By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
George Orwell is among my favorite writers, top five maybe. His clear and unadorned writing style is one reason. You seldom have to read his sentences a second time to grasp their meaning. I also admire his decency and sense of fair play, which comes through in spite of his left-wing views. That said, there are times when his socialist leanings cloud his judgment.
His essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” written for the British magazine Horizon in 1940, is a case in point. It could have been written by what Orwell used to call a “parlour Bolshie,” one of the trendy leftists he spent much of his professional life denouncing for their disdain for the ordinary people of Great Britain.
Horizon published a response to Orwell’s essay by Frank Richards, a popular writer for one of the popular British boys’ weeklies that Orwell took to task. In my opinion, Richards carried the day, displaying an understanding of the healthy role that escapist literature — such as that found in the United States in the comic books and “Big Little Books” of the 1940s and 1950s — can play in the lives of young people, if written with a proper respect for traditional values.
Let’s take a look at Orwell’s position first. The boys’ weeklies he focused on were what people in England at the time called “penny dreadfuls”: pulp magazines such as Gem, Modern Boy, Magnet, Champion, Wizard, and Hotspur. He attacked them for giving impressionable British youth a world where the heroes are soldiers, explorers, detectives, and historical figures such as Robin Hood, where the “‘good’ boys are ‘good’ in the clean-living Englishman tradition,” where they “wash behind their ears, never hit below the belt, etc., etc.” and where “sex is completely taboo….Kissing, for instance, would be regarded as ‘soppy’.”
Beyond this, it was a world, Orwell continues, where “foreigners are funny,” where “Frenchmen are still Froggies, and Italians are still Dagoes,” Indians are “comic babus,” Chinese are “sinister, treacherous” men in pigtails, and Negroes “comic and faithful.” The assumption “is not only that foreigners are comics who are put there for us to laugh at, but that they can be classified in much the same way as insects.”
Even worse, Orwell continues, the boys’ weeklies provided young boys an inaccurate understanding of working-class life: “Nearly all the time the boy who reads these papers — in nine cases out of ten a boy who is going to spend his life working in a shop, in a factory, or in some subordinate job in an office — is led to identify with people in positions of command, above all by people who are never troubled by a shortage of money.”
Orwell agrees that adolescent boys have a need to read stories “about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears, and gangsters,” but deplores the manner in which these publications “wrapped it up” in “the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them,” leading boys to “the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism, that foreigners are unimportant comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last forever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is unintentional.”
Every “adventure story” gets “mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism.”
Frank Richards’ response? He is puzzled by Orwell’s complaint that “sex is taboo” in the boys’ weeklies. Richards thinks that is the way it should be.
“What would Mr. Orwell have? The Magnet [the magazine where Richards’ stories appeared] is intended chiefly for readers up to sixteen….Would it do these children good, or harm, to turn their thoughts to such matters? Sex, certainly, does enter uncomfortably into the experience of the adolescent. But surely the less he thinks about it, at an early age, the better. I am aware that, in these ‘modern’ days, there are people who think that children should be told things of which in my own childhood no small person was ever allowed to hear. . . . They fancy they are ‘realists,’ when they are only obscene. They go grubbing in the sewers for their realism, and refuse to believe in the grass and flowers above ground — which, nevertheless, are equally real!”
Score one for Richards, say I.
Richards sees no need to bring the “reality” of class warfare, of “strikes, slumps, unemployment, etc.,” into children’s literature. “It is true that we live in an insecure world: but why should not youth feel as secure as possible?” He asks what good it does a “boy of fifteen or sixteen…on the threshold life” to be told that “life is a tough proposition. Let youth be happy, or as happy as possible. Happiness is the best preparation for misery, if misery must come.” A poor kid “may, at thirty, get the sack — why tell him so at twelve?”
Orwell, Richards continues, would prefer this boy be “told that he is a shabby little blighter, his father an ill-used serf, his world a dirty, muddled, rotten sort of show. I don’t think it would be fair play to take his twopence for telling him that.”
Score two for Richards.
Richards also thinks that Orwell is wrong about the patriotic messages in the boy’s weeklies: “Now about patriotism: an affronting word to Mr. Orwell.” (Richards uses a famous passage from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado to makes his point.) “I am aware, of course, that the really ‘modern’ highbrow is an ‘idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own.’ But is a country necessarily inferior because it is one’s own? Why should not a fellow feel proud of things in which a just pride may be taken?”
Another one for Richards.
What about the caricatures of foreigners in these publications? Richards takes a position different from the one I would take. He argues that “foreigners are funny,” and points to the mass adulation of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini taking place in Europe at the time. I think this more a wisecrack by Richards than a serious response. I contend that it makes more sense to point out that everyone in the adolescent literature of that era was a caricature, not just the foreigners. I have never seen copies of the British boys’ weeklies that Richards and Orwell are discussing. But I was a big fan of the 1940s comic books and movies in this country that are also attacked for promoting caricatures of minorities and immigrant groups.
It is true that one could find shuffling blacks, organ-grinding Italians, and rowdy drunken Irish in these venues. Stepin Fetchit, J. Carrol Naish, and Victor McLaglen made a career out of playing these characters on the screen.
But there were also caricatures of the rich and the privileged: stuffy British lords, bombastic corporate bosses, stodgy Bible Belt matrons, glad-handing small-town boosters, spoiled rich kids — what we call “trust fund babies” these days. It strikes me that Orwell’s class consciousness, admirable in many ways, made him overly sensitive to the stock characters he found in the boys’ weeklies of his time, hypercritical, a peevish elitist, a bit of a sourpuss, in fact — what, in other contexts, he would have called a “parlour Bolshie.”
But I suspect that some of our readers may disagree. Fire away.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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