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The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters #4

In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

george orwell sonia orwell ian angus

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In Front of Your Nose features Orwell's final writings, including extracts from his manuscript notebook, as well as details of his remarriage and adoption of a son, notes on the writing and publication of Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Graham Greene, an examination of politics and literature in Gulliver's Travels, and the hidden meanings of "nonsense poetry."

--From the 2000 edition.

555 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1968
Series
The Collected Essays, Journalism / Letters

This edition

Format
555 pages, Paperback
Published
August 6, 2002 by David R. Godine, Publisher
ISBN
9781567921366
ASIN
1567921361
Language
English

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About the author

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george orwell

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Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.
Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 19 votes)
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19 reviews All reviews
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Emerald1016
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"But surely you don't want a Carthaginian Peace? Well, as I recall, we haven't had much trouble from the Carthaginians since! To which I would reply, 'No, but we've had a great deal of trouble from the Romans'".--- George Orwell continued to stir, spear, and provoke in his essays and letters from the end of World War II until his death. On Gandhi: "Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent." In this collection, Orwell ponders, inter alia, what a world dominated by the United States with its A-bomb will be like, jots down notes for "1984" to mail to friends, and, in general, sees a gloomy future of failed capitalism and fake socialism, from the Labourites to the Stalinists.
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Lenko_
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Reading Orwell's essays, book reviews and letters has been an amazing experience. I've learned a great deal about Orwell's life, his ideas, his personality, his daily struggles, his fight with tuberculosis which at the end was the cause of his death, and more importantly about the global and British politics and culture of the period 1945-1950.

I have also learned how he wrote 1984 (it was a difficult process because of his illness), which theories or models he was influenced by while writing it (James Burnham's, especially as they are presented in his books entitled The Managerial Revolution, Suicide of the West, and The Machiavellians) and, finally, that Orwell wasn't fully satisfied with the novel when he finished it.

In terms of language, Orwell practiced, to a great extent, what he preached in his essay "Politics and the English Language," which is included in this collection. His English is clear, simple, accessible, and effective.

I highly recommend this volume and the entire series to anyone interested in good English prose, and in 20th-Century politics, history and culture.
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soniaball03
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Having a fever gave me the perfect exuse to spend entire yesterday's afternoon reading this book. I'm happy that I had the opportunity to finish it. This is the fouth volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell(1945-1950) and it must be the final one because he did die in 1950.

How frustrating that my laptop turned down last night just as I was finishing the review for this!Jebi ga.

What I like about Orwell is that he is what I call an active intellectual (and even though I'm pretty sure that such an expression doesn't exist, in my mind it means somebody who thinks with his own head.)

It is not that I always agree with him... (Is it me or does he have a touch of catholic phobia? I'm not talking about his negative reviwes on catholic writers or that "one cannot be a catholic and a grown- up" statement. After all everyone should be able to have an opion about any religion without being considered an offender. One should be able to say I think this religion is silly and that is that. However, Orwell's constant mentioning of the catholic church in every possible political context and attributing it with political power that is doesn't (and cannot) have seem to be out of place. One would conclude that the catholic church rules the world. That just doesn't seem to make any sense. All religion have an amount of political power but I don't think that it can be said for any religion that it holds all political power)


Nevertheless, I do think he is the best essayist of his age. In particular, I don't know anyone who has written so sensibly on political matters and put things so planely.


About 600 pages (my edition) provides us with some of his best writing and about a three hundered (my estimation I haven't actually counted them) letters show much of his personal life. It is touching how he managed to think and work till the very end.


Now, perhaps an average reader will not want to read all of it. So, here is my list of essays that I (for whatever reason) think you shouldn't miss:

V.I. E (very important essays):

" Revenge is Sour"
" What is Science"
" Good bad books"
" Freedom of the Park"
" The Sporting Spirit"
" The Prevention of Literature"
"Review of We by E.I. Zamyatin"
" Pleasure Spots"
"Politics vs Literature: An examination of Gulliver's Travels"
" How the Poor Die"
"Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle"
"Review of the The Soul of Man under Socialism"
" Review of Potrait of an Antisemite by Jean-Paul Sartre"
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"
" Reflections of Gangi"
" Conrad's Place and Rank in English Letters"
" The Question of the Pound Award"
" Such, Such were the Joys"



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redlittleriding
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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some of his greatest hits are here, incl. "Reflections on Gandhi" and "Such, such were the joys" concerning his school days, "Politics and the English language," "confessions of a book reviewer", etc. etc.

