All reviews copyright 1984-2026 Evelyn C. Leeper.
BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/07/2014]
BURMESE DAYS by George Orwell (ISBN 978-0-156-14850-2) is a sort of "reverse-Jane-Austen" novel. Like Austen's novels, in this the characters are concerned with marriage and station in life; unlike Austen's novels, in this things do not end well for everyone. John Flory is an Englishman stationed in a small town in Burma (then part of British India, now Myanmar), where his social circle consists of his club (which allows only whites) and one Indian doctor. The club's members are both racist and petty, and everyone is scheming. When Elizabeth Lackersteen comes to Kyauktada from England, it is clear that this is her last chance to find a husband and avoid spinsterhood and penury. She has some interest in Flory, but only until Verrall, a high-society British officer, shows up. Then she throws herself at Verrall, but he is even more a cad than Austen's Willoughby.
In all this, one sees glimpses of Orwell's work to come:
"It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. ... Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator,; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs' code."
"The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honorable, hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you."
COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/16/2011]
I saw a recommendation for COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell (ISBN 978-0-15-619625-3) somewhere recently, but I cannot remember where. Orwell is known best for his bleak picture of the future in 1984. COMING UP FOR AIR shows that it is not just the future that Orwell is negative about, but also the present, and indeed the past. It was published in 1950, and apparently written shortly before that, with the main action taking place in 1938, but with many flashbacks and memories going back to the 1890s. The basic thrust of the book is that life was fairly bleak back before World War I, but it got progressively worse, and will continue to do so. Orwell describes the life of lower middle class people in England as tedious, grinding, deadening, and thoroughly dispiriting. It may be a great book--it certainly has great power--but it is also very depressing.
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2003]
In connection with various older mysteries (see review here), I'll mention George Orwell's DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. (Bear with me; there is a connection.) DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON purports to be an autobiographical work about Orwell's (Eric Blair's) young bohemian life. However, research has revealed it to be full of (at best) exaggerations as to his level of poverty and inaccurate in other details as well. What stuck me was its casual and completely un-self-conscious anti-Semitism--and here is the connection. Orwell, and Chesterton, and Agatha Christie as well, seem to have put in their writing all sorts of off-hand anti-Semitic remarks and characterizations that would seem to indicate just how pervasive that attitude was in Britain in the earlier part of the 20th century. This is ironic, because Orwell was also an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism. (I would also add T. S. Eliot to this list, but he seemed even more stridently anti-Semitic and did not have the counter-balancing attitudes of the others. Yes, he was American by birth, but English by choice.) One could write a book on anti-Semitism in early 20th century English writing, and I'm sure several have. The one book I've seen close to that subject is Montagu Frank Modder's THE JEW IN THE LITERATURE OF ENGLAND, and it goes only through the end of the 19th century.
ORWELL'S ESSAYS by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/02/26]
I have started ORWELL'S ESSAYS by George Orwell (Everyman, ISBN 978-0-375-41503-6), and since it is 1416 pages long, I will be commenting on individual essays as I go, rather than saving it up for one ridiculously long column.
My first observation is from "Bookshop Memories" (Fortnightly, November 1936). Orwell writes "[Bookselling] is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman."
One cannot help but be reminded of similar claims. When European settlers first saw bison, they were sure it would never go extinct. Then in 1851 Herman Melville had written, "Speculating on the possible extinction of whales, Melville says: "Though so short a period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need were, could be statistically stated." In other words, it was impossible that whales would become extinct.
All this shows that predicting the future on the basis of the present is fraught with peril. Which in turn is the most important assumption of much science--uniformitarianism, that the physical laws and properties will continue in the future as they have in the past. But that's a different rabbit-hole.
In "In Defense of the Novel" (New English Weekly, 12 and 19 November 1936) , Orwell writes, "Question any thinking person as to why he 'never reads novels,' and you will usually find that, at bottom, it is because of the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers. ... Here is just one specimen, from last week's 'Sunday Times': 'If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.'"
Orwell goes on to say that "there can be no such thing as good novel-criticism as long as it is assumed that every novel is worth reviewing." Reviewers cannot write, "This book is tripe" for the majority of books they receive for review; no one will pay them to do that, and publishers will stop sending them books that they can resell. (The latter effect is Orwell's observation, not mine). And newspapers and magazines that rely on publishers' advertisements cannot afford to stop reviewing their books.
