Rob Henderson has a new essay Orwell in the Gutter, about his experience of poverty especially in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. One can see why the author of Troubled would be initially attracted to Orwell and why his admiration for him deepened and he became an adult and a writer on his own.
“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs. The Road to Wigan Pier, (1937)
A longish essay, but an excellent reminder of some basic realities that George Orwell would not obscure that still ring true today.
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