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George Orwell: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

As an aspiring essayist, it shames me to admit that I have only recently become familiar with the narrative and critical essays of  George Orwell . While I have read his manifesto on clear writing,  Politics and the English Language , I remained ignorant on the bulk of his work until a chance meeting with a shelf in a very comfortable section of the library.

It was a joy to discover for the first time, Orwell’s quietly devastating account of time spent at a London workhouse in  The Spike , his reflections on the ugly facets of colonialism in  Shooting an Elephant , and his comment on the futility of vengeance, distilled into one waxy yellow face, in  Revenge is Sour . Whatever the subject matter, Orwell had a knack for getting to its root with a concrete metaphor or an unforgettable statement. As an essayist, there is no greater skill than to be able to convey exactly what one intends, vividly and without doubt. For this is the writer’s truth, and Orwell spoke it as well as anyone.

Nature appreciation was not something I associated with Orwell, yet the more of his essays I read, the more I got the sense that the man, especially in his later years, harboured a profound fondness for not only his fellow men, but for other living things. In  Some Thoughts on the Common Toad , he managed to weave urban wildlife, politics, and personal post-war reflections together so seamlessly that I felt compelled to explore it as an Ekostory. The following entry looks not only at the ideas contained within the short piece, but also the skill in its construction. The entire essay, about 1,600 words in length, can be read  HERE .

Orwell’s Praise of the Neglected

Eyes akin to chrysoberyl. From wikimedia commons, by  Joxerra aihartza.

Orwell begins the essay by selecting the common toad as his personal herald of spring’s arrival. The prose in the introduction is exquisite, gains power when read aloud. I found myself mouthing each line as  David Attenborough  would narrate the script of a nature documentary:

“At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 214

It’s a lovely and intensely evocative passage. Orwell then proceeds to place the toad on a pedestal usually reserved for birds and flowers with a provocative statement:

“This allows on to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 214

Normally driven to write about societal injustices, Orwell speaks here in praise of a neglected denizen of the earth. His keen eye, usually used to detect and expose lies, reveals beauty in a creature generally detested and vilified. Nature is easy to love when it takes the form of a blushing rose or a soaring hawk. But here Orwell demonstrates that its ephemeral wonders exist all around us, even in a lowly denizen of the earth.

The Miracle of Spring

A trillium, a herald of spring introduced to me by one who was dear to my heart. From wikimedia commons, by  Paul Johnston .

After describing the toad’s mating habits (“intense sexiness” is a phrase I hope to work into my writing), Orwell returns to the arrival of spring in a post-war London and conveys its significance in one line:

“Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 216

The sentence’s simplicity belies its emotional and temporal heft. By capitalizing Winter, Orwell reinforces the image of an eternal season, unbroken, everlasting, a rigid time existing without possibility, freedom, and choice. His sentiment undoubtedly reflects the thoughts of many who lived through the war in constant fear and uncertainty.

It is in this context that Orwell describes the spring of 1946, the first post-war Spring, as a miracle. Release comes in the form of Nature, caring not of confident ideologies, exploding bombs, or the hopes of men. Spring arrives as it always does, free to all, and brings about change not only for the hibernating toad, but also to London after half a decade of darkness and despair.

Spring on Prince George Ave, London. From wikimedia commons, by  Christine Matthews .

The section ends with a glowing account (by Orwellian standards) of the season’s transformative powers on the people and creatures of the city: Thickening leaves of chestnut trees; Brighter blues of policemen uniforms; new hues on nervous sparrows; a smile on the face of the fishmonger. The descriptions are uncomplicated, without flourish, but together they leave upon the mind an indelible impression of urban renewal and hope.

Going Against the Grain

Orwell proceeds to mount a defense for the inevitable backlash surrounding his praise of spring and the toad. The fact that he had to justify his foray into the softer side of life provides deep insight into the psyche of post-WWII culture. Fondness for nature was dismissed as antiquated and sentimental. To waste energy on the natural world and its small joys at the beginnings of the  Atomic Age , critics contended, was at best backwards thinking, and at worst dangerous in its promotion of political quietism and inaction.

