What Orwell Learned From Chesterton | M. D. Aeschliman – First Things
The great writer and moralist George Orwell began his literary career as a disciple of G. K. Chesterton. Even after Orwell explicitly diverged from some of Chestertons views in the 1930s, under the influence of socialist ideas and hopes, Chestertons assumptions and political and ethical conceptions continued to shape him.
Orwells biographers provide intriguing evidence. Bernard Crick tells us that Orwells first published essay appeared in Chestertons renegade Distributist magazine G.K.s Weekly on December 29, 1928, and that later Orwell was recorded as saying that what England needed was to follow the kind of policies in Chestertons G.K.s Weeklythat is, anti-imperialist, Little England policies. Gordon Bowker writes that as a teenager, Orwell gave someone Chestertons novel Manalive. He adds that Orwell loved Chestertons Father Brown detective stories. Robert Colls tells us that although Orwell's friends, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, accepted Orwells own characterization of himself from the 30s on as some kind of socialist, this characterization was in several ways anomalousnot only because of his Tory upbringing, private education at Eton, and accent, but also because of his traditionalist sensibility and the way in which he took his bearings from a natural and moral universe. This is a precise and pregnant comment.
Orwell has come to have a unique authority among English-language readers, mainly due to the great anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farm and 1984. But these works were also important in communist-dominated Eastern Europe from their publication until the fall of the Soviet communist empire in the early 1990s. In The Captive Mind, the great Polish dissident writer Czesaw Miosz tells us how 1984 circulated surreptitiously in Poland and Eastern Europe (including a Ukrainian translation), and how its readers were amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception of its life. One hopes that Orwells anti-totalitarian novels have also found readers in China and North Korea.
Literary and cultural critics have also argued that Orwell was indebted to Chesterton as a thinker and writer. Both the wise but now-neglected English writer Hugh Kingsmill and the eminent American critic Lionel Trilling saw Orwells social-cultural criticism as in a direct line from William Cobbett, through Dickens, to Chesterton. Orwells own longstanding interest in Dickens, evident in his substantial 1939 essay on Dickens, is clearly and explicitly influenced by Chesterton, who wrote two substantial books on Dickens and is perhaps his greatest commentator.
It is perhaps Orwells 1939 essay on Dickens that best begins to explain what Chesterton and Orwell had in common in philosophical, ethical, and political terms and why these common factors still matter today. Orwell tries to specify or pin down the ethical basis of Dickenss great fictional works, in addition to his transfiguring gifts of generous humor, characterization, description, narrative, and symbolism. He sees and says that Dickens was a believing Christian, that his morality is the Christian morality, and that despite Dickens's dislike of both Catholicism and ostentatious evangelical Protestant religiosity, he was essentially a Bible-Christian with a quasi-instinctive siding with the oppressed against the oppressor . . . on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.
Throughout the essay, Orwell uses a word that has come to be identified with him as a person and writer: decency. He says that Dickenss whole message is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent. Like George Bernard Shaw, Orwell is disappointed that Dickens did not adhere to socialism and was even unsympathetic to the trade-union movement: Obviously he wants the workers to be decently treated, but there is no sign that he wants them to take their destiny into their own hands, least of all by open violence. With some annoyance, Orwell asks, What does [Dickens] want? As always, what he appears to want is a moralized version of the existing thing.
Despite Orwells criticism of Dickenss reformist, moralistic politics, he continues to insist that Dickens was neither superficial nor foolish: To say If men would behave decently the world would be decent is not such a platitude as it sounds. He adds: In the last resort there is nothing [Dickens] admires except common decency. Writing with great eloquence in the concluding paragraph of the essay, Orwell praises Dickenss devotion to human brotherhood and the idea of equality under God, with which all through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted. Orwell insists, against the ascendant fascists and communists, that the ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of realism and power politics. Yet he concedes that they may come to do so, in which case Dickens will be . . . out of date. . . . [He] has been popular chiefly because he was able to express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the common man.
