Fags, Facts, Fictions: Orwell and Cigarettes

George Orwell suffered from three main addictions – reading, writing and cigarettes. While largely ignored by biographers and commentators to date, cigarettes feature prominently in his fictions, essays and reportage. This article examines, critically, the impact of smoking on Orwell’s life; his many representations of cigarettes and smokers; his stress on the importance of tobacco in warfare and of cigarette stubs to down-and-outs and beggars. And it takes a close look at his wonderfully inventive Tribune essay, ‘Books vs. cigarettes’, of 1946, which brings together his thoughts on the addiction that, tragically, contributes to his early death. Significantly, the short story he leaves unfinished when he dies in January 1950 is titled ‘A Smoking Room Story’ (CWGO XX: 193-200).

George Orwell in his Canonbury Square flat

The Eton Habit

Smoking is strictly forbidden at Eton which Orwell (then Eric Blair) attends between 1917 and 1921 as a King’s Scholar. This ban clearly makes the habit all the more attractive to Blair who plays the role of the ‘outsider’ standing somewhat aloof from his contemporaries – critical of everything from parents, the Empire, masters, top hats and millionaires. His friend Cyril Connolly, who later in the 1940s as editor of Horizon publishes some of Orwell’s most distinguished essays, describes how ‘Blair amid a litter of cigarette ash drinks tea from a samovar which hisses insidiously’ (Bowker 2003: 64). And Blair in 1920 tells his friend Prosper Buddicom, in a letter, how he discovers the joys of Turkish tobacco at Eton (ibid).

According to Michael Shelden, in the authorised biography, Orwell as an adult is never content merely to smoke a cigarette. ‘He always needed to buy tobacco and paper separately and roll his own. It was a form of daily experimentation. The shape and consistency of each cigarette was always a little different from the one before it. It was a nasty habit and in time it helped to ruin his health, but the whole process of making and smoking the cigarettes gave him great pleasure’ (1991: 80).

In his 1946 Tribune article ‘Books v. Cigarettes’, Orwell reveals precisely his intake of tobacco: ‘I smoke six ounces a week, at half-a-crown an ounce, making nearly £40 a year’ (CWGO XVIII: 96). His first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, is also forever smoking. In her first letter to her friend Norah Myles after her wedding on 9 June 1936, she talks of making a cigarette ‘but not with the naked hand’ (Topp 2020: 141).

According to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell, later in life, smokes hand-rolled cigarettes as a way of deliberately forging a working class persona: ‘He kept up with old-Etonians and upper class friends but, as if to maintain his connection with the miners and workers, developed a working-class persona. He wore his habitual battered tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, dark shirt, hairy tie and baggy flannel trousers. … Orwell offered his dress and manner, his hand-rolled cigarettes and proletarian appearance as an alternative, not only to the nudists and homosexuals on the Socialist fringe, but also to bourgeois clothing and comfortable surroundings’ (2000: 167).

And fittingly, Orwell’s friends, the novelist and old-Etonian Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge, find him a smoking jacket for his marriage to Sonia Brownell in Room 65, University College Hospital, London, on 13 October 1949 – just days before he dies in January 1950 (Keeble 2021: 216). Bernard Crick comments on Orwell (1980: 576): ‘He looked unexpectedly grand and military in a smoking jacket as if, son of a poor gentleman, he had pursued his natural career in Burma to a successful end and had never become a political writer. Powell remembers the jacket as crimson corduroy, but Muggeridge as mauve velvet. Memory is so fallible.’

Down – But Not Out of Cigarette Ends

Not surprisingly, cigarettes feature prominently in Orwell’s accounts of his times tramping with down-and-outs and beggars. In ‘The spike’, one of his first published articles, appearing in Adelphi in 1931, the narrator demonstrates his allegiance to the other tramps by joining with them in smuggling cigarettes into the building:

Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong moment, and was impounded (1970 1 [1931]: 59).

For many of the tramps their wretchedness is reflected in their smoking habits since, unable to afford cigarettes, they are left scavenging for cigarette ends on pavements. As the narrator comments: ‘At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp’s only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture’ (ibid: 63-64).

