The Oaken Bucket and the

Crystal Spirit: The Political Art of

G.K. Chesterton and George Orwell
Barry Druker

BARRY D R U K E R lectures in further education in Northampton,

England. He has completed a M.A. dissertation on Chesterton
and the Distrihutists and has since carried out other research
into British political thought of the 1920s and 1930s of which
this article is a by-product.

If you ask me whether I think the populace, especially

the poor, should be recognised as citizens who can rule
the state, I answer in a voice of thunder, "Yes". (Chester-
ton)!
What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary
people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule
of the old . . . if we alter our structure from below we
shall get the government we need. (Orwell)2

At the very end of 1928, a young English writer called Eric

Blair published his first article in an English language periodical
called G.K.'s Weekly. It was entitled " A Farthing Newspaper,"*
and was an account of, and an attack on, an attempt in France
to produce a nearly-free right-wing publication. "While the journal-
ist exists merely as the publicity agent of big business," he had
declared somewhat plaintively, "a large circulation, got by fair
means or foul, is a newspaper's one and only aim."^ His down-
to-earth style, as well as his taking up the cudgels against **big
business", one of the betes noires of Distributism, were no doubt

*The farthing was the smallest coin then in circulation in Britain,

worth one quarter of an old penny. The actual price of the news-
paper in France was ten centimes.

247
 The Chesterton Review

both reasons why this particular contribution was chosen for publi-
cation. And the young writer later went on to achieve much
greater prominence, both stylistically and politically, with such
published works as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. For
Eric Blair was, of course, the real name of the author, George
Orwell.
It would be a brave man who boldly asserted that there were
a great many similarities between the two great writers. It would
be a foolish one, however, who would deny that there were broad
parallels along which their political thinking tended to travel
usually in the search to turn such ideas and ideals as "liberty",
"justice" and "freedom" into actual reality. Interestingly, Orwell
found the time and space to denounce Chesterton in cold print
certainly not the first or last time that he had bitten the hand that
had helped to feed himas well as to attempt to satirise Chesterton
(and Belloc) in one of his novels.^ By then, however, he had
evidently taken a conscious decision to reject the "anti-capitalist,
agrarian, *Merrie England' mediaevalism" of the Distrihutists, after
having earlier told at least one friend that "what England needed
was to follow the kind of policies in G.K.'s Weekly.''^

If politics and literature make uneasy bedfellows in the Eng-

lish-speaking tradition, Chesterton and Orwell are almost unique
as writers in attempting to get chem between the sheets at one
and the same time. Orwell managed to intertwine the two themes
most successfully in a number of essays. In "Politics and the
English Language" (1946), for example, he wrote that: " I n our
age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. A l l issues
are political issues . . ."^ Again, in the same year, in "Why I
Write," he asserted that "no book is genuinely free from political
bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics
is itself a political attitude." It was also in this particular essay
that he gave one of his reasons for writing as being "political
purposeusing the word 'political' in the widest possible sense"
as "desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other
people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
It was Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
his two most widely-acclaimed books, which did this the most

248
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

successfully. CHesterton had certainly tried his hardest to do

exactly the same. His Distributist novels and other works, such
as What's Wrong with the World (1912) and The Outline of
Sanity (1926) were an analysis of, as well as a prescription for
countering, the "twin evils" of Capitalism and Socialism. G.K/s
Weekly was, moreover, a more regular commitment to the same
belief. Chesterton must surely have agreed, had he lived to read
them, with the sentiments expressed by Orwell in "Inside the
Whale," published (in 1940) when Britain was at war, in which
Orwell was severely critical of writers such as Henry Miller,
whose attitude of political "quietism" meant abandoning the stage
to the totalitarian dictators so that "freedom of thought will be
at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction"
and "the autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of
existence. "9

