¹ This is perhaps more the case in Britain than in the United States. In 1968, Mr. Simon Raven of the London Sunday Times reported that “all over England, in Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, and London, young men and women (and some not so young) are busy with their theses on George Orwell…the man, the writer, the message and the problem.” (Ragen, Simon, “Portrait of a Gentleman,” The Sunday Times Magazine [18 August 1968], p. 27Google Scholar).

² For example, Isaac Deutscher dismissed Orwell as merely “a simple-minded anarchist” and saw 1984 as “a document of dark disillusionment not only with Stalinism but with every form and shade of socialism.” But Philip Rahv, another writer of the political Left, maintained that 1984 was “the best antidote to the totalitarian disease that any writer has so far produced.” To Communists, such as James Walsh, he was “little more than a mouthpiece for some of the most deep-seated petit-bourgeois illusions and prejudices.” But to Lionel Trilling, he was “a virtuous man,” in John Atkins's view “a social saint,” and to V.S. Pritchett “the wintry conscience of his generation.” (See Howe, Irving, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; Text, Sources, Criticism, (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

³ Powell, Anthony, “George Orwell: A Memoir by Anthony Powell,” The Atlantic Monthly 220 (October 1967), p. 27.Google Scholar

⁴ Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 3 vols. (New York, 1968), II: 460.Google Scholar

⁵ Rees, Richard, George Orwell Fugitive From the Camp of Victory (Carbondale, 1961), p. 6.Google Scholar

⁶ Orwell and Angus, I: 427.

⁷ Ibid., p. 417.

⁸ Ibid., p. 427.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid” p. 458.

¹¹ See “Rudyard Kipling,” Orwell and Angus, II: 184-197.

¹² See “In Defense of P. G. Wodenhouse,” Orwell and Angus, III: 341-355.

¹³ Quoted in Woodcock, George, The Crystal Spirit (Boston, 1966), p. 44.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Richard Rees once explored this aspect of Orwell's character within the context of Simone Weil's view of social justice: “If one knows in what respect society is unbalanced, one must do what one can to add weight to the lighter of the two scales. Although the weight is bound to be evil, by using it with the intention of reestablishing the balance it may be that one avoids any personal degradation. But one must first of all have clearly recognised where the balance lies, and be always ready to change sides, like Justice, that ‘fugitive from the victors’ camp,” (Quoted in Rees, , George Orwell Fugitive From the Camp of Victory, p. 4Google Scholar). “It would be difficult,” Rees concluded, “to imagine a better statement of the principles upon which Orwell seems always instinctively to have acted.”

¹⁵ Orwell and Angus, I: 416.

¹⁶ Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York, 1937), pp. 128–129.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Orwell and Angus, III; 119.

¹⁸ Orwell's admiration for the intellectual traditions of the Victorians extended even to comparatively minor figures. For example, when he reviewed H. W. Nevinson's Visions and Memories, shortly before the end of World War II, Orwell observed that Nevinson “was at once courageous, civilised, and intellectually honest—a combination that grows rarer and rarer as we move further from the nineteenth century.” (Observer [London], 28 January 1945, p. 3Google ScholarPubMed). A similar attitude is expressed in his evaluation of J. A. Spender: “When he writes of liberty, and especially of liberty of the press, Spender makes one realize what an advantage it is to have formed one's dominant ideas in the nineteenth century. Few modern people are able to be so unafraid of the consequences of liberty.” (Manchester Evening News, 23 November 1944: 2Google Scholar). The Victorians were held to be morally superior even in the field of escapist literature. As the Battle of Britain raged overhead, Orwell asserted that: “Human beings must escape from their environment occasionally, and that remote world of horsehair bustles and hansom cabs is more refreshing than the latest gangster film from Hollywood.” (Tribune [London], 23 August 1940, p. 19Google ScholarPubMed).

¹⁹ Orwell and Angus, III: 1 19. In a letter to a critic who raised questions about his view of Dickens, Orwell admitted that Dickens “had the most childish views on politics,” but he maintained that “because his moral sense was sound he would have been able to find his bearing in any political or economic milieu. So I think would most of the Victorians.” In a reference to the Soviet Union, Orwell concluded that “Dickens without the slightest understanding of Socialism etc., would have seen at a glance that there is something wrong with a regime that needs a pyramid of corpses every few years.” (Orwell and Angus, I: 531-532).

²⁰ Ibid., p. 458.

²¹ Although it scarcely applies to Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge was probably not too far off the mark when he cynically observed that “dickens is the true inspirer and remains to a great extent the embodiment, of English Radicalism or Leftism; his stamp is still upon the Labour Party stalwarts.…His capacity for turning on a passionate flood of righteous indignation at any time; his tears for the poor, and love of money and success; his scorn for his social superiors, and passion to be like them; the sentimentality in which all his emotions, public and private, were drenched, and the corresponding humour which so incomparably expressed what he really felt, how he really saw his fellows and the world he lived in—is not this characteristic of any of our leaders of the Left, from Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan to Harold Wilson?” (Muggeridge, Malcolm, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick [New York, 1973], p. 26Google Scholar).

