“The Lion and the Unicorn”
“The Lion and the Unicorn”
THE LITERARY WORK
An essay on the necessity of a socialist revolution in wartime Britain, written between August and October 1940; published in February 1941,
SYNOPSIS
Analyzing the situation in Britain in 1940-41, Orwell argues that the war has demonstrated the failure of private capitalism and that if Britain is to win the war, it must embrace socialism.
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal to a father who served as a middle-ranking official in the Opium Department of the Government of India. In 1904 Blair’s mother took him and his older sister Marjorie “home” to England, their father joining them on his retirement in 1911. Blair had a comfortable middle-class upbringing and, upon finishing his schooling at Eton, joined the Imperial Indian Police, which posted him to Burma. After five years’ service, however, he resigned, partly, as he later put it, “because the climate had ruined my health”—a reference perhaps to the tuberculosis that was to kill him at the age of 46 in 1950; “partly,” he continued, “because I already had vague ideas of writing books, but mainly because I could not go on any longer serving an imperialism which I had come to regard as very largely a racket” (Orwell, Complete Works 12, p. 147). On his return to Europe, Blair chose to spend a year and a half living in poverty in London and Paris, trying to share the life of the destitute and oppressed and doggedly teaching himself to write. In 1933, using the name George Orwell, he published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, and a new book followed every year for the rest of the 1930s. During this decade, his politics developed into a unique variety of revolutionary socialism; his socialism “engaged in a continual dialogue with the anti-Stalinist revolutionary left,” or those opposed to mainstream Russian communism, but always tried “to relate [their] ideas to what he understood to be the realities of British society and culture” (Newsinger, p. 21). This political journey was one that Orwell would chronicle in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). With the outbreak of war in September 1939, his politics took what seemed to be an even more surprising turn. In the late 1930s Orwell had opposed the coming war in Europe, believing it to be a clash between rival capitalist imperial powers that would lead to Britain’s becoming a totalitarian state; now he argued not only that it was necessary for the British to fight Hitler, but that this struggle must be accompanied by a socialist revolution in Britain. By 1940, he believed that German victories in Europe, and the threat that Britain itself would be invaded, had exposed the inadequacies of Britain’s economic and political system and brought its people to the brink of revolutionary change. It was this mood of “revolutionary patriotism” that produced “The Lion and the Unicorn” (Crick, George Orwell, p. 257).
Events in History at the Time of the Essay
Britain in the 1930s
The 1930s in Britain are often seen as a time of “economic disaster, social deprivation and political discontent” (Stevenson and Cook, p. 4). This image is certainly not without foundation. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were never less than one million people out of work—a tenth of the working population that had unemployment insurance. In the depths of the international economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of October 1929, unemployment soared to three million, exacerbating existing social problems of chronic poverty, ill-health, and poor housing. These mounting social problems were brought to the public’s attention as never before by pioneering social researchers and by the protests of the unemployed themselves.
As Orwell (in The Road to Wigan Pier) and many others observed, however, the effects of the “Great Slump” were not felt evenly across the nation. They were much worse in regions of Wales, Scotland, and the north of England that were economically dependent on the old industries: coal, textiles, iron and steel, and shipbuilding. In some of these areas, up to three-quarters of the insured population found itself out of work. London, parts of the Midlands, and the southeast of England, on the other hand, were virtually booming. For those who did have jobs, standards of living improved during the 1930s. The cost of living was falling, as was family size, and as a result many people could, for the first time, afford to own their own houses, operate a car, and buy consumer goods such as electrical appliances. Thus, argue Stevenson and Cook, we must add to “the pictures of the dole queues and hunger marches … those of another Britain, of new industries, prosperous suburbs and a rising standard of living” (Stevenson and Cook, p. 4).
The left in Britain during the 1930s
Left-wing organizations might have been expected to thrive in Britain’s economic crisis of the 1930s. But neither the extreme left nor the extreme right were able to capitalize on the situation and build mass movements for radical change.
The two most important moderate left-wing organizations were the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Although there were internal divisions within these organizations, they were on the whole committed to working within the existing parliamentary system to bring about the advent of socialism and, in the interim, to improving the pay and conditions of working people under capitalism. More radical were the British Communist Party (CP) and the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), which was affiliated to, but somewhat independent of, the CP.
