2. The Arandora Star was sunk in the Atlantic by a U-boat on July 2, 1940. It was carrying 1,500 German and Italian internees from Britain to Canada; 613 were drowned.
3. Matthew XVIII:7 and Romans III: 10.
Rudyard Kipling
1. This essay took as its starting point the publication of A Choice of Kipling's Verse, made and introduced by T. S. Eliot (December 1941).
Orwell here, as elsewhere, does not always quote exactly. He doubtless relied on memory, having a good knowledge of what he was quoting. These errors are treated in two ways. The original is corrected if the error does not seem significant, however slightly, to Orwell's argument or to the impression the words might have made upon him. Thus "Hosts" is given its initial capital, as in Kipling. If the form Orwell uses might have been important to him, the quote is left uncorrected; the proper reading is in the notes.
The sources and page references of Kipling's poems quoted by Orwell are from Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (1940; abbreviated to RKV). Dates of poems are provided where given in RKV. Reference is also made to Kipling's posthumous autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), and to Charles Carrington's Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (1955; Penguin, 1970, to which edition reference is made as "Carrington").
2. "Recessional," RKV, 328-29, was written after Queen Victoria's Jubilee and published in The Times, July 17, 1897.
3. London and Philadelphia, 1891. The U.S. edition has a happy ending. Kipling maintained in his preface that the English edition is "as it was originally conceived and written."
4. Although Singapore did not surrender until February 15,1942, most of Malaya had already been overrun.
5. Strictly, a peddler, but in the context applied derogatively to those working in commerce in India.
6. "Tommy," RKV, 398-99.
7. "The Islanders" (1902), RKV, 301-4; Orwell has "and" for "or" and "goal" for "goals."
8. RKV, 477-78, which has this note: "The more notoriously incompetent commanders used to be sent to the town of Stellenbosch, which name presently became a verb." Kipling tells how the General "got 'is decorations thick" and "The Staff 'ad D.S.O.'s till we was sick / An' the soldier--'ad the work to do again!"
9. "'Follow Me 'Ome,'" RKV, 446-47.
10. "The Sergeant's Weddin'," RKV, 447-49.
11. From "For England's Sake" by W. E. Henley (1849-1903), who has "you" for Orwell's "thee." Kipling had "the greatest admiration for Henley's verse and prose" (Something of Myself--SoM hereafter--82), and it was Henley who encouraged Kipling by publishing his verse in The Scots Observer, beginning with "Danny Deever," February 22, 1890.
12. "Drums of the Fore and Aft" in Wee Willie Winkie (Centenary Edition, 1969, 331). It occurs in a story that is a parallel to the poem "That Day" (see n. 15 below) and concerns an occasion when, contrary to popular belief, British soldiers fled in terror. Kipling teases out why soldiers don't follow "their officers into battle" and why they refuse to respond to orders from "those who had no right to give them" (330). The context of these words, which may be significant, is: "Armed with imperfect knowledge, cursed with the rudiments of an imagination, hampered by the intense selfishness of the lower classes, and unsupported by any regimental associations..." It is not surprising, argues Kipling, that such soldiers falter before a native attack if surrounded only by similarly raw soldiers and if poorly and uncertainly led.
13. SoM, 56. Kipling continued by saying he endured "on account of Christian doctrine which lays down that 'the wages of sin is death.'"
14. He was, however, a close observer. See SoM, chapter VI, "South Africa," and his account of the (slightly ironically titled?) "Battle of Kari Siding" (157-61).
15. "That Day," RKV, 437-38.
16. "The 'Eathen," RKV, 451-53. "They" are the NCOs--"the backbone of the Army is the Non-commissioned Man."
17. Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade."
18. Orwell probably refers to Karel Capek (1890-1938), novelist and dramatist, whose play R.U.R. (1920) features Rossum's Universal Robots and is usually thought to have introduced the word "robot" into general use. However, according to William Harkins's Karel Capek (1962), it was Karel's brother Josef (1887-1945) who introduced the word, in a story published in 1917. OED gives Czech robota--statute labor; robotnik--serf. Possibly forced labor aptly conveys the sense.
19. "East is East, and West is West": "The Ballad of East and West" (1899), RKV, 234-38. "The white man's burden": from the poem of that title (1899), RKV, 323-24, significantly subtitled "The United States and the Philippine Islands." The poem was first published in the United States, in McClure's Magazine. The appeal was initially to Americans, to take responsibility for the less fortunate, to assume a colonial burden. "What do they know of England who only England know?": "The English Flag" (1891), RKV, 221-24; Kipling has "What should they know...." "The female of the species is more deadly than the male": from a poem of that title (1911), RKV, 367-69. "Somewhere East of Suez": "Mandalay," RKV, 418-20; Kipling has "somewheres." "Paying the Dane-geld": "Dane-geld," RKV, 712-13.
