There, Orwell wonders why all of the major boys’ story magazines are right-wing and nationalistic in flavour, before concluding that left-wing or Communist-inspired magazines would be impaired by didacticism. Here we might compare ‘Inside the Whale’ with another of Orwell’s forays into literary criticism, ‘ Boys’ Weeklies’, his 1939 essay about the various magazines for younger readers in circulation in the 1920s and 1930s. Orwell stands out among the writers of the 1930s and 1940s for being prepared to speak out against harmful ideologies on both the right and left, when so many of his peers embraced Communism and far-left causes.Īside from Orwell’s scepticism about the political implications of this, he sees the effect on literature as corrosive, because it leads writers to adopt a didactic tone, and this mars the artistic qualities of their work. How come? It shouldn’t surprise us, in fact.

So, in ‘Inside the Whale’, we find Orwell – perhaps surprisingly – advising writers to stay away from political purpose and to be passive, even in the face of injustice and war. He resists God’s command that he go to Nineveh and make a public announcement to the people of the city. When Jonah is in the belly of the fish, all he does is sing and pray, rather than prophesy. So Orwell’s metaphor of the whale, itself derived from a comment made by Henry Miller about another writer, is not just about a writer insulating themselves from real-world political events, but from refusing to make pronouncements on those events. In the Jonah story the prophet is swallowed up by the ‘whale’ because he has refused to go to Nineveh and prophesy God’s imminent judgment of the city for its sins.

Instead, Orwell effectively does the opposite, proposing that Miller’s belated 1920s novel Tropic of Cancer is more likely to last than the left-wing poetry of Auden, Spender, and others. And we might expect to find Orwell condemning the modernists for their lack of engagement with the political issues of their time.

Essays by George Orwell