Orwell counters both claims. He rejects the idea that a love for Nature only surfaces in those removed from it, citing that humans have always valued it throughout history and continue to so in cultures with strong agricultural roots. He approaches the second critique slant, suggesting that a utopia achieved through technological and social perfection in which one cannot stop to literally smell the roses is perhaps not one worth living in. In the climax of the entire piece, Orwell pens a statement that is as relevant today as it was the day he inscribed it to paper:

“I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 218

In this passage, I get a glimpse of the man behind the persona of George Orwell, and I cannot help but admire him. In 1946, Eric Blair was in declining health, physically and mentally worn by first-hand experiences with colonialism, poverty, and war. Yet through this slew of self-imposed and circumstantial challenges, he managed to preserve the sensitivity of a child. In  Why I Write  (a piece I urge every writer to read), he speaks of his inability and unwillingness to abandon the worldview he acquired in childhood. “Only child life,” he writes in  Such, Such were the Joys , the last essay before his death, “is real life.” This undiminished capacity for wonder and empathy established Blair’s humanity, provided grounding for his moral authority, and helped forge his enduring legacy as one of 20th century’s greatest writers.

The Quiet Power of Orwell

Hypnotoad from Futurama . Orwell’s not quite that good.

Few essayists can match Orwell’s muted gravitas and persuasive power. George Packer,  the author of the foreword and editor of the two volume Orwell essay collection,  Facing Unpleasant Facts  and  All Art is Propaganda , comments that “he is emphatic, but he is rarely didactic; a characteristic tone of the Orwell essay is its lack of expressed outrage. Again, he is saying: ‘This is how things are – like it or not.'” (p. xxiv)  It is with this quiet power that Orwell ends  Some Thoughts of the Common Toad . It is a plainly-worded tour-de-force, packed with inevitable evils and sad truths, but tempered with unassailable defiance and warmth:

  “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process are able to prevent it.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 218

 I hope one day I can write something as quietly powerful. Until next time.

Related Ekostories

• A Boy and His Plants: The Curious Garden
• Journey to the Far Side: There’s a Hair in My Dirt!

Orwell, George., ed. George Packer.   Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.   New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008. Print.

Syndicated from Ekostories. Isaac Yuen’s essays and short stories can be found at Hippocampus, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Orion, and Tin House online; He is the creator of  Ekostories , a blog that connects narratives to themes of nature, culture, and identity. Isaac currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory.  

SHARE YOUR REFLECTION

2 past reflections.

On May 30, 2019 Marc Dougherty wrote:

wonderful read, refreshing and glorifying tribute to both the art of literature and of God/nature/this thing we have : )

On May 29, 2019 Patrick Watters wrote:

The Orwell you may never have known who speaks of the Universal Christ in his own delightful way and words. }:- ❤️ a.m.

The Common Toad: A Reading

16th February 2021 by Richard Blair

George Orwell’s son Richard Blair and great grandson Archie Blair introduce and read Orwell’s 1946 eulogy for the coming of spring, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad .

“a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold”

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George Orwell, Outdoorsman

A keen observer of human depravity, the author of 1984 found respite in natural settings.

During his school days at St. Cyprian’s, George Orwell went on butterfly-catching expeditions to escape bullying teachers. 

—Annie Spratt / Unsplash

For generations of students who first encountered George Orwell in assigned readings of  Animal Farm  and  1984 , he endures in memory as perhaps the palest man in English letters.

Published in 1946, Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts  on the Common Toad” extolls not only the amphibian of rough and warty skin but spring generally, the pleasures of which are “available to everybody, and cost nothing.”