In the late 1920s, under directions from Moscow to foment a revolution through a “class-against-class” policy, the British CP severed all connections with more moderate left-wing organizations and dissolved groups that contained communist and non-communist members. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Moscow changed its policy, and the CP and the NUWM sought to build a “united front” against fascism by re-establishing links with the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. These organizations, however, were not only committed to a moderate line but also deeply suspicious of the CP, and they rejected all such overtures.
Left-wing views became somewhat fashionable in Britain from the mid-1930s on, stimulated in particular by the rise of fascism abroad, by Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists at home, and by the Spanish Civil War. It was not, however, the working class that the CP attracted. Many of those who joined the Communist Party or became “fellow travelers” (sympathizers) were from the middle classes and the intelligentsia. It is estimated that of the several million who were unemployed or threatened with unemployment in the 1930s, only 3,140 joined the CP. Those among the working classes who were politically active tended to retain their traditional allegiances to the Labour Party and the TUC; in fact, many of them were suspicious of communism as a “foreign” political creed (Stevenson and Cook, pp. 136-44, 290).
The mood in Britain in 1940-41
The situation in Britain in mid-to-late 1940 was unprecedented. Dunkirk had revealed that “Britain had barely the means to defend itself, let alone to attack” (Addison, p. 111). Critics in Britain laid the blame—somewhat unfairly, in view of the fact that many on the left had advocated pacifism during the 1930s—at the door of the Conservatives. In power since 1931, it was argued, the Conservatives had failed to re-arm, hoping instead to appease Hitler. Amid strong feelings of “patriotism, rage against the Nazis, and the fear of invasion,” there arose a widespread feeling that the country had been misgoverned, along with calls for change (Addison, p. 104). As the blitz—the night bombing raids on Britain’s cities during 1940—progressed, the popular appetite for change was fueled by resentment of the more well-to-do, cushioned by their wealth from the worst hardships of the war. Ultimately, public discontent was partially addressed by social and economic reforms that began during the war and that developed, after the Labour party’s election victory in 1945, into the postwar welfare state. But in the summer and autumn of 1940 many on the left, including Orwell, were anticipating a revolution. On June 20, 1940, Orwell wrote in his diary: “if only we can hold out [against Germany] for a few months, in a year’s time we shall see red militia billeted in the Ritz” (Orwell, Complete Works 12, p. 188).
The Essay in Focus
Contents summary
The first section of “The Lion and the Unicorn,” “England Your England,” begins with the assertion that one cannot understand the modern world without acknowledging the power of patriotism and, moreover, that the peoples of different nations are divided by “real differences of outlook” (Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn” in Complete Works 12, p. 392). Orwell then turns to the task of identifying the distinctive characteristics of English life and civilization, because, he writes, “it is . of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 393).
The list of English characteristics that Orwell identifies include a lack of artistic ability; “a horror of abstract thought”; a devotion to private life; a “hatred of war and militarism”; a respect for constitutionalism and legality; and a deep xenophobia, particularly among the working class (“Lion and the Unicorn,” pp. 393-99). Orwell is not overly idealistic about English civilization. Its antimilitarism, for instance, “ignores
HUNGER MARCHES
The National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) was active in organizing “hunger marches,” and related demonstrations, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. However, the march that has came to stand for the protests of the unemployed in popular memory was organized not by the NUWM but by Ellen Wilkinson, the local Labour member of the parliament, and by the Mayor and Council of Jarrow, a shipbuilding community in northeast England, The jarrow march, or “Crusade,” of 1936 was atypical in that it was avowedly “nonpolitical,” refusing affiliation with the NUWM: its aim was not to change the government’s policies as a whole, but simply to get help for) arrow, which, with the closure of Palmer’s Shipyard, had lost almost 8,000 jobs. The dignified and disciplined conduct of the 200 men chosen to represent the community on the march to London gained them much public sympathy, although the march “achieved few tangible results” (Stevenson and Cook, p. 188).
the existence of the British Empire,” won and maintained by naval force, and it is “the most class-ridden country under the sun”; but, nonetheless, most English people feel themselves to be one nation and tend to “act together in moments of extreme crisis” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” pp. 396, 400). England, Orwell famously concludes, is like “a rather stuffy Victorian family … with the wrong members in control” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 401).
