Orwell the Journalist

Abstract This chapter provides a fresh assessment of Orwell’s stature and achievements as a journalist, from the vantage point of the twenty-first-century digital age. In this up-to-date context, and for the first time in international scholarship, a number of Orwell’s impressive strengths and influential contributions alongside a range of his shortcomings and oddities as a journalist are foregrounded and explored. Pioneeringly, Orwell’s journalistic oeuvre is refracted into literary journalism broadly to show specific forms of feature writing in which he excelled, such as reviews, reportage, and columns; the enduring influence of his obsession with politics and the English language, as well as his vigorous criticism of the popular press, are connected to contemporary mainstream journalism; his book-length journalistic works are problematized as transgressing genres, while classification of his news and feature writing—and even applicability of the term ‘journalist’ to him—are also demonstrated to be quite tricky; and his journalistic knowledge is shown to be integral to his two iconic works, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). This chapter argues, paradoxically, that, despite his political partisanship, expressed largely in the ‘alternative’ media sphere, Orwell is part of the DNA, as it were, of contemporary mainstream journalism and that, ultimately, he could be seen as a better journalist than novelist.