who became an enthusiastic advocate for the Soviet Union. Lucy, Lady Houston (1857–1936), philanthropist, political activist, and social adventuress, became an obsessive critic of socialism. For Pound, see note to p. 80. Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart (1881–1957), was a British diplomat of markedly anti-German views. Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979) was a Canadian-born US Catholic priest whose anti-liberal and proto-fascist broadcasts became notorious in the 1930s. Once again, Orwell lumps together figures who were more diverse than he suggests; they could not really be said even to manifest similar forms of ‘monomania’.

188 Arthur Balfour . . . shouted ‘Cad!’: Arthur Balfour (1848–1930) was the Tory leader in the Commons during the Boer War (the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, sat in the House of Lords); David Lloyd George (1863–1945, prime minister 1916–22), was at the time a Liberal backbencher and opponent of the war.

189 M.O.I.: the Ministry of Information.

The Prevention of Literature

First published in Polemic ( January 1946); reprinted in Shooting an Elephant.

191 the P.E.N. Club . . . freedom of the Press: the PEN Club (the initials stood for ‘Poets, Essayists, Novelists’) was founded in London in 1921 to unite writers after the devastation of the First World War, and evolved into an international organization supporting the rights of free expression. John Milton (1608–74) published Areopagitica, his tract championing freedom of the press, in 1644. The proceedings of the tercentenary event were published as Freedom of Expression, edited by Hermon Ould (London: Hutchinson International, 1945), which Orwell reviewed in Tribune, 12 October 1945.

Freedom of Expression: this book contains thirty-one addresses delivered during the celebrations; it is not obvious which four might correspond to Orwell’s somewhat tendentious characterizations. Overall, the volume perhaps makes more of a case for ‘intellectual liberty’ than Orwell allows.

192 Dare to be a Daniel . . . make it known: ‘Dare to Be a Daniel’ was a hymn composed by Philip Bliss in 1873, alluding to the biblical story of Daniel, thrown into the lions’ den for obeying his conscience rather than the king, but miraculously preserved by God’s protection.

194 Litvinoff . . . Zinoviev, Kamenev: Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), Soviet diplomat, was briefly the representative of the Bolshevik Revolution in London, later becoming the USSR’s Commissar for foreign affairs. Grigori Zinoviev (1883–1936), Soviet politician, was a close associate of Lenin in the Revolution and an influential figure up to 1924; thereafter he lost out in a power struggle with Stalin and was eventually executed as the result of the celebrated ‘show trials’ of the mid-1930s. Lev Kamenev (1883–1936), Soviet politician, followed a similar trajectory and was also executed on Stalin’s orders in 1936. Orwell’s point is that Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were rightly praised for their role in the Revolution in a pamphlet published in 1918, but after their disgrace they were written out of the history, and Party orthodoxy required that no mention, certainly no favourable mention, be made of them.

201 Disney films: the animated feature films of Walt Disney (1901–66), US film producer, began in 1937 and were hugely successful commercially.

201 the Writer: a popular periodical that offered practical advice on writing and getting published: ‘Its significance lies in its durability (it lasted from the early 1920s until 1976), the substance and breadth of its information about the world of amateur writers, and its influence on that world—an influence registered in articles contributed to the magazine and in its role as a resource for writers.’ Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 31.

203 Ilya Ehrenberg or Alexei Tolstoy: Ilya Ehrenburg [sic] (1891–1967), Soviet novelist and journalist, had at first been anti-Bolshevik, but from the early 1920s accommodated himself to the regime, working as a foreign correspondent of the official newspaper, Izvestia. Alexei Tolstoy (1883–1945), Soviet novelist, had also initially been an opponent of the Bolsheviks, but after 1923 he became an ornament of the Soviet establishment, writing works glorifying Stalin and the achievements of the USSR.

Decline of the English Murder

First published in Tribune, 15 February 1946; reprinted in Shooting an Elephant.

