All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays

  Notes

  Charles Dickens

  1. In Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (1937).

  2. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a romantic novel and play (1905), the first of several stories featuring the adventures during the French Revolution of the suave English aristocrat Sir Percy Blakeney, who rescued those destined for the guillotine. Their author, Baroness Orczy (Mrs. Montagu Barstow, 1865-1947), was born in Hungary.

  3. Carmagnole was a worker's jacket originating in Carmagnola, Piedmont. It became fashionable among French revolutionaries and was then used to describe a song and a wild dance. The first verse of the song pilloried "Madame Veto"--Queen Marie Antoinette--who was accused of influencing Louis XVI to exercise this right.

  4. Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) was the author of a number of works of self-improvement; the best known is Self-Help: with Illustrations of Conduct & Perseverance (1859). By far the most successful of many such books of its time, it and the attitudes it represented have been much castigated.

  5. On his return from a visit to the Soviet Union, Andre Gide (1869-1951), prolific French author and editor, wrote a somewhat disillusioned account of his experiences there, Retour de l'URSS (1936).

  6. Bartram wrote novels and folklore verses. The People of Clopton: A Poaching Romance was published in 1897.

  7. Orley Farm (1862) by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882).

  8. "Ye Mariners of England," by Thomas Campbell (1777-1844); "The Charge of the Light Brigade," by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).

  9. Orwell probably had in mind Bransby Williams (1870-1961), the "Hamlet of the Halls," whose impersonations of Dickens's characters and incidents were popular in music halls and on records; they anticipated the one-man Dickens recitals by legitimate actors in the latter part of the twentieth century.

  10. Frank Fairleigh, or Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil (1850) was by Francis Edward Smedley (1818-1864). Mr Verdant Green is a trilogy by Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley, 1827-1889), made up of The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman (1853), The Further Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Undergraduate (1854), and Mr Verdant Green Married and Done For (1857). The books were frequently reprinted, with illustrations by the author. Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures (1846; reprinted from Punch) was by Douglas Jerrold, a prolific dramatist (1803-185 7).

  Boys' Weeklies

  1. Boy's Own Paper (not Boys', as sometimes printed), founded in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, was a weekly to 1912, then monthly. It outlived Orwell. Chums, founded in 1892, was published by Cassell as a rival to Boy's Own Paper.

  2. In fact, the stories were not all the work of "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton, 1876-1961). He is credited with 1,380 of the 1,683 stories in Magnet; there were some twenty-five substitute writers. Nevertheless, he wrote some 5,000 stories, "created" more than a hundred schools, used two dozen pen names (including Hilda Richards, for girls-school stories, and Martin Clifford). He probably published some 100 million words.

  3. John Edward Gunby Hadath (c. 1880-1954), author of Schoolboy Grit (1913), Carey of Cobhouse (1928), and other school stories.

  4. Desmond Francis Talbot Coke (1879-1931), author of The House Prefect (1908) and other books for children.

  5. Officers' Training Corps, the army cadet force maintained in many public schools.

  6. "Hilda Richards" is Frank Richards.

  7. Mons, in Belgium, marked the limit of a British advance in August 1914. The German army under von Kluck was badly mauled, but success was short-lived. In what became a famous fighting retreat, the British II Corps held the Germans at the costly battle of Le Cateau.

  8. Air Raid Precautions.

  9. Ruby M. Ayres (1883-1955) was a prolific and popular romantic novelist and short-story writer, many of whose novels were made into films. Despite writing in this vein, she gave down-to-earth advice in her column in Oracle, the more convincing, perhaps, because her stories were so widely read.

  10. The Navy League was founded in 1895 to foster national interest in the Royal Navy. Orwell was a member when he was seven years old.

  11. Sapper was Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937), adventure-story writer and creator of the popular hero Bulldog Drummond. Ian Hay (John Hay Beith) (1876-1952) was a Scottish author and dramatist. His The First Hundred Thousand (see "Inside the Whale," 367, n. 35) gave a propagandist account of Kitchener's First Army in France at the beginning of World War I and was widely read.

  12. William Ewart Berry (1879-1954; Baron Camrose, 1929; Viscount, 1941) began his working life as a reporter and rose to control (with his brother, Lord Kemsley) a newspaper and periodical empire that included the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, twenty-two provincial newspapers, and some seventy periodicals, including Women's Journal and Boxing. He was controller of press relations at the Ministry of Information for a short time in 1939.

  13. Chapaiev (1935) was directed by the Vassiliev Brothers.

  Inside the Whale

  1. Tarr, by Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), was first serialized in the Egoist, April 1916--November 1917. It was expanded and published as a book in 1918.

  2. A series of books by Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921), novelist and journalist, featured Raffles, an elegant, socially acceptable "amateur cracksman," as Orwell described him in his essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish," Horizon, October 1944; see 232.

  3. The House with the Green Shutters (1901) was the only novel of George Douglas (1869-1902), pen name of George Douglas Brown.

  4. Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches; 1894-1961), was published in English as Journey to the End of the Night (1934).

