George Orwell | Typed letter signed, to Miss Amy Charlesworth, on Fascism and the Spanish Civil War, 30 August 1937

George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

Typed letter signed ("Eric Blair"), to Amy Charlesworth

responding to her further questions about the Spanish Civil War ("...Where the POUM, and you might say the Anarchists, different from the Government and the Communist Party, was in saying that Franco must be resisted not in the name of democracy as it exists in England, France etc., but in the name of workers' government..."), discussing the nature of Fascism, the likelihood of a Nationalist victory in Spain, and concluding with his fear of a coming European war ("...the next thing we know we shall find ourselves fighting another imperialist war (against Germany) which will be dressed up as a war 'against Fascism' and then another ten million men will be dead before people grasp that Fascism and so-called democracy are Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."), with brief autograph postscript at the head, 2 pages, 4to, The Stores, Wallington, Nr Baldock, Herts, 30 August 1937, weak at folds, nicks at edges, rust mark from paperclip

[with:] photocopy of letter by Charlesworth to Orwell, 6 October 1937, with stamp of the George Orwell Archive, UCL

"...It is quite true that we ought all to combine against Fascism, but then one has got to decide that Fascism is. If Fascism means suppression of political liberty and free speech, imprisonment without trial etc., then the present regime in Spain is Fascism..."

This is a second letter by Orwell to Charlesworth, explaining further how his experience of Stalinism in Spain had changed his political thinking (see previous lot). He here also expounds his deep pessimism about capitalist democracy, and his fear that the coming European war would prove to be a war of imperial gain dressed as a war against Fascism.

Charlesworth's reply to Orwell shows that she continued to be an eager student who took his political insights with a deep seriousness. She also reveals, unprompted, much more detail about her personal situation, hoping Orwell would not be "revolted by my frankness". She was 33 with two children and separated from her husband: they had married when she was sixteen and proved to be "absolutely & completely incompatible". She was currently in Manchester training to be a health worker, deeply conscious that early motherhood and unhappy marriage had left her with few educational opportunities, and evidently with a fervent wish to understand better the political causes of the poverty and misery that she saw around her in 1930's Britain.

LITERATURE

The Complete Works of George Orwell: Volume 11 (1998), pp.76-77