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    Fifty Orwell Essays

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    boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff

      that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very

      large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including

      many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with

      it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as

      hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.

      All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into

      them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist,

      that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that

      foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort

      of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these

      papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional. Of the

      twelve papers I have been discussing (i.e. twelve including the THRILLER

      and DETECTIVE WEEKLY) seven are the property of the Amalgamated Press,

      which is one of the biggest press-combines in the world and controls more

      than a hundred different papers. The GEM and MAGNET, therefore, are

      closely linked up with the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the FINANCIAL TIMES. This

      in itself would be enough to rouse certain suspicions, even if it were

      not obvious that the stories in the boys' weeklies are politically

      vetted. So it appears that if you feel the need of a fantasy-life in

      which you travel to Mars and fight lions bare-handed (and what boy

      doesn't?), you can only have it by delivering yourself over, mentally, to

      people like Lord Camrose. For there is no competition. Throughout the

      whole of this run of papers the differences are negligible, and on this

      level no others exist. This raises the question, why is there no such

      thing as a left-wing boys' paper?

      At first glance such an idea merely makes one slightly sick. It is so

      horribly easy to imagine what a left-wing boys' paper would be like, if

      it existed. I remember in 1920 or 1921 some optimistic person handing

      round Communist tracts among a crowd of public-school boys. The tract I

      received was of the question-and-answer kind:

      Q. 'Can a Boy Communist be a Boy Scout, Comrade?'

      A. 'No, Comrade.'

      Q. 'Why, Comrade?'

      A. 'Because, Comrade, a Boy Scout must salute the Union Jack, which is

      the symbol of tyranny and oppression,' etc., etc.

      Now suppose that at this moment somebody started a left-wing paper

      deliberately aimed at boys of twelve or fourteen. I do not suggest that

      the whole of its contents would be exactly like the tract I have quoted

      above, but does anyone doubt that they would be SOMETHING like it?

      Inevitably such a paper would either consist of dreary up-lift or it

      would be under Communist influence and given over to adulation of Soviet

      Russia; in either case no normal boy would ever look at it. Highbrow

      literature apart, the whole of the existing left-wing Press, in so far as

      it is at all vigorously 'left', is one long tract. The one Socialist

      paper in England which could live a week on its merits AS A PAPER is the

      DAILY HERALD: and how much Socialism is there in the DAILY HERALD? At

      this moment, therefore, a paper with a 'left' slant and at the same time

      likely to have an appeal to ordinary boys in their teens is something

      almost beyond hoping for.

      But it does not follow that it is impossible. There is no clear reason

      why every adventure story should necessarily be mixed up with

      snobbishness and gutter patriotism. For, after all, the stories in the

      HOTSPUR and the MODERN BOY are not Conservative tracts; they are merely

      adventure stories with a Conservative bias. It is fairly easy to imagine

      the process being reversed. It is possible, for instance, to imagine a

      paper as thrilling and lively as the HOTSPUR, but with subject-matter and

      'ideology' a little more up to date. It is even possible (though this

      raises other difficulties) to imagine a women's paper at the same

      literary level as the ORACLE, dealing in approximately the same kind of

      story, but taking rather more account of the realities of working-class

      life. Such things have been done before, though not in England. In the

      last years of the Spanish monarchy there was a large output in Spain of

      left-wing novelettes, some of them evidently of anarchist origin.

      Unfortunately at the time when they were appearing I did not see their

      social significance, and I lost the collection of them that I had, but no

      doubt copies would still be procurable. In get-up and style of story they

      were very similar to the English fourpenny novelette, except that their

      inspiration was 'left'. If, for instance, a story described police

      pursuing anarchists through the mountains, it would be from the point of

      view of the anarchist and not of the police. An example nearer to hand is

      the Soviet film CHAPAIEV, which has been shown a number of times in

      London. Technically, by the standards of the time when it was made,

      CHAPAIEV is a first-rate film, but mentally, in spite of the unfamiliar

      Russian background, it is not so very remote from Hollywood. The one

      thing that lifts it out of the ordinary is the remarkable performance by

      the actor who takes the part of the White officer (the fat one)--a

      performance which looks very like an inspired piece of gagging. Otherwise

      the atmosphere is familiar. All the usual paraphernalia is there--heroic

      fight against odds, escape at the last moment, shots of galloping horses,

      love interest, comic relief. The film is in fact a fairly ordinary one,

      except that its tendency is 'left'. In a Hollywood film of the Russian

      Civil War the Whites would probably be angels and the Reds demons. In the

      Russian version the Reds are angels and the Whites demons. That is also a

      lie, but, taking the long view, it is a less pernicious lie than the

      other.