I would like to think, therefore, that Orwell would be heartened by Simon & Schuster's decision earlier this year to stop requiring authors to obtain blurbs for their books. Alas, they are not going so far as to say they will not print blurbs, but at least authors don't have to go around begging their famous friends to blurb their book.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/23/26]
I'm slowly working my way through ORWELL'S ESSAYS by George Orwell (Everyman, ISBN 978-0-375-41503-6). One I'd recommend in full is "Boys' Weeklies" (11 March 1940) about pulp magazines.
Orwell also wrote a very long essay, "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (19 February 1941) is which he lays out a six-point plan he seems to think inevitable, and necessary for a British victory. They are:
He goes on to say, "I have deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person could not understand and see the reason for."
I'm not sure what his point is about Abyssinia, because Britain entered into a formal agreement with them in 1940. They officially joined with China in 1942.
The rest of the points seem to have gone by the wayside, and somehow Britain and the Allies won the war anyway.
Orwell had written about India couldn't be offered "freedom", but should be offered "equality" with the right to secede, which he assumed they would refuse to do. Now admittedly Indian independence did not occur for another six years, but major drives for independence, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing up through the Quit India Movement of 1942, would seem to indicate that this refusal was not such a sure thing as Orwell assumed.
In his review of THE SWORD AND THE SICKLE by Mulk Raj Anand, (Horizon, July 1942), Orwell writes, "At present English is to a great extent the official and business language of India: five million Indians are literate in it and millions more speak a debased version of it [1]; there is a huge English-language Indian Press, and the only English magazine devoted wholly to poetry is edited by Indians. On average, too, Indians write and even pronounce English far better than any European race. Will this state of affairs continue? It is inconceivable that the present relationship between the two countries will last much longer [2] and when it vanishes the economic inducements for learning English will also tend to disappear [3]. Presumably, therefore, the fate of the English language in Asia is either to fade out [4] or to survive as a pidgin language useful for business and technical purposes [5]. It might survive, in dialect form, as the mother-tongue of the small Eurasian community [6], but it is difficult to believe its has a literary future." [7]
[1] "Debased" by whose standards, one might ask. I'm sure a lot of Britishers think Americans speak a debased form of English as well. Then again, Orwell was writing before John McWhorter and other tried to educate the public about languages and how they change.
[2] So Orwell did come to realize that India was going to achieve some level of independence.
[3] Unless Orwell is assuming that Britain and India will stop doing any business together, I'm not sure why he thinks the economic inducements will disappear. Lessen, perhaps, but not vanish entirely.
[4] Needless to say, Orwell was wrong about the fate of the English language in Asia, in part because he saw Britain as the main promoter and user of the English language, and completely failed to recognize that another power (e.g., the United States) might become a driving force.
[5] Orwell seems to use "pidgin" as a derogatory term. I'm not sure what "business and technical purposes" he was thinking of, but most of what was being done after the war required some fairly sophisticated language.
[6] By "Eurasian" he obviously means "Anglo-Indian", and this community has gotten much smaller over time, as people stopped identifying themselves that way.
[7] Indian authors who write in English, such as R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Arundhati Roy, and Anita Desai, would disagree. Within the science fiction field, we have Manjula Padmanabhan, Samit Basu, Vandana Singh, Gautam Bhatia, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, and S. B. Divya.
(DuckDuckGo's Search Assist is totally useless: It starts by saying "approximately 6% of literary works in India are published in English," then says "English is the third largest language for publishing in India," and finally that 55% of the literary works are in English.)
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/26]
"Can Socialists Be Happy?" (Tribune, 31 December 1943) begins with Orwell observing that in Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" the Cratchits seem to be happy and enjoying life. He writes, "The Cratchits are able to enjoy their Christmas precisely because Christmas only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete." He then goes on to write, "All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures, from earliest history onwards. Utopias ... have been common in the literature of the past three or four hundred years, but the 'favourable' ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as well." Later he elaborates: "All 'favourable' Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness."