With this emphasis we return to Chesterton, who wrote an influential 1906 book on Dickens and also introductions to each of the novels, which were published in Everyman editions and then gathered as a separate book in 1911. Chesterton saw Dickens as having an elemental, primitive, profound Christian vision of the human person and society. He believed in this vision, and worked against the spirit of his own agethe first third of the twentieth centuryin trying to recover, renew, and defend the Judeo-Christian Natural Law tradition that is the ultimate source of Dickenss worldview and Orwells, too: the very basis of Orwells own, dogged common decency.
Orwell himself intermittently saw this. His intellectual departure from Chesterton occurred partly because Chesterton became a serious Christianfirst an Anglo-Catholic and then, in 1922, a Catholicand tried to renew the central Christian tradition through thought, argument, and writing. The vaguely, residually Anglican but increasingly agnostic Orwell moved on to socialism. He vehemently opposed the Catholic Church and, in fact, all systematic thinking, especially Marxism (an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense). His own socialism never favorably impressed left-wing intellectuals, who have always been his greatest haters and detractors.
True communists or socialists such as Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher, E. P. Thompson, and the Arab-American Edward Said always knew that Orwells socialism was a jerry-built, home-made, unsystematic, non-Marxist affair, a fact made particularly clear in Orwells own 1941 book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius and in many of his best essays and reviews. One of the most revealing is his December 1940 review of Charlie Chaplins satirical-comic, anti-Hitler film The Great Dictator. In this review, he credits Chaplin with depicting a sort of concentrated essence of the common man [and] the ineradicable belief in the decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West. We live in a period in which democracy is everywhere in retreat . . . liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists. And everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from Christian culture. Just as Orwell was to be banned in Soviet Russia and its satellites, Charlie Chaplin was banned in Nazi Germany (it is precisely the idea of human equalitythe Jewish or Judaeo-Christian idea of equalitythat Hitler came into the world to destroy, Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn).
But Chesterton understood something that Orwell would not steadily meditate: This set of allegedly normal beliefs is not ineradicable. Orwell wantedloved, in factthe fruits of centuries of Christian civilization, including manners and customs, and often said so, dreading their replacements. (Of a popular, depraved contemporary novelist he wrote in 1944: Emancipation is complete, Freud and Machiavelli have reached the outer suburbs.) But those fruits that Orwell loved came from Judeo-Christian roots. It was Chestertons long quest to recover and restore those roots, through popular and witty but also powerfully philosophical works such as The Everlasting Man and St. Thomas Aquinas. In A Knight of the Woeful Countenance, a brilliant retrospective 1971 essay on Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge praised his dogged devotion to the truth but warned that one of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only truth as enlightened expediency.
Orwell thought, or at least hoped, that common decency (ethics) and objective truth (epistemology) could survive without any metaphysical-philosophical basis or confessional-ecclesiastical structure, though he married in an Anglican church and requested burial in an Anglican service and grave (which was a bit tricky for his friends Muggeridge and David Astor to arrange). But he was also frightened at the erosion of this inheritance: the common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped . . . but . . . the doctrine of realism is gaining ground (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944). The ascendancy of fascist and communist propaganda in the 1930s and 40s is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world (Looking Back on the Spanish War, 1943). Of course, this is the ultimate nightmare of 1984.
Orwell had gotten his essential currency of beliefs and valuations from traditional English culture, whose nineteenth-century and subsequent capitalist-imperialist developments he documented, despised, and critiqued with great eloquence in his novels and expository prose works. The culture he loved was represented by writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, and Chesterton, not by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalinor even by H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. In 1936, when he tried to get a letter of recommendation to fight in Spain from Harry Pollitt, the leader of Great Britain's Communist Party, he was turned down. In Spain he fought the fascists (and was badly wounded) but was horrified by the communist purges of fellow Spanish Republicans, including the party of anarchists in whose ranks he was serving. Orwells documentary account of his experience in Homage to Catalonia was not initially popular, but Trillings 1952 introduction to an American edition did much to make Orwells modern reputation, and not only in America.
