“The Dirtiest Ramp of Modern Capitalism”

Orwell and Advertisements

George Orwell, throughout his career as a novelist and journalist, maintained a fascination with advertisements that has been largely missed in the many studies of his life and writings. His diaries, “As I Please” columns for Tribune, his “London Letters” for the American-based Partisan Review, his polemical pieces and, in particular, his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four all reflect this interest.

Throughout his writings on the press Orwell stresses the impact of advertisers and proprietorial control on content. Consistently adopting a “political economy” approach, he highlights the myth of press freedom, the close integration of mainstream newspapers with dominant financial, political and military interests – and their essential propaganda role for the wealthy (Keeble 2020).

Take, for instance, The Lion and the Unicorn (1970 [1941]), written during some of the bleakest days of the Second World War when Britain seriously feared invasion by the Nazis. Here Orwell writes bluntly: “Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news” (ibid: 88). He continues:

The unbearable silliness of English newspapers from about 1900 onwards has two main causes. One is that nearly the whole of the press is in the hands of a few big capitalists who are interested in the continuance of capitalism and therefore in preventing the public from learning to think: the other is that in peacetime newspapers live off advertisements for consumption goods, building societies, cosmetics and the like and are therefore interested in maintaining a “sunshine mentality” which will induce people to spend money. … Therefore, don’t let people know the facts about the political and economic situation; divert their attention to giant pandas, channel swimmers, royal weddings and other soothing topics (ibid).

Orwell’s preoccupation with advertising often crops up in unlikely places. For instance, he begins a long review essay on Beggar my Neighbour, by Lionel Fielden, for Horizon, September 1943 (reprinted in Partisan Review, in the Winter 1944 edition) with this somewhat idiosyncratic comment:

If you compare commercial advertising with political propaganda, one thing that strikes you is its relative intellectual honesty. The advertiser at least knows what he is aiming at – that is, money – whereas the propagandist, when he is not a lifeless hack, is often a neurotic working off some private grudge and actually desirous of the exact opposite of the thing he advocates (Orwell 1970 [1943]: 349).

Orwell even examines – originally and with great humour – the links between advertising, government propaganda and a short story in Home Companion and Family Journal (possibly purchased by his wife, Eileen Blair, and left about their flat in Mortimer Crescent, London NW6I) in an “As I Please” column of 25 February 1944. The story tells the adventures of a young girl named Lucy Fallows who works on the switchboard of a long-distance telephone exchange. Her normally boring job suddenly livens up and she finds herself in the midst of exciting adventures involving the sinking of a U-boat, the capture of a German sabotage crew and a long motorcycle ride with a handsome naval officer (Orwell 1998 [1944]: 103). At the end, there is this short note:

Any of our young readers themselves interested in the work of the Long Distance Telephone Exchange … should apply to the Staff Controller, L. T. R., London, who will inform them as to the opportunities open (ibid).

This sets Orwell off on an extraordinary creative riff. First he questions whether the advertisement will have any success: “I should doubt whether even girls of the age aimed at would believe that capturing U-boats enters very largely into the lives of telephone operators.” But he notes, “with interest”, “the direct correlation between a Government recruiting advertisement and a piece of commercial fiction“. Such stories are probably not written to order; rather, the departments concerned keep their eye on the weekly papers and “push in an ad. when any story seems likely to form an attractive bait”. Orwell relishes in the absurdity of it all: he imagines “some stripe-trousered personage in the GPO reading ‘Hullo, Sweetheart’ as part of his official duties”. Next, he imagines this hilarious dialogue:

“Hullo, Hullo. Is that you, Tony? Oh, hullo. Look here, I’ve got another script for you, Tony, ‘A Ticket to Paradise’. It’s bus conductresses this time. They are not coming in. I believe the trousers don’t fit, or something. Well, any way, Peter says make it sexy, but kind of clean – you know. Nothing extramarital. We want the stuff in by Tuesday. Fifteen thousand words. You can choose the hero. I rather favour the kind of outdoor man that dogs and kiddies all love him – you know. Or very tall with a sensitive mouth. I don’t mind really. But pile on the sex, Peter says“ (ibid: 103-104).

Orwell ends in a reflective mood, moving from the specific and seemingly trivial to the more general and important cultural/political issue: “Something resembling this already happens with radio features and documentary films, but hitherto there has not been any very direct connection between fiction and propaganda. That half-inch in the Home Companion seems to mark another small stage in the process of ‘co-ordination’ that is gradually happening to all the arts.”

Orwell’s fascination with advertisements is particularly evident in many of his diary entries. For instance, from September 1938 to March 1939, the Blairs take a break in Marrakesh – paid for by an anonymous donor. On 22 December 1938, he finds the time to note in his diary: “The other widely read French weekly paper is Gringoire. Used to be a sort of gossipy literary paper but now much as Candide. I notice that those papers, though evidently prosperous and having a lot of advertisements, are not above inserting pornographic advertisements“ (Orwell 2010: 118).

Back in England, he maintains a regular wartime diary. For the entry on 2 June 1940, he conducts a “rough analysis“ of the advertisements in that day’s edition of the People. So with a meticulous attention to detail, he conducts a quantitative survey: “Paper consists of 12 pages – 84 columns. Of this just about 26 and a half columns (over one quarter) is advertisements. These are divided up as follows: Food and drink 5 and three quarters columns. Patent medicines 9 and a third. Tobacco 1. Gambling 2 and a third. Clothes 1 and a half. Miscellaneous 6 and three quarters“ (ibid: 249, italics in the original).

