Orwell’s Views on Language

Abstract

In 1946, toward the end of his career but with one great novel still to be written, Orwell published an essay called ‘Why I Write’, reflecting on his aims and motives. This paper is helpfully reprinted right at the beginning of the otherwise chronologically arranged four volumes of Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (CEJL, I, pp. 23–30), and it gives valuable insights into Orwell’s artistic and linguistic goals. At its climax we find the often-quoted comment that ‘Good prose is like a window pane.’ Clarity is the prime requirement in prose writing. ‘Of later years,’ he writes, ‘I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly.’ And again in this essay: ‘So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.’ Prose is to be clear, exact, precise. Orwell’s essays contain many other references to precision and clarity, and in the later years, repeated analyses of what he felt to be abuses of language which worked against this quality of transparency.