Orwell rather dangerously committed himself more than once to the phrase and idea that all art is propaganda (Charles Dickens, 1939). Every writer, especially every novelist, has a message. . . . Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. He means that all artevery work of artpropagates some worldview and scheme of valuations, however absurd, idiosyncratic, or irrational. But this is to recognize that philosophy, worldview, or ideology cannot be escaped; that analytical reason, inference, implication, and evaluation are inevitable in humans. Philosophy cannot be escaped.
Chesterton died too early (1936) to see the astounding historical tragedies that Orwell would see before his untimely death in 1950. But Chesterton was in crucial respects wiser and deeper. In 1906, the same year his first great book on Dickens was published, he wrote a brief introduction to a volume of selections from the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold. He praised Arnold and credited him with great insight. He discovered (for the modern English) the purely intellectual importance of humility, Chesterton wrote. He had none of that hot humility which is the fascination of saints and good men. But he had a cold humility which he discovered to be a mere essential of the intelligence. To see things clearly, he said, you must get yourself out of the way.
It is that cold humility, self-depreciating and honest, that so many of Orwells friends, admirers, and readers saw or see in him. Whatever his deficiencies, we are right to do so.
M. D. Aeschliman is the author ofThe Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.
First Thingsdepends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.
Clickhereto make a donation.
Clickhereto subscribe toFirst Things.
Follow this link:
What Orwell Learned From Chesterton | M. D. Aeschliman - First Things
- Democratic socialism is dying. First the socialism, now the democracy - telegraph.co.uk - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Socialism and corruption: what the PSOE labeled as conservative sexual morality - Contando Estrelas - July 12th, 2025 [July 12th, 2025]
- Bernard S. Sharfman: Socialism will not save the Democratic Party. Its historic centrism will. - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - July 10th, 2025 [July 10th, 2025]
- Zohran Mamdani: Hypocrisy, Socialism and the Danger of Elitist Politics - Fair Observer - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- 'Ask Ann Landers' column once used cows as analogy to explain fascism and socialism - Snopes - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Letter to the Editor: Republican reconciliation bill is 'socialism for the rich' - Sioux City Journal - July 8th, 2025 [July 8th, 2025]
- Opinion | Cliff Asness on Zohran Mamdanis Socialism - WSJ - July 6th, 2025 [July 6th, 2025]
- Some Thoughts on Techno-Fascism From Socialism 2025 - Organizing My Thoughts - July 6th, 2025 [July 6th, 2025]
- Dont go down the Islamist rabbit hole: Socialism is what makes Mamdani toxic - New York Post - July 4th, 2025 [July 4th, 2025]
- The Worker-Peasant Alliance in the Transition to Socialism Today - Monthly Review - July 4th, 2025 [July 4th, 2025]
- Socialism, secularism are the spirit of the Constitution - The Hindu - July 4th, 2025 [July 4th, 2025]
- Hour 1 - Socialism will ruin NYC | NewsTalk 1320 KWHN | The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show - iHeart - July 4th, 2025 [July 4th, 2025]
- Daughter of Cuban exiles says Democratic socialism is wonderful in theory but miserable in practice - Fox Business - July 2nd, 2025 [July 2nd, 2025]
- Readers sound off on vilifying socialism, Trumps retaliation and a snipers victims - New York Daily News - July 2nd, 2025 [July 2nd, 2025]
- Socialism is a fantasy politicians are selling and doesnt work: Editor - NewsNation - July 2nd, 2025 [July 2nd, 2025]
- As a New York Resident Here Is My Biggest Worry About Mamdanis Socialism - The Daily Signal - July 2nd, 2025 [July 2nd, 2025]
- Opinion: The secularism-socialism debate is a fight over words, not essence - The News Minute - July 2nd, 2025 [July 2nd, 2025]
