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“The native decency of the common man”: George Orwell and the moral limits of decency

Peter Brian Barry

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[You can hear Professor Barry discuss George Orwell’s engagement with philosophy and ethics, with guest-host Scott Stephens, on  The Philosopher’s Zone .]

It is easy to get the impression that ethics wasn’t complicated for George Orwell, such that  Craig Carr could write : “Morally speaking, the world for Orwell seemed like a reasonably simple place”, demanding only that people “should be treated decently and should have the opportunity to live a decent life”.

Decency is clearly a central concept in Orwell’s ethics. He confessed in  Homage to Catalonia that, “if you had asked me what I was fighting for … I should have answered: ‘Common decency’”; and if combat left him “with memories that are mostly evil”, he emerged “with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings”. He affirmed more than once that human nature is “fairly decent”. In  The Road to Wigan Pier , he repeatedly tied the concept of decency to democratic Socialism — insisting that “the only possible course for any decent person … is to work for the establishment of Socialism”, that “Socialism is compatible with common decency”, and that “Socialism means justice and common decency”.

The centrality of decency to Orwell’s ethics has, moreover, been noted by his readers. Decency is variously described as  “Orwell’s highest praise” , a  “key Orwell phrase” , a  “significant Orwellian word” , one of the  “key words … in Orwell’s writing” , a  “key word in Orwell’s ethical code” , his  favourite word , one that he  “frequently employs … as a positive value-judgement” , and  “probably the best word to describe Orwell’s ideal” . Decency is  “fundamental to Orwell’s moral view” , a  “specific recurring theme of his work” ,  “a key feature of his secular morality” , and “the central morality on which we should focus in Orwell’s writings” . Decency is  “a prerequisite for all other values” and  “the common element in all George Orwell’s writing” . Decency is an  “extraordinarily important” concept that Orwell’s work is  “dedicated to defining” — it is  “his secular faith” .

Even so, some complain that Orwell used the term  “uncritically” and that he  “never analyzes the concept or even defines the word” . We are told that decency is an  “ultimately indefinable moral standard” and  “too vague to mean much” . Oddly enough, Orwell might have endorsed these critiques, in much the same way  as he complains that Charles Dickens’s moral criticism amounts to “an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent” — and yet he would go on to say that he thought Dickens was onto something: “‘Behave decently’ … is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds”.

I do not dispute that decency is important and pervasive in Orwell’s thought, but I do worry that once we get clearer about what Orwellian decency is, we find that it cannot do the job he wants it to do. To put it simply: Orwellian decency, whatever it is, is not  a moral virtue.

What Orwellian decency is not

Orwellian decency is often thought to have origins in Christian thought and morality, that decency is Orwell’s  “religionless Christianity” , that it is the  “essence of the Christian morality, stripped of its superstitious and ascetic qualities” , and that  “the traditional Judeo-Christian moral values could be equated with decency” .

But this supposed relationship between Orwellian decency and Christianity is not affirmed by Orwell himself — although he himself may be partly to blame for the confusion. For instance, in  A Clergyman’s Daughter , Dorothy remarks, “all that happens in church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something — it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness — that is not easily found in the world outside”. In  Coming Up for Air , George Bowling speaks of “a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s daughter and a decent God-fearing shopkeeper’s wife”, along with “decent God-fearing women who cook Yorkshire puddings and apple dumplings”. Finally, in his  review of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator , Orwell praises “the common man” who “everywhere, under the surface … sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from the Christian culture”. No wonder some readers find their own religious convictions in Orwell.

Yet in a hostile book review, Orwell declares explicitly that “it will not do to suggest … that a decent society can only be founded on Christian principles” — adding: “Are we to say that a decent society cannot be established in Asia?” In a letter to Humphry House, he explains: “the vast majority of people believe in [common decency] without the need to tie it up with any transcendental belief”. At times, he suggests that decency and religiosity pair badly in the work of his contemporaries. Graham Greene’s work, for example, yields “the fairly sinister suggestion that all ordinary human decency is of no value and that any one sin is no worse than any other sin”. And the “essential theme” of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited “is the collision between ordinary decent behaviour and the Catholic concept of good and evil”.