205 News of the World: see note to p. 56.

Roast beef and Yorkshire . . . right mood: Orwell is here itemizing some of the elements of the traditional English Sunday lunch of the period; ‘Yorkshire’ refers to ‘Yorkshire pudding’, a batter pudding (mixed from flour, eggs, and milk) usually served with roast beef.

Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson: William Palmer (also known as ‘the Rugeley Poisoner’ or ‘the Prince of Poisoners’) was convicted of murder in 1855, having poisoned his victim with strychnine; he was also suspected of poisoning several other people including his brother and mother-in-law, and four of his children who died of ‘convulsions’ before their first birthday. He was executed in public by hanging in 1856. ‘Jack the Ripper’ (also known as the ‘Whitechapel Murderer’ and ‘Leather Apron’) was an unidentified serial killer operating in the impoverished district of Whitechapel in 1888; a common feature of the cases was that the victims were prostitutes active in the slums of the East End, whose throats were cut prior to abdominal and genital-area mutilations. Dr Thomas Neill Cream, another Victorian serial killer, poisoned a number of prostitutes in the Lambeth area using chloroform and strychnine pills. He is suspected of murdering his wife, too, and at least four other women died in his care while he was administering illegal abortions. He was hanged at Newgate Prison in 1892. Florence Maybrick was an American woman convicted in Britain of murdering her husband by poisoning him with arsenic by soaking flypaper in water. Her previous attempts involved tampering with a Valentine’s Meat Juice bottle to contain a half-grain of arsenic. In 1889, Maybrick was sentenced for murder after her husband was found dead at his home. Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist, and medicine dispenser, hanged in 1910 in Pentonville Prison in London for the murder of his wife Cora Henrietta. Frederick Seddon persuaded his lodger Mary Barrow, an eccentric spinster, to sign over a controlling interest in all her savings and annuities; in 1911, after a short holiday together to Southend, Seddon poisoned her with arsenic extracted from flypaper. He was sentenced to death in 1912. Joseph Smith was an English serial killer and bigamist, known for the ‘Brides in the Bath Murders’: he drowned three victims by seizing their feet and dragging their heads underwater. He was sentenced to death in 1915. Herbert Rowse Armstrong was an English solicitor who attempted to murder a rival solicitor, Oswald Martin, by, first, anonymously sending him a box of chocolates injected with arsenic, and then by serving him an arsenic-laced scone; he was charged with murder in 1921, when it was discovered he had also poisoned his wife by the same means. Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson were a British couple executed in 1923 for the murder of Thompson’s husband Percy. Love letters from Thompson to Bywaters revealed that, in her desire to be free of her husband, she had made attempts on his life by grinding a light bulb into mashed potato.

the accused man was acquitted: this may refer to the case in which Harold Greenwood, an English solicitor, was accused of murdering his wife by arsenic poisoning in 1919. At first his wife had been certified as having died of heart disease, but the police exhumed the body and found arsenic in her remains (though no evidence of heart disease); at the ensuing trial Greenwood was acquitted.

206 verbatim account . . . Bechhofer Roberts: R. Alwyn Raymond, The Cleft Chin Murder (London: Jarrolds, 1945); Orwell reviewed this book, along with two others, in the Manchester Evening News, 1 November 1945. For Bechhofer Roberts, see note to p. 10.

Nonconformist . . . Temperance advocate: in England and Wales, ‘Nonconformists’ referred to those Protestant denominations that dissented or separated from Anglicanism, such as Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. The Temperance movement that began in the Victorian period campaigned against the consumption of alcohol, urging its followers to ‘take the pledge’, i.e. promise never to drink again. Orwell’s point is that the archetypal figure in these stories should be a pillar of respectable society.