The letters are funny sometimes (before email i wrote a lot of them, but i hope no one is going to save them and after I'm dead publish observations such as Orwell's "I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot" (p. 448, as he warmed up for a book review that indeed was pretty harsh), tedious sometimes (he very often encourages people to feel welcome to visit him at the remote home where he was trying to get over tuberculosis, never failing to advise giving him a week's notice so he could make the arrangements), but the essays and journalism are a terrific window into the mind of a hall of fame writer and thinker.
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shine_heaven
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Fewer formal essays and more letters (it seems) than the previous volumes, but that made this one way more personal. Two brief essays here I don’t think I’ve come across in any of the shorter essay compilations, and which were particularly good - “Writers and Leviathan” and “In Defense of Comrade Zilliacus”. Orwell was very social and very politically involved to the end. Reading his letters from the hospitals and sanatoriums where he spent the last three years of his life while trying to finish 1984 were incredibly bittersweet. I would pay handily for a copy of the full notebook he kept in his last year, an excerpt of which is published here in the last five or so pages.
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Perseusxz
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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The last of the volumes. More essays than letters, and even the essays are less personal and more political. Communism, which was a thread throughout the first three, really comes out in full force.

Still some primary source with interesting tidbits, like asking a correspondent whether he's torn up his ration book for clothes, and recounting how people don't really believe it. (They went off clothes rationing in 1949.)

Also stuff about hunger in Europe after the war, objecting to some nasty post-war trials, discussing Communist atrocities and how they were not to be discussed.

Essays on writing in general -- this is where "Politics and the English Language" appears -- and on various authors, sometimes vitiated by his blindspots (they can be amusing insights into Orwell, to be sure). Though at one point he observes that a book that opposes you makes you angry which is hard to see around, he doesn't observe that it is also likely to come across as falsified. (Socialist Realism is bad not only for the lack of conflict, but because it assumes the collective action problem out of existence, and beings without the collective action problem aren't human.) Actually, I think his best is his essay on Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare because there he comes to grip with the ideas and argues with them.

He wrestles with the Soviet views on literature and at one point observes he can feel more sorry for the persecutors than their victims because the victims at least have the clarity of knowing what is going on, where the persecutors are shocked and bewildered and unable to fathom why providing the best of everything to writers nevertheless does not produce the literature they desire. (Despite his Socialism, Orwell realizes that writers, at least, need some freedom to produce.)

He also had a bad shock from the atom bomb, which appears to have seriously shaken his views on progress. Nevertheless, he keeps arguing from the assumption that historical inevitability exists, and that he can discern it. I wonder how his views would have changed if he had lived to see the effects of the welfare state and the fall of Communism.
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Scandinaff
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A friend loaned me this book after Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” came up in conversation, and I expressed interest. His writing about his experience at boarding school sufficiently engrossed me that I went on to read more than a smattering of Orwell’s essays, letters, and book reviews, including all his “As I Please”columns for the Tribune. I had in the past read, of course, Animal Farm and 1984, with no idea that Orwell was such a prolific writer, that he’d written the brilliant and enduring 1984 while seriously ill, or that he died at the young age of forty-six. Coincidentally I read at the same time as reading about Orwell’s struggle with tuberculosis, the novel manuscript of a friend in which a young character dies with the same disease. Her fiction filled in the gruesome details Orwell would have suffered but omitted from his letters, though his ill health was mentioned often. I have often thought I’d like to reread 1984, since roughly 1984. Perhaps having read from this collection will at last spur me to do so. (Perhaps only because I’m realistic about how impossible it will be to get to all the books I would like to read.)
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Leegf
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"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
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