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All the diaries of Orwell that are extant (some were lost, and one was stolen during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona by the Stalinist secret police — it may still lie today in some Moscow archive) were first published in 1998 by Peter Davison and included in his monumental edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 volumes: 9,000 pages). They are now conveniently regrouped here in one volume, excellently presented and annotated by Davison. The diaries provide a wealth of information on Orwell’s daily activities, concerns and interests; they present considerable documentary value for scholars, but they do not exactly live up to their editor’s claim: “These diaries offer a virtual autobiography of Orwell’s life and opinions for so much of his life.” This assessment — as we shall see in a moment — would much better characterise the utterly fascinating companion volume (also edited by Peter Davison), George Orwelclass="underline" A Life in Letters.
Orwell’s diaries are not confessionaclass="underline" here he very seldom records his emotions, impressions, moods or feelings, hardly ever his ideas, judgements and opinions. What he jots down is strictly and dryly factual, events happening in the outside world or in his own little vegetable garden: his goat Muriel’s slight diarrhoea may have been caused by eating wet grass; Churchill is returning to cabinet; fighting reported in Manchukuo; rhubarb growing well; Béla Kun reported shot in Moscow; the pansies and red saxifrage are coming into flower; the rat population in Britain is estimated at 4–5 million; in the slang of the East Enders the word tart is absolutely interchangeable with girl with no implications of “prostitute”—people speak of their daughter or sister as a tart; among the hop-pickers, rhyming slang is not extinct, thus for instance, a dig in the grave means a shave; (and at the end of July 1940, as the menace of a German invasion becomes very real) “constantly, as I walk down the streets, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests.” The state of the weather is recorded daily as well as the count of eggs laid by his hens and the quantity of milk yielded by his goat. To some extent, the diaries could carry as their epigraph Orwell’s endearing words, from his 1946 essay “Why I Write”: “I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue… to love the surface of the earth and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
Very rarely does the diarist formulate a socio-psychological observation — but then it is always strikingly original and perceptive. Thus, for instance, on the sexual life of tramps: “they talk on sexual subjects in a revolting manner. Tramps are disgusting when on this subject because their poverty keeps them off entirely from women, and their minds consequently fester with obscenity. Merely lecherous people are all right, but people who would like to be lecherous but don’t get the chance, are horribly degraded by it. They remind me of the dogs that hang enviously round while other dogs are copulating.” In his enquiry into the condition of workers in Northern England during the Depression, he displays sensitive empathy and a remarkable capacity for attention to other people’s predicament; thus, for instance, this subtle remark on a specific “discomfort of the working man’s life: waiting about. If you receive a salary it is paid into your bank and you draw it out when you want it. If you receive wages, you have to go and get them on somebody else’s time and are probably left hanging about and probably expected to behave as though paying your wages at all was a favour.” Then he describes the long wait in the cold, the hassles and expenses of journeys by tram to and from the pay office: “The result of long training in this kind of thing is that whereas the bourgeois goes through life expecting to get what he wants, within limits, the working man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority. I was impressed by the fact that when I went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for certain statistics, both Brown and Searle [his two local miner-friends] — both of them people of much more forcible character than myself — were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the town clerk would refuse information. They said, ‘He might give it to you, but he wouldn’t to us.’ Actually the town clerk was snooty and I did not get all the information that I asked for. But the point was that I assumed my question would be answered and the other two assumed the contrary.” In turn, these observations develop into broader and bolder considerations:
It is for this reason that in countries where the class hierarchy exists, people of the higher class always tend to come to the front in times of stress, though not really more gifted than the others. That they will do so is taken more or less for granted always and everywhere. Note the passage in Lissagaray’s History of the Commune describing the shootings after the [Paris] Commune had been suppressed. They were shooting the ringleaders without trial, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class than the others would be the ringleaders. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he “had an intelligent face.”
The writing in the diaries is terse, detached and impersonal. I will give just one example — it is typical, as it expresses both the drastic limitations of the form adopted by the diarist as well as some remarkable features of his personality. It is the entry of 19 August 1947, dealing with the Corryvreckan Whirlpool accident: the entire episode is disposed of in eight lines — the style is as matter-of-fact and unemotional as that of a police report. It would be all too easy for the uninformed reader to overlook the whole incident, or at least to fail to grasp its dramatic and near-fatal nature. On that day, Orwell, his three-year-old son, his nephew and niece (respectively twenty and sixteen) all escaped near-certain death by drowning in the most terrifying circumstances. Yet to gauge the gravity of the episode (which was reported at the time in the Glasgow press) one must read the full account by Orwell’s nephew (in Orwell Remembered, eds A. Coppard and B. Crick, London: BBC Books, 1984, and quoted in large part by B. Crick in George Orwelclass="underline" A Life, London: Secker & Warburg, 1980).