Written in 1940, Inside the Whale was a collection of three long essays about Dickens, boys' weekly papers, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The essay about Miller, which gives the title to the collection, talks about English literature in general but I think it is weak and not as worthy as so much of Orwell's other work. It is dated and the piece about boys' weeklies could never have been very interesting to more than a handful of people, but Orwell's comments on Dickens are perceptive and worth reading.
Orwell's politics being what they were (leftist and Socialist) he admires Dickens' criticism of society, something not found in most other popular novelists of the time like Trollope and Elliot, but he points out that in essence all Dickens had to offer was the hope that people would behave more generously to one another. Orwell wanted the entire system overturned, capitalism wiped out, government by the workers, and the rest of the naive hopes and dreams of the leftists of the 20s and 30s. But he does appreciate Dickens for the sheer delight of his writing and the characters he created.
None of whom were what Orwell would call "workers," except for David Copperfield when as a youth he was put into a blacking factory, as in real life happened to Dickens. Orwell admires A Tale of Two Cities, which I found interesting as it is not the usual Dickens fare.
2012 No 52