- Winklevoss and Armstrong Warn: Socialism Punishes the Poor the Most - Bitcoin.com News - June 29th, 2025 [June 29th, 2025]
- The siren song of socialism - The Highland County Press - June 29th, 2025 [June 29th, 2025]
- How Bezos and Snchez Just Delivered a Pitch-Perfect Ad for Socialism - The Daily Beast - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- Zohran Mamdani and the Rise of Hipster Socialism - City Journal - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- From MAGA Marxism to NY Socialism, something is happening in America - AL.com - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- GMR Today: Can socialism win at the ballot box? - Communist Party USA - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- A City Not Of Socialism: Eric Adams Takes Shot At Zohran Mamdani As He Launches Reelection Bid - The Daily Wire - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- Eric Adamss Common Sense Will Save New York From Radical Socialism - The New York Sun - June 28th, 2025 [June 28th, 2025]
- Socialism in practice: Private land was 32.4 times as productive as public land in the Soviet Union - Stephen Hicks.org - June 24th, 2025 [June 24th, 2025]
- NYCs Zohran Mamdani Tries Selling Socialism to the Home of Wall Street - Bloomberg.com - June 22nd, 2025 [June 22nd, 2025]
- In todays US, saying be careful with crypto sounds like socialism - The Irish Times - June 22nd, 2025 [June 22nd, 2025]
- Ahead of Shreveport Rally, Louisiana Says No Thanks to Bernies Socialism and Tax Hikes - Bossier Press-Tribune - June 22nd, 2025 [June 22nd, 2025]
- Despite the Pain in the World, Socialism Is Not a Distant Utopia: The Twenty-Fifth Newsletter (2025) - thetricontinental.org - June 20th, 2025 [June 20th, 2025]
- The Cuban regime now says that to build socialism, a "well-structured economic system" is needed - CiberCuba - June 18th, 2025 [June 18th, 2025]
- We are heading for economic disaster: say goodbye to virtue-signalling socialism - The Telegraph - June 10th, 2025 [June 10th, 2025]
- Party for Socialism and Liberation holds NATO protest in Dayton - Cincinnati Enquirer - May 26th, 2025 [May 26th, 2025]
- Anti-U.S. Extremist Party For Socialism And Liberation, Linked To DC Jewish Event Shooter, Celebrates Hamas Attacks In NYC On October 8, 2023: The... - May 26th, 2025 [May 26th, 2025]
- STUC general secretary accused of 'champagne socialism' over second home - Yahoo News UK - May 26th, 2025 [May 26th, 2025]
- Under the socialism umbrella: Labor torched over pie in the sky super reform - MSN - May 26th, 2025 [May 26th, 2025]
- Socialism dressed up in the politics of empathy - The Spectator Australia - May 26th, 2025 [May 26th, 2025]
- Daz-Canel: "The fight against homophobia and transphobia is part of the ideals of socialism in Cuba." - CiberCuba - May 19th, 2025 [May 19th, 2025]
- Left turns toward socialism, and America must be on guard - The Mountaineer - May 17th, 2025 [May 17th, 2025]
- Join the Trotskyist movement to fight for socialism - World Socialist Web Site - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- "Socialism, yes... but with an hourly rate": The wave of memes about the rental of the Anti-Imperialist Tribune - CiberCuba - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- Economic Nationalism Divides Us. World Socialism Is the Answer | Opinion - Newsweek - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- Class struggle and identity politics in the era of Trump - International Socialism - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- Breaking European socialism will solve Americas drug pricing gap - Washington Times - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- We will intensify campaign for socialism: Chair Prachanda - The Rising Nepal - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- Cuba and Vietnam walk together in the construction of socialism - Granma - May 15th, 2025 [May 15th, 2025]
- The trade deals will be wasted unless Sir Keir rejects socialism - The Telegraph - May 11th, 2025 [May 11th, 2025]
- Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, and the sausage line - Stephen Hicks.org - May 10th, 2025 [May 10th, 2025]
- Ending the Gaza genocide requires the fight for socialism - World Socialist Web Site - May 8th, 2025 [May 8th, 2025]
