Eric Blair began by taking the name of England’s patron saint and ended up assuming his role. 1984, when it finally arrived, was the year of St George. This way of putting it risks understating the sheer scale of Orwell’s celebrity, the worldwide currency and talismanic power of his name since his death in 1950, at the age of 46. But it recalls attention to what many have said about him over the years, usually in sympathetic or admiring tones: that in him Englishness was not merely one provenance among others but a touchstone, a matter of moral constitution. Thus, Rob Colls’s intellectual portrait George Orwell: English Rebel joins an already substantial body of commentary—his introduction lists some twenty predecessors, who themselves are only a sub-set of the much larger corpus of writing devoted to the man, the works and their afterlife. Where he differs from these is in his particular interest in Englishness, which has been his speciality as a historian over the past thirty-odd years. That too has been a busy field, and the result is a book of conspicuous learning, more than a quarter of its length given over to the scholarly apparatus. It is also, within its simple chronological scheme, a digressive book, here taking off to explore some aspect of a general situation, there pausing over some circumstance or consideration, as if wanting to find room for everything. In this, Colls is faithful to his general understanding of Englishness as a historical formation: the title of his principal work on the topic, a loose-limbed discussion ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, is an awkward, telling epitome of his position. Identity of England (2002) finds its form by negation of the more obvious and fluent phrasings to hand in the book itself. (Omit the essentializing or stipulative The . . . while avoiding an easy, evasive plural or the deceptive calm of English Identity: national character is a singular not a plural, yet indeterminate and changeful.) Colls’s understanding of Orwell is of a piece with this. ‘I am not saying that Englishness is the key to Orwell . . . There is no “key” to Orwell’, he writes in his Introduction, ‘any more than he is a “box” to open.’ But then, in a parting sentence whose placing and manner are worth noting for later consideration: ‘His Englishness, though, is worth following through.’

This is the optic through which Colls reviews the familiar course of Orwell’s life: private schooling and service in the Imperial Indian Police (1922–28); the rejection of Empire and return to England with the aim of becoming a writer; living hand to mouth in Paris, hop-picking and tramping in the South of England, a self-styled Tory anarchist discovers the poor (1928–31); the early novels and the decisive encounter with the North of England working class (1932–36); a socialist fighting in Spain, fighting at home, against fascism, Stalinism and war (1937–39); the herald of revolutionary patriotism (1940–43); the fabulist of political betrayal (1943–50). The turning-point in the sequence comes in 1936, and its significance, as Colls reads it, is that during his two months of fieldwork for the publishing commission that became The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell ‘for the first time in his life found an England he could believe in’, a popular, proletarian Englishness that would serve him as a political stimulus and test from then onwards, inspiring his wartime advocacy of revolutionary patriotism.

The test applied in two ways. It served to justify Orwell’s unrelenting campaign against the left intelligentsia, whom he portrayed as a menagerie of grotesques, rootless eccentrics with a fatal weakness for abstraction and hard-wired doctrine, gullible in the face of Soviet boosterism and nihilistic in their attitude towards English institutions. Colls relays these themes in a kindred spirit, as contemptuous as Orwell if not so inventively abusive in his treatment of abstractions, systems, ‘set-squares and equations’, dogmas asserted in disregard of personal experience and what is ‘reasonably assumed to be the case’—everything that is suggested to him by the word ‘ideology’. However, he goes further and applies the test to Orwell himself. The ‘ludicrous’ anti-intellectualism, as he sees it, was at least in part a projection of the feelings of deracination that Orwell recognized and feared in himself. The Gordon Comstock figure in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, from 1935, the year before the journey north, can be read as George Orwell’s mocking appraisal of Eric Blair the writer. The powerful appeal of the Englishness that he found in working-class Lancashire and Yorkshire lay in its promise of belonging. But this Englishness was itself sustained and made articulate by the organizational form and culture of the labour movement, its unions and their party—which, until late in the 1930s, seemed not to feature in Orwell’s political perception and reasoning.

Colls’s political meridian is 1945. He concedes the ineffectuality of Labour in the later 1920s and 1930s, dismisses its purely gestural policy towards the Spanish war, and has bitter words to say about the party of recent times; but the upward path from the promulgation of the Immediate Programme in 1937, across the popular radicalization of wartime to the landslide victory in the first summer of the European peace, is numinous. Orwell’s outlook was quite different. Colls chooses to make nothing of it, but The Road to Wigan Pier concludes with a call for the formation of a popular socialist movement based on an expanded conception of the working class (including non-manual occupations) and ready to resort to ‘revolutionary’ violence in the struggle against fascism, which Orwell saw as an inherent potential of industrial capitalism. His leading slogan, Justice and Liberty!, echoed, perhaps not accidentally, the name of the Italian resistance organization led by Carlo Rosselli, the theorist of ‘liberal socialism’ and soon a volunteer in the anarchist militias in Spain. It was an eclectic scheme, coming after Orwell’s philippic against left intellectuals and owing much to his experience of the marxisant circles of the Independent Labour Party, in which he had moved for several years. Certainly there were better-judged assessments of impending probabilities. But it stands as a vivid indication of Orwell’s imaginative distance from the official thought-world of the Labour Party.