And the climax to the narrative – which mixes the pathetic, the touching and the squeamish as it captures the narrator’s ambivalent feelings of compassion and disgust – involves a soggy fag end. As he is finally leaving the spike, the narrator feels a tap on his arm:

It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation. ‘Here y’are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another – here y’are.’ And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends into my hand (ibid: 66).

Down – and Out of Fags

Orwell reproduces the scene, almost word by word, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1980 [1933]: 113), his part fictional/part factual memoir of his months struggling against poverty in Paris and with the beggars and hop-pickers of London and Kent. Orwell tells of meeting a tramp in Romton:

Leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-place was a wizened old Irishman, obviously a tramp. I went and leaned beside him, and presently offered him my tobacco-box. He opened the box and looked at the tobacco in astonishment: ‘By God,’ he said, ‘dere’s sixpennorth o’ good baccy here! Where de hell d’you get hold o’ dat? You ain’t been on de road long.’ ‘What, don’t you have tobacco on the road?’ I said. ‘Oh, we has it. Look.’ He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo Cubes. In it were twenty or thirty cigarette ends, picked up from the pavement. The Irishman said that he rarely got any other tobacco; he added that, with care, one could collect two ounces of tobacco a day on the London pavements (ibid: 82-83).

The sharing of cigarette ends can also convey a certain sense of acceptance and comradeship. Orwell arrives at a new spike and sees a long queue of ‘ragged men’ waiting for the gates to open: ‘Seen in the mass, lounging there, they were a disgusting sight; nothing villainous or dangerous, but a graceless, mangy crew, nearly all ragged and palpably underfed. They were friendly, however, and asked no questions. Many offered me tobacco – cigarette ends, that is’ (ibid: 84-85)

The search for cigarette ends becomes a crucial feature of the tramp’s lifestyle. Thus in describing his fellow tramp, Paddy, Orwell writes: ‘He had been brought up in Ireland, served two years in the war, and then worked in a metal polish factory, where he had lost his job two years earlier. He was horribly ashamed of being a tramp, but he had picked up all a tramp’s ways. He browsed the pavements unceasingly, never missing a cigarette end, or even an empty cigarette packet, as he used the tissue paper for rolling cigarettes’ (ibid: 88). In contrast, Bozo’s idiosyncratic way of tramping incorporates a particular attitude to cigarette ends:

With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor shame, nor self-pity. He had faced his position, and made a philosophy for himself. Being a beggar, he said, was not his fault, and he refused either to have any compunction about it or to let it trouble him. … He had various other points of honour; for instance, it was his boast that never in his life, even when starving, had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful (ibid: 96-97).

At one point in the narrative, the tramps are given cups of tea by a middle class, worthy ‘slumming party’ at a church and afterwards have to sit through a religious service. Amidst the hilarious theatricality of the riotous scenes which follow cigarette-smoking serves as an of rebellion: the tramps’ ‘revenge upon them for having humiliated us by feeding us’. The minister directs his address to the ‘dirty, hairy faces grinning down from the gallery’: ‘Having said which, he turned his face to the gallery and kept it so for five minutes, lest there should be any doubt about who were saved and who unsaved. But much we cared! Even while the minister was threatening hell fire, we were rolling cigarettes, and at the last amen we clattered down the stairs with a yell, many agreeing to come back for another free tea next week’ (ibid: 105).

Later, in a spike, smoking again serves as an act of rebellion – this time against the enforced boredom and workhouse rules:

Packed elbow to elbow on the benches, we were bored already, though it was barely eight in the morning. There was nothing to do, nothing to talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolation was that one could smoke, for smoking was connived at so long as one was not caught in the act (ibid: 111).

Cigarette advertisement on rear cover of Penguin edition of Burmese Days. In contrast, the rear cover of Penguin’s Down and Out in Paris and London advertised Jif Shaving Stick.

