Orwell and Charles Dickens

Abstract This chapter, a consideration of Dickens’s literary importance to Orwell, falls into four parts. The first considers some biographical evidence of Orwell’s unwavering devotion to Dickens from the beginning to the end of his life. The second scrutinizes the unmistakable stylistic debt Orwell’s novels owe to Dickens’s. The third assesses Orwell’s major 1940 essay on Dickens and its impact on Dickens criticism. The fourth takes the phrase ‘common decency’ as the epitome of what Orwell valued in his favourite author. The chapter begins with minor biographical amplification of Peter Davison’s account of the ubiquity of Dickens in Orwell, looking at some bits of collateral evidence that go back to before the writing career, and forward to after it.