None of this suggests that religiosity has much to do with being a decent person. So what did Orwell think made someone decent?

All kinds of decency

Orwell,  as a philosophical outsider , is never as precise as a professional philosopher might wish, but there are some trends in his discussion of decency that are suggestive. 

Decency and cleanliness

In  “Looking Back on the Spanish War” , Orwell explained that “the central issue of the war was the attempt of people … to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright”, and wondered whether they would “be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable”. What does a decent, fully human life require? Orwell explains:

the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all [includes] … [e]nough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done.

Food and shelter are obvious requisites of a minimally good life. Daily baths and clean linen might seem less obvious candidates, but, for Orwell, decency means cleanliness. The link between cleanliness and decency is especially clear in  The Road to Wigan Pier , where he explained that “even in the middle of the [Northern industrial districts] there is still room for patches of cleanness and decency”, but lamented that: “Some people hardly seem to realize that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God.” He recorded:

a great variation in the houses I visited … Some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them accurately … [W]ith, say, six children in a three-roomed house it is quite impossible to keep anything decent.

Somewhat oddly, he insisted that, “When all is said and done, the most important thing is that people shall live in decent houses and not in pigsties.”

Why should living in decent homes be the  most important thing? And what does cleanliness have to do with being decent? The connection is suggested by Orwell’s observation that clean homes promise a “place where the children can breathe clean air” and “start life with better chances” — which implies something more than the obvious fact that children raised in clean homes will grow up healthier. He often noted a connection between cleanliness and social status, most infamously when he recalled being taught as a bourgeois youth the “four frightful words … The lower classes smell ”, which he thought contained “the real secret of class distinctions in the West”. Similarly, in  Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Gordon notes the social consequences of indecency:

Don’t you see that a man’s whole personality is bound up with his income? His personality is his income. How can you be attractive to a girl when you’ve got no money? You can’t wear decent clothes, you can’t take her out to dinner or to the theatre or away for week-ends, you can’t carry a cheery, interesting atmosphere about with you. And it’s rot to say that kind of thing doesn’t matter. It does.

It is now easier to explain why cleanliness is relevant to Orwellian decency and  why he sought “to create a world in which every man’s right to self-respect would be jealously preserved”. For if cleanliness helps secure self-respect, then cleanliness is instrumentally morally valuable and relevant to decent personhood. Orwell’s obsession with cleanliness is not a remnant of bourgeois morality, but reflects his recognition that even mere decency is unlikely without self-respect.

“Common decency”

Orwell often speaks, not of decency, but common  decency, the decency of common people. He praised Charles Dickens for his ability to “express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man”, and Charlie Chaplain for his ability to highlight “the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the heart of ordinary people”. He likewise expressed his frustration that: “The mass of the people never get the chance to bring their innate decency into the control of affairs”. By contrast, the elites in control lacked what the common people have — especially “the modern intelligentsia” who cannot “see that human society must be based on common decency”, and those “cranks, doctrinaires, parlour Bolsheviks” who made socialism unpalatable and ought be replaced “by better brains and more common decency”.

Is there anything to be said about common decency besides the fact that it is, well, common? In  Keep the Aspidistra Flying , he writes:

Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras — they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They “kept themselves respectable” — kept the aspidistra flying.

The common people are praised faintly here: whatever their flaws, at least they kept themselves respectable. But common decency, insofar as it involves having standards and points of honour, is also of moral value: a capacity to keep one’s standards suggests a degree of self-mastery necessary to be autonomous and a fitting candidate for even faint praise. And if common decency is common , there is some hope that the mass of people are capable of Orwellian decency.

