Indeed, the 30s were the dec­ade during which Orwell took up the task of amateur anthropologist, both in his own country and overseas. Sometimes attempting to disguise his origins as an educated member of the upper classes and former colonial policeman (he is amusing about his attempts to flatten his accent according to the company he was keeping), he set off to amass notes and absorb experiences. I mentioned earlier that his family background, the income of which depended on the detestable opium trade between British-ruled India and British-influenced China, had at first conditioned him to fear and despise the “locals” and the “natives.” One of the many things that made Orwell so interesting was his self-education away from such prejudices, which also included a marked dislike of the Jews. But anyone reading the early pages of these accounts and expeditions will be struck by how vividly Orwell still expressed his unmediated disgust at some of the human specimens with whom he came into contact. When joining a group of itinerant hop pickers he is explicitly repelled by the personal characteristics of a Jew to whom he cannot bear even to give a name, characteristics which he somehow manages to identify as Jewish. He is unsparing about the sheer stupidity and dirtiness of so many of the proletarian families with whom he lodges, and is sometimes condescending about the extreme limitations of their education and imagination.

The failure of The Road to Wigan Pier was partly attributable to a successful Communist campaign to defame it (and him) for saying that “the working classes smell.” Orwell never actually did say this, except in the oblique context of denouncing those who did, but his own, slightly wrinkled nostrils must have helped a little in the spread of the slander.

It may not be too much to claim that by undertaking these investigations Orwell helped found what we now know as “cultural studies” and “post-colonial studies.” His study of unemployment and housing for the poor in the North of England stands comparison, with its careful statistics, with Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, published a generation or two earlier. But with its additional information and commentary about the reading and recreational habits of the workers, the attitudes of the men to their wives, and the mixtures of expectation and aspiration that lent nuance and distinction to the undifferentiated concept of “the proletariat,” we can see the accumulation of debt that later “social” authors and analysts owed to Orwell when they began their own labors in the postwar period. We can also feel, in the increasingly stubborn growth of his egalitarian and socialist principles during these years, the germination of one of the most famous lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” From a detail in the life of the British coal miner—does he have the right to a cleansing bath at the pithead, and if so, does he pay for it out of his own wages and in his own time?—Orwell illustrates the potential power of the working class to generate its own resources out of an everyday struggle, but also to generalize that quotidian battle for the resolution of greater and nobler matters, such as the ownership of production and the right to labor’s full share.

Similarly, in North Africa, Orwell continued down the track on which he had begun when he declared his own independence from the British colonial system in Indochina. The sexual and racial implications of the exertion of colonial power he reserved for his first novel—Burmese Days—but he never lost sight of the importance of the economic substratum and, in his comparatively brief stay in Morocco, was also highly interested in the ethnic composition of the population and in such seemingly arcane matters as the circulation wars between the different language groups and political factions, as reflected in the sales of local newspapers. Again, though, one notices a certain fastidious preoccupation with the stench of poverty and squalor, including some pungent reflections on the discrepant scents of Jewish and Arab ghettos.