²² In spite of the strident agnosticism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, Utilitarianism was essentially Christian in its approach to social reform. John Stuart Mill, in his definitive statement of the Utilitarian philosophy, maintained that: “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbor as yourself, constitute the ideal spirit of the ethics of utilitarian morality.” (Mill, John Stuart, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill [New York, 1961], p. 342.Google Scholar

²³ Orwell, , The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 149.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., p. 179.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 149.

²⁶ Here it is interesting to compare Orwell's criticism of the psuedo-scientific, statistically-oriented Fabians with Dicken's attacks upon their intellectual precursors, the Utilitarians. In Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and elsewhere, Dickens reduced the political and economic principles of the Benthamite school to objects of satire and derision. The harsh certainty of the scientific approach to social problems is rejected in favor of a vague, essentially Christian ideal of human brotherhood. The pattern is the same in most of Orwell's social and political Criticism. Marxism and other modern political and economic dogmas were “smelly little orthodixies” that threaten human freedom and thwart social justice in a world that has lost its sense of decency. Shaw and the Webbs were merely twentieth century Grandgrinds with totalitarian tendencies.

²⁷ Orwell, , The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 151.Google Scholar

²⁸ Orwell and Angus, I: 333.

²⁹ In the midst of the Stalinist purges, Shaw maintained that “Russia is an example to all the world of the enormous superiority of Socialism to Capitalism economically, socially, and politically.” The Stalinization of the Soviet Union and the ensuing purges, which by reliable estimate consumed some twenty million lives, were justified on the grounds that “some of the old Bolsheviks had to be executed; for revolutionary habits are hard to change; and it still holds good that one of the first jobs of a successful revolution is to get rid of the revolutionaries.” The infamous Cheka of Felix Dzerzhinsky was described as simply a necessary police force “to deal with the slackers and would-be sinecurists” that had gradually developed into “an ordinary department of the Russian Scotland Yard.…” (Shaw, George Bernard, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism [London, 1949], pp. 455, 466Google Scholar).

³⁰ Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (London, 1941), II: 944, 999–1,000.Google Scholar

³¹ According to the late Cyril Connolly, his former school mate and lifelong friend, Orwell enthusiastically “read Shaw and Samuel Butler” at St. Cyprian's, which he attended between the ages of eight and thirteen. At Eton (1917-1921) Connolly recalled that Orwell was still “Immersed in The Way of All Flesh and the atheistic arguments of Androcles and the Lion.” (Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise [New York, 1937], pp. 212–213, 244Google Scholar). Orwell always leaned more in the direction of agnosticism rather than atheism. The author of a recent study of Orwell is probably correct in his assertion that Orwell stopped “short of confessed atheism only because of his dislike of systems and atheists.” (Sandison, Alan, The Last Man in Europe: An Essay on George Orwell [London, 1973], p. 168Google Scholar).

³² Orwell and Angus, II: 15.

³³ In 1944, he wrote: “Western civilisation, unlike some oriental civilisations was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. If one looks at the Christian religion from the outside, this belief appears far more important than the belief in God. The western concept of good and evil is very difficult to separate from it. There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with modern man's feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated. Statesman, nations, theories, causes are judged almost inevitably by the test of material success. Supposing that one can separate the two phenomena, I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of the machine civilisation.” (Orwell and Angus, III: 103).

³⁴ Orwell and Angus, II: 15-16.

³⁵ Orwell, George, A Clergyman's Daughter (Penguin Edition, 1935), p. 258.Google Scholar

³⁶ Observer (London), 22 July 1945, p. 3.Google ScholarPubMed

³⁷ Orwell and Angus, II: 17.

³⁸ Orwell and Angus, III: 100.

³⁹ Orwell and Angus, II: 17.

⁴⁰ For example, when Mr. Joseph E. Evans reviewed 1984 for the Wall Street Journal, he insisted that “Orwell's savage indictment of totalitarianism is directed as much against British socialism as it is against communism or fascism.” (16 June 1949, p. 6).

⁴¹ Orwell's letter to Mr. Henson appeared in the New York Times Book Review (31 July 1949, p. 8Google Scholar).

⁴² Orwell and Angus, II: 143.

⁴³ Tribune (London), 21 June 1940, p. 19.Google ScholarPubMed

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1935), pp. 441–442.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ The Adelphi (London), May, 1940, p. 362.Google ScholarPubMed

⁴⁷ Orwell and Angus, I: 460.