Orwell and the ‘unreality’ of royal coverage

Given the recent, unprecedented avalanche of complaints to the BBC over its coverage of Prince Philip’s death, it’s interesting to consider George Orwell’s views on the press handling of the royals of his day.

On 7 April 1944, in one of the 80 ‘As I Please’ columns he writes for Tribune between 1943 and 1947, Orwell meticulously deconstructs the Daily Mirror issue of 21 January 1936 containing the announcement of the death of George V (Orwell 1998 [1944]a).

First, he provides a detailed quantitative analysis, highlighting the unreality of the world as manufactured by the press and, equally significantly, important events and perspectives missed by the media. He then moves on to make more general qualitative comments, comparing press output with that of the radio. He opens by providing background to the column (establishing the wry, critical tone which is to persist throughout):

Sometimes, on top of a cupboard or at the bottom of a drawer, you come on a pre-war newspaper, and when you have got over your astonishment at its enormous size, you find yourself marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity (ibid: 145).

He admits it may be dangerous to draw too many inferences from this one edition since the Daily Mirror is the ‘second silliest paper’ after the Sketch. But, he argues (addressing his readers directly as ‘you’), it is still worth analysing: ‘If you want to know why your house has been bombed, why your son is in Italy, why the income tax is ten shillings in the pound and the butter ration is only just visible without a microscope, here is part of the reason’ (ibid).

Most of the 28 pages, he calculates, are devoted to the Royal Family: the first 17 being entirely focused on the dead King and the other royals. ‘There is a history of the King’s life, articles on his activities as a statesman, family man, soldier, sailor, big and small game shot, motorist, broadcaster and what-not, with, of course, photographs innumerable.’ Pages 18-23 feature ‘amusement guides, comic articles and so forth’. On page 24, ‘some news begins to creep in’: a highway robbery, a skating contest, the forthcoming funeral of Rudyard Kipling and details about a snake at the Zoo which is refusing food.

Then, on page 26 comes ‘the sole reference to the real world’ with the headline: ‘Bombing pledge by Duce: No more attacks on Red Cross.’ The article underneath says il Duce ‘deplores’ the attacks on the Red Cross and adds that the League of Nations has just turned down Abyssinia’s requests for assistance and refused to investigate the charges of Italian atrocities. Orwell continues ironically: ‘Turning to more congenial topics the Daily Mirror then follows up with a selection of murders, accidental deaths and the secret wedding of Earl Russell’ (ibid). The last page is headed ‘LONG LIVE KING EDWARD VIII’ and contains ‘a short biography and a highly idealised photograph of the man whom the Conservative Party were to sack like a butler a year later’ (ibid: 145-146). Orwell goes on to highlight important omissions: the two or three million unemployed, Hitler, the progress of the Abyssinian war, the political situations in France and Spain. He adds:

And though this is an extreme instance, nearly all newspapers of those days were more or less like that. No real information about current affairs was allowed into them if it could possibly be kept out. The world – so the readers of the gutter Press were taught – was a cosy place dominated by royalty, crime, beauty-culture, sport, pornography and animals (ibid: 146).

Orwell’s contempt for the Daily Mirror is to persist. At the end of Animal Farm, the pigs take out subscriptions to John Bull, Tit-Bits and the Mirror – symbolically marking their ultimate betrayal of the revolution! (Orwell 1976 [1945]: 63).

Monarchy has also featured in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell’s stirring celebration of socialism and the English genius composed in 1941 when defeat by the Nazis appeared a distinct possibility (1970 [1941]). He suggests that any future English Socialist government will be neither doctrinaire, nor even logical. ‘It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and unicorn on the soldier’s cap buttons’ (ibid: 125-126). And in a special section on the monarchy in one of the London Letters he writes for the American leftist journal, Partisan Review, during the war, in spring 1944, he suggests the abdication of Edward VIII ‘must have dealt royalism a blow from which it may not recover’ (Orwell 1970 [1944]: 101). But Orwell is not an anti-monarchist. He continues: ‘I do not defend the institution of monarchy in an absolute sense, but I think that in an age like our own it may have an inoculating effect, and certainly it does far less harm than the existence of our so-called aristocracy. I have often advocated that a Labour government, i. e. one that meant business, would abolish titles while retaining the Royal family’ (ibid; 103).