— In Sicherheit am Straßenrand  by Arnd Gräfe, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Flickr

Barnhill (above), a property suggested by Orwell’s friend David Astor, publisher of the  Observer , offered solitude but little else in terms of comfort. As Orwell completed  1984  on the remote farm on the rugged island on Jura, his tuberculosis worsened. Still, he finished the novel in December 1948, before eventually returning to a London hospital, where he died a little over a year later.

—George Weir / Wikimedia Commons

His face seemed nearly spectral as it greeted readers from his author photo—those sad sunken eyes and wan cheeks, their pallor dramatized by a thin, dark moustache that stood out like a skein of geese across a winter sky.

Orwell didn’t look like a man who got out very much, an impression that was grounded, to some degree, in fact. He was a furiously prolific writer, churning out more than a dozen volumes of fiction, memoir, and essays in a life that lasted only 46 years. It was a pattern of production that often fastened him to his desk, and his chronically sick lungs, which led to his death in 1950 after a struggle with tuberculosis, conspired to keep him inside, too.

Nevertheless, like Robert Louis Stevenson, a frequent convalescent who miraculously marshaled his strength for hiking and camping, Orwell indulged an alternate life as an outdoorsman. He’s perhaps our most underappreciated commentator on nature, his writings about animals and agrarian life eclipsed by his reputation as a dystopian.

Orwell’s dueling identities as a brooding scribe hunched over his typewriter and an amateur farmer and naturalist point to his principal claim on posterity—his genius for embracing two lives in one. His legacy often reads like opposite sides of the same coin. 

George Orwell, ca. 1940.

—“George Orwell, c.1940” by Cassowary Colorizations / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license / Wikimedia Common

As a self-described democratic socialist, Orwell believed in active government, yet his alertness to the excesses of official power informed  Animal Farm  and  1984 , his two masterpieces about totalitarianism. Orwell was a shy populist often awkward with other people, a habitual realist touched by streaks of the romantic, and a creature of London who sometimes found his truest voice in remote rural places.

The novels  1984  and  Animal Farm  encapsulate Orwell’s underlying sense of city and country. The setting of  1984 , which chronicles a future society governed through collectivist oppression, is an urban one. In Orwell’s dark vision, the sheer scale of the modern metropolis is dehumanizing, its skyscrapers dwarfing the individual into insignificance. The architectural magnitude of the city, one quickly gathers, is its own form of brutality. In one memorable scene, the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, confronts a temple of bureaucracy:

The Ministry of Truth . . . was  startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood, it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Later in  1984 , Winston faces an even more daunting monument to the regime. “The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one,” he observes. “There were no windows in it at all.” That simple sentence about the absence of windows is also one of Orwell’s most chilling ones, conveying the sense of claustrophobia that often figures in his work. It’s there in  1984 , as a sensitive soul is brought within the inner sanctum of a tyrannical government. A similar feeling of confinement creeps over  Animal Farm , as a barn, ostensibly a wellspring of renewal, becomes a shadowy corner of conspiracy and conflict.

The theme of entrapment underscores the beginning of Orwell’s famous essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” too. It has one of the best opening lines in journalism: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Orwell wrote the essay in 1941 as England endured German aerial bombing. He’s boxed in as the planes circle above him, not quite sure of his fate. It’s a strange form of evil—stranger still, Orwell argues, because it’s been thoroughly domesticated. The Germans pitted as his enemies “are ‘only doing their duty,’ as the saying goes,” he tells readers. “Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Book covers of sixtieth-anniversary edition of 1984 and of  Animal Farm .

— Penguin Classics

Orwell was fascinated by how language could be distorted and abstracted to promote any number of atrocities, with individuals pulverized by the political power of the state. Against this villainy, the writer, insistently stationed at his keyboard and pecking away as the bombs drop, achieves an undeniable nobility. He’s physically imprisoned by the air raid, subject to oblivion at any moment. Yet, as the essay unfolds, Orwell’s mind, musing on everything from English history to stamp collecting to pigeons to crossword puzzles, is free.

