George Orwell's Conrad

Abstract

With Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad was one of the writers most important to George Orwell, and it is significant that all three were known for their fiction about Eastern places and people. Orwell’s engagement with Conrad was lifelong, and in published articles, essays and letters, he mentions nineteen Conrad works. This essay is not so much a study of ‘influence’ as an attempt to observe some of the ways his reading of Conrad helped to clarify for Orwell the writer he himself needed to become. His response to Conrad as a writer about Oriental places and people, and as a political novelist, has an important bearing on his own practice, and through his reading of Conrad we can watch him struggling with questions of theme, attitude, and technique that confronted his own creative work. Finally, this essay looks at the case of the haunting presence of Conrad’s Lord Jim in the working notes for A Smoking-Room Story, the novel Orwell was planning in 1949, the last year of his life.