Did George Orwell Say: VI

Did George Orwell say that the lower classes smell?

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George Orwell did not say ‘The lower classes smell’, he quoted the phrase as something he heard in common use when he was a child. Orwell dedicates a paragraph to the phrase in his book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937):

But there was another and more serious difficulty. Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West—the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.

(The Road to Wigan Pier, chapter 8)

(The paragraph as it appeared in the Left Book Club edition, 1937)