The trick here, Orwell implies, is to cultivate language as a liberating influence on culture, not a stultifying tool of officialdom. As he eloquently argued in another, more celebrated essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the best way to keep language morally pure was to keep it simple—its meaning clear, less prone to corruption by politicians.

Written in 1945 and published the following year, “Politics and the English Language” offers a concise seminar on writing well. Orwell lays out six basic rules for good English, most of them grounded on the ideal of simplicity. “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” he implores readers. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. . . . Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” For Orwell, good writing was a moral imperative:

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

Simplicity was a primary principle for Orwell, a core quality of his style. As with most aspects of literary expression, even Orwell’s simplicity isn’t as simple as it initially seems. There’s a bare-bones beauty to his prose, but its stark clarity also conveys an underlying sense of urgency. Orwell’s directness on the page revealed a writer who was eager to get to the point, his voice that of a man in a hurry. Perhaps he sensed early on that he wouldn’t live long.

His frankness doesn’t make Orwell a uniformly charming writer. He professed admiration for Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century satirist, and  Animal Farm ’s fabulist narrative of a corrupted revolution by farmyard creatures has some Swiftian touches. Where Swift is disarmingly digressive, Orwell, however, particularly in his newspaper and magazine articles, is usually a ruthlessly efficient rhetorician.

Orwell’s bluntness shaped his personal life, too. Friends remembered him “as prickly, diffident, ill at ease with ordinary people,” writes literary critic John Carey. “According to his brother-in-law, who took him to pubs in working-class districts of Leeds, he was ‘a skeleton at the feast’ and disliked his fellow men.”

Orwell’s embrace, however, of simplicity—in how he wrote and how he spoke—had a more ebullient side. He found its analog in nature, a subject that evoked a surprising tenderness in his vision. “He almost never praises beauty,” Carey notes of Orwell, “and when he does he locates it in rather scruffy and overlooked things . . . the eye of the common toad, a sixpenny rosebush from Woolworth’s. The style he developed in the essays and journalism is the verbal equivalent of these objects. It is plain and simple—or seems to be until you try to write like it yourself.”

While 1984 points to the city as a source of concentrated control, the bucolic landscape of  Animal Farm  promises, at least initially, a pastoral idyll. In an early passage after the farm animals banish their human masters, they survey the scene of their emancipation:

A little way down the pasture there was a knoll that commanded a view of most of the farm. The animals rushed to the top of it and gazed round them in the clear morning light. Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement. They rolled in the dew, they cropped mouthfuls of the sweet summer grass, they kicked up clods of the black earth and snuffed its rich scent.

If the revolt of  Animal Farm  is ultimately a failed revolution, its principles perverted by the same moral lapses that create the despotism in  1984 , the paradise lost in Orwell’s agrarian allegory is, indeed, a paradise before its desecration. Orwell was drawn to the notion of nature unsullied by the pathologies of politics, and it seems typical of his thinking that the creatures of  Animal Farm  grow more debased as they grow more human. Like many introverts, he appeared more comfortable with animals than with people, looking to the natural world as a source of solace during times of struggle. Orwell’s brief life included many such trials.

Thomas E. Ricks, author of a recent book about how Orwell and Winston Churchill influenced their time, summarizes Orwell’s origins: “The writer we know today as ‘George Orwell’ was born as Eric Blair in June 1903 in Bengal, India, where his father, the son of an officer in the Anglo-Indian army, was a low-ranking bureaucrat in the Indian Civil Service’s department responsible for overseeing the growing and processing of opium.” His mother was from a French family, the Limouzins, and she was the daughter of a teak merchant, according to Carey.

Orwell’s mother soon took him back to England, where, like many British boys of his day, he was sent to boarding school. Orwell hated the experience at his alma mater, St. Cyprian’s, although he enjoyed rare expeditions away from campus to catch butterflies. “Most of the good memories of my childhood, and up to the age of about twenty, are in some way connected with animals,” Orwell recalled.

