Object lesson | 6 September 2018

‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,’ wrote George Orwell in his preface to Animal Farm.

It is a line that has gone down as one of the great capsule defences of dissent, made all the more prescient by the fact that the preface, an attack on the self-censorship of the British media during the second world war, wasn’t published until the 1970s.

But the lines that follow it are too often overlooked. ‘The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it,’ Orwell goes on, ‘it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect’.

When we think of dissent today, we think of the intellectuals, the liberals, the learned revolutionaries, the cultivated minds willing to ‘speak truth to power’ against state tyranny or the tyranny of the mob. We think, most often, of those who attacked the establishment from within it.

To its credit, I object, a new exhibition at the British Museum, co-curated and fronted by Private Eye editor and satirist Ian Hislop (a man as much of the establishment as a thorn in its side), reminds us that the irreverent, rebellious instinct was never limited to those of good education and supposedly superior breeding. The history of dissent is as much about the rabble as the rabble-rouser.

In a similar fashion to former British Museum director Neil MacGregor’s much-celebrated 2010 book and Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, Hislop tells his global potted history of dissent through a series of objects and artworks — large and small, familiar and unfamiliar — gleaned from the museum’s enviable archive.