208 V1 and V2: the V1 (Vergeltungswaffe 1, or ‘revenge weapon 1’) was a pilotless flying bomb which the Germans launched in large numbers against targets in southern England between June 1944 and March 1945; the buzz of the bomb cut out as it lost power and fell silently to earth to explode on impact. They were popularly known as ‘doodlebugs’ or ‘buzz-bombs’. The V2 was an actual rocket, carrying a similar load of high explosive, but with a more high-pitched whining sound; they were first fired at targets in Britain in September 1944.

Politics and the English Language

First published in Horizon (April 1946); republished in Shooting an Elephant. This essay was initially written for Contact, a magazine founded and edited by George Weidenfeld (1919–2016, co-founder of the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1948). Contributors were asked for pieces of reportage—factual narratives and investigative articles; since Orwell’s essay did not conform to these requirements it was rejected, and was subsequently offered to Horizon.

210 Laski . . . Freedom of Expression: Harold Laski (1893–1950), political theorist, was an influential intellectual spokesman for socialism during the 1930s and 1940s, increasingly emphasizing class conflict and the need for some kind of revolution. A prolific writer, he co-founded the Left Book Club in 1936, was a professor at the London School of Economics 1926–50, and was the chairman of the Labour Party in 1945–6. The quoted passage comes from his essay ‘The Areopagitica of Milton after 300 years’, in Freedom of Expression, 172 (see also note to p. 191). Laski’s text does say ‘alien to’, though Orwell is right to question whether this may be a misprint for ‘akin to’.

Hogben . . . Interglossa: a language devised by the biologist Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975) in an attempt to draw on the lexicon of science and technology, largely derived from Greek and Latin roots, to form an international language. The quoted passage is from Interglossa: A Draft of an Auxiliary Language for a Democratic World Order (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943), 21; the book was reviewed by Orwell in the Manchester Evening News, 23 December 1943, repr. in CW xvi. 31–3.

Essay . . . Politics (New York): Politics (1944–9) was a highbrow literary and political magazine whose contents particularly reflected the interest in European intellectual and cultural life of its founding editor, Dwight Macdonald (1906–82); Orwell corresponded with Macdonald and several of his pieces were republished in the journal. The quoted passage is from Paul Goodman, ‘The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud’, Politics ( July 1945), 201.

Communist pamphlet: it has not been possible to identify this pamphlet.

211 Letter in Tribune: George Richards, ‘Galvanise the B.B.C.’ [letter], Tribune, 31 August 1945. Orwell’s version of this passage contains a number of small inaccuracies; see CW xvii. 432–7. For Tribune, see Introduction, p. xii.

212 Cul de sac . . . weltanschauung: it is not, pace Orwell, always easy to find exact equivalents for these phrases, but their respective approximate translations are: cul de sac—dead-end road; ancien régime—a former or superseded state of government or of affairs more generally; deus ex machina—an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation; mutatis mutandis—making the necessary alterations; status quo—the pre-existing state of affairs; gleichschaltung—coordination, bringing into line; weltanschauung—conception of life or of the world.

213 Poetry Quarterly: this periodical, edited by Charles Wrey Gardiner, was founded in 1940 and published contemporary poets alongside reviews and essays; it published several poems by co-editor Alex Comfort, some of whose prose works Orwell reviewed elsewhere.

214 Marshal Pétain: Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), French general and politician, was acclaimed as a national hero for his defence of Verdun in the First World War. He became the ‘chief of state’ of the Vichy government (1940–4) that collaborated with the Nazi occupation; he was convicted of treason in 1945, the death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

I returned . . . happeneth to them all: Ecclesiastes 9:11.

218 pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany: it has not been possible to identify this pamphlet.

220 Chase and others . . . a kind of political quietism: Stuart Chase (1888–1985), US economist and journalist, published The Tyranny of Words in 1938. It is not clear what ‘others’ Orwell had in mind here.

Confessions of a Book Reviewer

First published in Tribune, 3 May 1946; republished in Shooting an Elephant.

