The Pen as Sword: George Orwell,H.G. Wells and Journalistic Parricide

Abstract

Between 1937 and 1945 George Orwell several times used the pen as sword to criticize the later writings of H.G. Wells. An investigation of the nature of Orwell’s criticisms, however, shows that they often appear paradoxical, acknowledging the influence of Wells on the formation of Orwell’s generation (and thus on Orwell himself), whilst condemning Wells for his idealism and lack of understanding of contemporary political reality. This article considers Orwell’s criticisms of Wells through a reading of both Wells’s and Orwell’s political writings of the 1930s and 1940s. It sees the two writers’ political visions as firmly grounded in the same critique of late-Victorian and Edwardian society (i.e. a Wellsian critique), but also identifies a sharp divergence in their thinking when addressing the totalitarian crisis facing Europe and the world between the two world wars. It concludes by not only revealing Wells’s and Orwell’s political differences, but also by noting the variety of political creeds which gathered beneath the umbrella of socialism in mid-twentieth-century Britain—an ideology which both Orwell and Wells claimed (with some justice) to advance.