Orwell then turns his attention to what he sees as the failure of leadership on the part of the English ruling class during the last three-quarters of a century, and particularly since 1920.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
For many, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 embodied the great ideological conflicts of the age: between democracy and fascism, and between Christianity and communism. In July 1936 the Spanish military, supported by the old ruling class and the Catholic Church, rebelled against the Popular Front Government of the Spanish Republic. The rebellion was prompted by fears that the Popular Front, which had the support of the enlightened middle class and most of the working class, would bring in a revolutionary program aimed at ending economic underdevelopment and exploitation as well as social and religious conservatism. Al firs!, the attempt to overthrow the government seemed likely to fail: it was met by a popular uprising that went on, in many Republican areas, to develop into the beginnings of a socialist revolution. But German and Italian aid, along with internal divisions on the Republican side, enabled Franco’s Nationalists—essentially a fascist movement—to ultimately seize control of the country.
The Republicans received assistance from the Soviet Union, but Britain’s policy was not to intervene. At odds with this policy, around 2,500 British citizens fought as volunteers in Spain, most of them for the Republicans in the International Brigades, which were organized by national Communist Parties from around the world. Many more became involved in political and humanitarian campaigns in support of the Republic. The idealism of these volunteers, however, often gave way to disillusionment when they realized that the war was much more complex, and less heroic, than they had imagined.
Orwell himself volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, in the Partida Obrero de Unificación Marxista IPOUM), or United Marxist Workers’ Party militia, an independent socialist group., which, along with the anarchists, was dedicated to completing the economic and social revolution that had taken place behind the Republican lines. The Communists., however, were pursuing a different agenda. Under orders from Moscow, which was keen to secure an alliance with Britain and France against Hitler and therefore did not wish to see socialism established in Spain, the Communists were determined to reverse the socialist revolution. To this end, the Communist secret police hunted down and arrested or executed so-called “traitors” and dissidents and misrepresented revolutionary groups such as the POUM as pro-Fascist. Orwell could not forgive the Communists for this betrayal. In fact, it was this experience that led him to see communism as a totalitarian system equivalent to fascism, and totally incompatible with democratic socialism (Crick, George Orwell, pp. 207-36; Newsinger, pp. 42-54).
Although England’s rulers have been neither treacherous nor corrupt, their inability to “grasp what century they are living in,” and their “infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing,” prevented them from seeing the danger posed by fascism until it was too late (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 404). The English left-wing intelligentsia also played a part in allowing the war to happen; their contempt for English institutions and for any form of English patriotism throughout the crucial years of the 1930s damaged English morale and encouraged the fascist nations to believe that England was “decadent” and that she would not fight (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 406).
In the last section of “England Your England,” Orwell notes some of the changes that have taken place in England since the end of the First World War. Technological progress has led to improved living standards for the working and middle classes and to a less differentiated culture, especially in the south of England, “in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 408). The war, he predicts, will complete the process of eliminating class privileges. But “England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 409).
In Part 2, “Shopkeepers at War,” Orwell argues that Hitler’s conquest of capitalist Europe has proved that “private capitalism”—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit “does not work” (“Lion and the Unicom,” p. 409). Compared to the planned economies of fascist or socialist states, capitalism is hopelessly inefficient at directing resources to achieving the nation’s objectives because its main aim is maximizing private profit. But if Dunkirk and the blitz have opened English eyes to the merits of a planned economy, the wrong members of the English family are still in control. As a result the British war effort is halfhearted: the ruling class are at least as afraid of Bolshevism and of losing their economic and social privilege as they are of Hitler. The suffering of wartime, moreover, is far from equally shared, and here Orwell sees danger, for without “equality of sacrifice,” ordinary people may sooner or later begin to feel that they would be no worse off under Hitler and lose the will to fight (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 415).
In Part 3, “The English Revolution,” Orwell reiterates his belief that traditional English social structures are beginning to break down and that England is already moving towards socialism. He insists, however, that further progress toward this end must be made if the war is to be won:
The war and the revolution are inseparable. We cannot establish anything that a Western nation would regard as Socialism without defeating Hitler; on the other hand we cannot defeat Hitler while we remain economically and socially in the nineteenth century.