For much of his life, and for most of his career as a writer,
Orwell adhered to a political position that he described as "demo-
cratic Socialism". Here, he traced a direct line of descent from
"Utopian dreamers like William Morris and the mystical demo-
crats like Walt Whitman, through Rousseau, through the English
diggers and levellers, through the peasant revolts of the Middle
Ages, and back to the early Christians and the slave revolts of
antiquity."'olt is paradoxical, certainly, that the young G.K.
Chesterton was also a Socialistof sorts: albeit a "reluctant"
one, for the alternative "meant being a small-headed and sneer-
ing snob, who grumbled at the rates and the working-classes; or
some hoary horrible old Darwinian, who said the weakest must
go to the wall."^! As Orwell was later to write (though perhaps
with tongue in cheek): "Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Social-
ist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the
rather stodgy bait."'2 And here the paradox becomes more pro-
found. The young Orwell was by no means a Socialist and, indeed,
up to the time of his "conversion" on The Road To Wigan Pier
(1937), can best be described as the type of "Tory Anarchist"
which Chesterton undoubtedly exemplified in his Distributist days.i^

One of the earliest signs of Orwell's emerging, and then far

from Socialist, political consciousness can be seen in his first pub-

249
 The Chesterton Review

lished full-length work, Down and Out In Paris and London (1933),
and the debt owed not only to the later acknowledged William
Morris but also to the hkes of Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler. For
"what is work?" Orwell was to ask. A beggar puts in no less
effort than say, an accountant adding up rows of figures. Under
a Capitalist system, no one cared whether or not work was actually
useful or productive; the sole test applied was that it should be
profitable.^-* The expression of such sentiments can be identified
as a strong echo of the political thought and writing of those such
as Gill (and, indeed, John Ruskin before him), for whom work
was an empty activity unless it was also a source of meaning and
joy, so that the proper aim of society was to produce "fine works
and fine men."^^

"Money has become the grand test of virtue," wrote Orwell

in Down and Out,^^ as though deprecating a situation opposed
to that where, in the words of Gill, "the wealth of nations, as
of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and that the real
good of all work . . . depends on the final intrinsic worth of
the thing you make."'^ Also to be deprecated, most particularly
and definitely by Orwell's anti-hero and prototype "angry young
man," Gordon Comstock, in Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936),
was the undue emphasis and importance placed on money in the
modern, crass, commercial industrial world. It was no longer
"charity" that was the prevaihng virtue and, by rewriting St.
PauFs thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians
to keep apace with modern trends, you ended up with "faith,
hope and m o n e y . " H e might certainly have taken as an alter-
native Biblical text that "love of money is the root of all evil."
Now such ideas were not so very far removed from those of the
Social Credit school of writers who wrote in the New Age and
elsewhere, and whose similarity of beliefs to those of Chesterton
and other Distrihutists has been otherwise noted.

Many radical political thinkers of the earlier part of the

present century were to give at least a minor commitment of one
sort or another to the Socialist left. Eric Gill had been an active
member of the Fabians during that angry decade leading up to
the start of the First World War, and so had the two young

250
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

Chesterton brothers, Cecil and Gilbert himself. Yet the ideas of

mainstream Socialism came to seem almost as devoid of promise
to the truly creative thinkers as the Capitalism they railed against.
Those with a more visionary approach to the new tomorrow found
a greater attraction in more idiosyncratic paths that seemed to
offer a lot more to the world even if, in actuality, capable of
delivering less. Chesterton and Gill took the road to Distributism.
Like Hilary Pepler before him, the politically maturing George Or-
well was attracted to the small but influential Independent Labour
Party, the non-Marxist, revolutionary "conscience" of the Labour
left in Britain. It was part of the period during which, Orwell
was to note, "nearly every thinking man was in some sense a
rebel" and that "literature was largely the literature of revolt or
of disintegration."20

Both the young Chesterton and the politically immature Eric

Blair had this in common: they surfaced to political awareness
through a developing dislike of British Imperialism. " I knew little
of politics then," Chesterton admits in his Autobiography; but
he "saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the
street, my own middle class and most of my family and friends,
solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scien-
tific and secure"namely, the South African or Boer War of
the very early years of the 1900s. 2 1 And he suddenly realised
that he hated it. For the young Orwell it was a less sudden if
no less important conversion. For his role of Imperial policeman
in Burma on the Indian subcontinent brought him into eventual
and violent conflict with the better dictates of his conscience. This
was most forcefully expressed through his hero, Flory, in his first
published novel, Burmese Days (1935), where he talks of "the
lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of
to rob them" and the "everlasting sense of being a sneak and
a liar that torments us and drives us to justify ourselves night
and day."22 Orwell, like a Kipling in reverse, was to take the
road from Mandalay.
Orwell's journey to the industrial wasteland of the northern
English counties, to study at first hand the conditions of unem-
ployment and poverty in which many of the population subsisted