Fags and the Fight Against Fascism

Cigarettes play crucial roles amongst the men on the Republican frontlines fighting Franco’s fascist forces in Spain which Orwell joins in 1937. As he comments in Homage to Catalonia, his remarkable first-hand account of his time in Spain: ‘In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week’s leave’ (1980 [1938]: 273). Moreover, the extraordinary spirit of comradeship, working class solidarity and radical socialism which Orwell witnesses in Barcelona at the end of 1936 is, not surprisingly, reproduced in their attitudes to cigarettes. ‘A Spaniard’s generosity, in the ordinary sense of the word, is at times almost embarrassing. If you ask him for a cigarette he will force the whole packet upon you. And beyond this there is generosity in a deeper sense, a real largeness of spirit, which I have met with again and again in the most unpromising circumstances’ (ibid: 240). Similarly, the equality amongst the Republican militiamen is reflected in their handling of cigarettes:

The essential point of the system was social equality between officers and men. Everyone from general to private drew the same pay, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and mingled on terms of complete equality. If you wanted to slap the general commanding the division on the back and ask him for a cigarette, you could do so, and no one thought it curious. In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy. It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior (ibid: 247).

Orwell remembers this striking equality amongst the POUM militiamen in his stirring, patriotic essay The Lion and the Unicorn, published during the dark days of February 1941 when a Nazi invasion appeared a distinct possibility.

In the short run, equality of sacrifice, ‘war-Communism’, is even more important than radical economic changes. It is very necessary that industry should be nationalised, but it is more urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers and ‘private incomes’ should disappear forthwith. Almost certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic could keep up the fight for two and a half years against impossible odds was that there were no gross contrasts of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all suffered alike. When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general had not one either. Given equality of sacrifice, the morale of a country like England would probably be unbreakable (1980 [1941]: 549).

Returning to the Spanish frontlines, there are constantly shortages of basics – milk, sugar, tea, olive oil. But the shortage of tobacco is ‘the worst of all’. ‘At the beginning we had been issued with a packet of cigarettes a day, then it got down to eight cigarettes a day, then to five. Finally there were ten deadly days when there was no issue of tobacco at all. For the first time, in Spain, I saw something that you see every day in London – people picking up fag-ends’ (op cit: 274). Orwell is also particularly complimentary about the Andalusians – not over their fighting abilities but their skills in making cigarettes:

They were very useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes. The issue of cigarettes had ceased, but in Monflorite it was occasionally possible to buy packets of the cheapest kind of tobacco, which in appearance and texture was very like chopped chaff. Its flavour was not bad, but it was so dry that even when you had succeeded in making a cigarette the tobacco promptly fell out and left an empty cylinder. The Andalusians, however, could roll admirable cigarettes and had a special technique for tucking the ends in (ibid: 288).

The shift away from the revolutionary fervour Orwell witnesses on arriving in Barcelona late in December 1936 a few months later is reflected in the attitudes towards tobacco which he is keen to explore in depth:

A small but significant instance of the way in which everything was now orientated in favour of the wealthier classes could be seen in the tobacco shortage. For the mass of the people the shortage of tobacco was so desperate that cigarettes filled with sliced liquorice-root were being sold in the streets. I tried some of these once. (A lot of people tried them once.) Franco held the Canaries, where all the Spanish tobacco is grown; consequently the only stocks of tobacco left on the Government side were those that had been in existence before the war. These were running so low that the tobacconists’ shops only opened once a week; after waiting for a couple of hours in a queue you might, if you were lucky, get a three-quarter-ounce packet of tobacco. Theoretically the Government would not allow tobacco to be purchased from abroad, because this meant reducing the gold-reserves, which had got to be kept for arms and other necessities. Actually there was a steady supply of smuggled foreign cigarettes of the more expensive kinds, Lucky Strikes and so forth, which gave a grand opportunity for profiteering. You could buy the smuggled cigarettes openly in the smart hotels and hardly less openly in the streets, provided that you could pay ten pesetas (a militiaman’s daily wage) for a packet. The smuggling was for the benefit of wealthy people, and was therefore connived at. If you had enough money there was nothing that you could not get in any quantity, with the possible exception of bread, which was rationed fairly strictly. This open contrast of wealth and poverty would have been impossible a few months earlier, when the working class still were or seemed to be in control (ibid: 295).

Cigarettes also become the focus for remarkable acts of solidarity and bravery. As Orwell and his new wife, Eileen, who has joined him in Barcelona, live on the run as the communists hunt down anyone associated with the anarchists or Orwell’s neo-Trotskyite militia group, the POUM, they meet up with John McNair, the representative of the Independent Labour Party. ‘I said that we should be all right if we had some cigarettes. I only meant this as a joke; nevertheless half an hour later McNair appeared with two packets of Lucky Strikes. He had braved the pitch-dark streets, roamed by Anarchist patrols who had twice stopped him at the pistol’s point and examined his papers. I shall not forget this small act of heroism. We were very glad of the cigarettes’ (ibid: 300).