(“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 418)
Such changes would not be made by Churchill’s government, or any similar one: they must come from a genuinely popular socialist movement. Such a thing, Orwell acknowledges, has never existed in England before, a fact he blames on the inadequacies of the socialist organizations: the Labour Party has always been primarily interested in improving wages and working conditions for British workers, not in overthrowing capitalism; and the more extreme left-wing parties, including the Communist Party, merely alienated the middle classes—whom Orwell sees as vital to the success of a socialist revolution. By threatening the very survival of England, however, the war has made socialism a “realizable policy”; if the alternative is being conquered by Hitler, not only the working classes but “the great mass of middling people” on incomes between £6 a week and £2000 a year will choose socialism (“Lion and the Unicorn,” pp. 421-22). And even though there will be resistance from the upper and upper-middle classes, it is likely that—patriotism and a sense of national unity being stronger in England than class hatred,
ORWELL’S ATTITUDE TO WORLD WAR II
Orwell’s view of events Sri Spain profoundly shaped his attitude to the coming war with Germany in the late 1930s. The Communists’ advocacy of a “popular” or ‘united from” against fascism, he argued, was a way of getting the working class to unite with the bourgeoisie in a war that would actually protect the interests of British imperialism, “Communism,” he wrote in “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” “is now a counter revolutionary force; . . Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies” (Collected Works 11, p. 42), When war broke out in September 1939, however, Orwell was in the process of changing his mind and coming out in favor of the war effort. Britain was now facing both the major totalitarian powers, because on August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia had signed a Non-Aggression Pact—confirming Orwell’s view that there was little difference between the two. Moreover, as he described in “My Country Right or Left” in the autumn of 1940, Orwell had discovered “that I was patriotic at heart” and that he could not do other than support the war effort. But this patriotism, he insisted, did not compromise his revolutionary politics. One could be “loyal both to [then Prime Minister] Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow” (Orwell, Complete Works 12, p. 2/1). Indeed, the one required the other, for only if Hitler were resisted could a socialist revolution take place in Britain, and only if such a revolution occurred could Britain be saved. He went on to develop this argument at much greater length in “The Lion and the Unicorn.” But it also underlay his involvement in the Local Defense Volunteers or Home Guard, which he saw as a revolutionary militia in waiting.
especially in a time of war—the will of the majority will prevail.
Orwell then goes on to outline a six-point program that “aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 422). The first three points are intended to eliminate gross structural inequalities within English society: they are the transfer of ownership of all major industry, land, and infrastructure to the State, as representative of the people; the limitation of incomes, so that the highest “tax-free” (Orwell presumably means “after-tax”) income would be ten times the lowest at most; and reforming the education system to ensure that all children receive an education appropriate to their ability, regardless of their parents’ wealth. Points four and five concern England’s relationship with the Empire. Orwell insists that England cannot truly call itself a socialist democracy unless it ceases to exploit the peoples of its Empire. He therefore argues that Britain must offer India, and many other of her “possessions,” partnership on equal terms, meaning that Dominion status must be granted immediately, along with the right to secede completely once the war is over; and that an Imperial General Council representing all the peoples of the Empire must be formed. The sixth point extends this responsibility to oppressed peoples still further, calling for England to declare a formal alliance with other nations, such as China and Abyssinia, that have been overrun by Fascist powers (i.e. Japan and Italy respectively).
Orwell declares himself to be extremely optimistic that within a year, if England is not conquered, a specifically English Socialist movement will have developed and, by sheer strength of numbers, will have become the government. Its policies, he argues, will be distinctly English, retaining many of the essential aspects of England that he has already outlined. It will be neither “doctrinaire” nor “logical,” “[leaving] anachronisms and loose ends everywhere,” including, perhaps, the monarchy and the lion and the unicorn, the emblem of the old state, on soldiers’ cap-buttons (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 427). It will keep its tradition of compromise and of respect for a law that is above the State, and it will be tolerant of dissent, as well as of religion—although it will nonetheless shoot traitors (after a “solemn” trial) and “crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 427). It will furthermore fight the war wholeheartedly, and with all its forces mobilized, not being afraid of stirring up revolution in other states.
