Essays by George Orwell

Essays George Orwell 

The first thing that I want to notice is that the cover image of the edition I have is a detail from an Empire Marketing Board Poster  which to me is rather odd as I doubt that Orwell would have been in anyway comfortable with the activities of the EMB, and so this is something of a faux pas by Penguin.

To turn to the essays themselves, they range widely over political, literary, and sociological topics yet time and again the same classic "Orwellian" themes unsurprisingly come to the fore.  As someone who finds 1984 one of to the most incisive political works in the modern canon the essays were rich in contextual material which links 1984 to Orwell's lived experiences.  This clarifies the core evil in Orwell's eye is the Establishment's bending of the truth - which often leads to the demolition of 'truth' as a meaningful concept. It is Orwell's time in Spain that focused him on this, and as shown by Stradling in "Your Children Will be Next...", the Spanish Civil War was a test bed not only of the aeroplanes of WWII but the media manipulation that is now the norm in both war and peace.

Many of the Essays are critiques of writers, one I found particularly interesting was that on Dickens.  Orwell notes that Dickens is claimed as a hero by both the 'Right' and the 'Left' - but Orwell argues that he defies them both because fundamentally Dickens did not see a 'political' solution to the ills he saw around him.  Dickens was a moralist not a politician, in the sense that the ills of society would be cured if only people lived righteously, that is lived up to the highest ideals of human nature.  What Dickens (according to Orwell) saw was that neither this political system nor another would make better people, and also almost any system if populated by the best of people is preferred to the 'best' system populated by ordinary human corruption. Through Dickens, Orwell advances his distrust of politicians of every colour and the belief that people, people with freedom, are the answer and the only hope (however often they fail).

I found myself often in agreement with Orwell and while he dismisses religion, much of his hope in people is for me core to the Christian hope, that liberated people can become the salvation of the world.