british essay

The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Orwell (1903-50) is known around the world for his satirical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , but he was arguably at his best in the essay form. Below, we’ve selected and introduced ten of Orwell’s best essays for the interested newcomer to his non-fiction, but there are many more we could have added. What do you think is George Orwell’s greatest essay?

1. ‘ Why I Write ’.

This 1946 essay is notable for at least two reasons: one, it gives us a neat little autobiography detailing Orwell’s development as a writer; and two, it includes four ‘motives for writing’ which break down as egoism (wanting to seem clever), aesthetic enthusiasm (taking delight in the sounds of words etc.), the historical impulse (wanting to record things for posterity), and the political purpose (wanting to ‘push the world in a certain direction’).

2. ‘ Politics and the English Language ’.

The English language is ‘in a bad way’, Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.

Orwell concludes with six rules or guidelines for political writers and essayists, which include: never use a long word when a short one will do, or a specialist or foreign term when a simpler English one should suffice.

We have analysed this classic essay here .

3. ‘ Shooting an Elephant ’.

This is an early Orwell essay, from 1936. In it, he recalls his (possibly fictionalised) experiences as a police officer in Burma, when he had to shoot an elephant that had got out of hand. Orwell extrapolates from this one event, seeing it as a microcosm of imperialism, wherein the coloniser loses his humanity and freedom through oppressing others.

We have analysed this essay here .

4. ‘ Decline of the English Murder ’.

In this 1946 essay, Orwell writes about the British fascination with murder, focusing in particular on the period of 1850-1925, which Orwell identifies as the golden age or ‘great period in murder’ in the media and literature. But what has happened to murder in the British newspapers?

Orwell claims that the Second World War has desensitised people to brutal acts of killing, but also that there is less style and art in modern murders. Oscar Wilde would no doubt agree with Orwell’s point of view!

5. ‘ Confessions of a Book Reviewer ’.

This 1946 essay makes book-reviewing as a profession or trade – something that seems so appealing and aspirational to many book-lovers – look like a life of drudgery. Why, Orwell asks, does virtually every book that’s published have to be reviewed? It would be best, he argues, to be more discriminating and devote more column inches to the most deserving of books.

6. ‘ A Hanging ’.

This is another Burmese recollection from Orwell, and a very early work, dating from 1931. Orwell describes a condemned criminal being executed by hanging, using this event as a way in to thinking about capital punishment and how, as Orwell put it elsewhere, a premeditated execution can seem more inhumane than a thousand murders.

We discuss this Orwell essay in more detail here .

7. ‘ The Lion and the Unicorn ’.

Subtitled ‘Socialism and the English Genius’, this is another essay Orwell wrote about Britain in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War. Published in 1941, this essay takes its title from the heraldic symbols for England (the lion) and Scotland (the unicorn). Orwell argues that some sort of socialist revolution is needed to wrest Britain out of its outmoded ways and an overhaul of the British class system will help Britain to defeat the Nazis.

The long essay contains a section, ‘England Your England’, which is often reprinted as a standalone essay, written as the German bomber planes were whizzing overhead during the Blitz of 1941. This part of the essay is a critique of blind English patriotism during wartime and an attempt to pin down ‘English’ values at a time when England itself was under threat from Nazi invasion.

8. ‘ My Country Right or Left ’.

This 1940 essay shows what a complex and nuanced thinker Orwell was when it came to political labels such as ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’. Although Orwell was on the left, he also held patriotic (although not exactly fervently nationalistic) attitudes towards England which many of his comrades on the left found baffling.

As with ‘England Your England’ above, the wartime context is central to Orwell’s argument, and lends his discussion of the relationship between left-wing politics and patriotic values an urgency and immediacy.

9. ‘ Bookshop Memories ’.

As well as writing on politics and being a writer, Orwell also wrote perceptively about readers and book-buyers – as in this 1936 essay, published the same year as his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying , which combined both bookshops and writers (the novel focuses on Gordon Comstock, an aspiring poet).

In ‘Bookshop Memories’, reflecting on his own time working as an assistant in a bookshop, Orwell divides those who haunt bookshops into various types: the snobs after a first edition, the Oriental students, and so on.

10. ‘ A Nice Cup of Tea ’.

Orwell didn’t just write about literature and politics. He also wrote about things like the perfect pub, and how to make the best cup of tea, for the London Evening Standard in the late 1940s. Here, in this essay from 1946, Orwell offers eleven ‘golden rules’ for making a tasty cuppa, arguing that people disagree vehemently how to make a perfect cup of tea because it is one of the ‘mainstays of civilisation’. Hear, hear.