“The Lion and the Unicorn” concludes by reiterating the necessity of England’s fighting, and winning, the war. Although the left-wing intelligentsia is in the habit of arguing that democracy is just as bad as totalitarianism, the two are as different as the rent-collector and the Nazi S.S. man, and it is frivolous to suggest otherwise. Hitler’s totalitarianism has as its aim the establishment, over Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Russia, of a racially stratified empire, whereas British, or English, democracy, although far from perfect, contains within itself the seeds of socialism.
English democracy cannot simply be preserved in this war, Orwell concludes: it must be extended to become socialist democracy. He concedes that it is possible that England might follow this advice and still lose the war. But even such a defeat would be better than compromising with Hitler, for, if the English revolution had already taken place, “bringing the real England to the surface,” she could never be utterly defeated (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 432).
The idea of “England” in “The Lion and the Unicorn.”
It is noticeable that, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell refers almost exclusively to “England” rather than to “Britain,” which would include Scotland and Wales, let alone “the United Kingdom,” which would include Northern Ireland as well. Yet it seems that he intends his call to revolution to apply to the whole of Britain. He himself notes that “Welsh and Scottish readers are likely to have been offended because I have used the word ‘England’ oftener than ‘Britain,’ as though the whole population dwelt in London and the Home Counties and neither north nor west possessed a culture of its own” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 398). But for Orwell the question of national differences within Britain—which he here conflates with regional differences within England—are almost nonexistent compared to the difference between a Briton and anyone else, and are, in any case, less important than the difference between rich and poor.
Orwell is far from unique in conflating “England” and “Britain” in this way. Because England has always been the dominant nation within Britain, England has been taken—especially by the English—to stand for the whole in a way that Scotland and Wales have not. Only in the last two decades or so have politicians and the public become more conscious of the need to distinguish between “Britain” and “England,” in large part because of the growing debate over the devolution of powers to the constituent nations of the Union. In Orwell’s time, it was easy to write as though England was Britain, without thinking too hard about whether one’s comments about the national character really applied to Scotland and Wales as well. When we examine how Orwell characterizes his England, we find that his specific references do tend to be English.
IMPERIALISM AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM
By 1910 there were two distinct sides to the British Empire: the white settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa had all become self-governing Dominions, but the remaining, nonwhite, parts of the Empire were still ruled by Britain in an authoritarian fashion. Nationalist feelings in these countries were steadily growing, and the British government was coming under increasing pressure to grant them a greater degree of self-government. Pressure was also being applied from within Britain itself, where anti-imperialists were questioning both the motives for European expansion and the way the Empire was administered.
In India, which was by far Britain’s most important single colony, Britain made a series of reforms between 1909 and 1935 that gave Indians a greater role in the governance of their nation. Britain even announced that its intention was that India should eventually be granted Dominion status—on Britain’s timetable. But Indian nationalist organizations continued to press for independence; the most significant of these was the Indian National Congress, which combined constitutional politics with M. K. Gandhi’s strategy of Satyagraha, or peaceful resistance.
When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, 1hc Empire, with the exception of Ireland, declared war too. By and large, there was considerable enthusiasm for the war effort throughout the Empire, and its nations made significant contributions of both manpower and supplies: around 5,580,000 citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth served in the war, compared with 6,500,000 Britons (jeffery in Brown and Louis, pp. 307-8). But anti-imperial sentiment did not disappear; indeed, in India, it hardened. Britain’s failure to commit itself to Indian independence led to the campaign of 1942 to drive the British Out of India. The campaign was swiftly suppressed by the British, and the Congress itself was banned for the duration of the war. In August 1947, however, India and Pakistan became independent from Britain, although both remained within the Commonwealth.
Here, for example, he summons up the following typical “fragments . of the English scene”:
the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.
(“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 392)
The essay, then, can best be understood as referring not to Britain, but specifically to England—or, perhaps, to an idea of England. In fact, “The Lion and the Unicorn” is part of a long tradition of writing about England and Englishness. Debates about the nature of Englishness have gone on for centuries, but they were particularly intense in the years from 1900 to 1950. During this period, concepts of national identity were important in articulating war aims and in attempts to sustain the public’s morale during both world wars. Between the two world wars, during the 1920s and 1930s, there were economic crises and social changes that called into question the inclusiveness of older images of England.