      Here several difficult problems present themselves. Their general nature

      is obvious enough, and I do not want to discuss them. I am merely

      pointing to the fact that, in England, popular imaginative literature is

      a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter. ALL fiction from

      the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the

      interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the

      blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or

      other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only

      unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no

      impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe

      nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.

      CHARLES DICKENS (1940)

      I

      Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the

      burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you

      come to think of it.

      When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of

      Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with

      his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a

      Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, has made spirited efforts to turn


      Dickens into a blood-thirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as

      'almost' a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as 'almost' a Catholic, and

      both claim him as a champion of the proletariat (or 'the poor', as

      Chesterton would have put it). On the other hand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, in

      her little book on Lenin, relates that towards the end of his life Lenin

      went to see a dramatized version of THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH, and found

      Dickens's 'middle-class sentimentality' so intolerable that he walked out

      in the middle of a scene.

      Taking 'middle-class' to mean what Krupskaya might be expected to mean by

      it, this was probably a truer judgement than those of Chesterton and

      Jackson. But it is worth noticing that the dislike of Dickens implied in

      this remark is something unusual. Plenty of people have found him

      unreadable, but very few seem to have felt any hostility towards the

      general spirit of his work. Some years later Mr. Bechhofer Roberts

      published a full-length attack on Dickens in the form of a novel (THIS

      SIDE IDOLATRY), but it was a merely personal attack, concerned for the

      most part with Dickens's treatment of his wife. It dealt with incidents

      which not one in a thousand of Dickens's readers would ever hear about,

      and which no more invalidates his work than the second-best bed

      invalidates HAMLET. All that the book really demonstrated was that a

      writer's literary personality has little or nothing to do with his

      private character. It is quite possible that in private life Dickens was

      just the kind of insensitive egoist that Mr. Bechhofer Roberts makes him

      appear. But in his published work there is implied a personality quite

      different from this, a personality which has won him far more friends

      than enemies. It might well have been otherwise, for even if Dickens was

      a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might

      truthfully say a rebel. Everyone who has read widely in his work has felt

      this. Gissing, for instance, the best of the writers on Dickens, was

      anything but a radical himself, and he disapproved of this strain in

      Dickens and wished it were not there, but it never occurred to him to

      deny it. In OLIVER TWIST, HARD TIMES, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, Dickens

      attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been

      approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and,

      more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so

      completely that he has become a national institution himself. In its

      attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like

      the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful

      tickling. Before I was ten years old I was having Dickens ladled down my

      throat by schoolmasters in whom even at that age I could see a strong

      resemblance to Mr. Creakle, and one knows without needing to be told that

      lawyers delight in Sergeant Buzfuz and that LITTLE DORRIT is a favourite

      in the Home Office. Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking

      everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder

      whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.

      Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally, and politically? As

      usual, one can define his position more easily if one starts by deciding

      what he was NOT.

      In the first place he was NOT, as Messrs. Chesterton and Jackson seem to

      imply, a 'proletarian' writer. To begin with, he does not write about the

      proletariat, in which he merely resembles the overwhelming majority of

      novelists, past and present. If you look for the working classes in

      fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. This

      statement needs qualifying, perhaps. For reasons that are easy enough to

      see, the agricultural labourer (in England a proletarian) gets a fairly

      good showing in fiction, and a great deal has been written about

      criminals, derelicts and, more recently, the working-class

      intelligentsia. But the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make

      the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do

      find their way between the covers of a book, it is nearly always as

      objects of pity or as comic relief. The central action of Dickens's

      stories almost invariably takes place in middle-class surroundings. If

      one examines his novels in detail one finds that his real subject-matter

      is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on--lawyers,

      clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsmen, and servants. He has no

      portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in

      HARD TIMES) of an industrial worker. The Plornishes in LITTLE DORRIT are

      probably his best picture of a working-class family--the Peggottys, for

      instance, hardly belong to the working class--but on the whole he is not

      successful with this type of character. If you ask any ordinary reader

      which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he

      is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller, and Mrs. Gamp. A

      burglar, a valet, and a drunken midwife--not exactly a representative

      cross-section of the English working class.