Of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS he writes, "The earlier parts of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS are probably the most devastating attack on human society that has ever been written. Every word of them is relevant to-day; in places they contain quite detailed prophecies of the political horrors of our own time. Where Swift fails, however, is in trying to describe a race of beings whom he does admire." Even Heaven fails: "Attempts at describing a definitely other-worldly happiness have been no more successful. ... It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody." Somehow vague references to "gold, precious stones, and hymns" don't really sound inviting to most people. When Tertullian (an early Church father) wrote in "De spectaculis" ("The Shows") that the greatest joy from those in heaven is watching the tortures of the damned, he may have been trying to make Heaven more appealing.
(Or as Mark Twain said, "Heaven for climate, hell for society.")
Basically, Orwell is saying that we need contrast. Just as we don't appreciate health unless we have experienced illness, or satiety until we have known hunger, a life with no difficulties would not result in happiness. (Elements of this appear in the probably apocryphal early life of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha). So Orwell concludes, "[The] real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness has hitherto been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood."
"As I Please 5" (Tribune, 31 December 1943) Orwell talks about war and war crimes. He points out that waging war is not in itself crime, and that Hitler never personally did anything that we label as a war crime. "So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does. Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a looney-bin made use of by some other planet."
Orwell is no predictor, though; he writes, "[Hitler] has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have cost twenty million lives before it ends." The latest estimates I have seen are sixty to eighty million lives, with about two-thirds directly caused by the war and the other third from war-related disease and famine. (China alone had twenty million deaths.)
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/27/26]
"As I Please 10" (Tribune, 4 February 1944): In this essay we see the beginnings of that aspect of 1984 where the government re-writes history. He writes, "Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don't like it."
He then gives an example of how history books are written by the winners: "This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the millions of instances which must be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audiences with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners."
Admittedly this addresses only a single re-write, but there is no reason not to extend this to constantly changing the "truth", as we have been seeing even now. Orwell at least has some optimism: "There is some hope ... that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive."
"The English People" (written in 1944, published in 1947): This long essay (40 pages in the Everyman edition) was commissioned by Orwell's editor on request from the Ministry of Information. Orwell disliked it, described it as "silly" and "propaganda" and refused to allow it to be reprinted in his lifetime. (Given that he lists the national characteristics as "suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions and an obsession with sport," I'm not sure who he was propagandizing for.) Now it is available in this Everyman collection, as well as in ORWELL'S ENGLAND from Penguin.
The six sections are "England at First Glance", "The Moral Outlook of the English People", "The Political Outlook of the English People", "The English Class System", "The English Language", and "The Future of the English People". While many of his claims (and predictions) are questionable, the section on the English class system is certainly worth reading (especially for those who didn't grow up in it), and I found the section on the English language of great interest. On the other hand, the section on the future of the English people suffers from the same problems as Orwell's other predictions--or anyone's, come to that. For example, he thinks that England "will remain on good terms with Russia and Europe, will keep its special links with America and the Dominions, and will solve the problem of India in some amicable way."
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/03/26]
"Review of TOLSTOY: HIS LIFE AND WORK by Derrick Leon" (The Observer, 26 March 1944): After a long review, Orwell writes, "... this is an outstanding book, and though one cannot not advise people to buy books costing twenty-five shillings, at least everyone who can borrow a copy should read it." At the time the average wage for general workers was about four-and-a-half pounds (90 shillings) a week, and for skilled workers about six pounds (120 shillings) a week. so for the average worker it would take 28% of his weekly wage, and for a skilled worker, 20%. Obviously wages in the United States cover a broad range, but if we take $70,000 a year as an average, this would be the equivalent of a book costing over $300. Clearly, this work was not going to sell a lot of copies to your average worked in Britain.
Another conversion table, however, claims the purchasing power of twenty-five shillings in 1944 is equivalent to about 70 pounds, or $95. This doesn't really make it more affordable in real terms.
Either way, it makes today's hardcover prices ($30, on the average) seem like bargains, and trade paperbacks ($20, on the average) practically giveaways. The reason those prices seem high is that for a long time the incredibly cheap mass market paperbacks spoiled the reader of popular books. (Whether a biography of Tolstoy would have come out in mass market format is another question.)
Now the mass market format is being phased out, and the electronic and audio formats have entered the market. The electronic format is the cheapest, but you are not actually buying a book, but the right to read a book. You can't resell it, and if the supporting hardware or platform becomes obsolete, or if the vendor decides you shouldn't have it, you don't have the book anymore.
And coincidentally, there was a recent column on Book Riot ( https://bookriot.com/were-in-a-book-affordability-crisis/) talking about the cost of books now that mass market is going away.