251
 The Chesterton Review

took, as its central theme in Wigan Pier, the very lifeblood of

industrial societycoal. His epic description of journeying down
into the bowels of a coal-mine has become one of the minor
classics of English literature. But Orwell was prepared to give
credit where it was due for the originality of the idea: "Our
civilisation, pace Chesterton," he wrote, "/s founded on coal."23
But Chesterton had also undertaken his own "journey", as des-
cribed in his book. Orthodoxy (1908), where he related his attempts
to work out a philosophy of life and "discovered England." Not
surprisingly, perhaps, this account has been compared with Or-
well's "pilgrimage to the industrial North of England."24 The
one found his way to the doctrine of the Christian church, but
the other arrived at a belief in democratic Socialism that was
far from being orthodox. Some little time after Wigan Pier Orwell
was also to discover England in his own way in The Lion and
the Unicorn.

Orwell went some way towards defining what he meant by

the term "democratic Socialism" in an essay written towards the
end of his life, "Towards European Unity" (1947), where his
vision was that of "the spectacle of a community where people
are relatively free and happy and where the main motive of life
is not the pursuit of money or power."25 i t was a vision inspired
by what the short-lived Distributist Party had summed up, more
than a decade earlier, as "the outstanding evils of modern society"
inherent in pre-War Capitalism, so that "in every country" there
was to be found only "dereliction and despair."26

There is no doubt that Orwell's analysis of current economic

and social problems ran for a long time along a parallel course
to that of G.K. Chesterton and other Distrihutists; monopoly
Capitalism had been the cause of such problems and conventional
Socialist ideas had yet to present a workable palliative. Where
Orwell's thinking diverged was in the solutions to be put forward
to end unemployment, poverty, homelessness and other basic
injustices. His passionate commitment was to the future of an
England which he thought should fight to radical, deep-seated
change, described by him as "revolutionary" {The Lion and the
Unicorn, 1941). In a memorable phrase, he likened the British

252
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

and their government to "a family with the wrong members in

control." For Britain was, in short, governed by "the rich, the
old and the silly,"27 and much would have to change, not only
if Britain was to win the war itself, but if the return to the social
and economic despair of the pre-War depression years was to
be averted.
After his brief membership of the I.L.P. (with which he
broke following the start of the warhe would have no truck
with their anti-militarist stance), he aligned himself with no politi-
cal party or other group^^holding, indeed, that it was a writer's
duty to do otherwise, so he could use propaganda as a tool but
not be its tool. In one of his regular journalistic pieces at this
time, his "London Letter to Partisan Review'" (a non-Marxist
periodical of the Left in the United States) he had written, in
the autumn of 1940: " I n the summer, what amounted to a revo-
lutionary situation existed in England." The opportunity had
come about, he believed, "to isolate the moneyed classes and
swing the mass of the nation behind a policy in which resistance
to Hitler and the destruction of class privilege were combined."
Unfortunately, there had been "no one to take advantage of it."28
The necessary and longed-for change in the "present social order
and economic structure," he thought, could only arise with "a
rapid growth in popular consciousness.9 But where, a less com-
mitted observer might have asked, was the evidence that any
political party or other mass movement seeking such change was
heading even in the right general direction to seize hold of the
levers of power? Barring a German invasion and a breakdown
in public order it seemed one of the least likely eventualities of
the war years in Britain.