Decency as privation

In a rather vindictive moment,  Orwell explained that “it is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being” — presumably because Orwellian decency precludes the flaws of the Oxbridge clique. Often, he suggested that decency has a privative  aspect, that Orwellian decency demands the absence of certain character flaws.

Some of Orwell’s talk of decency is not to be taken literally. In  Down and Out in Paris and London , Boris, Orwell’s white Russian compatriot, complains that “the Jew with whom he lived” lacks “the decency to be ashamed of it” — which is to say, ashamed of being Jewish. Bozo, one of the memorable vagabonds Orwell tramped with, “considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful”. Perhaps his most obviously ironic uses of “decency” appear in  Burmese Days . The dislikable love interest, Elizabeth, is of the mind that “decent people — people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes — were not brainy” and “didn’t go in for this nonsense of writing books and fooling with paintbrushes; and all these Highbrow ideas — Socialism and all that”. She thinks that to “turn deliberately away from all that was good and decent” — say, by living as an unemployed artist — is “shameful, degrading, evil”. The detestable Ellis likewise chides Flory for failing to rise to the defence of his racist proposal to keep the Burmese out of their private club:

My God, I should have thought in a case like this, when it’s a question of keeping those black, stinking swine out of the only place where we can enjoy ourselves, you’d have the decency to back me up.

If Orwell was ironic in these instances, we have a template for constructing his conception of decent personhood: that which is commended by the ironic use of “decency” is inconsistent with Orwellian decency. So, if decency as Boris and Ellis understand it demands contempt for others because of their religion or race or ethnicity, Orwellian decency opposes it. If decency as Bozo understands it demands ingratitude and thanklessness in reaction to generosity, Orwellian decency precludes those sentiments. If decency as Elizabeth understands it is prim and snobbish, Orwellian decency excludes privilege, hostility, and materialism. And so forth. 

Orwellian decency also precludes the power fetish. Orwell regarded Dickens as a decent man partly because “he sees the stupidity of violence” and “belongs to a cautions urban class which does not deal in socks on the jaw, even in theory”. In  Coming Up for Air , Bowling identifies “the decent people” with “the people who don’t want to go round smashing faces in with spanners”. Orwellian decency and the power fetish are also clearly opposed when he explained: “Either power politics must yield to common decency, or the world must go spiralling down into a nightmare of which we can already catch some glimpses.”

Orwellian decency, all told

Orwellian decency, then, requires certain valuable character traits and precludes others. It involves self-respect and self-mastery, which will tend to ensure that the decent person will have some tendency to stick to their convictions and act decently. It ensures that the decent person lacks tribal hostilities based on religion, ethnicity, race, and nationality and familiar vices like snobbishness and hypocrisy, among others. Above all, Orwellian decency is inconsistent with admiration of gratuitous violence and other vulgar displays of power, such that even merely decent people will be less prone to suffering from extreme moral vices, like cruelty and malice. Orwellian decency is not an unattractive condition of character and goes some way to articulating what a minimally good person is like. 

But that is its weakness: since Orwellian decency only illuminates what a minimally good person is like, it is not a moral ideal worthy of widespread admiration nor the sort of thing that one should try to construct a moral theory out of.

Orwell knew that “the sense of decency” varied as a function of time and people, country and age. He was especially interested in English decency — affirming that: “England is the only European country where internal politics are conducted in a more or less humane and decent manner”, and “Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England”.  Jeffrey Meyers even suggests that Orwellian decency involves a “synthesis of the traditional English virtues” and equates “the distillation of English virtues” with “the concept of decency”.

My complaint is not with understanding Orwellian decency as English virtue, but with understanding it as English virtue . “Decency” may be a term of praise, but Orwellian decency is simply not a moral virtue and, for a number of reasons, I am deeply suspicious that it can play the sort of foundational role in Orwell’s ethics that he and others seem to attribute to it.