The earliest mass market the author of the column (R. Nassor) has is a 1966 book from Bantam Books for $0.50 ($5.08, adjusted for inflation). (They clearly started collecting late; I have mass market paperbacks going back to the early 1950s at least, depending on how one counts such early appearances as Donald Wollheim's 1943 POCKETBOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION. Penguin Books started publishing what were effectively the first mass market paperback books in 1935; the term was first used by Pocket Books in 1939.) The latest they have is a 2025 book from Avon for $9.99.
By comparison a 2025 trade paperback costs on between $15.99 and $21.99.
Ebooks are basically rented to you, not owned, and Kindle Unlimited at $11.99 a month has the same flaws. As Nassor notes, if they want to read a book without owning it, they will go to the public library. So they do not think that low ebook prices are comparable. (Not noted is that Kindle Unlimited is not really unlimited: Of the estimated 12 million Kindle books on Amazon, less than half--5 million--are available in Kindle Unlimited. It is unlimited in the sense that you can borrow as many of these as you want, though no more than twenty at a time.)
In a later essay, "Are Books Too Dear?" (Manchester Evening News, 1 June 1944), Orwell goes into the cost of books in more detail. He starts with two premises: The more the public reads, the better, and it is undesirable that writers should starve to death. He then figures out what the writer's annual income is when a book sells for seven [shillings] and six pence (apparently the standard price before the war; during the war it was half a guinea). The author gets 50 pounds for every thousand sold, but a writer's first book rarely sells more than six or seven hundred. The writer is somewhat helped by the fact that at the time lending library charges two pence to borrow a book and some of the local taxes also supported the cost of books in the public libraries. In fact, Orwell claims it is the libraries and not the book-buying public that manages to support the writer.
In 1935, Penguin Books came out with reprints at sixpence which were also better bound and more attractive than the other publishers' books. But this was only financially sound for the writers if it was for reprints, not for original publication, and Orwell concludes that the price for books is not unreasonable, especially given the existence of libraries.
1984 by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/04/2012]
Someone on a mailing list recently claimed that the use of language such as Newspeak in 1984 by George Orwell (ISBN 978-0-451-52493-5) could actually change reality--for example, making it impossible to hate Big Brother. I agree that there are limited cases in which language can change reality, using performative utterances such as "I promise", "I apologize", "I congratulate you", and (if properly empowered) "I now pronounce you married" (or less felicitously, "I declare war on Eastasia"). But no language will ever make two plus two equal five, or the sun revolve around the earth. I am more inclined to view reality (and in particular history) with Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
This person's claim seems at least partially based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which was popular for a while, but now seems to have been somewhat discredited, or at least weakened. In any case, the claim made on the mailing list seemed to be more that language can control thought, not change reality.
Orwell has Winston think, "It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? What happens in all minds, truly happens." I simply do not agree with this. First of all, we know that our minds can be deceived--by optical illusions, for example. If we recognize that optical illusions are deceiving our mind, then we must think there is some reality outside our mind that is different from what is inside our mind.
In any case, I do believe in an external reality, not dependent on some sort of "consensual reality". If all minds think the sun revolves around the earth, that does not make it so. And if all minds thinking that something is true makes it true, what if all but one mind thinks it? What if it is a fifty-fifty split?
And with Winston's definition of reality, if everyone believes in an external reality, does that make it so? And isn't that a contradiction?
THE PENGUIN ESSAYS OF GEORGE ORWELL by George Orwell:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/09/2018]
THE PENGUIN ESSAYS OF GEORGE ORWELL (ISBN 978-0-140-18235-4) is not a collection of Orwell's essays about bird-watching in Antarctica. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.) Most of these essays are from the 1930s and 1940s, and it is often useful to check the publication date at the end of an essay before reading it, particularly those having to do with European politics. In those, by the way, one sees some of the ideas he later used in 1984, such as the re-writing of history. His essays on literature are also often tied up with politics. For example, he has some comments on how Charles Dickens used class distinctions in his novels, and how Wells's view of the World State seems to be detached from reality. I did skip a few of the essays when I was unfamiliar with the subject matter (e.g., essays about British turn-of-the-century children's books, or about people who were well-known in England when he wrote the essay, but are unknown, at least in the United States now), but the great majority of thes essays are thought-provoking and worth reading.