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3 thoughts on “The Best George Orwell Essays Everyone Should Read”

Thanks, Orwell was a master at combining wisdom and readability. I also like his essay on Edward Lear, although some of his observations are very much of their time: https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/george-orwell-on-edward-lear/

The Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays (1200 pages !) is my desert island book. I like Shooting the Elephant altho Julian Barnes seems to believe this is fictitious. Is this still a live debate ?

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The Great Age of the English Essay

From the pens of spectators, ramblers, idlers, tattlers, hypochondriacs, connoisseurs, and loungers, a new literary genre emerged in eighteenth-century England: the periodical essay.  Situated between classical rhetoric and the novel, the English essay challenged the borders between fiction and nonfiction prose and helped forge the tastes and values of an emerging middle class. 

This authoritative anthology is the first to gather in one volume the consummate periodical essays of the period. Included are theSpectator cofounders Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, literary lion Samuel Johnson, and Romantic recluse Thomas De Quincey, addressing a wide variety of topics from the oddities of virtuosos to the private lives of parrots and the fantastic horrors of opium dreams.

In a lively and informative introduction, Denise Gigante situates the essayists in the context of the contemporary Republic of Letters and highlights the stylistic innovations and conventions that distinguish the periodical essay as a literary form.  Critical notes on the essays, a chronology, descriptions and a map of key London sites, and a glossary of eighteenth-century English terms complete the anthology—a uniquely pleasurable survey of the golden era of British essays.

About the Author

Denise Gigante

Denise Gigante teaches British Romantic literature, and poetry over a longer tradition. Her interests include poetic form and aesthetics, bibliomania and literary antiquarianism, gastronomy, the history and form of the essay, material print culture, and the mixed-media work of William Blake.

She is currently completing work on The Cambridge History of the British Essay, a monumental history the development of the essay genre by a global network of authors that includes her own chapter, “On Books: The Bibliographical Essay” She is also working to complete The Mental Traveller: William Blake, a study of Blake’s illuminated poetry in relation late Medieval and Renaissance Christian iconography and the literary tradition of Pilgrimage, in a heavily illustrated volume to be published as part of the Clarendon Lecture Series by Oxford University Press.

Her most recently published book is Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale University Press, 2023), a narrative experiment in literary history that explores different pockets of book collecting in mid-nineteenth-century America. The story is based on the sale of Charles Lamb’s antiquarian books—a quintessential book lover’s library—in New York in 1848.

She is also the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, (Harvard UP, 2011), Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on topics of interest from taste and gastronomy to book collecting and poetic form

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Of Travel by Francis Bacon

"Let him sequester himself from the company of his countrymen"

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

A statesman, scientist, philosopher, and author, Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the first major English essayist . The first edition of his "Essayes" appeared in 1597, not long after the publication of Montaigne's influential "Essais." Editor John Gross has characterized Bacon's essays  as "masterpieces of rhetoric ; their glowing commonplaces have never been surpassed."

By 1625, when this version of "Of Travel" appeared in the third edition of "Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall," European travel was already part of the education of many young aristocrats. (See the essay by Owen Felltham also titled "Of Travel." )

Observe and Keep a Diary

Consider the value of Bacon's advice to the present-day traveler:  keep a diary, rely on a guidebook, learn the language, and avoid the company of fellow countrymen. Also notice how Bacon relies on list structures and parallelism to organize a number of his recommendations and examples .

"Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language , goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen in the country where they go, what acquaintances they are to seek, what exercises or discipline the place yieldeth; for else young men shall go hooded, and look abroad little. It is a strange thing, that in sea-voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries ; but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation: let diaries, therefore, be brought in use. The things to be seen and observed are, the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to ambassadors; the courts of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of consistories ecclesiastic [church councils]; the churches and monasteries, with the monuments which are therein extant; the walls and fortifications of cities and towns; and so the havens and harbours, antiquities and ruins, libraries, colleges, disputations , and lectures, where any are; shipping and navies; houses and gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armories, arsenals, magazines, exchanges, burses, warehouses, exercises of horsemanship, fencing, training of soldiers, and the like: comedies, such whereunto the better sort of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets and rarities; and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable in the places where they go; after all which the tutors or servants ought to make diligent inquiry. As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings, funerals, capital executions, and such shows, men need not to be put in mind of them: yet are they not to be neglected."