Advertising plays the crucial role both symbolically and in the narrative of Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1976 [1936]: 573-737). As Gordon Bowker argues, it is a novel bursting with Rabelaisian gaiety and high spirits (2003: 171) and ads become a focus for Orwell’s ironic banter and mischievous wordplay – as well as his critique of Americanised capitalism.

Gordon Comstock, the anti-hero, is a poverty-stricken aspiring poet belonging to “the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landed gentry’ (op cit: 598). When we first meet him he is working at Mr McKechnie’s bookshop. Significantly, the streets around it are completely taken over by advertisements:

Opposite, next to the Prince of Wales, were tall hoardings covered with ads for patent foods and patent medicines. A gallery of monstrous doll-faces – pink vacuous faces, full of goofy optimism. Q. T. Sauce, Truweet Breakfast Crisps (“Kiddies clamour for their Breakfast Crisps“), Kangaroo Burgundy, Vitamalt Chocolate, Bovex. Of them all, the Bovex one oppressed Gordon the most. A spectacle rat-faced clerk, with patent-leather hair, sitting at a café table grinning over a white mug of Bovex. “Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex“, the legend ran (ibid: 578).

Given Gordon’s hatred of the world of advertising, it is somewhat ironic that he suddenly acquires a job in the accounts department of the New Albion Publicity Company – through a “friend of a friend“ of his lady friend’s employer’s brother, as Orwell explains, highlighting subtly and wittily the ways in which nepotism plays such a crucial role in the operations of capitalism.

The outraged, obsessive voices of the narrator and Gordon next come together to condemn advertising as nothing less than “the dirtiest ramp“ of modern capitalism. “Most of the employees were hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naïveté, the blind worship of the money-god“ (ibid: 608).

Daphne Patai (1984: 113) rightly identifies the appalling sexism that underlies Orwell’s representation of the advertising industry. For women are blamed for luring men from the path of social justice into the seductive arms of consumerism.

Yet Orwell has an enormous amount of fun throughout the novel playing with the language he uses to evoke the world of advertising. The New Albion Publicity Co. is the actual name of the firm run by the father of one of his friends, Michael Sayer, and Orwell is clearly pleased to have slipped that past his publishers. When Gordon meets Rosemary for the first time, he strokes her face in the night-time darkness and quotes four lines in medieval French (attributed to Villon). When Rosemary asks him to translate he does so. In fact, it’s a subtle invitation to fellatio. Not surprisingly Rosemary refuses – despite Gordon’s persistent pleas for her to satisfy him. So again, Orwell has had fun deceiving the censor.

Another Orwellian joke is in the name he gives his anti-hero – for Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) was a notorious anti-vice campaigner in the United States who opposed abortion, prostitution, gambling and contraception (see Bowker 2003: 171; Werbel 2018). When Gordon rejoins New Albion at the end of the novel (symbolising his submission to bourgeois conventions), Orwell enjoys playing around with the slogan P. P. – exposing at the same time both the cynicism and naïveté of the advertisers and the gullibility of the public. It stands for Pedic Perspiration. “Gordon had searched for the word pedic in the Oxford Dictionary and found it did not exist. But Mr Warner [his boss] has said Hell what did it matter anyway? It would put the wind up them just the same“ (ibid: 734). But what Orwell enjoys most of all is the fact that in French “peepee“ is slang for piss.

Just as the streets in Gordon Comstock’s London of Keep the Aspidistra Flying are dominated by advertising hoardings, so propaganda posters are everywhere in the London roads of Winston Smith’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]). At the start of the novel, Winston walks from his flat in Victory Mansions and looks around:

Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s eyes. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC (ibid: 4).

And the slogans on posters at the Ministry of Love and on telescreens everywhere no longer focus on tempting people to spend, spend, spend; rather they spell out the doublespeak principles of the Party: “WAR IS PEACE/FREEDOM IS SLAVERY/IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH“ (ibid: 6; 19).

So the messages have changed: the consumerist capitalism of Keep the Aspidistra Flying has given way to the authoritarian propaganda of the surveillance, hyper-militarised state. Not surprisingly, the representation of advertising – which features prominently in Orwell’s journalism, diary entries and novel writing – lies at the heart of his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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References

Bowker, Gordon (2003) George Orwell, London: Little, Brown

Keeble, Richard Lance (2020) The myth of freedom: Orwell and the press, Keeble, Richard Lance, Journalism Beyond Orwell, London: Routledge pp 15-32

Orwell, George (1976 [1936]) Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in Animal Farm and Other Novels, London: Secker and Warburg/Octopus pp 573-737

Orwell, George (1970 [1941]) The Lion and the Unicorn, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left 1940-1942, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 74-134; February 1941

Orwell, George (1970 [1943]) Review of Beggar My Neighbour, by Lionel Fielden, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1942, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 349-359; Horizon, September

Orwell, George (1998 [1944]) As I Please, Davison, Peter (ed.) Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol 16: I Have Tried to Tell The Truth, 1943-1944, London: Secker and Warburg pp 103-104; Tribune, 25 February

Orwell, George (1998 [1946]) As I Please, Davison, Peter (ed.) Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 17: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946, London: Secker and Warburg pp 497-500; Tribune, 22 November 1946

Orwell, George (2000 [1949]) Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Penguin, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon

Orwell, George (2010) Diaries, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Penguin

Patai, Daphne (1984) The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Werbel, Amy Beth (2018) Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock, New York: Columbia University Press

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Richard Lance Keeble is the out-going chair of The Orwell Society.

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