He’s one of Britain’s most beloved – and misunderstood – writers. Seventy-five years on, here’s all the ways the 1984 author’s legacy has been abused.
Seventy-five years after his death on January 21 1950, George Orwell is still used – and abused – as if he were our contemporary. We go to him for handy thoughts on the “deep state” and freedom of speech; he’s a trump-card, a kind of secular saint. Plaster the word “Orwellian” over anything you don’t like, sit back, and feel smug: you’ve won.
The examples are dizzyingly various. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Orwell’s books stormed into bestseller lists. After the invasion of Ukraine, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was the most downloaded book in Russia. Wherever democratic liberal values are threatened – Iran, Turkey, Zimbabwe and Myanmar used to be the hotspots, but it applies to the West as well – people always turn to Orwell. Both the left and right, and everyone in the centre, claim to “own” him. Even on the extremes, while some on the far-left distrust his view of the world, in every conspiratorial corner of the internet you’ll find the far-right appropriating his words.
Orwell’s dedication to apprehending reality remains a luminous example. Yet the real bite and horror of his work – the ways in which he identified the abuse of language and the impact of tyranny – must, like all great art, help us to understand things we couldn’t otherwise grasp. To see him as a 21st century figure, a man who thinks “just like us” (whoever “we” are), is to miss out on almost everything that makes him so particularly himself. And a confetti of misquotes and misapplications undermines the real value of his work.
So: here are 10 things we – perhaps you – often get wrong about Orwell, his life and his writing.
Orwell was a freedom-of-speech fundamentalist
He certainly wasn’t. He fought fiercely for freedom of speech, but was no libertarian. The most famous line in Nineteen Eighty-Four is “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” This may seem to be about freedom of speech, but it’s a statement about verity. It is the freedom to declare self-evident truths, facts – not, say, to make a mad allegation about Jess Phillips.
Orwell, in fact, never defends the “right to say anything”. On the contrary, he’s all too aware of the insidious power of corrupted and hateful speech, how it can create horror. The “two minutes’ hate” viscerally shows how violent language will disinhibit people and serve as the precondition for cruelty. This isn’t an abstract “hate”: it leads directly to the mobs who attack innocent people in Trafalgar Square later in the novel. Words, for Orwell, matter more than anything.
Orwell was the arch-enemy of the ‘deep state’
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Advertise with NZME.Rubbish. Orwell was opposed to totalitarian terror, and as such, he certainly saw bureaucracy as potentially stifling in the hands of tyrants. Drawing on what he saw from the two great “-isms” of his time – fascism and communism – he showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four how systematised lying can provide an order of its own. His work was a kind of prophylactic: read this and beware.
But he was completely in favour of good government, and saw the state as the organiser of law and order. Nineteen Eighty-Four describes an arbitrary world of power and fear and the subversion of reality, with no accountability. Its author wanted better government; even as a young man, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), he was ruminating, however naively, on what a policy to house and employ the homeless might look like.
And he understood national security. The controversial list of writers he provided to the security services was intended to help the state make better choices. He named them as unsuitable to write anti-communist propaganda in 1949, and fair enough: they were indeed pro-Stalin.
Orwell wasn’t really a socialist
Orwell wasn’t anti-communist: again, he was anti-tyranny – not the same thing. It’s true that his work, slung on balloons and flown into North Korea and Poland during the Cold War, was used by the CIA, and reprinted on clandestine presses by brave oppositions. Unlike many of his more fashionable contemporaries, he’d had a long inoculation against the lies and terrors of Stalinist tyranny. But he was himself a socialist – just one who didn’t fit easily into party lines. He was as radical on the day he died as when he tramped the streets of Paris and London as a young writer to experience poverty in the flesh.
Orwell was a visionary, and knew it
Absolutely not. On the contrary, his work was the product of an astonishingly prodigious range of reading and writing. Orwell wrote thousands of articles and reviews, and the clarity in his writing came from that work. It was grounded in the empirical, everyday observation and assessment of evidence. While writing The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he wrote nearly 1000 letters inquiring after such evidence. He was no seer, but a relentless worker.
Orwell was a secular saint
In fact, he was blind to plenty in our culture: art, music, football. And his work is distinguished by his use of his own dark side, deeply Calvinistic and self-excoriating. Orwell identified the mote in his own eye, and with extraordinary objectivity analysed his own nastiness. He was no sadist, but he understood violence: his comprehension of fascism was based on a streak of it in himself. Rather than saying “poor me”, Orwell says time and time again, “nasty, weak, cowardly me”: see essays such as Shooting an Elephant (1936) and A Hanging (1931). Anything critical you want to say about him, you’ll find he’s said it, and more damagingly, first. His starting point for all his best work is how guilty he is: he reports on himself with a weird cool detachment. His instincts were utterly at odds with too many people today: he was never a victim, always an agent.
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Advertise with NZME.Orwell was a grumpy and slovenly political obsessive
Such is the myth; but friends describe a man who was almost radiant in his decency. He defended art over politics, he liked to entertain, he gave money away when he had it, and he had devoted friends such as Anthony Powell and David Astor who valued his integrity, brilliance and kindness. Orwell was immersed in the life he lived, loving the small things – planting flowers and vegetables everywhere he lived, making absurd toys for his son Richard. He was a devoted father, and other children he met have testified since his death to how much fun his company was, and how much time he spent with them.
Orwell was a monster to women, and his wife was oppressed
This is a popular shibboleth of the moment. Orwell was a man of his times, and so were the women around him. But the women he knew, married and loved (whether or not they slept with him) were extraordinary. They were doctors, White Russian refugees, writers (Lydia Jackson, also known as Elisaveta Fen), pioneering child researchers. They were society beauties who had extraordinary literary lives (the Paget twins).
Eileen O’Shaughnessy (his first wife) was a university radical, one of the first women to go to St Hughes, Oxford, who worked as a pioneering psychological researcher and at the Ministry of Food. She transformed his life, and he hers. She was his first reader, and her recently discovered letters reveal her as witty, mordant, argumentative – not the frustrated put-upon housewife of one recent biography. Reading her last letter to Orwell from hospital, hours before she died on the operating table, is moving: it comes from the heart of a real, complex marriage. His second wife, Sonia Brownell, ran a literary magazine. These women had tough, sometimes rackety, wartime lives, but they were independent women of spirit and fortitude.
Orwell wasted his time at the BBC
Orwell worked at the BBC, on the Eastern Service, from 1941-3. Later, he called the Corporation “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum”, and referred to his stint there as “two wasted years”. But in reality, he did extraordinary work: he was exaggerating his unsuitability. He sponsored pioneering Indian writers, and people such as the wonderful black writer and broadcaster Una Marson. His stint at the BBC grounded him in more popular tastes – and it even gave him the idea of Room 101 (in reality, a mail-sorting room).
Orwell retreated to Jura as a kind of a death wish
Orwell lived, for the most part, on the Scottish island of Jura from 1946 to 1949; there he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s true that he was sick with tuberculosis, and would die in 1950. But he went to Jura because he thought it would be healthier. He wanted to avoid the consequences of fame; he had always dreamed of working in the country; he wanted to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four; and he thought that Richard would be safer in the event of a nuclear war.
Orwell was, in any sense, our contemporary
This is absurd. He was forged by an almost unrecognisably different England, Britain and world; they, and he, were steeped in a different literature, different politics. His odd class position, which he called “lower-upper-middle class”, and his work in and for the Empire, which was normal then, have disappeared like dust. His emotional temperature and habits seem alien now – because they come from a different age. It’s especially ironic, I think, that the number one myth-tackler should be subject to the projection of contemporary values onto his own life.
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