Hire a Tutor

Overseas travel during Francis Bacon's time wasn't something just anyone could do, and without air travel, it wasn't something one did on a lark for a quick vacation, either. It took a lot longer to get somewhere, so once there, you were going to stay a while. In this section he advises travelers to have a tutor in the language or a servant who's been to the place before as a guide. Today this advice still can apply, though you don't have to hire someone to go with you. Maybe you know someone who's been to the country or city before and can give you dos and don'ts. You can have a travel agent put together an itinerary for you. When you get there, you can hire a local guide or find tours at the local tourism office. Bacon's point is to draw on others' knowledge of the place before you go, so you don't end up walking around blindfolded ("hooded") and not able to fully understand the place while you experience it.

Learning any of the local language that you can before you depart only helps you in the daily details of getting from point A to point B and finding the absolute essentials: food and drink, a place to sleep, and lavatory facilities, though Bacon was too genteel to point these items out specifically. 

Record Details of Your Experiences

Bacon advises people to keep a journal of what they see and experience, which is good advice as well. Trips last only so long, and memories of the finer details can fade. If you write them down, though, you'll be able to re-experience the trip later, through your first-impression eyes. And don't just write down a few things on the way over there and then drop it. Keep it up throughout your trip where you'll be seeing new things all the time.

See historical buildings where "courts of princes" or "courts of justice" took place. See churches, monasteries, monuments, town walls and fortifications, harbors and shipyards, ruins, and colleges and libraries. You might be able to see fencing demonstrations or horse shows, though nowadays you're likely not to run into many "capital executions." You can take in plays and attend talks, see artifacts, and do whatever other activities of interest your guide or friend recommended are "musts" for the place.  

Carry a Guide Book

In addition to hiring a tutor and keeping a journal, Bacon suggests using a guidebook to navigate new places. He recommends moving around as much as possible and cautions against staying too long in one area.

"If you will have a young man to put his travel into a little room, and in short time to gather much, this you must do: first, as was said, he must have some entrance into the language before he goeth; then he must have such a servant, or tutor, as knoweth the country, as was likewise said: let him carry with him also some card, or book, describing the country where he travelleth, which will be a good key to his inquiry; let him keep also a diary; let him not stay long in one city or town, more or less as the place deserveth, but not long: nay, when he stayeth in one city or town, let him change his lodging from one end and part of the town to another, which is a great adamant of acquaintance; let him sequester himself from the company of his countrymen, and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth: let him, upon his removes from one place to another, procure recommendation to some person of quality residing in the place whither he removeth; that he may use his favour in those things he desireth to see or know; thus he may abridge his travel with much profit."

Interact With Locals During Your Travels

Don't isolate yourself with your traveling group or people from your home country. Interact with the locals. Get recommendations from residents of the place you're visiting for what to see, do, and eat. Your travel will be richer when you follow advice from locals because you'll find places that you might not have otherwise found.

"As for the acquaintance which is to be sought in travel, that which is most of all profitable, is acquaintance with the secretaries and employed men of ambassadors; for so in travelling in one country he shall suck the experience of many: let him also see and visit eminent persons in all kinds, which are of great name abroad, that he may be able to tell how the life agreeth with the fame; for quarrels, they are with care and discretion to be avoided: they are commonly for mistresses, healths, place, and words; and let a man beware how he keepeth company with choleric and quarrelsome persons; for they will engage him into their own quarrels. When a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him; but maintain a correspondence by letters with those of his acquaintance which are of most worth; and let his travel appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse, let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories: and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country."

For a 17th century aristocrat, it was probably easier to make acquaintance with ambassadors' employees, but they didn't have travel agents or the internet, either, to find out about destinations. It's definitely good advice to be on good behavior while traveling, though.  

Learn From Your Experiences

Upon your return, as Bacon points out, your friends aren't going to want to hear you go on and on ad nauseam about your trip. Neither should you discard your previous way of life and completely adopt the customs of the place you've just returned from. But definitely do learn from your experience and incorporate knowledge and practices that you've picked up to make your life better—at home.

• Of Truth, by Francis Bacon
• "Of Studies" by Francis Bacon
• Definition and Examples of Formal Essays
• Of Discourse by Francis Bacon
• What Is Enlightenment Rhetoric?
• Francis Bacon on Youth and Age
• Francis Bacon: "Of Parents and Children"
• Comparison in Composition
• What is Classification in Grammar?
• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?
• E.B. White's Diction and Metaphors in 'Death of a Pig'
• On Rhetoric, or the Art of Eloquence, by Francis Bacon
• The Essay: History and Definition
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• Adverb of Emphasis Intensifier

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The best essay collections for proving how amazingly well-read you are

Hearing the word “essay” probably filled you with dread at school, because it generally meant you had to write one. Chances are, that’s changed. The best essay collections – by proper writers and critics, rather than students pulling all-nighters – aren’t just celebrated in the literary world. They’re kind of cool . The modern critic, dispatching sharp analyses of the social media age from their New York or Berlin flat, has become a cult figure.

