George Orwell, a Puritan radical who deplored poverty but detested privilege even more, yearned for an uncorrupted, premodern England, James Wood wrote, in 2009. The revolutionary essayist and author was born on this day in 1903.
Orwell is wrongly thought of as the great neutral reporter, immune to the fever of judgment—the cool camera, the unbiased eyeball. He was attacked by Edward Said for propagating “the eye-witness, seemingly opinion-less politics” of Western journalism. “When they are on the rampage, you show Asiatic and African mobs rampaging: an obviously disturbing scene presented by an obviously unconcerned reporter who is beyond Left piety or right-wing cant,” Said wrote about the Orwellian tradition.
Perhaps Orwell struck Said as dangerous because, though politically didactic, he is rarely obviously sympathetic. On the contrary, he thrashes his subjects with attention. In “How the Poor Die,” what stays with the reader is the description of the administration of the mustard poultice: Orwell says of Mr. Brooker, in “Wigan,” that like all men with dirty hands he handled food in a lingering way, but it is really Orwell whose eye cannot stop lingering on those dirty hands. In “Down and Out,” he cannot suppress the relish with which he tells us how many times he has seen the nasty fat pink fingers of the chef touching steak.
And it is the same with empire—a “stream of dividends that flows from the bodies of Indian coolies to the banking accounts of old ladies in Cheltenham.” The biggest convention in this semi-fictional world is the working class. In “The Road to Wigan Pier,” Orwell says that he knows too much about working-class life to idealize it, and then proceeds to idealize it, like some moral-moistened Victorian genre painter. In the best kind of proletarian home, he says, “you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere,” and a working man has a better chance of being happy than an “educated” one.
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