George Orwell and part of his draft for 1984
It was 79 years ago, on 10 April 1947, when George Orwell left London for the Isle of Jura to review his living options on that remote Scottish Island. Three months later, in July, he would end his lease on his Wallington cottage in South London and move, at least intermittently, to “Barnhill,” an abandoned farmhouse on Jura. Conditions were primitive, but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place with his adopted son, Richard, appealed to Orwell. Moreover, and according to a BBC report, Orwell was spending months on the island “to escape the daily grind of journalism and to find a clean environment which doctors thought would help him recover from a dangerous bout of tuberculosis.”
Animal Farm, had already been published in August 1945, after facing multiple rejections from British and American publishers. The importance of this work – 80 years later - was brought up here on “Orwell’s Grave” last August: HERE
But on Jura in 1947 and 1948, Orwell would find the opportunity to work on his next novel, 1984, a task which was seriously interrupted between late December 1947 and July 1948 when Orwell stayed at Hairmyers Hospital in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, at the tuberculosis sanatorium. By December, 1948, Orwell finished the manuscript of 1984, and the next month, in a very weak state, he set off for another attempt at recovery at the Sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire.
The work was published in June 1949, but its success came too late for the author. The ailing Orwell was moved to University College Hospital in September. It was there that he married Sonia Brownwell an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. It was a hospital bedside ceremony on 13 October 1949. Their marriage was very short, with Orwell dying from tuberculosis on 21 January 1950 at the age of 46.
While most Americans might know George Orwell from those two popular novels – Animal Farm and 1984 – scholar Laura Beers writes of Orwell’s broader ideas, politics, and important lessons in her book Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton and Company). It appeared two years ago, on the 75th anniversary of the publication of 1984. The book was well-received, and it won a number of significant prizes, including winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and the Goldsmith Book Prize.
Yes, Beers reviews the political education of Orwell and his most important writings in revealing social injustice, empire, and public deceit. Orwell may encourage his readership to dig deeper into the realities of inequality, censorship, and the persistence of social hierarchies, but Beers brings his lessons “up to speed,” as it were, examining some of our ongoing and current political upheavals.
This is particularly important since all sorts of political advocates, particularly those on the right, have attempted to hijack the verbiage and lessons of “Orwellianism.” And this is despite the man’s avowed dedication to socialist democracy, clearly defined though his experience in the Spanish Civil War and beyond. But appropriately, Beers takes the works of Orwell, mostly from the interwar decades, as a clarifying lens to re-examine the crises of our own times.
Laura Beers has endeavored to see how understanding Orwell’s own world view might offer new way to evaluate our present day. While Orwell critiqued the British Empire in which he was born – and temporarily served – he was nonetheless a leftist patriot, with a patriotism whose nature he viewed as defensive, as opposed to the aggression behind the concept of nationalism. Beers reminds us that he was “capable of simultaneously loving his country and acknowledging its faults.”
Orwell is not put on a pedestal, and Beers does not ignore his flaws. Chapter 5 of Orwell’s Ghosts is almost painfully devoted to patriarchy and Orwell’s blindness – if not hostility – to what we consider gender politics. (She cleverly makes a current-day comparison to recent tensions between “Bernie Bros” and dedicated feminists.) Moreover, Orwell on women’s reproductive rights, how women appear in most of his work (decidedly in the background), and even on a casual acceptance of aspects of sexual violence “cannot be simply dismissed as products of their times,” asserts Beers. While being attuned to the need for “revolutionary change to Britain’s class structure and to its imperial relations, he remained broadly uninterested in issues affecting women or related gender relations,” rendering his social proposals both radical and limited from the perspective of the 21st century, according to Beers.
It is in the final chapter, Chapter 6, of the book – “Blueprint for Revolution – Making the Case for Democratic Socialism” - where Beers seemingly “ties it all together,” and she gives us a solid appreciation for Orwell’s relevance today. She rests much of the case on Orwell’s ability to identify the problems of capitalism rather than presenting proposals for creating a socially just and equal society. At least in one work of his, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, written during the Blitz of 1940-1941, we get a glimpse of the opportunity to have the war turn socialism “from a text-book word into a realisable policy,” according to Orwell.
Here’s an example of Orwell’s connection to socialist democracy with a distinctive British flavor – and in the midst of war – that flies in the face of any poorly informed right-wingers who seek to co-op Orwell for their own anti-radical purposes. See for yourself. You can find the full text of The Lion and the Unicorn HERE.
Orwell was disappointed with the comparatively moderate reforms of the postwar Labour government, although its prized National Health Service (NHS) persists despite adjustments and assaults. He favored nationalization of “land, mines, railways, banks, and major industries,” but as Beers points out, did not explain how such nationalization should take place. In fact, compensation, tied to the “inviolable rights of property,” slowed the rate of real expropriation, and the tax rates reduced capital gains but did not abolish them.
Moreover, the failure of Labour to abolish private schooling - something Orwell saw as “training in class prejudice” – annoyed him greatly. And Beers herself draws a parallel between that system and most “magnet schools” in the U.S. which fail to address the issue of educational equality. While there were other reforms initiated in the post-war Atlee government, Orwell was convinced, in the words of Beers, “that the abolition of the class system was unlikely to occur as long as the two-tiered system of education persisted.”
Her rundown of the education levels of Great Britain’s modern national leaders – MPs, doctors, lawyers, and bankers - who attended private education is eye-opening. They continue to be disproportionately educated through elite institutions. She credits Orwell with valuing educational equality, something which he actually rated higher than the potential abolition of the House of Lords.
When it came to the Empire, Orwell was acutely aware that the colonies - with India toward the top – had been ruthlessly and unjustifiably exploited for centuries. Independence - sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid, but always inevitable - was to be desired. This wish was often subject to the circumstances of development, trade, and different degrees of democratic engagement. Beers knows that developed countries are still facing these realities in relation to the Global South, and that the options are not always dealt with graciously or intelligently. In the U.K., Labour governments move cautiously in the direction of engagement and aid; Conservative governments pull back. In the U.S., as Beers points out, it’s not government bureaucrats operating out of huge ministries, but it is a swath of powerful multinational companies running without much restraint. She notes that even so, a Trump government will drastically scale back on overseas aid. (She might not have held a crystal ball, but Beers had her book published before the Trump administration essentially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.)
Laura Beers has provided us a fine review of Orwell’s ideas and works, his orientation toward the working classes, his prescient criticism of technology and the surveillance state, his personal contradictions including a blindness on gender, and even potential lessons for a wandering left, here and abroad. His ideas continue to resonate.
On 20 March, Laura Beers was interviewed about her book by Leigh Haber, the director of The Ink Democracy Book Club, a project of the substack launched by Anand Giridharadas. Beers and Haber talked for an hour about the importance of Orwell to us today. Even non-subscribers to The Ink can access the first thoughtful 14 minutes of that interview HERE.
Pick up Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century to get new appreciation of the real George Orwell and understand why he continues to be important today, especially in any quest to revisit his faith in democratic change and even social revolution.
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PAUL BAICICH - union activist and environmentalist living in Maryland