He saw it all

Apart from a passionate relationship with the common toad, what do George Orwell and David Attenborough have in common? H.G. Wells is the answer. The self-consciously ‘great’ old man’s bad, yet gripping, writing about utopias profoundly influenced Orwell. And Attenborough, as a lad, was entranced by Wells’s extravaganza A Short History of the World — biology, space science, archaeology, the past and the future, all delivered for children in digestible weekly parts. Attenborough said he derived from it the idea that you ought to know about everything. This ambitious lack of boundaries that they received from Wells liberated both men.

As Dorian Lynskey points out in this idiosyncratic and acutely written ‘biography’ of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, (written to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the book’s publication in June 1949), it was Wells’s cheery dedication to progress that Orwell needed — in order to react against it. Orwell asked in 1943: ‘Is there anyone who wants to live in a Wellsian utopia? … not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms has become a conscious political motive.’

Improbably, the Orwells asked Wells to dinner. The other guest, the startled poet William Empson, who had met Orwell for the first time the day before, watched aghast as it became clear that Wells had read Orwell’s essay ‘Wells, Hitler and World Civilisation’ in Horizon, the classy thinking magazine of the decade, which claimed that Wells was ‘too sane to comprehend the modern world’ and that he had been squandering his talents since 1920. Lynskey points out that Orwell was proud of his ‘intellectual brutality’ and that knowing people never compromised his reviews. The argument ended with the two men squaring up with rolled-up copies of Horizon.