Orwell and English Socialism

Abstract

In 1946 in an essay ‘Why I write’ Orwell wrote, ‘What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.’ And he might well have added, into a popular art, for I believe that he developed his famous clear, plain, simple, colloquial and forceful style precisely in order to reach what he was more apt to call ‘the common man’ than the working class. His debt to Swift has often been noted, especially for the strategies of his two major satires, but his deliberate choice of rhetoric, his adopted style and conscious persona as a writer may owe more to Daniel Defoe; and he wrote for much the same kind of audience.