It is possible that, to some extent, Orwell was himself the

victim of what he termed "transferred nationalism."3o He had
spent a fairly brief period in fighting on the Republican side in
the cauldron that was the Spanish Civil War, having intended to
spend his time there only as a political observer and chronicler
of events. His account of some of the fighting and other hap-
penings was Homage To Catalonia (1938). This makes clear that
he returned to the "deep, deep sleep of England,"^^ not only with

253
 The Chesterton Review

a bullet wound to the neck (which helped to shorten his life),

but with two other lasting impressions. One was of a permanent
hatred of totalitarian Communism. The other was of the blow
which had been struck for freedom and equality in the streets
of Barcelona^where "waiters and shop-walkers looked you in
the face and treated you as an equal," and where "servile and
even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared."
He admitted that there was much in it that he did not under-
stand and even, in some ways, that he did not like. But here was
a "belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of suddenly
having emerged into an era of equality and freedom" where
"human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not
as cogs in the Capitalist machine." And he recognised it immedi-
ately as "a state of affairs worth fighting for."^^

But such sentiments bespeak the romantic, idealistic, even

Utopian view of social transformation rather than the practical,
hard-headed approach of the pragmatic schemer. For, in truth,
it had not been possible to bring lasting change out of revolu-
tionary chaos, even in Catalan. And, worse, there were no well-
organised political cadres armed and ready to seize power in
London's streets as there had been in Spain. The Home Guard,
which Orwell spoke so highly of in his published "Wartime
Diaries"33 was, in reality, far from being the popular army and
nascent revolutionary force which he fondly imagined it to be
capable of becoming. Significantly, he was to find that the per-
meation of middle-class ideas was too great: the last thing its
part-time recruits wanted to see was the ending of class distinc-
tions. The Lion and the Unicorn had partly been a call for a
declaration of "war aims." Winning, in the sense of military
defeat of the Axis powers, was not enough. There had also to be
the promise of a better, more egalitarian, less unjust society which
would be "worth fighting for." It was not forthcoming or, at
least, came about only piecemeal as the military victory seemed
to be secure. 3 4

Orwell was no "revolutionary defeatist". He believed that

the military struggle alone was worth pursuing, since the alterna-
tive, a totalitarian. Fascist victory, was too horrible even to con-

254
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

template. Yet if he was also a firm believer that a "revolution"

in Britain was both necessary and desirable, he failed lamentably
to explain who or what was capable of bringing about such last-
ing change. Like Chesterton, his notion was of some deux ex
machina that would imbue the populace with the spirit to rid
themselves of their oppressions. The donkey, Benjamin, in Animal
Farm shaking off his flies was a metaphor adopted by Orwell to
show the innate power of the working classes and what they were
capable of achieving if only they realised their own strength.
Indeed, this attitude was the one very much like Chesterton ex-
pressed in The Secret People when he wrote of "the people of
England, that never have spoken yet."^^

There were other, more conscious, similarities between the

political thinking of the two writers, Chesterton and Orwell,
nonetheless apparent if the latter was sometimes given to deny
the credibility of the former. He had thus repudiated "what
Chesterton stood for," which he characterised as "a return to a
peasant society with a wide distribution of private property." And
added that, even in Chesterton's lifetime, " i t was perfectly obvious
that this was a hopeless programme."^^ By no means were "great
blocks of people" yearning to "step back into the middle ages."3s
Yet was this really the same writer who had concluded, after long
months of meticulous and painstaking research that: "One thing
that could be done and certainly ought to be done as a matter
of course is to give every unemployed man a patch of ground
and free tools i f he chose to apply them"? And had he not also
moralised that it was disgraceful that men who were expected to
keep alive on public assistance should not even have the chance
to grow vegetables for their families?^^ Orwell spoke warmly of
the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (a "revolutionary
organisation" which it was certainly far from being"intended
to hold the unemployed together"'*^). There is no evidence that
he had ever heard of such things as the Birmingham Land Settle-
ment Scheme, the Catholic Land Movement, or the writing of
leading Distrihutists like George Heseltine, all of which seriously
advocated farming and small holding as an alternative means of
livelihood for the long-term unemployed, These ideas and prac-

