Life & Letters | 12 September 2009

Sad, but for the most part the newly published edition of Orwell’s Diaries is a bore. Not altogether, of course, but much of what is interesting — some of the wartime stuff — isn’t new, but has already appeared in the Collected Essays, Letters, Diaries etc. And what is new, the Domestic Diary, a record of the kitchen garden at his Wallingford cottage, isn’t interesting — though it may come to be so in time. I suspect that contemporaries would have found little of interest in Parson Woodforde’s journal, which nevertheless delights many today, with its picture of a vanished way of life.

Orwell, however, lacked the two things which make for a great diary: a keen interest in other people and their individual quirks, and an equally keen interest in himself. He is not much interested in gossip — except in the form of political rumours, which he was often a sucker for — and he is even less interested in self-examination.