  5. Little Women (1868-69) was by Louisa M. Alcott (1832-1888); Helen's Babies (1876), by John Habberton (1842-1921). "Riding Down from Bangor" (Bangor, Maine) is an American folk song.

  6. Charles Bedaux (1887-1944), U.S. efficiency engineer, devised the "Bedaux unit" or point system to assess the amount of work an individual should do in a specific time. The resultant speed-up of industry in the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic was opposed by the unions. In London, it led to a major bus strike in 1937. Bedaux, who had been born in France, returned there in 1937, collaborated with the Nazis, was arrested by U.S. troops, and charged with treason. He committed suicide.

  7. Max and the White Phagocytes, by Henry Miller (1891-1980), was published in 1938. Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934; Black Spring, in 1936; and Tropic of Capricorn, in 1939.

  8. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970). Le Feu: journal d'une escouade (1916), by Henri Barbusse (1873-1935), was published in English as Under Fire: Story of a Squad (1917). It won the Prix Goncourt. A Farewell to Arms (1929) was by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961); Death of a Hero (1929, expurgated; 1965, unexpurgated), by Richard Aldington (1892-1962); Good-bye to All That, an Autobiography (1929), by Robert Graves (1895-1985); Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967); A Subaltern on the Somme in 1916 (1927), by Mark VII (Max Plowman). Plowman was among those who encouraged Orwell in his early days as a writer.

  9. The Booster, a monthly magazine in French and English, was edited by, among others, Alfred Perles, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, and William Saroyan, September 1937-- Easter 1939 (as Delta from April 1938). One of those who assisted was Anais Nin; see n. 29 below. Orwell had reviewed The Booster in New English Weekly in 1937.

  10. A. E. Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and poet. A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896. The text printed in this essay is that of The Collected Poems (1939).

  11. Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), a naturalist and writer, drew his inspiration from rural England. William Henry Hudson (1841-1922), travel and fiction writer.

  12. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), was published twice in 1912, in Basileon and in Poetry Review.

  13. Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1955) wrote novels associated with rural England, especially Sussex
.

  14. John Masefield (1878-1967), poet and dramatist, also wrote about the war. The Everlasting Mercy (1911) tells how a Quaker, Miss Bourne, saves the soul of the debauched Saul Kane, to whom Orwell refers a few lines below.

  15. Orwell quotes this stanza from Last Poems (1922) by A. E. Housman; see n. 10.

  16. George Norman Douglas(s) (1868-1952), novelist and travel writer. In fact, much of his small output of fiction was published after the outbreak of war in 1914, notably South Wind (1917), considered shocking in its day.

  17. John Squire (1884-1958), literary editor of The New Statesman, 1913-1919, founded the monthly London Mercury (1919-1939), which he edited from 1919 to 1934. Philip Gibbs (1877-1967), prolific novelist and journalist, also wrote much on national issues, including the war, and was a war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle. Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), popular novelist, was the author of Mr Perrin and Mr Traill (1911) and The Herries Chronicle, in five volumes (1930-1940).

  18. The reference to "eagles and of crumpets" is obscure. Possibly Orwell had in mind Psalm 103, 5, in the version in The Book of Common Prayer: "Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things: making thee young and lusty like an eagle."

  19. Told by an Idiot (1923), by (Dame Emilie) Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), a prolific novelist.

  20. Of Human Bondage (1915), by W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965).

  21. Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), a poet, dramatist, and critic.

  22. See The Road to Wigan Pier.

  23. The first line of "Poem No. 10" in The Magnetic Mountain (1933), by Cecil Day Lewis (IC)04-1972).

  24. Stephen Spender (1909-1995, Kt. 1983), poet, novelist, critic, and translator.

  25. Edward Falaise Upward (1903--), a novelist.

  26. Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was with Orwell at St. Cyprian's and Eton. They met again in 1935, and were associated with a number of literary activities, particularly Horizon, which Connolly edited.

  27. By Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), published in 1853.

  28. James M. Barrie (1860-1937), a popular Scottish novelist and dramatist. George Warwick Deeping (1877-1950), a popular novelist, is, with Ethel M. Dell (1881-1939), the object of Gordon Comstock's contempt in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, chapter I. (See also n. 2, 374)

  29. Anais Nin (1903-1977), novelist and diarist, with a special interest in psychology, was born in Paris, where she assisted in editing The Booster (see n. 9 above). Her diary was published 1966-1974.

  30. This essay, "Meditation on El Greco," by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963 ), appeared in his Music at Night (1931).

  31. Job, xxiii, 15, though it continues, "but I will continue my own ways before him."

  32. "Sketch of a Marxist Interpretation of Literature," in The Mind in Chains (1937), edited by C. Day Lewis.

  33. Minuit (Midnight in English) (1936) by Julian Green (1900-1999). Green was born in Paris of American parents and became a prolific French novelist. Orwell reviewed his Personal Record 1928-1939.

  34. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) broadcast for Orwell on a number of occasions in the BBC's service to India. Among his novels were Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905 ; New York, 1920), A Room with a View (1908; New York, 1911), and Howards End (1910). His critical works include Aspects of the Novel (1927), Abinger Harvest (1936), and Two Cheers for Democracy(1951). After the war, Forster supported the Freedom Defence Committee, of which Orwell was vice chairman.