255
 The Chesterton Review

tical attempts at self-help were certainly closer to Orwell's own

thinking (as expressed above) than that of the N.U.W.M., whose
leader, Wal Hannington, expressly repudiated such forms of
action42even though, in Orwell's eyes, Distributism was a mori-
bund creed with a dearth of serious adherents.
Even so, the Orwellian attack on industrialism equals in vehe-
mence to any that could have come from the pen of Chesterton
himself or a dyed-in-the-wool "mediaevalist" like Arthur Penty:
Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines
tottered into motion, the British square stood firm under
the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of
the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pock-
ets; and this is where it all ledto labyrinthine slums
and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creep-
ing round and round them like blackbeetles. I t is a kind
of duty to see and smell such places now and again.43
"Socialists accept the industrial system as a foundation upon which
to build a perfect society" wrote Penty, in comparing them with
Distrihutists, who would "deny the possibility of erecting anything
of stability upon it."^^ A reasonable enough generalisation one
would think; yet such a contrast breaks down when a Socialist
of Orwell's ilk is considered. And, again, he was a far cry from
the more usual type of Socialist (certainly not in line with the
Fabian thinking of Shaw, Wells, and others), when he saw the
family as the integral group in modern society, which modern
society would abandon or even derogate at its peril:
They want to live near their work, but they want to
live in houses and not in flats. They want day nurseries
and welfare clinics, but they also want privacy. They
want to save work, but they want to cook their own meals
and not eat meals chosen by other people and delivered
in thermos containers. A deep instinct warns them not
to destroy the family, which in the modem world is the
sole refuge from the state, but all the while the forces
of the machine age are slowly destroying the family.
So they look on while our culture perishes, and yet irra-

Powys Evans's "Cornucopia of Trash" appeared in G.K:S Weekly

(March 21, 1935).

256
 The Chesterton Review

tionally cling to such fragments of it as the whitened

doorstep and the open fireplace. 4 5
In The Road To Wigan Pierthe second part of it, which
his publisher, Victor Gollancz, had wanted to suppress in favour
of the purely descriptive first partOrwell had attacked the
Socialist view of the virtues of machinery, as well as the Social-
ists themselves"that vision of the future as a sort of glittering
Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil [from]."46 Mechanical
progress in itself was not something to be welcomed with enthusi-
asm, he argued, andhereSocialists were often unable to grasp
that the opposite type of opinion could exist. And in a phrase well
worthy of C.B.T. Donkin, who wrote the Distributist League's
pamphlet on The Problem of Machinery, Orwell was of the
opinion that "There is probably no one capable of thinking and
feeling who has not occasionally looked at a gas-pipe chair and
reflected that the machine is the enemy of life."^^ Instead, i f such
a phrase had come from a Donkin, a Chesterton or a Father Mc-
Nab, it might well have been dismissed as an example of extreme
and frenzied mechanophobia. And it may come as some surprise
to those who have not read Orwell in depth before on this subject
to find that he concludedin opposing just such a possibility
that "the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the
human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle."^8
So Orwell was equally as antagonistic as Chesterton and his small
but vociferous band of Distrihutists to the Wellsian Utopia: "The
thought [Wells] dare not face," he declared, "is that the machine
itself may be the enemy."-^^

Where Orwell's thinking diverged markedly from that of the

Distributists was in his much greater willingness to compromise
many would say "come to terms"with the modern world. Thus,
"the machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to
accept it rather as one accepts a drugthat is, grudgingly and
suspiciously," for though "useful" it was also "dangerous and
habit-forming."5o He also regarded collectivisation, or centralised
control by the state, as more of a necessarily evil than many of
his political admirers have often admitted. He could thus write
in a wartime essay, "Notes On the Way," that ". . . Hilaire

258
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

Belloc, in his book. The Servile State, foretold with astonishing

accuracy the things that are happening now . . . . The only ques-
tion is whether [the collectivist society] is to be founded on
willing co-operation or the machine gun."si His was a caring,
humane type of Socialism that would provide the day nurseries
and the welfare clinics without the loss of privacy and, most
importantly, without the loss of the cohesion of the family.

