ABSTRACT
Despite the title, my purpose in this chapter 1 is less to comment on George Orwell, né Eric Arthur Blair, than to reflect upon the interest in reforming and manipulating natural language that we predominantly associate with Orwell. Not that I do not believe the time ripe for a revaluation of Orwell, especially in view of the undue reverence in which he is held as a serious thinker on social and linguistic matters. It is indeed not so much the quality or originality of his writing upon language that justifies his place in my title as the fact that the journalist in him, the artist in him, seized upon the tenor of thought in the ‘inter-war’ years and articulated it into imaginatively arresting and memorable form.