Once Orwell and his wife escape from Spain and cross over by train into France, tobacco comes to symbolise the new-found peace: ‘I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets. Then we all went to the buffet and had a cup of tea, the first tea with fresh milk in it that we had had for many months. It was several days before I could get used to the idea that you could buy cigarettes whenever you wanted them. I always half-expected to see the tobacconists’ doors barred and the forbidding notice “No hay tabaco” in the window’ (ibid: 356).

The Magnetic Fascination of Fags for the Boys

Cigarette-smoking also serves as a symbolic act of rebellion in the world of boys’ weeklies such as Magnet and Gem as dissected by Orwell in his celebrated essay in the Inside the Whale collection of March 1940 (1980 [1940]):

When the Gem and Magnet were started, it is probable that there was a deliberate intention to get away from the guilty sex-ridden atmosphere that pervaded so much of the earlier literature for boys. In the nineties the Boys’ Own Paper, for instance, used to have its correspondence columns full of terrifying warnings against masturbation, and books like St Winifred’s and Tom Brown’s School-days were heavy with homosexual feeling, though no doubt the authors were not fully aware of it. In the Gem and Magnet sex simply does not exist as a problem. Religion is also taboo; in the whole thirty years’ issue of the two papers the word ‘God’ probably does not occur, except in ‘God save the King’. On the other hand, there has always been a very strong ‘temperance’ strain. Drinking and, by association, smoking are regarded as rather disgraceful even in an adult (‘shady’ is the usual word), but at the same time as something irresistibly fascinating, a sort of substitute for sex. In their moral atmosphere the Gem and Magnet have a great deal in common with the Boy Scout movement, which started at about the same time (ibid: 480).

Cigarette-smoking is even able to add a certain kudos to the standing of various cads: ‘… even some of the cads probably have their following. Loder, for instance, “the rotter of the Sixth”, is a cad, but he is also a highbrow and given to saying sarcastic things about football and the team spirit. The boys of the Remove only think him all the more of a cad for this, but a certain type of boy would probably identify with him. Even Racke, Grooke & Co. are probably admired by small boys who think it diabolically wicked to smoke cigarettes. (A frequent question in the correspondence column: “What brand of cigarettes does Racke smoke?”)’ (ibid: 484).

Fags in the Fiction

Not surprisingly, fags feature prominently in Orwell’s fictions. For instance, Gordon Comstock, aspiring poet and central character in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (and, in many ways, an ironic self-portrait), is clearly addicted to smoking and, being obsessed with money, constantly worried about the cost of cigarettes. From the first paragraphs of the novel, the smoking habit is stressed:

The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr McKechnie’s bookshop, Gordon – Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already – lounged across the table, pushing a four penny packet of Player’s Weights open and shut with his thumb.

The ding-dong of another, remoter clock – from the Prince of Wales, the other side of the street – rippled the stagnant air. Gordon made an effort, sat upright, and stowed his packet of cigarettes away in his inside pocket. He was perishing for a smoke. However, there were only four cigarettes left. Today was Wednesday and he had no money coming to him till Friday. It would be bloody to be without tobacco as well as all tomorrow (1976 [1936]: 577).

Orwell’s debt to James Joyce is particularly evident in Chapter 3 of A Clergyman’s Daughter where the leading character, Dorothy Hare, mingles with the down-and-outs in Trafalgar Square – the dialogue rather awkwardly echoing the style of the ‘nighttown’ section of Ulysses. Yet Orwell’s use elsewhere in his fiction of symbolism and allusion typical of modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf is fascinating. Here, the aspidistra symbolises the comforts and predictability of bourgeois life. Initially, as part of his ‘war against the money god’, Gordon significantly uses a cigarette in an attempt to kill the plant in his rented room at Mrs Wisbeach’s bed-sitter: ‘Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra. Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it – starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased existence’ (ibid: 593). At the end of the novel, symbolising Gordon’s surrender to the ‘money god’ (so culminating Orwell’s ironic self-portrait), he takes a job at the New Albion advertising agency and persuades his new – and pregnant – wife, Rosemary, to purchase an aspidistra for their flat off the Edgware Road.