It was, above all, the spirit of this type of thinking that was
to prevail in his best-known and almost final work. Nineteen
Eighty-Four. This painted a more than grim picture of a then
futuristic, nightmare world, where omnipresent television cameras
ended almost all possibility of seclusion and where young children
were encouraged to denounce their parents to the all-powerful
state as possible spies and traitors. He was to write, in a letter to
the American United Automobile Workers, that this was not
meant as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party,
but was simply intended to show what was capable of happening
if the "totalitarian ideas" which had "taken root in the minds of
intellectuals everywhere" were not eradicated.52 i t is perhaps little
realised that Chesterton's own anti-utopia novel. The Napoleon of
NOtting Hill (1904), was meant to inspire in the reader some of
the same alarmist fears and despondencies as Orwell's epic. Set
in London at the beginning of the next century, it depicts an
England whose government has become so totally bureaucratic
that a titular head of state is selected almost at random. Auberon
Quinn, like Orwell's Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, sets
out to throw a spanner into the works of the political machine,
a hopeless, futile individual gesture doomed to failure almost from
the start. Orwell's novel ends with Winston Smith awaiting death
after capture and prolonged torture; Adam Wayne, Chesterton's
other leading character in Notting Hill, perishes in the final battle
for "that which is large enough for the rich to covet" and "large
enough for the poor to defend. " 5 3 Both novels are essentially
concerned with what has been termed "the real stuflF of human
loyalties," where "the grand, large-scale, progressive intellectual
movements" of the time "ignored the human emotions and the
power of small local loyalties."^-*

259
 The Chesterton Review

There was certainly a deep, patriotic strain running through

much of the work of both Chesterton and Orwell. The one revealed
that directly in his essay "The Patriotic Idea" (in England: A
Nation), where he declared that patriotism meant "a defined and
declared preference for certain traditions and surroundings."^s
Orwell, in "England Your England" (in The Lion and the Uni-
corn), was to come to much the same conclusion some four
decades later in declaiming that "One cannot see the modern
world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength
of patriotism, national loyalty."56 Both also came to hold firmly
on to the view that patriotism and war were not bad in them-
selves, but, on the contrary, could be put to impeccable use, al-
though, like many other things, they were also open to abuse.

Chesterton's literary defence of the Boers in England: A Nation

was paralleled by Orwell's own anti-Imperialism, his calls for
Burmese and Indian independence, as well as his fighting for the
cause of Republican Spain (although on this issue Chesterton and
many of his political contemporaries tended to line up on the
other side). I t was in his thoughts on the "Spanish war" (as he
called it) that Orwell was to be found at perhaps his most roman-
tic and evocative. Amidst physical suffering and dire shortages,
where "meat and bread were scarce, tobacco a rarity, coffee and
sugar almost unobtainable,"^^ he could recall a pure, distilled
essence of goodness of humankind as represented by a militiaman
he had met at the time and whom he had fought alongside. "The
real issue of the Spanish war," he claimed, was whether "people
like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human
life," or "Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud?"58

The expression on the face of that soldierhopeful, trusting

and with a look of the utmost comradeshipOrwell called "the
crystal spirit," a phrase which later came to be applied to himself
by the anarchist writer, George Woodcock. ^ 9
. . . the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.eo

260
The Oaken Bucket and the Crystal Spirit . . .

Certainly, that "decent, fully human life" could be obtained

only where the State was the friend of the individual and not
its enemy, where governments were liberal and not totalitarian.
Like Chesterton, Orwell stood for a total rejection of what he
[Orwell] referred to as "the beehive state" or, even worse, "a
world of rabbits ruled by stoats."ei Like Chesterton, too, and
unlike many of his contemporary Socialists, Orwell also believed
that a turning away from many aspects of the glossy, mechanised,
too readily-packaged modern world would not come amiss
whether this was "the shiny, standardised, machine-made look
of the American apple"^or "the filthy chemical by-product that
people will pour down their throats under the name of beer."^
This sounds very much like a return to the "simple life" that
Chesterton and the Distributists espoused and which Orwell (like
some Distributists) actually practised for some years on his small
farm in Wallington, a Hertfordshire village. As a young man
Chesterton had argued for a much wider distribution of private
property and had said "the only step forward is the step back-
ward. "^3 As a boy, young George Orwell had decided that "you
are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the
right way up."^^ Perhaps he also later discovered that, para-
doxically, you notice more in this position. This would help to
explain why he turned so much of Socialist theory on its head.
Perhaps, like Chesterton, he also came to realise that the best
way to make progress was at times to turn your back on it. I f so,
then the child had indeed been father to the man.