Decency lacks aspects of moral virtue

Decency, as I have said, amounts to adequacy, to minimal goodness, and not much more. On a familiar Aristotelian account, virtue is a kind of excellence and moral virtues are excellences of character — character traits that make their possessor morally admirable and praiseworthy. Orwellian decency is therefore wrongly classified as an excellence and thus lacks aspects of moral virtue.

There is undoubtedly a connection between moral virtue and right action, but the moral virtues are not merely dispositions to act in certain constitutive ways. Generosity is not merely a matter of giving to those in need when the chance arises; an opportunistic miser can do that . The generous person also tends to give to those in need with feelings of joy while believing that the poor are deserving of help, unlike the miser who gives with contempt and believes that the poor are scum. Virtues, as I understand them, are complicated multi-track dispositions that dispose their agents to perform certain actions in certain circumstances with constitutive beliefs and feelings, and so forth.

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Orwellian decency is less clearly a multi-track dispositional state — at least, it is less clearly the right sort of multi-track dispositional state. Orwellian decency may involve a disposition to do what is morally required and a tendency to feel something like shame when failing to do so, but it does not follow that it demands any tendency to act with constitutive beliefs or feelings. Someone prone to acting decently — say, to giving up their seat on the bus — may do so hesitantly or with cool emotional regard, knowing that this is the sort of thing she is expected to do. And while a decent person may feel shame or regret if she doesn’t give up her seat, it doesn’t follow she feels anything if she does.

Orwellian decency also lacks other aspects of moral virtue too. Some character traits are best regarded as natural virtues — the kind of character traits we have by luck and not as a result of any effort on our part. Just as some people are naturally inclined to be strong and fast and smart, some people are naturally inclined to be helpful and brave and caring. But, again, on an Aristotelian account, moral virtues require practice and habituation to become moral virtues; no one is simply born generous or brave or just. Orwell sometimes talks as if Orwellian decency is more akin to a natural virtue, say, when he allows that “human beings are by nature fairly decent” and that “human nature is fairly decent to start with”. If Orwellian decency is natural to human beings, then it differs from moral virtue in another relevant respect.

Decency is consistent with serious moral flaws

Orwell praised the Catalan working class in  Homage to Catalonia and recalled being “struck by their essential decency; above all, their straightforwardness and generosity”. This is a clear case in which decency and moral virtue — namely, generosity — are in harmony. But too often, Orwell described some persons as decent and flawed. Some of these flaws he noted were trivial:

• he explained that Jonathan Swift “couldn’t see what the simplest person sees, that life is worth living and human beings, even if they’re dirty and ridiculous, are mostly decent”;
• he noted that public schools were still “turning out the brave, stupid, fairly decent mediocrities who are still their typical products today”;
• he allowed that there are people who are “decent, but their minds have stopped”, suggesting that various intellectual deficiencies are compatible with decency.

But he also suggested that decency is consistent with more grievous moral flaws. For example, Orwell recalled in one column a clumsy coolie receiving a terrific kick from a police sergeant, and noted the “ordinary, decent, middling people … watching the scene with no emotion whatever except a mild approval”. Their decency did not preclude racially inspired schadenfreude . Keep the Aspidistra Flying  repeatedly implies that decency is consistent with a deficiency of compassion if it is “quite impossible to explain to any rich person, even to anyone so decent as Ravelston, the essential bloodiness of poverty”. Apparently, someone can be evil  and decent, given a passage in  The English People in which Orwell referenced a caricature of “the hanging judge”: “that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig … a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency”.

The best reason to think that Orwellian decency is consistent with serious moral flaws is that Orwell clearly thought that decent people can be exploited by seriously unjust causes. Why fascists attract the loyalty of ordinary people is a pressing question and Orwell was worried that the decent might be charmed: hence  he explained that it is “the most urgent need of the next few years is to capture those normal decent ones before Fascism plays its trump card”, and that “Fascism has a great appeal for certain simple and decent people who genuinely want to see justice done to the working class and do not grasp that they are being used as tools by the big capitalists”.