To judge both what “The Lion and the Unicorn” shares with much other writing of the period about England and how it differs from it, one might compare it with a famous speech by the Conservative politician Stanley Baldwin, three times the Prime Minister of Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s speech, which was delivered to the Royal Society of St. George on May 6, 1924, begins by outlining the essential elements of the English character, elements that overlap with those highlighted by Orwell. Both men emphasize the anti-intellectualism of the English, their predilection for action without forethought, their distrust of foreigners, their sense of national unity, and their determined individuality. But Baldwin laments social and economic change and warns that the real England, which for him is the countryside, is in danger of being lost as its fields are converted into towns. Orwell’s imagined England, on the other hand, while certainly not excluding the country, consistently includes the England of “the factories and the newspaper offices, … the aeroplanes and the submarines” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 415). And, at least as important, Orwell looks not back into the past, but into the future, for the real England.
Baldwin’s primary concern as a politician, argues one historian, was “the preservation of parliament and the British character from extremism” of the left or of the right (Addison, p. 27). Orwell’s was to reconcile English patriotism and socialist revolution. In his 1980 biography of Orwell, Bernard Crick avowed that “The Lion and the Unicorn” was “the only book that has ever been written about the possibility of revolution in terms of English national character” (Crick, George Orwell, p. 257); it is probably still the only one. Given this aim, Orwell was understandably concerned to argue that England after a revolution would still be England—that, indeed, revolution would make England more fully itself, setting free the “native genius of the English people” (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 415). The continuity that Orwell envisages between the old England and the new is embodied in the essay’s title. The lion and the unicorn, the emblem of the old state, would not be replaced the way national symbols had been in Russia or Germany, but would remain on soldiers’ cap-buttons. England’s revolution would be as “peculiar” as England itself. But it would be a revolution nonetheless (“Lion and the Unicorn,” p. 427).
Sources and literary context
“The Lion and the Unicorn” was the first of “a series of short books on war aims for a better future” planned during the summer of 1940 by Orwell, Fredric Warburg, and Tosco Fyvel (Newsinger, p. 71). The Searchlight series was a reflection of the revolutionary hopes of 1940-41, and “The Lion and the Unicorn” needs to be understood, writes Newsinger, as “a work of propaganda, not of analysis,” intended to “help inspire, mobilise and direct” the masses of people who, Orwell believed, were ready to support a socialist transformation of British society (Newsinger, pp. 75-76).
As well as recognizing the relation of “The Lion and the Unicorn” to traditions of writing about Englishness, we need to understand Orwell in the context of socialist writing and thought. For, despite his idiosyncrasies, Orwell was “a pretty typical English left-wing socialist in the tradition of Morris, Blatchford, Carpenter, Cole, Tawney, Laski, Bevan and Foot”; this socialism is “egalitarian, libertarian, environmental, individualist in practice if not in theory, highly principled but somehow untheoretical, or if tinged with Marxism, then only in its broadest and most libertarian forms” (Crick, “Orwell and English Socialism”, p. 4).
Furthermore, as noted, in the early part of the war, other left-wing thinkers shared Orwell’s belief that a revolution was imminent, which gave rise to a tide of books, pamphlets, and essays calling for—or prophesying—change. It has been suggested that one such work in particular may have influenced Orwell: The Malady and the Vision (1940) by Tosco Fyvel, co-editor of the Searchlight series. In this book, Fyvel argues that the real England has been kept down by a class of the “idle rich” fostered by the Empire, but that “with the first crash of bombs over British troops in Norway, the whole cracked edifice of Chamberlainism and outdated British Imperialism was blown up,” and “the real England,” whose “enduring spirit” is the spirit of freedom, could once again show itself (Fyvel in Newsinger, p. 71).
Orwell’s style in “The Lion and the Unicorn” is intimately connected to his political purpose. Orwell wanted, as he said in “Why I Write” (1946), “to make political writing into an art” (Orwell, Complete Works 18, p. 319). His “famous clear, plain, simple, colloquial and forceful style” was modeled on those of political writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe (see Gulliver’s Travels and Moll Flanders , in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Like them, he wanted to reach a popular audience—specifically, the self-educated working and lower-middle classes for whom Dickens and H. G. Wells had written (Crick, “Orwell and English Socialism,” p. 3). But his style was also an expression of his belief that “plain language speaks the truth whereas polysyllabic neologisms are either obfuscations or lies” (Crick, “Orwell and English Socialism”, p. 16).
