It’s been an unrelenting dynamic of hyperliberalism that when it comes to the teaching of history and literature, it’s imperative that the works of dead white males must be sidelined or erased. In their place must be inserted women and ethnic minorities, whose significance has been hitherto ‘overlooked’ or ‘hidden’.
Thus it’s no surprise to read in the Telegraph today that one of the UK’s most popular English A-level courses will from this September be removing George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London from its set text. In its stead will be taught Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life,by Anna Funder, a controversial 2023 biography which claims that his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, was mistreated by her cheating husband and was a victim ‘cancelled by the patriarchy’.
While Orwell was indeed a womaniser and at times a selfish and neglectful spouse, this combined development is both horribly predictable and likely to mislead and misinform students approaching the man’s work for the first time.
Even if the examination board responsible for this development, OCR, insists that Wifedom ‘is not replacing’ Orwell’s experiences of the Great Depression, it certainly accords with its broad agenda, as made clear by other works on its list. These include books by deaf, autistic and anxiety-plagued authors and a British writer of Kashmiri heritage.
The move is also in keeping with another hyperliberal trend: the propensity to twist the events of the past to make them align with their contemporary ideology. Quentin Kopp, chairman of the Orwell Society, says Wifedom ‘pursues a feminist thesis that is not supported by any serious study of Orwell and Eileen’s life’, and is ‘full of factual errors and shows no understanding of English middle-class mores of the period’. Robert Colls, whose biography of Orwell appeared earlier this year, remarks that ‘Eileen is more spoken for than listened to’ in Funder’s account, while Sylvia Topp, who wrote a warmly-received biography of Eileen in 2020, contests the claim that she was ‘invisible’.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a poet who held a master’s degree in psychology, was in her lifetime recognised as her husband’s intellectual equal among their circle of friends, as a companion who did more than type up his manuscripts – she made amendments and suggestions of her own. She wasn’t a passive figure and she has never been written out of history. Orwell’s recent biographers recognise the supportive role she played, particularly in her contribution to Animal Farm. In his most recent Orwell biography of 2023, D. J. Taylor calls that novella ‘to a certain extent, a collaborative project’, with the pair regularly having discussed the text before it arrived at its finished form. Collis agrees, noting that Animal Farm is ‘funny in ways she was funny – slightly madcap, occasionally deadpan, casually ironic.’
‘Funny’. That observation continually emerges in contemporary accounts of Eileen Blair in her short life, before she died in March 1945 during an operation for an emergency hysterectomy. Furthermore, she was stoic, independent, self-abasing and lacking in resentment – traits largely absent among modern hyperliberals. Even in the face of death she displayed a rare combination of fortitude and humility likewise found wanting today.
Contemplating the 40 guineas that her operation would cost, she noted: ‘what worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the money.’ I doubt she would care for being regarded posthumously as some kind of victim.
While the insertion of one questionable book into the curriculum might be lamentable, the simultaneous removal of a classic is criminal. Down and Out In Paris and London is not only a great work of literature in its own right, written in Orwell’s characteristically taut and spare prose, a style all youngsters would do well to emulate, it’s also an invaluable piece of reportage and a snapshot of its time. With its tales of degradation and humiliation set amid a backdrop of squalor – the insects, filth, faeces and cold, the soul-destroying boredom and aching, persistent hunger – it’s a salutary lesson on the inevitable hardships of life, and a timely reminder that some had it much worse in the past.
It’s often said that one of the main benefits of reading books, and especially fiction, is that it teaches you empathy, because you peer into the minds of others and recognise that everyone has their troubles and worries. And one of the themes that unites Orwell’s fiction and reportage is the notion that we are all flawed, all capable of being corrupted by simplistic and utopian ideologies. That much is made clear in Homage to Catalonia and in his two, final dystopian masterpieces. In our era beset with extremism and ideology – and a current woke ideology propagated in obtuse prose riddled with slogans and cliches – we would all benefit from reading him more, not less.
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