The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius

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a b c I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 442-3. George Orwell’s war-time call to change, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, was published on February 19th, 1941. On this February 19th, Dr Philip Bounds, author of Orwell and Marxism and an Orwell Society member, takes a look at Orwell’s book, paying particular attention to its first part, ‘England Your England’. One thing which is worth mentioning is that he hates Communists and Marxists in general only slightly less than he hates fascists, partly because they’ve tainted socialism in the eyes of a great many otherwise well-meaning people. Orwell is a good writer and writes with a forceful confidence which is impressive when he’s making a prediction or a statement on something true or revealed to be true and is not impressive when he’s bullshitting.

The Lion and the Unicorn: An Anniversary Commemoration The Lion and the Unicorn: An Anniversary Commemoration

The Lion and the Unicorn should be read alongside Animal Farm, the allegory of revolution betrayed, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the warning of revolution subverted, as the statement of what revolution could or should be. They form a triptych of Orwell’s political credo, and the ideas are interlinked. For example, the most chilling phrase from Nineteen Eighty-Four, the metaphor of humanity’s future being ‘a boot crashing down on a face’, appears first in The Lion and the Unicorn. Another Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker says the book represents ‘a distillation of Orwell’s thinking over the previous quarter of a century’, or in other words since he left the Burmese police. It certainly crystallises Orwell’s politics formed after his experiences in Spain in 1936-7, after which everything he wrote was ‘against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism’ in purpose, and ‘to make political writing into an art’ by design. The English Revolution - The argument is made for an English democratic socialism, sharply distinct from the totalitarian communism of Stalin. Orwell gives a sweeping trenchant review of the current political scene in England then in 1941. All the parties of the left are incapable of reform, the Labour Party most of all since it is the party of the trade unions and therefore has a vested interest in the maintenance and flourishing of capitalism. The tiny communist party appeals to deracinated individuals, but has done more to put the man in the street off socialism than any other influence. The Lion and the Unicorn Socialism and the English Genius With the Introductory Essay 'Notes on Nationalism' Orwell is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945) — they have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author. His 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with numerous essays on politics, literature, language, and culture, have been widely acclaimed. Down and Out in Paris and London. Homage to Catalonia. Selections from Essays and Journalism: 1931 - 1949. Including Such, such Were the Joys. The Lion and the Unicorn. The road to Wigan Pier. Complete & Unabridged.

Find out about the latest Fabian Society research, publications and events with our regular updates Sign up today Fabian Society But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire. Orwell singles out the “middle class intelligentsia, the type who has ceased to love his own country but still feels the need of patriotism, and therefore develops patriotic sentiments towards Russia.” He denounces the “nineteenth century doctrine of the class war” and its adherents who “continued year after year to preach this out-of-date gospel and never drew any inference from the fact it got them no followers.”

The Lion and the Unicorn - Penguin Books UK

Even Churchill realised that to win the war, the forces of modernity must be mobilised and the whole nation given a single purpose. You needed radar and Mulberry harbours, not bayonets and horses. The people were patriotic. As Orwell described, when Anthony Eden called for volunteers for the Local Defence Volunteers, a quarter of a million men reported for duty in the first 24 hours. But they wanted more than victory over the Germans. Despite Churchill’s outdated references to race and Empire, the bulk of the population were with Orwell, seeing the war as the means to a better future, without dole queues, slums, and soup kitchens. When Labour invited them to ‘win the peace’ in July 1945, the heirs to Nelson and Cromwell did so in record numbers. Those that had queued for jobs in the 1930s and queued to join the army in 1940, queued at the ballot box in 1945. The revolution, when it came, was peaceful and democratic, and its sounds were the trundle of prams bearing babies full of milk, not tumbrils en route to the guillotine. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. He was a prolific polemical journalist, article writer, literary critic, reviewer, poet, and writer of fiction, and, considered perhaps the twentieth century's best chronicler of English culture. As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Beat that for an opening line.Orwell also repudiates the pre-war Labour party itself, which he says stood for a ‘timid reformism’, had ‘degenerated into a Permanent Opposition’, dominated by docile trade unions. He was no fan of Clement Attlee. Orwell left the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1939 because of its pacifism, but aligned only with the Labour Tribunite wing of Foot and Bevan rather than the Labour party as a whole. This, it is worth saying, was the original, radical Tribune, not the fan-club newsletter currently bearing the same title. The same can be said of The Lion and the Unicorn. The first sentence, written in the present tense, conveys the urgency of his argument. He believes ‘anyone able to read a map knows we are in deadly danger’ and the answer is straightforward, if paradoxical: “We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.”