Politics and the English Language: Bodleian Reprint

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Within weeks of its appearance in the April 1946 issue of Horizon magazine the significance of George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ was recognised. It was printed as a pamphlet and circulated to the staff of British newspapers (newspapers, plural); it was abridged and reprinted in Britain; it was published in the USA. I doubt if it has ever been out of print since.

In this pocket-sized hardback book, Orwell’s essay occupies 33 pages; there is a two page chronology of Orwell’s life; several extracted quotations have pages to themselves in large type; a portrait of Orwell; an image of the Horizon front cover (in those days it listed its contents on the cover); while Taylor’s Introduction has ten pages to itself.

In his Introduction Taylor adopts a teleological position, writing that ‘”Politics and the English Language” soon reveals itself as an early staging post on the labyrinthine path that lead to Nineteen Eighty-Four’. That, though, was the construction of the essay, for as Taylor discloses the magazine which had commissioned a piece from Orwell turned it down, whereupon Orwell took it to Horizon. (About this time, Orwell was also to experience rejection of his Saturday Essay series which gave us ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ and ‘The Moon Under Water’. Again his commissioning editor was overruled by a superior and Orwell was abandoned. Fortunately Orwell wrote on).

Taylor writes, ‘The shadow of Nineteen Eighty-Four starts to fall across the page about three-quarters of the way through, at the point Orwell adduces a “special connection between politics and the debasement of language”’ (p.10). Examining the images in the essay Taylor points out how they form a tapestry weaving links to Orwell’s other work such as the essay ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ (written about the same time), but also Orwell’s pre-war novel Coming Up For Air, and forward to scenes in Orwell’s final novel.

Did things improve after Orwell’s analysis, warnings, and guidance; what Taylor calls his ‘eerie premonitions’? Taylor does not think so: quoting Orwell’s sentence ‘The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another’, Taylor goes on ‘The student of twenty-first-century politics may think that, three-quarters of a century later, the situation is even grimmer than Orwell prophesied and that many of the abstract nouns batted about in public discourse – liberal and tolerance for example – now mean the precise opposite of their dictionary definitions’ (p15).

We should not be completely pessimistic. Take one of Orwell’s observations, in which he recognised his limitations with the research of the time: ‘I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.’ Even while he was writing, in Germany Victor Klemperer was preparing to publish his book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, in which while living under the Nazis he had recorded the language of Germany and how it deteriorated. Had he lived, Orwell would have found his belief vindicated.

It seems that it will not be books of philosophy or theology or whatever that may save the world. It is odd but true, that in our time this pamphlet about language, as Taylor writes, ‘retains its status as one of the great moral primers of the age’ (p17). Of course, it is not enough to read it; one must put its precepts into practice, and that is something that most of the world finds more difficult to do.

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Politics and the English Language

by George Orwell,

Introduction by D J Taylor

(Bodleian Library, ISBN13: 978851246021)