Orwell as Literary Critic: A Reassessment

Abstract

Keith Alldritt’s assessment of Orwell as a literary critic will serve as a convenient point of departure for my own reassessment. It casts serious doubts on the validity of Orwell’s entire critical performance, doubts that any serious defence of Orwell must attempt to resolve.

To the modern student of literature, Orwell’s criticism must seem crude and rudimentary. Indeed, Orwell’s essays about literature bear very little relationship to literary criticism as that term is now understood. Modern literary criticism… tends to concentrate upon given texts. Above all it is attentive to the words on the page and to the quality of mind and responsiveness to which the words attest. It is conducted by means of a set of verbal conventions that make for the neutralisation, sometimes even for the virtual extinction, of the personality of the critic. It is meticulous in its formulations even at the risk of becoming Alexandrian. With Orwell it is quite otherwise. There is no great reverence for the novel or poem as a thing in itself, nor is there much critical vocabulary. His essays seldom offer a new insight into a work.¹