1 G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man (London, 1950), p. 38.

George OrweU, "Shopkeepers At War" in The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941), (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 85.
3 Eric Blair, G,K,'s Weekly, December 29, 1928. The newspaper in
question was called the Ami du Peuple and, Blair revealed, so far from
being a small independent publication was actually owned by the proprietor
of the Figaro.
* See, in particular, Orwell's tirade against Chesterton in his "Notes
On Nationalism," written in May 1945, where he described G.K. as "a writer
of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his
intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda." (The Col-
lected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol, 3, As I please,
1943-45 [London, 1968], p. 365.) In one of his "As I Please" columns for the
periodical Tribune in June, 1944, Orwell also wrote that "Chesterton's vision
of life was false in some ways and he was hampered by enormous ignorance

261
 The Chesterton Review
[sic] but at least he had courage." However, he saved his real venom for
an attack, in the same article, on the journalists "Timothy Shy" (D.B. Wynd-
ham Lewis), and "Beachcomber" (J.B. Morton), whom he described as
"simply the leavings on Chesterton's plate." (Tribune, June 23, 1944.)
* George Orwell, a comment made to Kay Ekevall, quoted in Bernard
Crick, George Orwell: A lAfe (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 270.
George Orwell, Collected Essays (London, 1961), p. 148.
' George Orwell, Collected Essays, p. 422.
The Distributist League Manifesto (London, 1930), advertisement for
"The League." Moreover, the expression was widely used in Distributist
literature of the time.
^ George Orwell, Collected Essays, p. 157.
George Orwell, "What Is Socialism?" Manchester Evening News, Jan-
uary 31, 1946.
11 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London, 1937), p. 111.
w George Orwell, Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936), The Penguin Com-
plete novels of George Orwell (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 602.
13 Orwell applied this description to himself and later used it of Swift.
Professor Crick has commented that Orwell's "anti-authoritarianism and
anti-Imperialism too a Tory anarchist' form, rather than anything specifi-
cally or even latently Socialist at this time." (Bernard Crick, George Or-
well: A Ufe, p. 211.)
14 George Orwell, Do^(m And Out In Paris amd London (1933), The Pen-
guin Complete Longer Non-Fiction of George Orwell (Harmondsworth, 1983),
p. 124.
1 Eric Gill, letter to The Highway (February, 1911), in Walter Shew-
ring [editor] Letters of Eric Gill (London, 1948), p. 38.
1 George Orwell, Complete Longer Non-Fiction, p. 124.
1' Eric Gill, quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Eric Gill (New York,
1966), p. 58.
1 George Orwell, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Complete Novels,
p. 367. He also used this modified Biblical quotation at the beginning of his
novel, Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936).
i^> See, in particular, John L . Finlay, Social Credit: The English Origins
(Montreal and London, 1972). Eric Gill and Arthur Penty were both attracted
to the Social Credit school.
20 George Orwell, "Notes On the Way" (1940), The Collected Essays,
Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 2, My Country Right or Left,
1940-43 (London, 1968), p. 15.
21 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 113.
2 George Orwell, Complete Novels, p. 94.
23 George Orwell, Complete Longer Non-Fiction, p. 167.
24 Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton, Radical Populist (New York,
1977), p. 23.
25 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell, Vol. 4, In Front Of Your Nose, 1945-1950 (London, 1968), p. 371.
26 A Provisional Programme of the Distributist Party (London, 1933), p. 3.
27 George Orwell, "England Your England" in The Lion and the Unicom,
pp. 53.54.
2 George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 50.
29 George Orwell, "The British Crisis: London Letter To Partisan Re-
View, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 214.

