Donald McGill
The comic-postcard artist whose work gets a whole essay, and whom Orwell had never identified. "Who Donald McGill is, I do not know," the essay says. Apparently a trade name, and also unquestionably a real person with a style recognisable at a glance.
Orwell attributes no purpose to McGill beyond raising a laugh, and says that is the whole test. A comic postcard is an illustration to a joke and stands or falls by it. What the cards want, in his reading, is to give the worm's-eye view of life the one printed outlet it has.
The book
At a glance
- The subject of "The Art of Donald McGill", the fourth essay
- 1941
- Horizon; a shortened version ran in the Strand Magazine
- 89–99
- Whether Donald McGill was a person or a trade name; he says both may be true
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-free"The Art of Donald McGill" is about the penny and twopenny coloured postcards sold in cheap stationers' windows, and George Orwell picks McGill out because he is the most prolific and the most exactly typical of the artists working in the form. He is candid that he does not know who the man is. At least one series was issued simply as The Donald McGill Comics, which suggests a trade name, but the drawing is unmistakably one person's, and Orwell notes that if you pull the funniest cards out of a pile they will mostly turn out to be his.
The essay's method is classification. Orwell sorts the jokes by subject, taking sex first at more than half of them, then the henpecked husband, drunkenness, lavatories, snobbery within the working class, stock figures and politics, and sets out the conventions of each. Marriage benefits only women. Sex appeal vanishes at about twenty-five, with no stage allowed between the honeymooning couple and the grim wife and moustachioed husband. The lawyer is always a swindler and the clergyman always a nervous idiot. Under politics he records that the implied outlook is a Radicalism appropriate to about 1900, and that the cards go in for a mild guying of patriotism rather than the reverse.
The argument arrives at the end. The obscenity is the point, but not in the obvious way: the cards are not pornography but a skit on pornography, and their jokes only mean anything against a strict moral code. In Esquire the imagined background is promiscuity; in a McGill card it is marriage, which is why the four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newlyweds. Orwell reads the whole genre as the Sancho Panza view of life given a hearing it is denied everywhere else, and defends its ugliness on the grounds that any hint of higher influence would ruin it. He ends by saying he would be sorry to see the cards vanish.
How the book draws them
- Who he isOrwell does not know. "Who Donald McGill is, I do not know," the essay says: apparently a trade name, since one series is issued as The Donald McGill Comics, but also unquestionably a real person with a style recognisable at a glance and a real caricaturist's touch with faces.
- What the cards look likeEndless fat women in tight bathing dresses, crude drawing, unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's-egg tint and Post Office red. Orwell says the designs are full of heavy lines and empty spaces like a child's, and that every gesture is deliberately ugly.
- The classificationSex first, at more than half and perhaps three-quarters. Then home life, drunkenness, lavatory jokes, snobbery inside the working class, stock figures and politics. Orwell writes out the conventions governing each, down to the rule that no drunken women are ever drawn.
- A skit on pornographyThe central claim. The exaggerated figures are caricatures of the Englishman's secret ideal rather than portraits of it, and the humour only works against a fairly strict moral code. The background of the jokes is marriage, not promiscuity, which is why they are obscene without being immoral.
- The joke that disappearedAmong the stock figures Orwell records an absence. There were no longer any cards making jokes at the expense of Jewish people; that joke, always more ill-natured than the standing joke about Scotsmen, had vanished abruptly soon after Hitler came to power.
- The double meaningOrwell explains how the broadest cards stay legal. In one, a young woman demonstrates something two feet long to open-mouthed friends, with a stuffed fish in a case on the wall behind her. It is obviously not the fish, and it could never be proved.
- Sancho PanzaThe essay's conclusion. Everyone contains both a Don Quixote and a little fat man whose tastes run to safety, soft beds and no work, and whose point of view never gets a fair hearing anywhere in law, morals or religion. Whatever is funny is subversive; every joke is ultimately a custard pie.