223 Nicer Lying Down: these titles are, of course, all invented by Orwell for comic effect.

a minimum of 100 books a year: Davison calculates that ‘in twenty years of reviewing, Orwell reviewed just over 700 books, plays, and films. His busiest year was 1940 when he reviewed 135 books, plays, and films’ (CW xviii. 303).

224 Four Just Men: a popular novel by Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) published in 1905.

Why I Write

First published in Gangrel, 4 (Summer 1946); republished in Shooting an Elephant. Gangrel (a Scottish word meaning vagrant) was a short-lived quarterly literary ‘little magazine’ published in Britain, edited by J. B. Pick and Charles Neill, with four issues between 1945 and 1946. ‘Why I Write’ appeared in the last issue.

226 I barely saw my father before I was eight: although Orwell was born in Bengal, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service (Richard Blair was 46 when his son was born), he was brought to England by his mother the following year, leaving his father in India. Apart from one brief period of leave, Richard Blair stayed in India until his retirement in 1912 at the age of 55.

vers d’occasion: light verse written for a special occasion.

Aristophanes: Aristophanes (c.450/460–386 bc) was an Athenian comic playwright who wrote broad satires and burlesques on contemporary figures and themes.

227 So hee . . . labour hee: John Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 1021–2.

228 Burmese Days: based on Orwell’s experiences in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma between 1922 and 1927, Burmese Days was published in the USA in 1934 and in Britain in 1935.

I am the worm . . . Were you?: these are the last three stanzas of a nine-stanza poem entitled ‘A happy vicar I might have been’, published in The Adelphi, December 1936. In most later reprintings of the essay all nine stanzas are reproduced.

230 The Spanish war . . . I knew where I stood: the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 and in December Orwell went to Spain to fight on the Republican side. However, his reference to ‘other events in 1936–7’ may also refer to the period he spent among the working class in northern England between January and March 1936, an experience he drew on for The Road to Wigan Pier, published in March 1937.

such a chapter . . . must ruin the book: Orwell left instructions that if the book were reprinted (it was never reprinted in his lifetime), chapters 5 and 11 should be removed from the main text and made into appendices. Most subsequent reprints have followed the format of the 1938 printing, leaving these chapters in their original position, but in his edition of the book for the Complete Works, Peter Davison follows Orwell’s later request.

231 ‘You’ve turned . . . a good book into journalism’: the identity of the ‘critic’ has to be a matter of speculation; Orwell’s friend Cyril Connolly (see note to p. 103) is one plausible guess.

I hope to write another fairly soon: Orwell had published Coming Up for Air in 1939, seven years earlier; in 1946 he had already begun what became Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. His phrasing here seems to suggest that he did not regard his political allegory, Animal Farm, published in 1945, as a ‘novel’.

Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels

First published in Polemic (September–October 1946); republished in Shooting an Elephant.

232 Gulliver’s Travels: a satirical fiction in the form of a travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels was published by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in 1726. In the course of the book, Gulliver visits both Lilliput, where the inhabitants are only six inches high, and Brobdingnab, where the inhabitants are many metres tall.

Houyhnhnms: these inhabitants of a country Gulliver visits are horses endowed with reason whose admirable society is contrasted with that of the recognizably human Yahoos.

when he bears off . . . Yahoos: these are all among Gulliver’s exploits.

233 Trevelyan (England under Queen Anne): G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962), historian, published England under Queen Anne in three volumes (1930–4).

Tale of a Tub . . . Established Church alone: A Tale of a Tub was a prose satire by Swift, published in 1704; it mocks the three main religious denominations—Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism—though it is gentlest on the third, the doctrinal basis of the Anglican Church (and thus the Church of Ireland, in which Swift was ordained).

war with France . . . single reactionary power: Orwell is presumably referring to the War of the Spanish Succession between 1701 and 1714, in which Britain and its allies defeated the French.

Jacobite: see note to p. 118.

