Such Very Different Company

George Orwell – early proponent of Meme theory?

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One women stands out in the life of George Orwell for her importance in his intellectual development – Brenda Salkeld*, a friend he made after his family moved to Southwold in Suffolk. His letters to her are records of first thoughts on many of his interests, and he wrote in some cases at length so that they not just “first thoughts”. Sometimes these ideas remained unknown until Miss Salkeld allowed extracts to be printed in the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of 1968, while others later appeared without mentioning their earlier record as letters in Orwell’s own journalism. The depth of Orwell’s appreciation of James Joyce’s Ullysses remained undocumented outside his letter, while his thoughts on climate change noted by reading about Shakespeare’s England re-appeared in his ‘As I Please’ column in Tribune, for example.

Orwell gave us some of the important concepts of the Twentieth Century, the most significant of which may have been the concept of “Cold War”. Orwell’s column of October 19^th 1945 may not have been the first time the two words were published together, but as the Oxford University Press blog notes:-

… it seems to have been the first time it was applied to the conditions that arose in the aftermath of World War II. (posted October 24th 2015)

The concept remained significant, the blog noted, because “Seventy years after the publication of his essay, the dynamics George Orwell discussed in it are still recognizable in international relations today.”

Reading Orwell’s letters to Brenda Salkeld reveals that his thought covered far more, and one letter which is better remembered as a record of British pub life, actually contains a deeper intellectual seed – the concept of the “meme”.

The word “meme” was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, in which he expanded a concept that was considerably older, but never developed to the degree that Professor Dawkins took it (this explanation is given in the Wikipedia article on early formulations of the concept). “Memes” are abstract things – ideas – which can be transmitted down the generations as if they were physically inherited:

Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. (The Selfish Gene Quoted on Wikipedia)

In a letter to Brenda Salkeld in 1934, Orwell asked her to cast her mind back to a meeting with the social scientist Cecil Delisle Burns (according to Peter Davison’s notes in the Complete Works, Burns was a London neighbour of Orwell’s friend Mabel Fierz. Mrs Fierz, a champion of Orwell even before he was first published, presumably was introducing Orwell to other intellectual powers in her circle). Orwell wrote:-

Do you remember that afternoon when we had tea with Delisle Burns and I asked him what was the tune of “Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre”, and he said it was the same as “For he’s a jolly good fellow”? And the other night I was passing the King’s Head, and the Buffaloes, who were holding one of their secret conclaves in there, were singing it—or rather, as they seemed to be gargling it through pints of beer, what it sounded like was:

Fo-or-ee’s a jorrigoo’ fellow,

For-ee’s a jorrigoo’ fellow,

For-ee’s a jorrigoo’ fe-ellow—

And toori oori us!

And I could not help thinking again what very peculiar histories tunes have. To think that Napoleon was whistling, at I forget what battle, the same tune as the Buffaloes were singing! And it struck me that an idea is very like a tune in this way, that it goes through the ages remaining the same in itself but getting into such very different company. It is an idea that interests me, and I must use it in my next book.

Letter to To Brenda Salkeld, 27 July 1934 (emphasis added)

The King’s Head, Southwold, passing which in 1934 George Orwell conceived of the meme .

The next book that Orwell published was the novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, and the book after that was Keep The Aspidistra Flying which plays with the iconography of respectable London life, but does not seem to have explicated the idea that gets “into such very different company”. Orwell’s realisation of the meme might have stayed in his letters for thirty-four years until they were published by his editors Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

It was later in his career that Orwell returned to ideas. We can go further, because Orwell went further. He had first identified ideas that went “through the ages remaining the same”, but in February 1945, after he had spent years at the BBC and then at Tribune combatting totalitarian thought, he made it clear that ideas can appear completely new**. He was inspired by reading G K Chesterton:

Looking through Chesterton’s introduction to Hard Times in the Everyman Edition (incidentally, Chesterton’s introductions to Dickens are about the best thing he ever wrote), I note the typically sweeping statement: “There are no new ideas.”… the claim that “there is nothing new under the sun” is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries.

And Orwell contrasted this:

In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilisation need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance: it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton’s dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. (“As I Please”, 25 February 1944)

If Orwell’s sudden realisation of the meme as he walked away from the King’s Head in Southwold is as original as it seems to have been, then we may have to add the pub to the list of locations of historic intellectual significance in Britain. In fact, these flashes of insight seem to have been happening across Britain about the same time – the most famous being Leo Szilard’s moment of enlightenment on September 12 1933, as he waited for the traffic lights to change where Southampton Row crosses Russell Square near the British Museum. In that moment Szilard realised that nuclear reaction was possible. Should the pavement outside the King’s Head, Southwold, be marked as the place where, in 1934, the meme was first realised?

* We have fewer written records of Orwell’s intellectual discussions with his wife Eileen, than we do with Brenda Salkeld or with his other Southwold friend Eleanor Jaques.

** Orwell at this time knew biologists such as C H Waddington and John Baker – it is not clear if he discussed the importance of mutation in evolutionary theory with them, but new forms of life had to appear from somewhere. Orwell wrote his radio dramatisation of The Voyage of the Beagle in 1946, but how evolution worked was still in the air when this article in The Atlantic magazine appeared in 1957, seven years after Orwell’s death. It has an additional significance for Orwell’s biography as it mentions streptomycin which became part of his treatment for Tuberculosis.