Edited extracts of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall discussing the life of George Orwell in 1984. Originally part of the Open University module 'State and Society'. Taken from the Williams family archive and on loan to the Raymond Williams Society from Merryn Williams. Digitised and uploaded by Phil O'Brien, society secretary.
For more on Orwell by Williams, see 'Culture and Society' (1958), 'Orwell' (1971), and 'George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays' (1974), edited by Williams.
‘In the Britain of the fifties, along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life, there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. Down to the late sixties political editorials in newspapers would regularly admonish younger socialists to read their Orwell and see where all that led to. This seemed to me false. The Orwell history seemed to me more complex and contradictory. Here was a man who said that every word he had written was for democratic socialism, and who fought for it in Catalonia as a revolutionary, yet so much of whose writing is clearly anti-socialist in a general way and not just on particular questions, and indeed has had an enormous anti-socialist effect' -- Williams in 'Politics and Letters' (1979), p. 384.