20. "The Absent-Minded Beggar," RKV, 459-60. Published October 31,1899 in the Daily Mail; with music composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan, it raised some PS250,000 for servicemen and their dependents. Kipling refused to admit the poem to his collected verse for many years. See SOM, 150; Carrington, 363-64.
21. Tennyson, "The May-Queen."
22. The poem concludes, in italic: "No doubt but ye are the People.../ On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!" (RKV, 304). Kipling records in SoM that "after a few days' newspaper correspondence" these verses "were dismissed as violent, untimely and untrue" (222).
23. RKV, 406-8 and 397-98.
24. "Mandalay," RKV, 418-20, hyphenation and punctuation corrected.
25. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), ardent abolitionist, was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which brought her fame and aided the antislavery cause. She later started another storm, at home and in England, with her article "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life."
26. The authors of these poems are: Thomas Hood ("The Bridge of Sighs"); Charles Kingsley ("When all the world is young, lad" from "Young and Old"); Alfred, Lord Tennyson ("The Charge of the Light Brigade"); Charles Wolfe ("The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna"); Leigh Hunt ("Jenny kissed me" from "Rondeau"); Sidney Dobell ("Keith of Ravelston" from "A Nuptial Eve"); and Felicia Hemans ("Casabianca," which includes the line, "The boy stood on the burning deck").
27. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) wrote no poem entitled "Endeavour." Churchill quoted the last two stanzas of his lyric "Say not the struggle naught availeth" in his broadcast of May 3, 1941. The last line quoted was obviously directed at the United States, then providing much aid but still seven months away from becoming a combatant: "But westward, look, the land is bright"; see Churchill, The Second World War, III, 209-10; U.S.: The Grand Alliance, 237. It is possible that the title "Endeavour" comes from a reprint of the poem in an anthology.
28. "The God of the Copybook Headings" (1919), RKV, 793-95. In the last line Kipling has them "with terror and slaughter return!"
T. S. Eliot
1. The quotation from "The Dry Salvages," Poetry (London) omitted the comma after "us" in line 3. In the second and fourth stanzas from "Whispers of Immortality" (written about 1918), "his eyes" was printed for "the eyes"; "how thought" for "that thought"; a semicolon appeared for a full stop after "luxuries," and a colon for a semicolon after "skeleton."
2. Sir J. C. Squire (1884-1958), journalist, essayist, and poet.
3. Alan Patrick Herbert (1890-1971; Kt., 1945; Order of the Companions Honour, 1970), humorist, novelist, dramatist, and author of much light poetry.
4. Poetry (London) did not hyphenate "sea-girls"; it added a comma after "brown."
Can Socialists Be Happy?
1. Orwell wrote this essay under the pseudonym "John Freeman."
2. Henry Fitz Gerald Heard (1889-1971), author, broadcaster, and
lecturer. Orwell may be referring to Heard's Pain, Sex and Time (1939).
Propaganda and Demotic Speech
1. Wallington, near Baldock, Hertfordshire.
2. Army Bureau of Current Affairs and (Women's) Auxiliary Territorial Service, 1938-1948.
3. From "Sweeney Agonistes: Fragment of an Agon." Orwell is probably quoting from memory and the quotation is not quite accurate. Eliot's text reads:
This went on for a couple of months
Nobody came
And nobody went
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent.
Raffles and Miss Blandish
1. No Orchids for Miss Blandish was James Hadley Chase's first book and was written when he was working for a book wholesaler. It was published in May 1939, and by the time Orwell wrote his essay had sold over a million copies. Chase's real name was Rene Brabazon Raymond (1906-1985); he wrote some eighty books, using various pseudonyms.
2. Charles Peace (1832-1879), petty criminal and murderer. In 1876 he killed Police Constable Cook, but another man was charged and found guilty of murder. In 1878 he murdered Alfred Dyson. Arrested in the act of burglary, he was tried for Dyson's murder and found guilty. He confessed to having killed Cook, and the man originally charged, William Habron, was given a free pardon. Peace was executed in 1879. His exploits entered popular myth and he was the subject of an early silent film.
3. Zingari ] properly, I Zingari (Italian, the Gypsies); an exclusive English cricket club founded in 1845 that has no home ground and so travels away to all its matches.
