Caroline Crampton
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war.
The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk.
You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the news of the world.
Roast beef in Yorkshire, or roast pork and applesauce, followed by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany brown tea.
have put you in just the right mood.
Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant.
In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
This isn't the opening of a detective novel from 1932, although you could be forgiven for thinking so.
This is George Orwell writing in 1946, conjuring a cosy atmosphere ideal for the reading of horrible murder stories.
His pipe-smoking householder is buried in a tabloid newspaper, not a murder mystery novel.
But nonetheless, Orwell's critique of post-war media consumption about crime has plenty to tell us about detective fiction in the first half of the 20th century too.
Let us consider, then, the decline of the English murder.
Orwell's essay, Decline of the English Murder, was published in Tribune on 5 February 1946.
The Second World War had not been over a year, and the author was enjoying one of the most successful moments in his career to date.
Animal Farm had been published in the UK the previous summer and was forthcoming in the US.
The novel's huge success had led to a renewed interest in Orwell's writing, and 1946 was an especially prolific year for him.
As his title would suggest, Orwell's subject in this essay is murder, specifically what he calls our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, defined as being roughly between 1850 and 1925.