Robert Colls
Oxford University Press, 2026, £14.99
I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager because it felt like a moral duty and as a student regarded the four paperback volumes of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters as a sort of bible. So I wonder if Rob Colls (who taught me on my MA Victorian Studies course long ago) is right to say we are now living at peak Orwell.
The
imperative to read Nineteen Eighty-Four surely faded with the end of the
Cold War, even if Orwell’s picture of a world divided into three power blocs –
Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – is beginning to look prophetic. My impression
is that many who cite him today have been influenced by the American right
(“Make Orwell History Again”) and have little idea that Orwell remained, in his
writings at least, a revolutionary socialist until well after the outbreak of
the second world war.
There are many good things in this short book. Colls notes
how the Old Etonian Orwell took his preconceptions with him when he went to
lodge with working-class families so he could write The Road to Wigan Pier:
His local … contacts
reckoned he sought out the worst digs in the worst places. Having stayed a few
days with the Meades, “some kind of trade union official” on their new council
estate, Orwell seemed to think they couldn’t be working class because they
weren’t poor and the house didn’t smell.
Nor did Orwell show any understanding of the rich network of
chapels, clubs and societies that constituted working-class communities. Anyone
he found not to be living in abject destitution risked being dismissed as
“bourgeois”.
Colls is good too on the changing trends in Orwell scholarship. The importance to his work of Orwell’s two wives is becoming increasingly recognised, which is not something he always managed himself. It’s been said that it’s easy to read his Homage to Catalonia without realising that Orwell’s wife Eileen was in Spain with him the whole time.
Colls cheerfully admits Orwell’s limitations as a writer – too many generalisations, too many “beastly old boy adjectives”, too keen to deploy his “stage army of potty progressives” – but rightly praises his ability to write without condescension about the pleasures of the poor and insists Orwell is and will remain a vital presence in our culture. I hope he is right.
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