262
The Oaken Bixket and the Crystal Spirit . . .
30 George Orwell, "Notes On Nationalism," Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters, Vol. 3, pp. 423-425.
31 George Orwell, Complete Longer Non-Fiction, p. 467.
3 George Orwell, Complete Longer Non-Fiction, pp. 304-305.
33 George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism amd Letters, Vol. 2.
34 For example, the Butler Education Act, 1944, and the Beveridge Re-
port {Full Employment In A Free Society) of the same year.
3 Benjamin may have been based on, and certainly bore a resemblance
to, the writer Arthur Koestler. "Benjamin . . . would say that God had given
him a tail to keep flies off, but he would sooner have had no tail and no
flies." Animal Farm (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 6.
36 "The Secret of People," Collected Poem^s of G.K. Chesterton (London,
1927), p. 157. Orwell also noted with approval in his Wartime Diary for Sep-
tember 17, 1940 that "the other day fifty people from the East End [London],
headed by some of the borough councillors, marched into the Savoy [a high-
class hotel] and demanded to use the air-raid shelter." {Collected Essays,
Journalism a/nd Letters, Vol. 2, p. 374.)
37 George Orwell, Letter to the Rev. Herbert Rogers, Collected Essays,
Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 102. This correspondence followed a pub-
lished review by Orwell of Golm Brogan's The Democrat At The Supper
Table.
3 George Orwell, Review of Golm Brogan's The Democrat At The Supper
Table, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 97.
39 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-Fic-
tion, p. 207. Orwell had also earlier suggested in Down and Out In Paris and
London that "each workhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen
garden, and every able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made
to do a sound day's work. The produce of the farm or garden," he added,
"could be used for feeding the tramps." {Complete Longer NonrFiction,
p. 147.)
4 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-Fic-
tion, p. 206.
41 See Unemployment: A Distributist Solution (London, 1928) for details
of the Birmingham land settlement scheme. Other examples of land settle-
ments in the 1930s under the auspices of the Catholic Land Movement are
outlined in the relevant issues of the periodical. The Cross and the Plough,
edited by the Birmingham Distributist, Harold Robbins. Heseltine was the
author of The ChangeEssays On The Land (London, 1927).
42 Walter Hannington, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (London,
1937).
43 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-Fic-
tion, p. 165.
44 A.J. Penty, Distributism: A Manifesto (London, 1937), p. 7.
45 George Orwell, Review of The Reilly Pla/n by Lawrence Wolfe in
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 4, p. 91.
46 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-
Fiction, p. 272.
4' George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-
Fiction, p. 273.
4 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-
Fiction, p. 280.
49 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-
Fiction, p. 281.

263
 The Chesterton Review
50 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-
Fiction, p. 281.
51 George Orwell, "Notes On The Way," Collected Essays, Journalism
and Letters, Vol. 2, p. 16.
52 George Orwell, letter to Francis A. Henson of the United States Auto-
mobile Workers, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letter, Vol. 4, p. 502.
53 G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), (Harmonds-
worth, 1946), p. 57.
54 Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist, p. 102.
55 G.K. Chesterton, "The Patriotic Idea" in Lucian Oldershaw [Ed.], Eng-
land: A Nation (London, 1904), p. 15.
56 George Orwell, "England Your England" in The Lion and the Unicorn,
p. 35.
57 George Orwell, "Looking Back On The Spanish War," Complete Long-
er Non-Fiction, p. 486.
58 George Orwell, "Looking Back On The Spanish War," Complete Long-
er Non-Fiction, p. 487.
59 George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell.
60 George Orwell, "Looking Back On The Spanish War," Complete Long-
er Non-Fiction, p. 488.
61 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-Fic-
tion, p. 289.
62 George Orwell, The Road To Wigan Pier, Complete Longer Non-Fic-
tion, p. 282.
63 G.K. Chesterton, Whafs Wrong With The World (London, 1912),
p. 292.
64 Jacintha Buddicom, "The Young Eric" in Miriam Gross [editor], The
World of George Orwell (London, 1971), p. 2.

This Chesterton drawing appeared

on the cover of the Novem-
ber 7, 1935 issue of G.K.'s
Weekly. The caption reads:
"Why should Labour
want the Red Shirt
or the Black Shirt,
when it can attain
the Boiled Shirt
at last?"

264