234 Quislingism: see note to p. 161.

The Dutch . . . wantonly attacked in Part III: the Dutch had been among Britain’s allies in the War of the Spanish Succession; Swift’s pamphlet was The Conduct of the Allies, published in 1711 in the context of an anti-Dutch campaign designed by those in the British government at that time who were trying to pave the way for peace negotiations and the eventual signing of a peace treaty.

235 people like Sir Alan Herbert . . . W. H. Mallock onwards: for Herbert, Young, Elton, and the Tory Reform Committee, see note to p. 182. W. H. Mallock (1849–1923), novelist and satirist, was best known for The New Republic (1877), a satire on mid-Victorian intellectual high society. Orwell makes a common mistake in describing Mallock as a Catholic; he was a High Anglican.

An Argument . . . errors of Bertrand Russell: An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May . . . Be Attended with Some Inconveniences is a pamphlet by Swift that was first printed in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1711). This ironical tract was directed at the Whigs and those who favoured the repeal of the Test Act, the legislation that barred all but Anglicans from public office. D. B. Wyndham Lewis (1891–1969) wrote a regular column in the News Chronicle under the pseudonym ‘Timothy Shy’; Orwell frequently criticized its Catholic and conservative point of view. ‘The Brains’ Trust’ was a BBC radio programme in which leading intellectual figures discussed questions submitted by listeners. Father Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was a prominent apologist for Catholicism. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), philosopher and mathematical theorist, was a leading champion of a wide range of progressive causes. Orwell is suggesting that Swift, like ‘Timothy Shy’ and Ronald Knox (and indeed W. H. Mallock), had his fun from mocking the ‘enlightened’ views of his time.

237 like Tolstoy and like Blake, he hates . . . studying the processes of Nature: both William Blake (1757–1827), English poet, artist, and polemicist, and Leo Tolstoy (see note to p. 52) were critical of the mechanistic view of the world that they saw as resulting from uncritical admiration for the methods of science.

237 Noble Savage: the concept of an idealized primitive man who had not been corrupted by civilization was a frequent device in eighteenth-century social thought; it is associated above all with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

238 his Ancestors . . . and himself: Marcus Junius Brutus (85–42 bc) was leader of the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar in order to protect the Roman Republic; defeated in battle, he committed suicide. Lucius Junius Brutus was the figure who established republican government at Rome and was elected one of its first two consuls (509 bc). Socrates (c.470/469–399 bc), Athenian philosopher, is often regarded as ‘the founder of philosophy’. Epaminondas (c.418–362 bc) was a Theban general who initially defeated the Spartans but was later killed in action. Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Younger’) (95–46 bc), a leader of the republican opposition to Julius Caesar, committed suicide rather than surrendering, and later became a symbol of republican resistance to tyranny. Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), scholar and lawyer, became Lord Chancellor in 1529 but refused to deny the authority of the Pope or sanction Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon; he was convicted of treason and beheaded 1535. All six figures may be thought of as loosely associated by some form of resistance to tyranny.

242 he himself belonged to the less successful party, and was personally disappointed: Swift aligned himself with the Tory group around Harley and Bolingbroke; after the Whigs came to power in 1714 and Walpole became First Lord of the Treasury in 1715, Swift was denied further preferment.

248 The Lady’s Dressing Room . . . Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed: two poems by Swift. In ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, first published in 1732, Strephon sneaks into the dressing room of his lover, Celia, in her absence, and is disillusioned by the assortment of filthy and smelly powders, pastes, and potions she deploys to maintain the alluring ideal of femininity. ‘Upon a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’ similarly depicts the ritualistic undressing of Corinna, an eighteenth-century prostitute, in her bedchamber, revealing the artful deceptions behind her appearance (her hair is a wig, for example, her eyebrows are made from ‘mouse’s hide’).

human form divine: in ‘The Divine Image’ from Songs of Innocence (1789), Blake had reworked Milton’s phrase ‘the human face divine’ to suggest that the man who loves wears a ‘human form divine’.

