Orwell and the Politics of Culture

This chapter seeks to position George Orwell's essays on popular culture as important precursors of the British cultural studies tradition that was institutionalized from the 1950s onwards, under the influence of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall. All three of these central figures in the cultural studies tradition had ambivalent attitudes to Orwell's work, and the chapter describes those attitudes, seeking to show that political disagreements (stemming largely from Orwell's canonization as a key anti-communist figure during the Cold War period) did not detract from a genuine admiration for Orwell's openness to, and critical analyses of, popular culture. Focusing on essays such as 'Boys' Weeklies' (1940), 'The Proletarian Writer' (1940), 'The Art of Donald McGill' (1941), and 'Rudyard Kipling' (1941), the chapter shows that Orwell produced innovative studies of popular culture while rejecting embattled defences of 'high' culture by the likes of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Against the backdrop of these defensive and conservative arguments, which tied culture to the fate of social elites, Orwell's essays proposed a genuinely fresh account of the politics of culture, with an alternative social basis.