Smoking also serves in Keep the Aspidistra Flying to highlight Gordon’s (and, in turn, Orwell’s) ambivalent, contradictory approach to life. On the one hand, it’s acknowledged to be an addiction – but then it’s so pleasurable. Shame mingles with joy:

Suddenly a ravishing, irresistible desire to smoke came over Gordon. He had made up his mind not to smoke this afternoon. He had only four cigarettes left. They must be saved for tonight, when he intended to ‘write’; for he could no more ‘write’ without tobacco than without air. Nevertheless, he had got to have a smoke. He took out his packet of Player’s Weights and extracted one of the dwarfish cigarettes. It was sheer stupid indulgence; it meant half an hour off tonight’s ‘writing’ time. But there was no resisting it. With a sort of shameful joy he sucked the soothing smoke into his lungs (ibid: 588).

Smoking cigars – not cigarettes – is a mark of social standing in Coming Up for Air. George Bowling is a respectable bloke, an insurance seller of the Flying Salamander Life company, who has decided to skip off work, lie to his missus, and return to the country of his youth in an attempt (ultimately doomed) to recapture some of its joys. As, at the start, he describes himself: ‘At my best moments, when I’ve got a new suit or when I’m smoking a cigar, I might pass for a bookie or a publican, and when things are very bad I might be touting vacuum cleaners, but at ordinary times you’d place me correctly. “Five to ten quid a week”, you’d say as soon as you saw me. Economically and socially I’m about at the average level of Ellesmere Road’ (1976 [1939]: 435).

Or conversely, smoking is portrayed as an act of rebellion by youths against their parents. Bowling reflects on his own childhood: ‘Old Lovegrove, the saddler, caught his two sons, great lumps aged sixteen and fifteen, smoking in the garden shed and walloped them so that you could hear it all over the town. Lovegrove was a very heavy smoker. The thrashings never seemed to have any effect, all boys stole apples, robbed birds’ nests, and learned to smoke sooner or later, but the idea was still knocking around that children should be treated rough’ (ibid: 458). Joe is George’s rebellious brother – who smokes Woodbines all the time, drinks and gets into fights. Late one night, he walks out of the house and is never seen again (ibid: 488).

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece published just before he dies – aged 46 – in January 1950, the totalitarian nature of the state, forever intruding on the individual citizen’s private life, is symbolised with the face of the leader, Big Brother, appearing on everything – books, banners, posters and cigarette wrappers (1976 [1949]: 758). Winston Smith, the novel’s central character, is, like Gordon Comstock, addicted to tobacco – in his case to Oceania’s Victory Cigarettes. Smoking clearly helps provide him with a spurt of energy and courage as he prepares to make his first entry into his dissident, personal diary (1976 [1949]: 745). And smoking inevitably accompanies most adult social interactions; for instance, while eating with his colleague and fellow tenant at Victory Mansions, Parsons, in the underground canteen at the Ministry of Truth, Winston smokes a cigarette – carefully holding it horizontal since ‘the new ration did not start until tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left’ (ibid: 777). Parsons, in contrast, smokes a ‘huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe up to the top’ (ibid).

Despite all the fabulous statistics forever flowing out of loudspeakers about conditions in Oceania, in reality society is crumbling: socks are full of holes, furniture is always battered and rickety, tube trains are crowded, houses falling to pieces, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting and, not surprisingly, cigarettes are forever coming to pieces (ibid: 778). To underline this point, the next few times we meet Winston smoking, his cigarettes always fall apart! Thus, as Syme, Parsons and Smith respond to the piercing whistle marking the end of their canteen break and race to the lifts ‘the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette’ (ibid: 780). When he next puts a cigarette in his mouth, ‘Half the tobacco promptly fell out on to his tongue, a bitter dust which was difficult to spit out again’ (ibid: 803).

