7/30/2019 But who can resist, George Orwell

1/2

But Who Can Resist It? Tracing Orwells Collecting Project

from Burma to Oceania

Henk Vynckier

George Orwell, author ofAnimal Farm (1945) andNineteen Eighty-four(1949), was a

keen student of popular culture and passionate collector of boys weeklies, political and satirical

pamphlets, comic postcards, Victorian commemorative mugs, and generally any objects with a

curiosity value. In his oft quoted programmatic essay Why I Write from 1946, in which he

states his aim to turn political writing into an art, he calls attention to the world-view which

he acquired in childhood and confesses his lifelong passion for solid objects and scraps of

useless information. (Collected Works 18: 320) The same year, in an essay entitled Just Junk

But Who Can Resist it?, he reflects on his life-long interest in junk-shops and suggests that the

appeal of such shops is to the jackdaw inside all of us, the instinct that makes a child hoard

copper nails, clock springs, and glass marbles out of lemonade bottles. (CW 18: 19) He also

catalogues some of the objects worth looking for in the junk shops of London and concludes with

a story about a rubbishy shop which he has known for years in spite of the fact that it sells

nothing which he would ever be tempted to buy and, at the same time, he admits, it would be all

but impossible for me to pass that way without crossing the street to have a good look. (19) In

his great last novelNineteen Eighty-four, meanwhile, published three years later, he returns to

the collecting theme as the protagonist Winston Smith, an urban flneur and collector like his

creator, tries to construct a private sphere and reclaim his humanity with the help of beautiful

objects from the past such as an antique ladys keepsake and a crystal paperweight. In the

Oceania ofNineteen Eighty-four, however, information archives, the mass media and visual

culture in general are strategic resources and the creation of images and spectacles is ruthlessly

monopolized by the Party. Winston Smith, in consequence, is apprehended, tortured and taught

to love Big Brother.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to trace how Orwells fascination with

materiality and popular culture led him to become a passionate collector; and second, to examine

how this fascination worked its way into his writings from his first unpublished sketches to his

great last novelNineteen Eighty-four. This, in turn, will make possible a contextualization of

7/30/2019 But who can resist, George Orwell

2/2

the larger political agendas that drove Orwell throughout his life and help to solve a fascinating

riddle: why was Orwell able to resist the Comrade Napoleons and Big Brothers of this world, but

not junk?

Key words: George Orwell, collecting, materiality, popular culture, politics.