While it is dangerous to understand moral virtue in mythological terms, the genuinely morally virtuous person should have sufficient courage, justice, empathy, and practical wisdom to ensure that she will not be so easily charmed. Those who are prone to exploitation by seriously unjust causes must have some vulnerability that moral virtue tends to preclude.

Decency standards are not moral standards

Orwell praises the common people who contrive to keep their decency and “had their standards, their inviolable points of honour”. But are those moral  standards? Often, the standards to which he appeals when he praises someone for their decency are dubiously regarded as moral ones. For example, in  Down and Out in Paris and London , Orwell explains that he will not approach his gentleman friend for money since “it seemed hardly decent to do so yet” having just returned to England. In  Burmese Days , we are told that while “[e]veryone was perishing [for a drink] … it seemed hardly decent to go down to the Club for drinks immediately after the funeral”. In these passages, decency involves compliance with norms governing what is polite or mannerly or otherwise socially expected but not clearly with substantive moral norms.

In  “Raffles and Miss Blandish” , Orwell pointed out that Raffles, the gentleman thief, and his partner-in-crime, Bunny, “are gentlemen, and such standards as they do have are not to be violated” — adding that, for them, “Certain things are ‘not done’”. But he also explained that Raffles and Bunny “have no real ethical code”, only “certain rules of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively”. If the Raffles stories “belong to a time when people had standards”, he thought that “they happened to be foolish standards” and that the “line that they draw between good and evil is as senseless as a Polynesian taboo”. The standards that Raffles embraces — do not abuse hospitality, be chivalrous in sportsmanship, and so forth — are thus better understood as amoral standards reflective of class position and status, not moral standards.

Orwell had a bit of fun with taboos that specify that certain things “are not done”, suggesting he knew that supposed standards need not be taken all that seriously. In  Keep the Aspidistra Flying , Gordon fiercely rejects Rosemary’s offer to pay for dinner on the grounds that “one can’t do that sort of thing. It isn’t done.” Rosemary’s replies “You’ll be saying it’s ‘not cricket’ in another moment” and “Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria?” are supposed to highlight just how silly Gordon is being as he clings to his standards. In  “Freedom of the Press” , Orwell explained that: 

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

It is hard to read this passage without coming away with the conclusion that we should not suppose that a standard has ethical content just because it has popular currency. But then it is simply unclear why decency, insofar as it involves having standards, is evidence of moral virtue, which demands more. Some of the standards Orwell recorded as relevant to decency are not simply silly or amoral, but clearly unjust. In a much-discussed passage from  The Road to Wigan Pier , Orwell expressed his preference for patriarchal working-class standards governing the home:

In a working-class home … you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere … I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat — it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of  it to be taken for granted.

In response,  Beatrix Campbell rightly criticises Orwell’s “sentimental fallacies about the perfect symmetry of family life”, and  Daphne Patai suggests that Orwell fetishises “this patriarchal image” that “allows him to create a myth” of symmetry while ignoring domestic inequality. Orwellian decency is apparently consistent standards that are not just amoral but ethically dubious.

What, then, does Orwellian decency amount to?

I believe Orwellian decency is best understood as a character trait — rather like loyalty. On its face, loyalty seems to be a good thing: we would like our children to be loyal people not, we typically respect loyal people because of their loyalty, it can motivate us to do good, and so forth. Yet loyalty is dubiously regarded as a moral virtue since it can conflict with other paramount moral virtues, like justice: loyalty in the service of the wrong cause has little moral value and misplaced loyalty is evidence of serious vice — say, in the case of those Soviet apologists that Orwell scrapped with who would be better if they were less loyal.

That said, loyalty metered by other virtues, moral and intellectual, is a good thing and truly reflects a condition of character we hope our children develop. We want them to be loyal but  loyal to the right people and causes , having thought hard about what that might mean, and lacking the convictions of a fanatic.