  35. The First Hundred Thousand, Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of "K(I)" (Kitchener's First Army, 1915) by Ian Hay; see "Boys' Weeklies," 364, n. 11. Horatio Bottomley (1860-1933), politician, entrepreneur, and swindler, founded the Financial Times in 1888 and the popular weekly John Bull (1906-1958), and was its first editor. He was a Liberal MP, 1906-1912 and 1918-1922. He recruited vigorously and unscrupulously for the services during the war and raised money, ostensibly to further the conduct of the war and to provide for those who suffered in its cause, through War Savings Certificates. These certificates proved fraudulent. He was tried and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude in 1922.

  36. Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), poet, novelist, and critic. Michael Fraenkel (1896-1957) was a novelist.

  37. Jack Kahane (1887-1939), author and publisher, lived in Paris between the wars and founded Obelisk Press there. He fostered the work of authors regarded as commercially risky either for fear of censorship or because of limited appeal. Among those he published were Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, James Joyce (poetry and excerpts from Finnegans Wake), and Lawrence Durrell. Many of his choices became classics.

  Film Review: The Great Dictator

  1. Alain (735-804), theologian, adviser to Charlemagne: "The voice of the people is the voice of God."

  Wells, Hitler and the World State

  1. Viscount Sankey (1866-1948) was a judge of the King's Bench, 1914-1928; Lord Chancellor, 1929-1935. In 1919 he had chaired a Parliamentary Commission into the state of the coal industry that recommended its nationalization. H. G. Wells, in his Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution (1941), wrote: "There has been a worldwide need for some formula upon which mankind can unite against Air Terrorism and the present frantic waste of the world's resources. Such a Declaration was drawn up last year [1940] after a world debate, by a committee of responsible British people under the presidency of that great lawyer, Lord Sankey. It stands available today. It could be adopted as a universal fundamental law so soon as war conditions cease" (chapter 12, "Declaration of Rights," 48). He then outlined the propositions of the Sankey Declaration: 1. Right to Live; 2. Protection of Minors; 3. Duty to the Community; 4. Right to Knowledge; 5. Freedom of Thought and Worship; 6. Right to Work; 7. Right in Personal Property; 8. Freedom of Movement; 9. Personal Liberty; 10. Freedom from Violence; 11. Right of Law-Making.

  2. Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982) was author of The Revolution of Nihilism (1939) and Hitler Speaks (1939). Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) provided Hitler with a quasi-philosophical basis for his racist practices in Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts (1930). He was hanged following the Nuremberg war crimes trial. Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) was an Italian novelist. Dr. Franz Borkenau was an Austrian sociologist whom Orwell held in high esteem. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a novelist and essayist.

  The Art of Donald McGill

  1. Horizon reproduced two of McGill's cards, but these have not been reprinted since. In one, a soap-box orator advocating temperance is concluding his oration with "Now I have just one tract left. What shall I do with it?" A wife is depicted with her hand over a fat man's mouth, stopping his answering, and the caption is: "Don't say it George!" In the other, a vastly overweight man who might be a bookie, accompanied by a shapely young lady, is seen telling a hotel receptionist, "I and my daughter would like adjoining bedrooms!"

  2. Donald McGill (1875-1962) was a real person; compare Orwell's doubts about the existence of a Frank Richards in his essay "Boys' Weeklies." He began his career in 1904 when he sketched a drawing on the back of a postcard to cheer up a nephew in the hospital. By December 1905, Picture Postcard Magazine "picked him out as a designer whose cards would become "widely popular.'" One card, no. 1772, designed in 1916, sold over three million copies. It was not of the kind described by Orwell, but showed a little girl in a nightdress at which a puppy was tugging; the caption read: "Please, Lord, excuse me a minute while I kick Fido!!" He fairly claimed that his cards were not obscene but depicted situations with honest vulgarity, and he was depressed by the way his art form was allowed to degenerate. See Tonie and Valmai Holt, Picture Postcards of the Golden Age (1971), 91-93, Arthur Calder Marshall, Wish You Were Here (1966). Orwell, in commenting that McGill was "a clever draughtsman," could not have known that, from 1897 to 1907, McGill worked as an engineering draughtsman.

  3. Air Raid Precautions.

  4. An air-raid shelter built in the gardens of individual houses, capable of holding four to six people in modest discomfort. It was designed by Sir William Paterson (1874-1956)
at the instigation of Sir John Anderson (1882-1958; Viscount, 1952) in 1938. More than three million Andersons were built, and they are credited with saving many lives. A few have survived as makeshift garden sheds.

  5. Winston Churchill, in addressing the House of Commons, May 13,1940, said, "I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.'"

  6. Ecclesiastes VII: 15-17.

  No, Not One

  1. Ernst vom Rath (as "Vom" in the original) was Third Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. A Jewish youth, Herschel Grynszpan, shot him there on November 7, 1938, and he died of wounds on November 9. Violent attacks on Jews and Jewish property--"Kristallnacht"--followed.