O’Brien first befriends Winston, embracing him as a fellow member of the dissident Brotherhood (but in the end, he turns out to be a top Inner Party official and tortures Winston in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love). When, early on, they meet with Julia, Winston’s secret lover, at O’Brien’s apartment in a huge block of flats supposedly to discuss the Brotherhood, the cigarettes on offer significantly reflect special privileges: ‘There was a silver box of cigarettes on the table. With a rather absentminded air O’Brien pushed them towards the others, took one himself, then stood up and began to pace slowly to and fro, as though he could think better standing. They were very good cigarettes, very thick and well-packed, with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper’ (ibid: 847). Unlike Winston, who holds his cheap cigarettes clumsily constantly afraid of them falling to pieces, O’Brien handles them ‘with a remarkable grace’: ‘It came out even in the gesture with which he thrust a hand into his pocket, or manipulated a cigarette. More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony’ (ibid).

Cigarettes even feature in ‘softer’ periods during Winston’s otherwise relentless torture. ‘He was getting, he judged, three meals in the twenty-four hours; sometimes he wondered dimly whether he was getting them by night or by day. The food was surprisingly good, with meat at every third meal. Once there was even a packet of cigarettes. He had no matches, but the never-speaking guard who brought his food would give him a light. The first time he tried to smoke it made him sick, but he persevered, and spun the packet out for a long time, smoking half a cigarette after each meal’ (ibid: 902).

‘Books v. Cigarettes’ and the Journalistic Imagination

Orwell brings together a consideration of his two addictions – books and cigarettes – in ac feature of ‘semi-comic seriousness’ (Marks 2011: 149), titled ‘Books v. Cigarettes’ in Tribune, 8 February 1946. It’s a wonderfully inventive manifestation of his journalistic imagination (Keeble 2007).

Whilst Orwell is always keen to stress his love of words and literature, he is, at the same time, never afraid to do the counting and engage in quantitative analysis – to quote the jargon. Thus, in The Road to Wigan Pier, the result of his research into the plight of the poor and unemployed in the north of England, he carefully lists the costs and expenses for miners (1980 [1937]: 142, 159, 166-167). In his critical deconstruction of an issue of the Daily Mirror, in Tribune, on 7 April 1944, he counts the pages devoted to specific topics: the royal family, amusement guides, comic articles, the forthcoming funeral of Rudyard Kipling, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia – and so on (CWGO XVI: 145-148).

Here in his Tribune article, Orwell argues in meticulous, quantitative detail against the far too ‘widespread’ view that buying, or even reading, books is an expensive hobby beyond the reach of the average person. Firstly, he calculates the amount of money he has spent over the last 15 years on books and compares this with his spending on cigarettes over the same period (CWGO XVIII: 95-96). He concludes he has around 900 books at a cost of £165.15s, working out at £11.1s a year. Whilst Orwell may have enjoyed his excursions into quantitative analysis, Peter Davison, editor of the 20-volume Complete Works, comments somewhat cryptically: ‘Arithmetic was not Orwell’s forte’ (ibid: 97). The total should be £165.17s.

Orwell, still intent on his analysis, adds another £8 a year for newspapers and periodicals. He continues: ‘Obviously one often spends money on books without afterwards having anything to show for it. There are library subscriptions, and there are also books, chiefly Penguins and other cheap editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away. However, on the basis of my other figures, it looks as though £6 for a year would be quite enough to add for expenditure of this kind. So my total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year’ (ibid: 96). Marks comments: ‘That factual point established, he compares the amount spent on beer and drink by the average adult, drawing on a few national statistics and his own habits to reach the pseudo-sociological conclusion that “it looks as though the cost of reading … does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking”’ (Marks 2011: 149).

In the final paragraph, Orwell suddenly introduces an international reference while making a wider social point stressing that ‘this is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes than the average Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood’ (his thoughts perhaps going momentarily back to his time as an Imperial Policeman in Burma, 1922-1927, and as a talks producer for the BBC’s Eastern Service 1941-1943). Marks concludes: ‘If the essay ends somewhat critically of the ordinary reader, the voice making the criticism criticizes gently, ending almost apologetically by insinuating that writers are not providing sufficiently exciting material. Short and quirky, “Books v. Cigarettes” deftly employs for comic and illustrative purposes the humane intimacy allowed the personal essayist’ (op cit: 150).

