George Orwell's life and work pose a challenge to those who would seek to explain what appear to be some very fundamental inconsistencies. He was an Old Etonian who made a career of slumming with the lowest of the low; a political intellectual who aggressively disdained all political intellectuals; a champion of clear prose who never managed to explain clearly his own idiosyncratic political stance; and a self-avowed socialist who wrote an iconic indictment of totalitarian dystopia during the cold war. Orwell has come to be acclaimed as a preeminent public moralist, yet he had helped assemble blacklists of communist sympathizers for the MI5.

Robert Colls is far from the first to try to tackle this intriguing bundle of contradictions, but his study offers a most compelling attempt to resolve it. This is not a conventional biography, nor a literary critique of Orwell's work. Instead, Colls writes a penetrating historical exploration of Orwell's political imagination and the distinctive position it occupied within the political culture of mid-century Britain. As such, the book deftly mixes dense analysis of the context and meanings of Orwell's writings with incisive, sometimes whimsical, commentaries that testify to Colls' own comfortable familiarity with both the low and high cultures of the day. Orwell would have enjoyed this good read.

By the mid-1930s, Orwell had pledged himself both to socialism and ordinary people. Yet he had very fuzzy notions of either cause. After his one visit to observe the northern working class in its native habitat in Wigan, he had declared the working man to be the guardian of the future. Yet Colls cannot help but note Orwell's lack of familiarity with the workers, or his continued inability to accord them any real sense of agency in his own documentary and fictional writings. The Road to Wigan Pier is Orwell's bitter outcry at the conditions endured in the devastated industrial north. But it is also famously as much about Orwell's struggle with his own class prejudices (and those he attributes to other socialist intellectuals), as it is about his ostensible subjects themselves. As Colls notes, Orwell managed to stay in Wigan only a little more than a couple of weeks, befriended no one, and focused almost exclusively on an ethnographic account of unemployment, poverty, and work in the mines. What he seems to have missed almost entirely were the working-class culture and autonomous institutions that had helped sustain their lives for generations. As Colls puts it irreverently, “Where was George Formby, Wigan's favourite son?”(56) Only as he was leaving did Orwell catch the eye of a young woman passing outside his train in a way that gave him his first sense of genuine human contact. Colls rightly suggests that such fleeting encounters (Orwell would not go north again) were scarcely enough to validate Orwell's unshakeable new faith in the working class as the moral core of the nation.

Orwell had perhaps an even more distant relationship with socialism. His common-sense definition of what really mattered in socialism—defined in The Road as “justice and common decency”(176)—was heartfelt, but painfully vague. Of course, he disliked abstract theorizing and did not bother to hide his distaste for either socialist intellectuals or their ideological fads. In a notorious passage in The Road, Orwell draws a savage portrait of middle-class socialists as sandal-wearing fruit-juice drinkers and vegetarian cranks, who only alienated the “genuine working man”(173–76). After returning from Spain in 1937, he embarked on a lifelong row with much of the British Left over both communist betrayal of the popular revolution in Spain and the oppressive nature of the Stalinist regime and Marxist ideology generally. During and after the war he came out strongly in support of Labor's welfare state (without much apparent interest in actual policy details), but he also began to write dire prophecies about the menace posed by totalitarian state socialism.

So what kind of a socialist was he? Colls finds the answer to the riddle of Orwell's politics in the latter's idea of “Englishness,” which he shows Orwell began to assemble shortly before and during the Second World War. The mature Orwell pledged his loyalty not to a party (though he supported Labor) nor to an ideology (though he called himself a socialist), but to his own blend of distinctively “English” history, customs, values, and, above all, shared experiences of the ordinary people. Applying the term in a typically loose manner to cover British virtues generally, Orwell's idea of “Englishness” was expressed partly in nostalgic essays about its material aspects (open fire, smoked kippers, ideal pub, nice cup of tea) but also in writing about what he considered to be essential strands of national culture rooted in the shared past, such as the English language, literature, common law, and Britain's conventions of tolerance, social solidarity, and comparatively gentle accommodation to timely reform.

Orwell sometimes came close to an almost Whiggish celebration of “Englishness,” but Colls shows that his was not the complacent liberal version, but far closer to a “Radical Tory” one, following in the dissident tradition of Richard Oastler and William Cobbett. Orwell raged against those forces that threatened the beloved “English” inheritance: at first, contemporary versions of “old corruption” and a selfish millocracy on the Right, but increasingly the menacing new ideologies and self-deceiving intellectuals on the Left. Although he sometimes called it a “revolution,” Orwell's goal was not to overthrow anything, but to protect the old values, though now with the workers (represented by the Labor party) in charge as the guarantors of the sense of fairness and common decency long since lost to the other social classes. In his political imagination, those things that mattered—truth, justice, and communal solidarity—lay not with the state or the higher classes but with the ordinary people, who alone still had an almost unthinking connection to the core values of their ancestral past. The most serious indictment in 1984, Colls suggests, is not that the “Ingsoc” regime had abolished Parliament or waged a never-ending war, nor even that it physically brutalized dissidents; it was that it had wiped out the people's identity by manipulating their language, memory, and history. The Orwellian dystopia, Colls explains persuasively, was really a modern Radical-Tory version of the old Burkean nightmare of a heritage severed.