- Trumps dictatorship, global war, and the fight for socialism - World Socialist Web Site - May 8th, 2025 [May 8th, 2025]
- The Illusion Of Choice: Capitalism, Socialism, And The Suppression Of Religion In The Modern Era - Kashmir Reader - May 8th, 2025 [May 8th, 2025]
- Parroting of socialism: Merely in words, not in action - The Himalayan Times - May 8th, 2025 [May 8th, 2025]
- The end of post-socialism and the opportunity for a European public service media house - New Eastern Europe - April 30th, 2025 [April 30th, 2025]
- Socialism, the only alternative in the face of danger - Granma - April 18th, 2025 [April 18th, 2025]
- Study group: What are the prospects for socialism in the U.S.? - Freedom Socialist Party - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Debunking the Not Real Socialism Myth - New Ideal - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Capitalism versus Socialism: The Confusion of Knight, the Clarity of Mises | Peter J. Boettke - Independent Institute - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Dilemmas of Humanity: Socialism is the only way, says Vijay Prashad during the conferences opening - Brasil de Fato - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Brinda Karat interview: Socialism is only alternative to capitalism, loot, American hegemony - The Federal News - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Letters: "The bandwagon of vindictive socialism [against farming] rolls on" - Farmers Guardian - April 3rd, 2025 [April 3rd, 2025]
- Leipzig Book Fair 2025: David North to present the German edition of his book Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War - WSWS - March 28th, 2025 [March 28th, 2025]
- Democrat Party Imploding as Bernie Sanders and AOC Embark on Fight Oligarchy Socialism Tour - Megyn Kelly - March 28th, 2025 [March 28th, 2025]
- Trump's tariffs fly like socialism in the face of free enterprise capitalism | Letters - The Columbus Dispatch - March 22nd, 2025 [March 22nd, 2025]
- Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics: How big data is eliminating poverty and building socialism - People's World - March 13th, 2025 [March 13th, 2025]
- The defense of science requires a fight for socialism! - WSWS - March 11th, 2025 [March 11th, 2025]
- Womens liberation and the fight for socialism are inseparable - Counterfire - March 11th, 2025 [March 11th, 2025]
- Faced with Trumps tariffs: working class unity and international socialism - In Defence of Marxism - March 11th, 2025 [March 11th, 2025]
- The Dialectics of Ecology: Socialism and Nature book review - Counterfire - March 1st, 2025 [March 1st, 2025]
- Oklahoma Republican says prohibiting hitting disabled kids is socialism and violation of scripture - Heartland Signal - March 1st, 2025 [March 1st, 2025]
- Talk to tell forgotten history of socialism in West Norfolk town - Lynn News - March 1st, 2025 [March 1st, 2025]
- Red Reviews: Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR - Fight Back! Newspaper - February 18th, 2025 [February 18th, 2025]
- Socialism at the Milk Bar - Tribune magazine - February 18th, 2025 [February 18th, 2025]
- To Fight The Right, Fight For Socialism - Socialist Alternative - February 18th, 2025 [February 18th, 2025]
- Like the GDR, GAA must balance socialism and capitalism - The Irish News - February 18th, 2025 [February 18th, 2025]
- Jenny Erpenbeck: There is a place in the world for socialism - Hindustan Times - February 18th, 2025 [February 18th, 2025]
- AIs growth will pave the way for socialism - The Times of India - January 30th, 2025 [January 30th, 2025]
- Boomers, its time to hand over your dosh and kill millennial socialism - The Telegraph - January 30th, 2025 [January 30th, 2025]
- System change not climate change Socialism and the fight to save our environment - Socialist Worker - January 9th, 2025 [January 9th, 2025]
- A Deputy claims that young Cubans want to stay in Cuba to "build socialism." - CiberCuba - December 25th, 2024 [December 25th, 2024]
- Milei becomes a symbol of the global far right: We must put an end to the garbage of socialism once and for all - EL PAS USA - December 8th, 2024 [December 8th, 2024]