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intellectuals have done this over the years—proving that Orwell's style is a facade, an invention, a mask he put on when he changed his name from Eric Blair to "George Orwell"; that by seeming to tell the whole story in plain and honest terms, it actually makes it more difficult to see, it
obfuscates,
the part of the story that's necessarily left out; that ultimately it rubber-stamps the status quo. In some sense, intellectually, all this is true enough; you can spend a day, a week, a semester proving it. There really are things in the world that Orwell's style would never be able to capture. But there are very few such things.
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    Orwell did not want to become a saint, but he became a saint anyway. For most of his career a struggling writer, eking out a living reviewing books at an astonishing rate, he was gradually acknowledged, especially after the appearance of
Homage to Catalonia
in 1938, to be a great practitioner of English prose. With the publication of
Animal Farm
—a book turned down by several of England's preeminent houses (including Eliot's Faber and Faber) because they did not want to offend Britain's ally the Soviet Union—Orwell became a household name. Then his influence grew and grew, so that shortly after his death he was already a phenomenon. "In the Britain of the fifties," the great cultural critic Raymond Williams once lamented, "along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life, there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back." In a way the incredible posthumous success of Orwell has seemed one of the peculiar episodes in the cultural life of the West. He was not, as Lionel Trilling once pointed out, a genius; he was not mysterious; he had served in Burma, washed dishes in a Parisian hotel, and fought for a few months in Spain, but this hardly added up to a life of adventure; for the most part he lived in London and
reviewed books.
So odd in fact has the success of Orwell seemed to some that there is even a book,
George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation,
devoted to getting to the bottom of it.
    When you return to these essays, the mystery evaporates. You would probably not be able to write this way now, even if you learned the craft: The voice would seem put-on, after Orwell; it would seem deliberately "hard-boiled." But there is nothing put-on about it here, and it seems to speak, despite the specificity of the issues discussed, directly to the present. In Orwell's clear, strong voice we hear a warning. Because we, too, live in a time when truth is disappearing from the world, and doing so in just the way Orwell worried it would: through language. We move through the world by naming things in it, and we explain the world through sentences and stories. The lesson of these essays is clear: Look around you. Describe what you see as an ordinary observer—for you
are
one, you know—would see them. Take things seriously. And tell the truth. Tell the truth.

Charles Dickens
Inside the Whale, March 11, 1940
Inside the Whale and Other Essays
was published in London by Victor Gollancz Ltd on March 11, 1940. It contained three essays: "Charles Dickens," "Boys' Weeklies," and "Inside the Whale."
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    Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing. Even the burial of his body in Westminster Abbey was a species of theft, if you come to think of it.
    When Chesterton wrote his introductions to the Everyman Edition of Dickens's works, it seemed quite natural to him to credit Dickens with his own highly individual brand of medievalism, and more recently a Marxist writer, Mr. T. A. Jackson, 1 has made spirited efforts to turn Dickens into a bloodthirsty revolutionary. The Marxist claims him as "almost" a Marxist, the Catholic