Of course, the essay and the essayist long preceded the viral online article. The best writing in the tradition can be both inward- or outward-looking, but it has to have an inquisitive, speculative spirit – two of the books below have “suppose” in their title, after all. And, most importantly, the prose has to be faultless. Here’s our pick of the best essay collections, from undisputed classics to underappreciated gems.

For all Zadie Smith ’s talents and successes as a novelist, some in the literary world think her real strength is non-fiction. They have a strong case: Feel Free , Smith’s second essay collection, is full of superb writing. She’s razor-sharp at times, but also unafraid to confess genuine love and admiration for the subject at hand. The book and exhibition reviews are deft, but the highlights come with weirder subjects: a meditation on joy, in relation to ecstasy and British rave culture, and an improbable but brilliant comparison between Justin Bieber and the philosopher Martin Buber.

Glenn O’Brien – a friend of Madonna , Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a fixture of the Manhattan party scene for decades and surely one of the coolest men of the 20 th century. He also happened to be a phenomenal writer. Intelligence for Dummies is the only available collection of his work, which was published in a range of magazines including GQ . His acid, witty thoughts on politics, culture and style are still fresh decades after the events they describe. One essay on the Taliban blowing up religious images veers, masterfully, into O’Brien musing that America’s advertising billboards should be replaced with abstract paintings.

No essay list could omit the Sacramento-born master of literary non-fiction. Though Joan Didion’s books have become slightly overplayed signifiers of cool, their quality can’t be denied. The White Album , her second essay collection, is an obvious choice but the right one. All the cliches about the coolness and analytic power of her prose are accurate; so too is her reputation for getting to the core of 1960s counterculture, best seen in the masterly title essay.

Since its foundation in 2004, n+1 has established itself as one of America’s (and the Anglosphere’s) best literary magazines. This compilation, edited by the critic Christian Lorentzen, explains why that reputation is deserved. Highlights it picks out from the magazine’s early years include a polemic against exercise, a wry dispatch from the Miami party scene, and an examination of America’s warring literary cultures. The subtitle, “Say What You Mean”, sums up the dominant attitude of unpretentious intellectualism.

This compilation, co-edited by eminent New Journalist (and later novelist) Tom Wolfe, helped solidify the characteristics of The New Journalism: essentially, non-fiction with all the flashy prose and detailed characterisation of a novel. It provides a thrilling overview of the best magazine reporting from that era, and Wolfe’s introductory essay is very insightful too.

Along with Didion, the other obligatory feature for this list. Orwell is now best known for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm , but he spent far more of his writing career on non-fiction. This bulky complete edition of his essays is great to browse through. Sometimes Orwell’s wrestling with grand questions of geopolitics and English identity; other times, he’s outlining his ideal pub , or meditating on the tradition of rude postcards in England’s seaside towns. Though his style is famously unflashy, it’s never short of insight or humour.

‘Unflashy’ is a word not often in the vicinity of David Foster Wallace, though, whose essays are just as expansive as his novels. This is the first of his non-fiction collections, and it includes a few of his career highlights: an intense, borderline-hallucinatory account of his visit to the 1993 Illinois State Fair; an analysis of the life and philosophical predicament of a mediocre professional tennis player; and the title essay, his dispatch from a Caribbean cruise, which spawned an entire mini-genre of journalists going on cruises and being snarky about them.

This collection has a simple premise: each essay analyses a single sentence. The sources of those sentences range from centuries-old writers like Shakespeare and John Donne to modern ones like Hilary Mantel. Many of them are, funnily enough, from essays themselves, although one of book’s highlights comes when Dillon looks at a Vogue picture caption written by Joan Didion at the beginning of her career. (“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” Not bad.)

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, a couple years after James Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s since become one of the main books confirming his reputation as a pivotal 20 th -century writer. He’s eloquent and endlessly well-read, but the essays never feel airless – in fact, their dissection of race relations in America (and in Europe, where Baldwin spent much of his time) are often brimming with cold fury. Highlights include the title essay, about Baldwin’s dysfunctional childhood, and one about the very different cultural heritages of Black Americans and Black people in France.

Wonder why the cinemas are always filled with sequels and reboots? This book by the late Mark Fisher, one of the most influential cultural theorists of the 21 st century, explains why. Ghosts of My Life ranges over all kinds of terrain: Jimmy Savile, the electronic producer Burial, Drake , John le Carré, primetime British TV and more. Fisher’s overriding thesis – encapsulated in the term “hauntology” – is that culture has become too exhausted to imagine the future. Instead, we’re dogged by “lost futures” in the form of what old sci-fi imagined our world would look like.