Considering that he was one of the most important writers of all time, I found it incredibly hard to obtain a collection of Orwell's complete works. According to Wikipedia only two were ever done; one four-volume set published by his second wife, and one twenty-volume set which included all his novels and books. I just wanted his essays and short pieces, so I went with the first set, but both The Book Depository and AbeBooks came up stumped; I had to order the four separate books from four separate websites, two of which eventually emailed me back to say they didn't actually have them in stock. I have all four now (split across two different publishing editions, so they look a bit mismatched) but geez, that was difficult.

An Age Like This covers the period from 1920 to 1940; which is to say, it has three letters from the 1920s and then jumps to 1930, when Orwell's surviving work is a bit more substantial. Letters, nonetheless, comprise the vast majority of the book. I've never read a collection of an author's letters before, and I can't say I enjoyed it all that much. They weren't something I was ever interested in reading, and at times they didn't seem to be particularly relevant to anything, which left me feeling like a voyeur. I'd hate to think that sixty years after I died somebody was reading all of my old correspondence to my friends. (Well, actually, I wouldn't, because it would mean I became hugely important. But still.)

But there's still some fairly interesting bits and pieces throughout: a diary Orwell kept while living in the slums of northern England for The Road to Wigan Pier, letters he sent while in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War, observations of Morocco, and a good understanding of his opinions leading up to WWII. Nowadays that war has been all but deified, the last Good War where the Free Men stood up to Nazi Oppression, but Orwell makes it clear that public opinion in Britain (and presumably elsewhere) was complex and divided; he himself clearly had no illusions about nations standing up for what is right, as opposed to what was in their (capital) interest.

There's also a particularly hilarious reply (the only piece in the volume not written by Orwell) to the essay "Boy's Weeklies," which I read a long time ago, and which remains one of Orwell's most interesting essays. Frank Richards, the writer of the weeklies in question, actually responded to Orwell. In his indignant, rambling response he refers to himself in third person, suggests that he is a better writer than Bernard Shaw, Thackeray or Chekhov, and declares that "noblemen generally are better fellows than commoners" and "foreigners are funny."

I read An Age Like This in bits and pieces, and found it fairly easy going. If I'd tried to read it all at once I probably would have been bored. Nonetheless, I expect to enjoy the later volumes more, when there's less personal correspondence and more essays and opinion pieces.

A weighty tome, and not one for the faint-hearted, but definitely one for Orwell enthusiasts or those interested in the lives and drives of writers. It's also a fascinating snapshot into that period of history, covering the Depression of the 1920s, the Spanish civil war and the build-up to the Second World War. Now for Vol. 2...

I was so impressed by the collection of Orwell's essays I read a few months ago, and by "Homage to Catalonia", that when I came across the 4-volume collection of his non-fiction remaindered in the bookstore, it was a no-brainer to buy the whole set. A preliminary glance at the material in this book supports the notion that it is in his short non-fiction pieces that Orwell truly excels, rather than in the two novels for which he is most famous.

A lot of personal opinion and detail, informative of the times

brilliant

I've finished reading volume 1 and have now moved on to vol. 2.

I didn't really expect to read this whole volume cover to cover, but the combined excellence of Orwell's writing and editors' choices made it a surprise page turner. The mix of articles interspersed with Orwell's personal letters creates a strong sense of narrative.

The earliest years see Orwell working as a school teacher and bookshop assistant, while writing mainly about the poor and working class in England. He goes around doing stuff like tramping, hop-picking, touring coal mines, and attending union meetings. Above all, these articles are interesting, mainly because the experiences are so far from anything that most readers would have experienced in both time period and circumstance. He also never romanticizes his subjects, presenting a straightforward account of their ambiguities, yet still believing that they are owed a better life, not because they're earned it but just because they are people.

Then comes the Spanish Civil War. Orwell can get in the weeds on this topic, and, in fact, the only section of the book I skipped was 12 pages of notes cataloging the various Spanish militias. I find these writings primarily worthwhile because they focus not on the conflict of right versus left, but rather on the in-fighting and obfuscation occurring within the left. Orwell considers most of the loudest voices on the left to be either shills for the Soviet Union or people wishing to retain their power and wealth by coopting the socialist movement. It's a good reminder that politics is rarely the savior people hope for.

The last phase of the book is the lead up and start of World War II. Beforehand, Orwell is very anti-war. He views a potential war an imperialist endeavor, primarily aimed at preserving Britain's colonial interests. At one point, he suggests to a friend that they should buy a printing press so that they can be ready to publish anti-war pamphlets when the time comes. But once the war actually starts, he totally changes his position, writing that he simply cannot oppose his own country. Part of it is his quasi-military upbringing and love of authors like Kipling, part of it is that he still hopes for a socialist revolution and thinks this has even less chance of happening under Nazi rule, and part of it is probably just a innate instinct to fight back against existential threat.

Despite Orwell's reputation as a kind of doomsayer, his non-fiction writing always leaves me feeling positive. Unlike many political people, he appreciates that what is valuable is life itself and the process of living, and that politics is only a means of improving it (and maybe not a very good one at that). He loves Dickens and boys' adventure stories. He has a wife and grows vegetables and tries to open a small grocery shop. He believes in common decency. He presents the events of his time in context that reminds me that, at once, things are better than they were and that the unsolvable problems will never leave us nor overwhelm us.

FOUR whole volumes ... yet it's hard to believe how hard it is to put any of these down. I've read through all 4 of them several times and have done so much yellow-highlighting they're about unreadable now.

They are THAT good.

This one contains rather more letters than the later volumes. Provides some interesting insights.

Into Orwell for one. His unthinking biases, including his assumption that Socialism is the only right way -- oddly enough while commenting on how government inspectors who refused to let farmers hire hop pickers without providing "proper accommodation" only caused suffering among the itinerant workers, and observing that a heavily Conservative city is effectively Socialist with the amount of crony capitalism going on. (There are more about this assumption in the later volumes.)

Though, re-reading it after reading the other three volumes puts a certain amount of glee in the passages where he's complaining that Fascism and capitalism are really the same thing, because then you have read his arguments against that position. He sticks to it in this book however until the last essay in, where he admits to having argued against the war, but having dreamed just before the Russo-German Pact, he realized that he would support the country if war came. (He understates his earlier opposition; that was exactly what he predicted many people would do, and he derided them for it.)

A number of reviews give an interesting glance at literature of the time, and earlier. There's a fair number about the Spanish Civil War, in which case his personal experience is brought to bear on the subject matter of the book. (He has nothing from while he actually served, but wrote about it after.) He wrote an essay on Dickens that has interesting insights -- not all into Dickens, some into Orwell.

Also, he has some essays on life in England, generally among the very poor, with some interesting anecdotes. Like the woman who always kept herself respectable -- that is, always wore a hat, not a shawl -- and how one time she tried to get some charity and was told they were for people really in need, and if she can dress like that, she must not be. She rather resented it.

Essential, as all Orwell's books.

When I read these collected works of Orwell when I was at university, they inspired me to be political in my writings. In this volume, I admire his intellectual rigour and brutality.

"While [Orwell] is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, most of his writing derived from his tireless work as a journalist, and thanks to David Godine’s welcome reissue of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, which has been out of print for a decade, readers can find it all in one place. All of the author’s insightful, hard-hitting essays and journalistic pieces are here…the most complete picture of the writer and man possible."
—Eric Liebetrau | Kirkus Reviews