The critique of the 1936 royal coverage is not the only occasion when Orwell enjoys deconstructing the contents of newspapers and magazines. Let’s look at just a few other examples. Significantly, his first published piece in the UK, ‘A farthing newspaper’ (for Chesterton’s review G. K’s Weekly) adopts a political economy approach that he is to maintain throughout his writing career (Orwell 1970 [1928]: 34-37). Ami du Peuple, costing just ten centimes, has recently been launched in Paris with a manifesto claiming it is ‘uncontaminated by any base thoughts of gain’ (ibid: 34). Blair adds, ironically:

The proprietors, who hide their blushes in anonymity, are emptying their pockets for the mere pleasure of doing good by stealth. Their objects, we learn, are to make war on the great trusts, to fight for a lower cost of living and above all combat the powerful newspapers which are strangling free speech in France (ibid: 34-35).

He proceeds to deconstruct, with polemical vigour, the paper’s pretensions – noting that its proprietor is M. Coty ‘a great industrial capitalist and also proprietor of the Figaro and the Gaulois’. In other words, it is merely putting across ‘the sort of propaganda wanted by M. Coty and his associates’.

At the heart of Homage to Catalonia, his eye-witness account of fighting in a Republican militia during the Spanish Civil War, is Orwell’s anger at the coverage of the conflict by both mainstream and alternative/left newspapers – and his desire to put the record straight. As he writes: ‘One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right’ (though he excludes the Manchester Guardian from this criticism) (Orwell 1962 [1938]: 64). With typical wry humour, he tells of the ‘fat Russian agent’ at the Hotel Continental, in Barcelona: ‘I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies – unless one counts journalists’ (ibid: 135).

In another ‘As I Please’ column of 1944, he uses a serious critique of women’s papers – such as Lucky Star, the Golden Star and Peg’s Paper – to explore the ways in which press proprietors and the ruling class in general promote the notion of the moral superiority of the poor as ‘the deadliest form of escapism’ (Orwell 1998 [1944b]: 305). He argues that it is all ‘a sublimation of the class struggle’ and adds, with typical dry irony: ‘The vast majority of the people who will see a film are poor and so it is politic to make the poor man a hero. Film magnates, Press lords and the like amass quite a lot of their wealth by pointing out that wealth is wicked’ (ibid).

In his lengthy essay, The English People (also written in 1944 but only published in 1947), Orwell’s critique again focuses on the press (1998 [1947]): ‘It is a fact that the much-boasted freedom of the British press is theoretical rather than actual. To begin with the centralised ownership of the press means in practice that unpopular opinions can only be printed in books or in newspapers with small circulations.’

Orwell’s reflections on the press culminate in his creation of Winston Smith, the anti-hero of his dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four – published in 1949 just months before he died. For Winston is a media worker at the Ministry of Truth altering the records of The Times to conform to the current dogma. So Orwell’s damning critique of the press persists to the very end.

Orwell is becoming well-known as, in effect, the founder of Cultural Studies with his essays on boys’ weeklies, American crime novels, sexy seaside postcards, junk shops, cups of tea, public houses and so on. His role in inventing Journalism/Media Studies is yet to be acknowledged (see Keeble 2020).

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References

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

Orwell, George (1970 [1928) A farthing newspaper, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 34-37; G. K.’s Weekly, 29 December

Orwell, George (1970 [1941]) The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 74-134

Orwell, George (1962 [1938]) Homage to Catalonia, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

Orwell, George (1998 [1944a]) 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 145-148; Tribune, 7 April

Orwell, George (1998 [1944b]) 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 251-253; Tribune, 28 July

Orwell, George (1970 [1944]) London Letter to Partisan Review, Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3, As I Please, 1943-1945, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 95-103

Orwell, George (1976 [1945]) Animal Farm, London: Secker and Warburg pp 13-66

Orwell, George (1998 [1947]) The English People, Davison, Peter (ed.) Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol 16: I Have Tried to Tell The Truth, 1943-1944, London: Secker and Warburg pp 199-228

• Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society, 2013-2020. His book of recent essays, Orwell’s Moustache, is to be published by Abramis, of Bury St Edmunds, later this year

27 April 2021: Paragraph on The Lion and the Unicorn and Orwell’s London Letter added.