Reception
“The Lion and the Unicorn” sold well when it appeared in February 1941. Five thousand copies were initially printed, and good sales meant that this run was soon increased to 7,500. In March, a further 5,000 were ordered, but only 1,000 had been delivered when the Mayflower Press was hit in a German bombing raid on Plymouth (Orwell, Complete Works 12, p. 391). Reviewers praised Orwell’s polemical skill, even if they did not agree with his politics. V. S. Pritchett, for example, writing in The New Statesman and Nation, placed Orwell with Cobbett, Defoe, and G. B. Shaw among the finest English pamphleteers:
His virtue is that he says things which need to be said; his vice that some of those things needed saying with a great deal more consideration. But, damn thoughtfulness! Pamphleteers have to hit the bull’s eye every time, or, failing that, somebody else’s eye.
(Pritchett in Crick, George Orwell, p. 280)
As time went on, and hopes of an English revolution faded, Orwell’s predictions came to seem mistaken. In March 1942, reviewing “The Lion and the Unicorn” for the American journal Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald pointed out that there were still “no signs of the English socialist movement Orwell so confidently predicted. Despite an almost unbroken string of humiliating defeats, … the reins of power are still firmly in the hands of Churchill,” the anti-revolutionary (Macdonald, p. 193). Toward the end of 1942, Orwell himself concluded that revolutionary change was unlikely in Britain, and in 1949, preparing for his own death, he drew up instructions stipulating that “The Lion and the Unicorn,” along with the related essay “The English People,” and two of his novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, should not be reprinted. Nonetheless, in an obituary for Orwell after his death on January 21, 1950, Arthur Koestler insisted on the essay’s importance in the literature of the war: “Among all the pamphlets, tracts and exhortations that the war produced, hardly anything bears re-reading today, except, perhaps, E. M. Forster’s What I Believe, a few passages from Churchill’s speeches, and, above all, Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicom’” (Koestler in Crick, George Orwell, p. 273).
Since Orwell’s death, his legacy has been strongly contested. In the 1950s and early 1960s, his criticism of communism caused many on the left to repudiate him, although this began to change in the late 1960s with the rise of the new left outside of traditional affiliations to either the Labour Party or the Communists. Meanwhile, his critique of totalitarianism, most famously in Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), led some on the political right to ignore his lifelong commitment to socialism and to claim him as, in Newsinger’s words, “an emotional conservative who had given terrible warning of the totalitarian logic inherent in the socialist cause” (Newsinger, p. 155).
Like Orwell’s more famous works, “The Lion and the Unicorn” has been caught up in this struggle over his memory. In April 1993, in a clear allusion to “England Your England,” British Prime Minister John Major evoked a vision of an unchanging nation of “long shadows falling across the country [cricket] ground, … warm beer, … invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers … and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” (in Porter, p. 2). This echo of “The Lion and the Unicorn” in a speech by a Conservative Prime Minister might well have surprised Orwell himself. But it indicates his essay’s complex relationship to traditions of thinking about England and his singular achievement in turning such traditions to revolutionary ends.
—Ingrid Gunby
For More Information
Addison, Paul. The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War. Rev. ed. London: Pimlico, 1994.
Brown, Judith M., and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 4, The Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1980.
——— “Orwell and English Socialism.” In George Orwell: A Reassessment. Ed. Peter Buitenhuis and Ira B. Nadel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
Giles, Judy, and Tim Middleton, Eds. Writing Englishness 1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity. London: Routledge, 1995.
Macdonald, Dwight. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” In George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Jeffrey Meyers. London: Routledge, and Boston: Kegan Paul, 1975.
Newsinger, John. Orwell’s Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Orwell, George. The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 9: Facing Unpleasant Facts, Volume 12: A Patriot after All, and Vol. 18: Smothered under Journalism. Ed. Peter Davison. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1998.
Porter, Henry. “England, Our England.” Guardian, 28 July 1993, sec. 2, pp. 2-3.
Stevenson, John, and Chris Cook. The Slump: Society and Polítics during the Depression. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
Thomas, Hugh. The Spanish Civil War. 3rd ed. Harmondsworth: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.