249 spiritualist . . . Buchmanite . . . Ku Klux Klan: a spiritualist believes that the dead can communicate with the living via human mediums; a Buchmanite was a follower of Frank Buchman (1878–1961), a US Evangelical who founded the revivalist movement ‘Moral Rearmament’, which worked to establish ‘the dictatorship of God’; the Ku Klux Klan was (and is) a secret society, established in the southern states of the USA after the Civil War, dedicated to upholding White supremacy.

How the Poor Die

First published in Now, ns 6 (November 1946); republished in Shooting an Elephant. (There is considerable uncertainty about when this essay was written; for a full discussion, see CW xviii. 455–9. Peter Davison’s best estimate is that it was first drafted between 1931 and 1936; that it was reworked between summer 1940 and spring 1941 and submitted to Horizon, only to be rejected; and that a revised version was sent to Now in late autumn 1946. Now was an anarchist journal edited by Orwell’s friend George Woodcock: founded in 1940, a new series began in 1943 and appeared irregularly until 1947.)

250 Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris: this essay is largely, but not faithfully, autobiographical, and various details do not correspond with the facts of Orwell’s life as established by independent evidence. According to Davison, the records of the Hôpital Cochin show that Orwell was admitted on 7 March and discharged on 22 March, having been treated for ‘une grippe’ (flu), not tuberculosis.

253 weazened: variant of ‘wizened’, meaning ‘shrunken’ or ‘shrivelled’.

white imperial: ‘a small pointed beard growing beneath the lower lip’ (OED).

256 Mrs Gamp: see note to p. 12.

Madame Hanaud: Marthe Hanau [sic] (1890–1935) founded a financial newspaper, La Gazette du franc et des nations, ostensibly dispensing stock tips to financial speculators. However, she primarily promoted the stocks nominally owned by her own business partners. After banks began to investigate these non-existent companies, Hanau was arrested in 1931, and charged with having defrauded the high finance markets of approximately 120,000,000 French francs.

257 ‘bleed him till he faints’: in an attempt to deal with his frequent periods of bad health, mental and physical, George III was regularly subjected to ‘bleeding’, i.e. deliberate draining of his blood. Medical thinking at the time ruled that the bleeding could be allowed to continue until the patient passed out.

Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen: Sawyer and Allen are medical students in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers who, having left Guy’s Hospital in London, set up a physician’s shop in Bristol. Dickens’s satire is broad: ‘Have you finished that leg yet?’ asks Allen. ‘Nearly,’ replies Sawyer, ‘it’s a very muscular one for a child’s . . . Nothing like dissecting to give one an appetite.’

La Débâcle and War and Peace: Émile Zola’s La Débâcle, published in 1892, is set against the bloody background of the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle of Sedan, and the Paris Commune; Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) is set against the equally bloody background of the Napoleonic Wars.

Melville’s Whitejacket: Herman Melville’s novel White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, first published in London in 1850, is set aboard the USS Neversink and constitutes a severe criticism of American naval life. Cadwalladar Cuticle, MD, the one-eyed, bloodthirsty ship’s surgeon (who never washes his hands), performs an amputation that is described in grisly detail.

258 Tennyson’s poem . . . as late as 1880: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘In the Children’s Hospital: Emmie’ was published in 1880; Tennyson claimed it was based on a true story.

The Story of San Michele: The Story of San Michele is a book of memoirs by Swedish physician Axel Munthe (1857–1949), first published in 1929.

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

First published in Polemic (March 1947); republished in Shooting an Elephant.

260 Hazlitt, Brandes: William Hazlitt (1778–1830), essayist, critic, and political writer, published several critical discussions of Shakespeare, notably Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and Lectures on the English Poets (1818). Georg Brandes (1842–1927), Danish critic and essayist, published William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (London: Heinemann, 1898).

