All Souls, the blue riband Oxford graduate college, used to be famous for its fellowship exams. A particular highlight was the General Paper, in which candidates were often presented with a solitary abstract noun (“Hope,” “Charity,” etc.) or an especially thorny epigram (“Freedom and equality are ultimately incompatible”) and invited to “discuss.” Well, an All Souls General Paper here in 2026 could usefully begin with the question, “What is meant by the adjective ‘Orwellian’?”
Primed by long exposure to Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), this veteran Orwell-fancier would argue that “Orwellian,” in its original framing, means a dystopian landscape whose cowed inhabitants are oppressed by a) highly intrusive surveillance technology; b) denial of objective truth, most obviously manifested in the rewriting of history practiced by the novel’s hero Winston Smith; and c) the manipulation of language, here exemplified by Oceania’s “Newspeak,” whose aim is to reduce vocabulary as a way of inhibiting the speaker’s ability to think.
Clearly this definition won’t do at all, for the merest glance at a specimen newspaper op-ed page insists that “Orwellian” long ago tugged free of its moorings and floated off into a kind of linguistic cloudscape, at once sensationalist, all-purpose, and correspondingly vague. In this trajectory it resembles “Dickensian,” which used to be an adjective with a fairly precise meaning (“Dickensian housing conditions,” “Dickensian gloom”), but 150 years after Dickens’s death seems to be interchangeable with “Victorian.” A senator having his book contract canceled; the perfectly reasonable exercise of lawful authority; a decision in the realm of “taste,” which the person on the receiving end disagrees with—each, if you go about it in the right way, with due regard to your own offended amour propre and the prejudice of your audience, can safely be written off as “Orwellian.”
Robert Colls, a retired English academic and an ornament of Orwell Studies these past 20 years—see his George Orwell: English Rebel (2013)—is sensitive to these appropriations and also to Orwell’s absolute ubiquity in contemporary media-land. “Scarcely a day goes by without someone calling him up from the dead,” he remarks at one point. Elsewhere, he notes that “‘Orwellian’ has so many meanings it is irresistible.” Meanwhile, as the “Legacy” chapter at the end of the book confirms in some detail, the Orwell Industry is barreling off into all manner of hitherto uncharted territory, sometimes bringing back tantalizing new material, on other occasions simply scratching away at some neurotic modern itch.
Given the vast contemporary interest in Orwell and the number of volumes about him that descend each year onto his readers’ heads like so many snowflakes, you might wonder what this tiny wisp of a book can do for his reputation. Colls’s technique in George Orwell: Life and Legacy is to scuttle through his subject’s 46 years on the planet (1903-50), halting whenever he finds something that particularly interests him and then subjecting it to an intent and oblique scrutiny. Brief, impressionistic, and not wholly uncritical, Colls has a happy knack of not only establishing Orwell in the contexts of his time, but foregrounding him amid the 21st century debris. That reputation, he observes, has gone beyond writing and now expresses itself as “a sort of Puritan glamour, an intellectual mystique, a ‘cool’ more often bestowed on rock stars than writers.”
The “Puritan glamour” that Colls finds in Orwell’s work isn’t the only contradiction on display here. In fact, Orwell’s inconsistency is one of the chief stanchions of his appeal. A paid-up Marxist ideologue would doubtless be appalled by the sight of this onetime denouncer of the English public school system telling a friend that he intended to put his newly arrived adopted son Richard down for Eton, but that, whether ideologues like it or not, is how the average human mind works. It is the same with Orwell’s famous run-in with the correspondent of the left-wing weekly newspaper Tribune, where he worked as literary editor from 1943-45, who complained that his liking for the rambler roses that grew in his Hertfordshire garden was “bourgeois.”
Colls appreciates and to a certain extent revels in all this, while observing that some of Orwell’s inconsistencies in the realm of social class are much more revealing of the kind of person he was. As in George Orwell: English Rebel, he has a field day with Orwell’s trip around the “distressed areas” of the north of England that produced his travelogue The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), demonstrating along the way that while Orwell sympathizes profoundly with the out-of-work miners and the slum-dwellers he meets in the course of his travels, he knows little about the circumstances of their lives and tends to judge them by standards to which they can never match up.
Thus, staying with a trade union official and his wife, and noting that the beds are aired and the food good, he automatically assumes his hosts to have risen up the social scale into a world of middle-class comfort; the working-classes, according to Orwell’s scale of values, merely frowst away in poverty. On the other hand, confronted with the genuine squalor of a flyblown lodging house run by a couple named Brooker, where the dinner table is so long unwashed that you could “get to know individual crumbs by sight,” he simply walks out.
Colls is good on Orwell’s inability, or rather his unwillingness, to shake off some of the assumptions he brought with him from his echt-Edwardian childhood, his expensive schooling (paid for by scholarships), and his time spent serving the British Raj in Burma. He also has some sensible things to say about Orwell’s relationship with his first wife, Eileen, which has been crawled over by feminist revisionists in recent years. If he has a faint weakness, it is a willingness to take some of Orwell’s statements about himself at face value.
The preface, for example, begins with a chunk of Orwell “in his own words” from 1945, offering a sketch of his life to date to a magazine editor. Here he volunteers that he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma but that “the job was totally unsuited to me, and when I came home on leave at the end of 1927, I had already decided to take up journalism.” But this is a case of Orwell massaging the facts to suit the retrospective view that he took of himself. The Imperial policeman who sailed back to England on sick-leave in 1927 brought an engagement ring with him. Had the girl he wanted to marry said yes, he would probably have shepherded her straight back to the East.
Elsewhere, Colls jinks his way adroitly through Orwell’s time in the Spanish Civil War and the dynamics of Nineteen Eighty-Four (“like a dream about being inside the head of a country that is losing its mind”). Critics sometimes lament that the modern-day Planet Orwell is overburdened by a glut of material, that the well must surely be about to run dry. The great merit of George Orwell: Life and Legacy is that it shows how much liquid remains to be piped up to the surface.
George Orwell: Life and Legacy
by Robert Colls
Oxford University Press, 224 pp., $19.99
D.J. Taylor is a novelist and biographer. His The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien appears in November.
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