'Quintessentially English'
A writer can sometimes have more influence on the mentality of political activists than the most reasonable of politicians. Orwell once said, '...above all I wanted to make political writing into an art'. That he did and his provocations, sometimes perverse and extreme, were always deliberately intended to challenge his readers - to make them think, or even to think twice.
He was an English Socialist of the classic kind, in the same mould as Michael Foot and Aneurin Bevan - left-wing, but also libertarian, egalitarian and hostile to the Communist Party. In addition he was quite un-theoretical, almost anti-theoretical. He maintained that no person or party was above criticism: when he was a member of the old left-wing Independent Labour Party he wrote that 'no writer can be a loyal member of a political party'.
'Orwell was quintessentially English in his love of the countryside and in his protestant conscience...'
Orwell was quintessentially English in his love of the countryside and in his Protestant conscience, which made him angry at injustice and concerned for the plight of the poor, even if he was a firm rationalist and unbeliever. And he was English in his forthright outspokenness - 'liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear'.
The writer's Englishness was not, however, that of the upper classes; it belonged to the radical tradition of Cobbett, Blake, Bunyan and the Levellers. His mastery of the plain style of writing and personal unconcern for anything other than a plain style of living was all of a piece with the ordinary people whom he wished to reach in his writing, in the tradition of Wells and Dickens rather than modern and now post-modern novelists.
Orwell's was an Englishness far removed from what was called by his contemporary, the Christian socialist Richard Tawney, 'the acquisitive society' (today's 'consumer society'). In other words he was one of the 'awkward squad', an Etonian who despised the establishment; he might have been happier in Cromwell's New Model Army of 1646 than he was in the Home Guard of 1941.
Published: 2002-06-01
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