Shooting an Elephant
GEORGE ORWELL
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays
with an Introduction by Jeremy Paxman
BookishMall.com
Contents
Introduction
Why I Write
The Spike
A Hanging
Shooting an Elephant
Bookshop Memories
Charles Dickens
Boys’ Weeklies
My Country Right or Left
Looking Back on the Spanish War
In Defence of English Cooking
Good Bad Books
The Sporting Spirit
Nonsense Poetry
The Prevention of Literature
Books v. Cigarettes
Decline of the English Murder
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Politics v. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels
How the Poor Die
Such, Such Were the Joys
Reflections on Gandhi
Politics and the English Language
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Shooting an Elephant
George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903 in India and then went to Eton when his family moved
back to England. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first
novel, Burmese Days (1934). He lived in Paris before returning to England, and Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1936. After writing The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia (his account of fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from
then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco where he wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War Orwell served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC. His political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945 and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him worldwide fame. George Orwell was taken seriously ill in the winter of 1948–9 and died in London
in 1950.
Jeremy Paxman is a journalist and writer.
Introduction
If you want to learn how to write non-fiction, Orwell is your man. He may be known worldwide for his last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty Four. But, for me, his best work is his essays.
Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in
April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights,
the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (‘a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature’) the
baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself,
but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell’s dingy Islington flat.
When he produced articles like this, hair-shirted fellow socialists got cross. Why wasn’t he spending his time promoting discontent,
denouncing the establishment, glorifying the machine-driven future? It is a mark of his greatness that Orwell didn’t care.
They – whoever they might be – cannot stop you enjoying spring. The essay ends, ‘The atom bombs are piling up in the factories,
the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able
to prevent it.’
It all reads so effortlessly. And yet it cannot have been produced without toil. He tells us in ‘Why I Write’ that he found
writing a book ‘a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness’ and even the shorter pieces, knocked
out for magazines or newspapers, must often have been a chore. There is the research, for one thing. His generous, insightful
analysis of Charles Dickens shows not merely a close familiarity with thirteen of his novels, but also with those of Trollope,
Thackeray and a host of long-forgotten writers, too. For his caustic piece on Boys’ Weeklies he evidently immersed himself
in mountains of the things.
The result of this steeping is a piece so deft and witty that the result has you laughing out loud. Here, for example, is
his list of the national characteristics of the foreigners who make occasional appearances in this bizarre genre:
FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly.
SPANIARD, MEXICAN, etc.:
Sinister, treacherous.
ARAB, AFGHAN, etc.:
Sinister, treacherous.
CHINESE:
Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail’s.
ITALIAN:
Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto.
SWEDE, DANE, etc.:
Kind-hearted, stupid.
NEGRO:
Comic, very faithful.
How one longs for him to have lived long enough to be let loose on the lads’ mags culture of the early twenty-first century.
Because something paradoxical has happened to us. The abundance of the mass media offers a greater choice than ever before.
We are adrift in a sea of newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the limitless extremities of cyberspace. It is not merely that the more there is of it, the less any individual
part of it matters. It is that so little of it seems intended to have any meaning. The mechanical processes of printing and broadcasting seem somehow to have been applied to the generation
of content, too. To take one small example; no one ever experiences inconvenience as a result of motorway traffic jams or
a broken-down train.
1 comment