Final Reflections

Orwell, clearly addicted to tobacco since his time at Eton, not surprisingly features cigarettes – rarely cigars or pipes – throughout his writings. John Flory, in Burmese Days, his first novel, is a typical Orwellian anti-hero in being addicted to tobacco: his body tortured ‘for whisky and tobacco’ (1976 [1935]: 143). In contrast, Ma Kin, wife of the unscrupulous local magistrate, U Po Kyin, smokes ‘slender white cigars’ (ibid: 154).

While tramping with down-and-outs he records with compassion – and occasional disgust – how they mostly survive not on cigarettes but on the cigarette ends they pick up on pavements. Their destitution and their standing outside the norms of bourgeois society are reflected, then, in their consumption of tobacco.

During his first months fighting alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, he records the ways their attitudes to cigarettes reflect their commitment to equality, radical socialism and comradeship. Yet after a few months, Orwell notices the revolutionary fervour fading – with the wealthier classes exploiting their privileges at a time of tobacco shortage. And as Orwell and his wife, Eileen, arrive in France by train – after fleeing the violence in Barcelona – tobacco comes to symbolise their new-found peace.

Accounts of cigarette smoking appear in his essay on boys’ weeklies, in his novels and in his typically idiosyncratic essay, ‘Books v. Cigarettes’.

Yet, for Orwell, smoking is a particularly unfortunate habit to take up since from a very early age he suffers bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis. John Ross comments (2012: 210): ‘In Orwell’s case, the bronchitis he had in infancy might have begun the process which was probably accelerated when he started smoking at Eton. (No physician ever seems to have suggested to Orwell that he quit smoking, perhaps because 87 per cent of British doctors smoked at that time.)’

Orwell is certainly rarely to be seen without a cigarette. David Astor, Observer journalist, old-Etonian and his great friend during the 1940s, stresses, when I interview him at his London home in 2000, just a year before he dies, how Orwell surprises all his contemporaries by being so attentive and caring to his baby son: ‘I saw him bath Richard with the greatest care but with a cigarette in his mouth’ (Keeble 2020: 41).

George Orwell with his adopted son, Richard.

References

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

Crick, Bernard (1980) George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin

CWGO (1998) The Complete Works of George Orwell, XX Vols, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg

Keeble, Richard (2007) The lasting in the ephemeral: Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ columns, Keeble, Richard and Wheeler, Sharon (eds) The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalism from Defoe to Capote and Carter, London: Routledge pp 100-115

Keeble, Richard Lance (2020) George Orwell, the Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bury St Edmunds: Abramis

Keeble, Richard Lance (2021, forthcoming) Orwell’s Moustache, Bury St Edmunds: Abramis

Marks, Peter (2011) George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture, London: Continuum

Meyers, Jeffrey (2000) Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, New York and London: W. W. Norton

Orwell, George (1970 1 [1931]) The Spike, Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (eds) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin pp 58–66; originally published in the Adelphi, April

Orwell, George (1980 [1933]) Down and Out in Paris and London, in the Collected Non-Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 15-120

Orwell, George (1976 [1935]) Burmese Days, in the Collected Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 73-249

Orwell, George (1976 [1936]) Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in the Collected Fiction, London, Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 573-737

Orwell, George (1980 [1937]) The Road to Wigan Pier, in the Collected Non-Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 123-231

Orwell, George (1980 [1938]) Homage to Catalonia, in the Collected Non-Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 233-358

Orwell, George (1976 [1939]) Coming Up for Air, in the Collected Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg pp 431-571

Orwell, George (1980 [1940]) Boys’ weeklies, in the Collected Non-Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 477-494

Orwell, George (1980 [1941]) The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, in the Collected Non-Fiction, London: Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 527-564

Orwell, George (1976 [1949]) Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the Collected Fiction, London, Secker & Warburg/Octopus pp 743-925

Ross, John (2012) Orwell’s Cough: Diagnosing the Medical Maladies & Last Gasps of the Great Writers, London: Oneworld

Shelden, Michael (1991) Orwell: The Authorised Biography, London: Heinemann

Topp, Sylvia (2020) Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, London: Unbound

• Richard Lance Keeble was the chair of The Orwell Society 2013-2020. His latest book, Orwell’s Moustache, is shortly to be published by Abramis, of Bury St Edmunds.