ABSTRACT
Educational literature mirrors George Orwell’s concern with fragile human attachments, manifested in two senses of loss. Firstly, the sense of lost community symptomatised by social atomisation; secondly, the sense of lost economic security, manifested in widespread inequality and material precariousness. Industrialisation in Britain created great wealth but also great poverty. In the late nineteenth century, there was a reaction against the unequal society produced by the economic system. The main points so far are firstly, at the time of Orwell’s birth at the turn of the twentieth century, fears about social and cultural atomisation helped create a counter-movement, stimulated by an ideal of society enacted within and through the actions of citizens. Secondly, in the later nineteenth century and throughout Orwell’s life ran a period of free-market ascendancy that Orwell observed and critiqued. Orwell explores English and British patriotism, in his famous work from 1941, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.