Decency is like loyalty in these respects. We want our children to be decent but not merely so: we want them to be decent and  to have good politics, good convictions, and good moral sense. Their decency needs to be augmented by moral virtue if it is going to reliably lead to good conduct and just results. A fully virtuous person will be decent, just as she will be loyal, but she is under-described as being simply either, and both her decency and loyalty will be grounded in her moral virtue: just as a morally virtuous person is loyal because she has and exercises moral virtues like friendship and care, so the morally virtuous person will be decent because she has and exercises moral virtues like magnanimity (which ensures her self-respect), justice (which ensures that she will lack tribal hostilities), and courage (which ensures that she has and keeps to her standards).

Still, if Orwellian decency does not constitute the nerve of Orwell’s ethics, his talk of decency might tell us what is. In what initially seems like a throwaway line,  Orwell affirms : “Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.” I call this a throwaway line as it seems dubious: why, exactly, can’t some people live in a decent world while others don’t? Why does decency for some require decency for all? Perhaps what Orwell is after here is not decency, or at least not decency for its own sake.  Ian Slater rightly observes of Orwell’s “calls for decency”, “for all their vagueness, [they] do signify an intent to improve the quality of life, to move away from inequality wherein privilege takes precedence over ability”.

Insofar as equality is relational, we cannot speak of equality in insolation of other persons. Perhaps Orwell thinks that we either all live in a decent world or none of us do because he thinks that decency is tied up with equality in some interesting sense and inseparable from it. Perhaps a world lacking in Orwellian decency must be in virtue of that fact an unjust one and unjust because inegalitarian.

Peter Brian Barry is Professor of Philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of  George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality (Oxford University Press), from which this article is  an edited extract .

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Two ‘London’ writers: George Orwell and Charles Dickens

Two legs good.

Very, very few people get their names turned into adjectives. British politics can boast the adjective ‘Churchillian’ and perhaps ‘Thatcherite’.

Two London authors have both become everyday adjectives in the English-speaking world. If anyone talks of a factory or perhaps housing being ‘Dickensian’ – we know it means the sort of ‘ Oliver Twist’ conditions found in nineteenth-century London. The word ‘Orwellian’ is frequently used to describe government behaviour similar to Stalin’s or Hitler’s totalitarian state parodied by the great twentieth-century author of Animal Farm and 1984 – George Orwell.

“Dickensian” and “Orwellian”

Whereas we can assume Shakespeare would gladly see something described as ‘Shakespearean’, and Churchill no doubt would be happy that politicians like to be called Churchillian, the descriptions ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Orwellian’ both refer to things they both campaigned against!

Grave of Charles Dickens. Image by Jack1956

This year saw the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens was commemorated in lights on Westminster Abbey (where our kings have been crowned for a thousand years) during lockdown, and whenever there is a long discussion on the current controversy over ‘fake news’, or perhaps a debate on a CCTV camera in a public place, you can frequently bet someone will decry it as ‘Orwellian’.

Walks in London 

As a London tour guide, perhaps the most popular literary walk is showing how much of Dickens’s London is still there (see London Walks ). You can still see the bank referred to in his most successful novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and how the banks and the Law Courts are still in the same street – Fleet Street (the newspapers only recently moved out).

Statue of George Orwell in front of BBC. Credit: sam.romilly, licensed under CC BY 2.0

George Orwell died more recently (1950) so a lot of the cafes he frequented and the places he worked (the BBC, where I also worked, but I do not have my own statue outside the building!) are very much as they were in his time (see Orwell’s London Tour ).

How are Orwell and Dickens similar?

Over and above both being adjectives, these authors have striking similarities. Both were originally journalists who wrote non-fiction as well as fiction, and both are famous for the excellence of their writing style ( Orwell’s six rules for writing are taught in some journalism schools to this day).  Both wrote about poverty in London comparing it with Paris (Dickens in a Tale of Two Cities, Orwell in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London, a book about his own experiences trying life as a tramp, even though he had attended Eton, Britain’s smartest boys’ school, the same one as most of our Prime Ministers Princes Harry and William, the Queen’s grandchildren). And here is the great contrast. Orwell’s solution to poverty was to fight alongside communists and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (where he was shot).

