A Collection of Essays
Fourteen essays written between 1936 and 1949, gathered in the 1954 Anchor paperback that became a standard classroom introduction to Orwell's nonfiction. The contents run from the boarding-school memoir "Such, Such Were the Joys" and the Burma reportage of "Shooting an Elephant" to "Politics and the English Language," studies of Dickens and Kipling, essays on the Spanish Civil War and English national character, and pieces on postcard art and boys' weeklies, closing with "Why I Write."
Fourteen essays, and this assembly leads with the grimmest: twenty thousand words of boarding-school misery (the longest thing Orwell ever wrote), "a horrible way to introduce readers to his essays" when other editions open with the friendlier Why I Write. What follows never coheres, "an uneven patchwork, with parts that do not match": Spanish War reportage shelved beside postcard criticism and boys' weeklies. The Kipling and Marrakech pieces carry the era's slurs and national stereotyping, "excessively distracting" rather than quaintly of their time. And whole essays argue with 1930s opponents the book never bothers to introduce, so one reader blames "my lack of historical, political and cultural knowledge" for a collection that never landed the way 1984 or Animal Farm did.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
