I.
About the author:
II. Background:
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This
essay was written in 1946, at a time when modernism was
further criticized in Britain as abstract, divorced from
the general readership and the pressing social and political
problems of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1940 George Orwell,
while commenting on the modernists, said, “What is noticeable
about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’ they have
is very much in the air. There is no attention to the
urgent problems of the moment, above all no politics in
the narrower sense… in ‘cultured’ circles art-for-art’s
sake extended practically to the worship of the meaningless.
Literature was supposed to consist solely in the manipulation
of words.” (Inside the Whale, 1940, P. 557)
Orwell’s theory of writing is
to combine political purpose with aestheticism, making
of the two an organic whole. In Inside the Whale he records
that “During the past ten years literature has involved
itself more and more deeply in politics … the younger
writers have ‘gone into politics’ … the movement is in
the direction of some rather ill-defined thing called
communism.”
Students have to know the political
and literary climates of the 1940s and Orwell’s bitter
personal experiences to understand why he emphasizes political
purpose in writing. 
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