4. The two lines, from Barrack-room Ballads (1892 or 1893), should be printed as a single line as "Yes, a trooper of the forces who has run his own six horses,"--no exclamation point. "[C]ohorts of the damned" is quoted from Gentleman Rankers.
5. M.C.C.] Marylebone Cricket Club, then the ruling body of English and international cricket, responsible for the rules of the game and situated at Lord's Cricket Ground, the "headquarters of cricket." Membership is restricted.
Politics and the English Language
1. "rift within the lute" is given after "fishing in troubled waters" in Orwell's list of metaphors in his notes. Not all the metaphors in this list are in the essay, but in his next sentence Orwell asks "what is a 'rift,' for instance?" He must have intended to include this metaphor, since his question does not make sense without it; it has therefore been added here in square brackets. The line comes from Tennyson's Idylls of the King, "Merlin and Vivien." Vivien sings to Merlin a song she heard Sir Launcelot once sing. It includes these two stanzas, which make the meaning plain:
It [want of faith] is the little rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.
The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garner'd fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all. [Lines 388-93]
2. Stuart Chase (1888-1985), economist who investigated the U.S. meat-packing industry and served with the Labor Bureau Inc. Orwell probably refers to his The Tyranny of Words (1938).
Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
1. Sir Alan P. Herbert (1890-1971; Knight, 1945), humorist, novelist, dramatist, represented Oxford University as an Independent MP, 1935-1950. G. M. Young (1882-1959), civil servant until his resignation after World War I; then author, historian, and editor. Godfrey Elton, 1st Baron Elton (1892-1977), author and broadcaster.
2. W. H. Mallock (1849-1923), author of The New Republic (1877) and The New Paul and Virginia (1878).
3. "Timothy Shy" was D. B. Wyndham Lewis, who wrote this column in the News Chronicle; "The Brains Trust" was a popular BBC program in which a panel discussed questions submitted by listeners.
4. Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957), Roman Catholic priest and, for many people, an unofficial spokesman for that church. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; 3rd Earl Russell, 1931), philosopher and mathematician, joint author, with A. N. Whitehead, of Principia Mathematica (1910-1913). A pacifist during World War I (he was imprisoned for six months), he renounced pacifism in 1939 because of the growth of Fascism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
1. Tulips seem to have originated in Turkey. A mania for them struck Holland in the seventeenth century with devastating financial results. In Alkmaar, in 1639, 120 tulip bulbs were sold for 90,000 florins; a single bulb, the Viceroy, fetched 4,203 guilders. In the eighteenth century, such was the economic damage being caused, the government stopped the tulip traffic. Orwell may have known the novel, La Tulipe Noire (1850) by Alexandre Dumas. An abridged version was often set for schoolboys to read (in French).
2. George Warwick Deeping (see n. 28,367.), prolific and popular novelist. Perhaps his best-known work is Sorrell and Son (1925; New York, 1926). In Keep the Aspidistra Flying it looks as if Orwell originally intended to have Gordon Comstock call the novels of Warwick Deeping and of Ethel M. Dell "garbage." This was, however, suppressed on legal advice.
Footnotes
*Hard Times was published as a serial in Household Words and Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in All the Year Round. Forster says that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it "much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each." Dickens himself complained of the lack of "elbow-room." In other works, he had to stick more closely to the story [Orwell's footnote].
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*Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part. But any action by such a character would seem incongruous [Orwell's footnote].
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*From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): "You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it ... Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it" [Orwell's footnote].
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*This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper [Orwell's footnote].
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*Published in 1932 [Orwell's footnote]. Edited by Michael (William Edward) Roberts (1902-1948).
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*The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (the Dial Press, New York) [Orwell's footnote].
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*Dali mentions L'Age d'Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defaecating [Orwell's footnote].
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*In spite of this, Common Wealth has adopted the astonishingly feeble slogan: "What is morally wrong cannot be politically right" [Orwell's footnote].
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*Raffles, A Thief in the Night and Mr. Justice Raffles, by E. W. Hornung. The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as Raffles is Stingaree [Orwell's footnote].
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*1945. Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for the death
of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is, however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer "doesn't count" [Orwell's footnote].
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*1945. Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality of the book [Orwell's footnote].
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*They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast, which accounted for their low price and crumpled appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with something more useful, probably gravel [Orwell's footnote].
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*It is fair to say that the P.E.N. Club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not always stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an examination of the speeches (printed under the title Freedom of Expression) shows that almost nobody in our own day is able to speak out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do 30c years ago--and this in spite of the fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war [Orwell's footnote].
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*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific [Orwell's footnote].
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*Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness.... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation" (Poetry Quarterly) [Orwell's footnote].