Shakespeare and the Drama: Tolstoy’s study ‘A Critical Essay on Shakespeare’, translated by V. Tchertkoff and I. F. M. [Isabella Fyvie Mayo], was published as an introduction to Ernest Crosby, Shakespeare’s Attitude to the Working Classes, with Preface by George Bernard Shaw (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906).

261 one may be too good . . . the end justifies the means: Georg Gervinus (1805–71), German critic and professor, published his influential commentaries on Shakespeare from 1849 to 1852; an English translation appeared in 1862. On Gervinus, Tolstoy writes: ‘that one may do too much good (exceed the reasonable limits of good) is convincingly proved by Shakespeare’s words and examples. . . . Shakespeare taught, says Gervinus, that one may be too good.’ And on Brandes: ‘Shakespeare at last clearly saw that the moral of the aim is the only true and possible one; so that, according to Brandes, Shakespeare’s fundamental principle, for which he extols him, is that the end justifies the means—action at all costs, the absence of all ideals, moderation in everything, the conservation of the forms of life once established, and the end justifying the means.’

262 Crusades . . . Philosopher’s Stone . . . tulip growing . . . Holland: beginning in 1096, the Crusades were a series of military expeditions to recover the Holy Land from the infidel; they often attracted an enthusiastic popular following. Finding the Philosopher’s Stone, a substance supposed to change other metals into gold or silver, was the most cherished aim of alchemy, and thus attracted often frenzied commitment from devotees. A mania for growing tulips spread across the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, leading to bulbs being sold for ludicrously high prices; the eventual collapse of the tulip market caused widespread damage to the Dutch economy.

Dreyfus . . . no sufficient reason: Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935) was a Jewish officer in the French army who in 1894 was accused of treason for having allegedly passed secret military documents to a foreign power. He was court-martialled, stripped of his rank, and sent to a penal colony. In 1898 his conviction was challenged in proceedings that bitterly divided opinion across France; Dreyfus was eventually found to be innocent and was reinstated. Orwell is mocking Tolstoy’s belittling of the significance of the ‘Dreyfus Affair’, which in reality had involved a fundamental clash of world-views over questions of injustice, patriotism, anti-Semitism, and so on.

Darwin . . . ‘beginning to be forgotten’: although Darwin had died in 1882, his worldwide fame showed no sign of diminishing in the early twentieth century. Orwell is again raising an eyebrow at Tolstoy’s high-handed and inaccurate dismissals of these allegedly ‘shortlived crazes’.

His reputation ‘originated in Germany . . . was transferred to England’: Tolstoy was at least right to suggest that it was German enthusiasm for his work at the end of the eighteenth century that gave a decisive and lasting boost to his European reputation. On this, see John A. McCarthy, Shakespeare as German Author: Reception Translation Theory, and Cultural Transfer (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2018).

263 Goethe pronounced Shakespeare a great poet . . . the general infatuation has lasted ever since: Tolstoy talks about how in the eighteenth century there appeared ‘in Germany a group of educated and talented writers and poets, who, feeling the falsity and coldness of the French drama, endeavoured to find a freer dramatic form. . . . At the head of the group stood Goethe, who was then the dictator of public opinion in aesthetic questions. He it was who, partly owing to a desire to destroy the fascination of the false French art, partly owing to his desire to give a greater scope to his own dramatic writing, but chiefly through the agreement of his view of life with Shakespeare’s, declared Shakespeare a great poet. When this error was announced by an authority like Goethe, all these aesthetic critics who did not understand art threw themselves on it like crows on carrion and began to discover in Shakespeare beauties which did not exist, and to extol them.’

Warwick Deeping is ‘bad’: Warwick Deeping (1877–1950) was a prolific and commercially very successful English novelist, best known for Sorrell and Son (1925). He was sometimes taken by critics to represent the limitations and failings of popular ‘middlebrow’ fiction.