      Secondly, in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word, Dickens is not a

      'revolutionary' writer. But his position here needs some defining.

      Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner

      soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will

      be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is

      worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much

      better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited.

      He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a

      series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable,

      and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but

      important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the

      existing form of society, certain evils CANNOT be remedied. Fasten upon

      this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it

      before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it.

      Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting

      them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that

      society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks 'Which root?'

      that one begins to grasp his position.

      The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively

      moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in

      his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational

      system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in

      their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist,

      or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that

      Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear

      sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he

      believes it would make very much difference if it WERE overthrown. For in

      reality his target is not so much society as 'human nature'. It would be


      difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the

      economic system is wrong AS A SYSTEM. Nowhere, for instance, does he make

      any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like

      OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with

      living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to

      suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of

      course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again

      from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of HARD TIMES, and

      indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of

      LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism; but Dickens makes no such inference himself. It

      is said that Macaulay refused to review HARD TIMES because he disapproved

      of its 'sullen Socialism'. Obviously Macaulay is here using the word

      'Socialism' in the same sense in which, twenty years ago, a vegetarian

      meal or a Cubist picture used to be referred to as 'Bolshevism'. There is

      not a line in the book that can properly be called Socialistic; indeed,

      its tendency if anything is pro-capitalist, because its whole moral is

      that capitalists ought to be kind, not that workers ought to be

      rebellious. Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been

      morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well

      enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social

      criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this,

      unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is

      one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would

      behave decently the world would be decent.

      Naturally this calls for a few characters who are in positions of

      authority and who DO behave decently. Hence that recurrent Dickens

      figure, the good rich man. This character belongs especially to Dickens's

      early optimistic period. He is usually a 'merchant' (we are not

      necessarily told what merchandise he deals in), and he is always a

      superhumanly kind-hearted old gentleman who 'trots' to and fro, raising

      his employees' wages, patting children on the head, getting debtors out

      of jail and in general, acting the fairy godmother. Of course he is a

      pure dream figure, much further from real life than, say, Squeers or

      Micawber. Even Dickens must have reflected occasionally that anyone who

      was so anxious to give his money away would never have acquired it in the

      first place. Mr. Pickwick, for instance, had 'been in the city', but it

      is difficult to imagine him making a fortune there. Nevertheless this

      character runs like a connecting thread through most of the earlier

      books. Pickwick, the Cheerybles, old Chuzzlewit, Scrooge--it is the same

      figure over and over again, the good rich man, handing out guineas.

      Dickens does however show signs of development here. In the books of the

      middle period the good rich man fades out to some extent. There is no one

      who plays this part in A TALE OF TWO CITIES, nor in GREAT

      EXPECTATIONS--GREAT EXPECTATIONS is, in fact, definitely an attack on

      patronage--and in HARD TIMES it is only very doubtfully played by

      Gradgrind after his reformation. The character reappears in a rather

      different form as Meagles in LITTLE DORRIT and John Jarndyce in BLEAK

      HOUSE--one might perhaps add Betsy Trotwood in DAVID COPPERFIELD. But in

      these books the good rich man has dwindled from a 'merchant' to a

      RENTIER. This is significant. A RENTIER is part of the possessing class,

      he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for

      him, but he has very little direct power. Unlike Scrooge or the

      Cheerybles, he cannot put everything right by raising everybody's wages.

      The seeming inference from the rather despondent books that Dickens

      wrote in the fifties is that by that time he had grasped the

      helplessness of well-meaning individuals in a corrupt society.

      Nevertheless in the last completed novel, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND (published

     


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