Inside the Whale and Other Essays

Victor Gollancz published the book in London on 11 March 1940, in a first printing of 1,100 copies, and it was out of print before the year ended. There was no American edition. The three essays appear in the order "Charles Dickens", "Boys' Weeklies", "Inside the Whale", so the title piece comes last. This was George Orwell's first collection of criticism; the novels and the books of reportage had come first, and the essays are what most readers now go to him for.

The title essay is largely about Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer had appeared in Paris in 1935 and Black Spring a year later. Orwell reads them as the last good books of the American Paris: the swarm of artists and idlers who filled Montparnasse while the dollar was strong, and the smaller fringe that stayed on after the slump. He is not writing a review. Miller's refusal to take any political position at all is the exhibit; the essay is about what that refusal means at the end of a decade in which nearly every young English writer had taken one.

Orwell had met Miller once, in Paris at the end of 1936, on his way to the war in Spain, and says so in the essay. Miller told him that going to Spain out of a sense of obligation was sheer stupidity and that his ideas about combating Fascism were baloney. Accounts of that meeting, including the Orwell Society's, add that Miller gave him a corduroy jacket for the Spanish winter. The essay records only the argument.

"Boys' Weeklies" is the odd one, and the one that has aged least. Orwell counted ten twopenny boys' papers on sale, read them closely, quoted their prose, tabulated how each nationality was drawn, and printed readers' letters from the correspondence columns. He was wrong about one thing, and the mistake produced the exchange the piece is now remembered for.

"Charles Dickens" runs longest. Orwell begins from the fact that Marxists, Catholics and Conservatives have all claimed Dickens, and asks what there is in him to steal. He works through the novels for evidence: Dickens writes almost nothing about the proletariat, has no constructive politics, distrusts Parliament and trade unions, and treats revolution in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities as a nightmare. Against that he sets what Dickens does have: an unmatched grasp of childhood, a hatred of tyranny, an absence of the vulgar nationalism that runs through Thackeray, and a fertility of unnecessary detail that no imitator has ever managed. The essay ends with the face Orwell sees behind the page.

"Boys' Weeklies" starts in a poor newsagent's shop and works out from the twopenny papers on sale there. Orwell takes the Gem and the Magnet first, the two oldest, and shows how their public-school world was frozen in about 1910 and kept there: the same fourth-formers never ageing, the slang thirty years out of date, sex and religion absent, foreigners sorted into fixed comic types. Then he turns to the newer papers, the Wizard, Hotspur, Skipper and the rest, which are better written and more violent and politically identical. He ends on the question of who owns them and why no left-wing equivalent exists.

"Inside the Whale" is in three parts. The first is on Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer: what the book is, why its obscenity is not the point, and why a novel about penniless Americans in Paris felt more alive in 1935 than anything the political writers were producing. The second is a history of English literature from about 1918 to 1939. Housman and the nature poets, then the Joyce-Eliot generation, then Auden and Spender and the pull of the Communist Party, and what that orthodoxy did to prose. The third returns to Miller and to the image of Jonah, who was swallowed and did not mind.