265 ‘verbal music’ which even Bernard Shaw . . . admits to be ‘irresistible’: in the ‘Letter From Mr. G. Bernard Shaw’ that prefaces Leo Tolstoy on Shakespeare, Shaw writes: ‘Finally, I, for one, shall value Tolstoy’s criticism all the more because it is criticism of a foreigner who can not possibly be enchanted by the mere word-music which makes Shakespeare so irresistible in England.’

‘To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s Day’: verse sung by Ophelia in Hamlet, Act 4 scene v.

267 ‘a frequent desire . . . disagreed’: the quotation is from Derrick Leon, Tolstoy: His Life and Work (London: Routledge, 1944), 64.

269 It were a delicate stratagem . . . kill!: Act IV scene vi.

No, no . . . by the moon: Act V scene iii.

270 But to the girdle . . . stench, consumption: Act IV scene v. Towards the end of 1899 Tolstoy wrote in his diary (as quoted by Leon, Tolstoy: His Life and Work): ‘The chief cause of unhappiness in marriage lies in the fact that young people are brought up to believe in the idea of married happiness. Sex attraction, encouraged by public opinion and by literature, surrounds marriage with a charm full of promise. But marriage, far from being a happiness, is always a misery—the price of sexual satisfaction. Slavery, satiety, repulsion, and the physical and moral faults of one’s partner— these are sufferings that must be endured, as are malice, stupidity, lying, vanity or drunkenness, all faults which are even more unbearable in another than in oneself, to say nothing of physical defects such as ugliness, dirtiness, smells, sores, insanity and so on.’

273 Pistol: a comic minor character and associate of Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two.

274 Turgenev, Fet: Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) was a Russian novelist; Afanasy Fet (also spelled Foeth) (1820–92) was a Russian poet renowned for his sincere and passionate lyric verse.

Writers and Leviathan

First published in Politics and Letters (Summer 1948). Politics and Letters, a review of Literature and Society was a short-lived journal produced by three recent Cambridge graduates, Clifford Collins, Wolf Mankowitz, and Raymond Williams. It began in 1947 and Orwell’s essay appeared in its fourth issue. He wrote an essay on George Gissing for the projected fifth issue, but the journal folded and the issue never appeared. The journal aspired to unite ‘left politics and Leavisite criticism’ (see Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979), chapter 5).

275 somebody like Zhdanov: Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948), Soviet political leader, exercised strong control over cultural production in the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s, banning unorthodox or ‘cosmopolitan’ work.

278 Criterion . . . London Mercury . . . dominant literary magazines: The Criterion (1922–39) was edited by T. S. Eliot and tended to favour markedly conservative, even reactionary political views. The London Mercury (see note to p. 93) was a less political and more middlebrow journal, but still broadly conservative.

a Labour government . . . shows hesitation about nationalizing steel: the Labour Government of 1945 considered nationalizing the steel industry, but by the time Orwell was writing had not yet done so (it was finally done in 1949 when the Government passed the Iron and Steel Act, though nationalization was reversed by the Conservative Government after 1952). See Henry Pelling, The Labour Governments, 1945–1951 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 83–91.

279 our own government . . . fighting . . . against its own past propaganda: the Labour Governments of 1945–51 struggled to cope with the economic and financial consequences of the war, needing to increase, rather than reduce, food rationing, and eventually, under intense pressure from financial markets after the USA threatened to revoke its post-war loans, having to devalue sterling in 1949.

280 Mr Winkler’s essay in this series: in the first issue of Politics and Letters in the summer of 1947, a series on ‘Critic and Leviathan’ had been inaugurated with a debate between R. O. C. Winkler (a contributor to F. R. Leavis’s journal Scrutiny) and the Marxist historian Christopher Hill on the question of (in Winkler’s words) ‘the bearing of the values implied by literature on political practice’. See Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer (eds), F. R. Leavis: Essays and Documents (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 142.