“Where’s Orwell?” This photo was taken during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell is the tall one at the end on the left at the back. Image: Public domain

Unlike Orwell’s ‘fake’ poverty, Dickens had experienced the real poverty of Oliver Twist or his virtually autobiographical novel David Copperfield (‘The Personal History of David Copperfield’ is an excellent British film released this year if you have a chance to see it) when his father was sent to prison and the young Dickens was forced to work in a factory aged 12. Unlike Orwell’s radical political solution to poverty, Dickens in contrast simply encouraged the rich to give to charity.

London boasts an excellent Dickens Museum in one of his many London houses, very close to the Children’s Hospital and the Foundling Museum (see below) which he supported and encouraged others also to support.

Image by Matt From London, licensed under CC BY 2.0

If anyone visiting would like a ‘Churchillian Tour’, a ‘Shakespearean tour’ or even a ‘Thatcherite’ tour of London, there is a blue badge tour guide waiting to show you how much of London still resonates with these historic figures.

Featured image: Charles Dickens photo was taken by Watkins and George Orwell profile picture was published in an old accreditation for the Branch of National Union of Journalists. Both of them are in public domain.

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Orwell on Dickens

I’ve just discovered Orwell’s superb 1939 essay on Dickens, and can’t believe I’ve never read it before. The last section is reproduced below & gives a flavour of what to expect. The full text is here . In the main body of the essay, Orwell offers a clear-eyed analysis of Dickens’ shortcomings which serves to separate the chaff & identify what it was about the man that was great.

“Dickens voiced a code which was and on the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey. When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” – “Charles Dickens” by George Orwell, 1939.

One thought on “Orwell on Dickens”

Went brousing on your site to see if you have a new book out because, as you may recall, I loved Little Bee. Sorry to see you are no longer writing for the Guardian. Your columns were truly funny and insightful. As for Orwell on Dickens, not having read it I wonder how much he idolizes him without looking at the man, who failed miserably as a human being when it came to his family, but especially his wife. Tolstoy was also the subject of one of Orwell’s essays, in which among other things he covered his dislike of Shakespeare. There at least Orwell pointed out Tolstoy’s dishonesty of ideas, and even malice toward the Bard. Tolstoy, of course, had the double standard of mistreating wives in common with Dickens. ‘Nough said. Hope a new novel will come soon, and congrats to the arrival of baby #3, who wasn’t born when we last communicated.

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[Discussion] George Orwell: A collection of essays- "Charles Dickens"

Welcome to the second essay from George Orwell's collection tackling the body of work of Charles Dickens! He not only critiques Dickens, but he critiques critics critiquing Dickens.

This is one of his longest and most well-regarded literary critiques, published in 1940 and interestingly, Dickens was one of the first writers that Orwell really reflected on and was also the last author he wrote about before his death in 1950. We know that he re-read Little Dorrit in 1949--maybe our next Gutenberg?

" At Orwell’s death he owned five volumes of an 1890 edition of Dickens’s work, and, as the list of his books states, ‘Another 10 vols., to make a complete set; various publishers ’. More about Orwell's writing and Charles Dickens .

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If you want to know more about the following terms and subjects in the essay, please see here:

Dickens' burial drama

C.K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens

The Gordon Riots

The London "Mob" - (you will need a school account + J Store to see this essay)

The Fairchild Family - scary!

Lumpenproletariat

Nelson's Column

Antinomianism

Previously read Charles Dickens on here! Plus, we've read 1984 by Orwell in 2019 and quite a bit of H.G. Wells .

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Question down below! See you tomorrow for "The Art of Donald McGill" with u/thematrix1234 !

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Uploaded by station02.cebu on June 20, 2019

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