Colls is correspondingly qualified in his attitude towards Orwell’s Spanish period, both the fighting itself and the polemical episode that followed back in London, including Homage to Catalonia. He hates Stalin’s Comintern quite as much as Orwell came to hate it, but has no positive political sympathy with the revolutionary militiamen of the poum. He applauds the achievements of Rojo’s centralized army and, resisting Orwell’s claim that the Republic was turning ‘fascist’ in its slanderous, brutal assault on the revolutionary left, defends the Negrín government for its realism and competence in desperate circumstances. Orwell eventually reconsidered the poum’s thesis that defence of the Spanish revolution was a condition of winning the war, but only after a period of years during which, in starkest contrast, he held on to it as a truth of wider application—in Colls’s words, seeing ‘Spanish lessons as English lessons’. That is to say, rather, that errors abroad gave rise to errors at home, as Orwell the anti-fascist persisted in his belief that the European war now threatening, like the one twenty years past, would be a strictly inter-imperialist conflict, which the left should oppose on principle.

War came; Orwell resigned from the ilp and volunteered for active service, eventually finding roles in the Home Guard and the bbc Empire Service India Section. Now the incompatible urges of the past two years were resolved, Colls tells us; ‘Orwell’s great reconciliation with England, his England’, begun in Wigan in 1936, would soon be complete. The defining work of this period was The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, which reinvented the strategy of the poum on the terrain of the national war effort, arguing that only a socialist revolution could make good the failings of capitalism and Britain’s political elite, creating the psychological and material conditions of success in the struggle against fascism. The great difference in this case was the centrality of the idea and imagery of nationality. The English were a family, but one ‘with the wrong members in control’, Orwell wrote. The revolution would be ‘fundamental’, pressing far beyond what he called the ‘timid reformism’ of the Labour Party, but not less English in its means and outcomes because of that. For England—it is always England, not Britain—is, in Orwell’s own words, ‘an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.’ Colls expresses his warm admiration for Orwell’s statement of the national theme but is quick to lodge a claim on behalf of the Westminster parliament for its role in forwarding the revolutionary programme, and likewise to claim him as a supporter of the Attlee government for the rest of his life.

The culminating moment was short-lived. By the later 1940s, and arguably sooner, Orwell’s English preoccupations had been overlaid by international politics, above all the geopolitics of the new Cold War. In this rather more than in other respects, Orwell was indeed at one with the Labour government, seconding Bevin’s foreign policy and going so far as to grant the Foreign Office’s propaganda unit—in secret—the benefit of his political assessment of fellow writers. Anti-Communism had been a constant in Orwell’s political thinking since 1935 (the dating is his own) and now it was assuming a new and inescapable objective significance. This, whatever Orwell may have intended and however dismaying to him the upshot, was the conjuncture into which Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) were released. The earlier of the two novels, in Colls’s reading, offers a radically pessimistic assessment of both the traditional working class and the new middle class, the teachers, technicians, journalists and other non-manual workers who had long been central to Orwell’s vision of a popular socialist bloc. His beast fable does not say why the animals allow themselves to be robbed of their gains or why the pigs act as they do. It all unfolds as if to show that nature will out. This satire on the Russian Revolution, as Orwell described it in one of his several statements of purpose, is also, in Colls’s estimate, ‘against revolutions in general’. Nineteen Eighty-Four, it might be said, projects the outcome of one revolution in particular: the one announced in The Lion and the Unicorn. The novel ‘envisages the end of England’, the name, the history, the identity and the language. What survives of Englishness is to be found among the proles, from whom, however, the Party has now abstracted itself entirely, creating a parallel reality. The O’Brien figure is intellectuality taken to its anti-English extreme of ‘idealist solipsistic nonsense’. Colls does not quite say as much, but the inference to be drawn is that, in the end, the fundamental opposition in Orwell’s political imagination was England versus Communism. Speculating on the futures that the novelist of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not live to define for himself, he writes: ‘the signs are he would have been a Cold Warrior’. By 1949, the signs were he already was.