Orwell felt bullied by the faculty at St. Cyprian’s, which fed a distrust of official authority that became central to his writing. His later stint as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, which soured him on colonial rule and led him to the political left, deepened that skepticism. Like many liberals of his day, Orwell went to Spain to support the war against the fascists, where a sniper shot him in the throat in 1937. He returned to England, struggling as a freelance journalist and novelist, not achieving fame until  Animal Farm  appeared in 1945. His wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom he had married less than a decade earlier, died the same year, leaving Orwell to raise their adopted baby boy, Richard, as a single parent.

Faced with loss, or the prospect of loss, Orwell often looked outdoors for relief. In August 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Poland just days away, Orwell spent the final stretch of summer “watching over his garden and ducks and chickens, and taking notes on the news as Europe slid toward war,” Ricks writes. “Blackberries are ripening,” Orwell mentioned the day before the invasion. “Finches beginning to flock.”

The war proved hard on Orwell. His flat was bombed, which destroyed many of his books. His manuscript for  Animal Farm  survived, although, as he confided to T. S. Eliot, the explosion had left it in a “slightly crumpled condition.” However, the war years had also raised his profile, and more readers were noticing George Orwell.

Having a pen name helped Eric Blair preserve his privacy. The origins of his pseudonym are unclear, although “Orwell” is the name of an English river—perhaps a reflection of the degree to which George Orwell’s interest in nature was central to his identity.

In 1946, with the war now over, Orwell published “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” an uncharacteristically upbeat essay on the resilience of the earth and the return of spring. It was just like Orwell, though, to  hold up the proletarian plainness of the toad to herald  a hopeful season:

Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water . . . though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

Orwell turned to nature once again in the final years of his life, as he worked to complete  1984  and sought out the isolated island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland as a retreat. He lived in Barnhill, the rustic house of a friend, with his sister and a nanny along to care for Richard. Although the change of scenery was to take Orwell away from the distractions of London, he seemed to spend a lot of time on Jura away from his writing—gardening, fishing, and exploring instead. All the while, his health was rapidly failing.     

“Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans,” journalist Robert McCrum noted. “It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work. He is remembered here as a specter in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins.”

—Creative Commons

Despite the hardships—or perhaps because of them—Orwell seemed thoroughly enthralled by his newfound surroundings. “Shot a black rabbit yesterday,” he writes in a May 16, 1946, diary entry from Jura. “Very black, under side grey. They seem to be common about here.”

For a man with compromised lungs, Orwell’s physical activity on Jura was striking. “It is extremely difficult to find straight pieces of timber here,” he laments on June 25, 1946. “Even when cutting pieces for stool legs, I find that any sizeable & strong branch has a kink in it.”

Nothing was easy on Jura, including the completion of  1984 . Orwell finished the book, however, as his life faded, forcing him to leave Jura for good. He spent his last days in a London hospital, having married a second wife, Sonia Brownell. Orwell was planning a trip to Switzerland in a last-ditch effort to stabilize his health when he died on January 21, 1950. As he breathed his last, Orwell’s fishing rods rested in a corner of his hospital room.

“There was something undoubtedly romantic both in Orwell’s life and his work, standing as he did in the same revolutionary tradition as Shelley and Byron,” biographer Gordon Bowker concluded. “He was a born adventurer, a man of action, drawn often by the romantic dream. . . . Always, too, was the man who revered the natural world and drew inspiration from it. There stands the romantic Orwell.”    

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Republication statement

This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as "George Orwell Out of Doors" in the Winter 2019 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at  @email  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

“The Masterpiece That Killed George Orwell,” by Robert McCrum,  The Guardian , May 9, 2009.  George Orwell: Essays , edited and introduced by John Carey, Everyman’s Library, 2002.  Animal Farm ; 1984  by George Orwell, Harcourt, 2003.  Orwell: The Life  by D. J. Taylor, Henry Holt, 2003.  Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom  by Thomas E. Ricks, Penguin, 2017.  Inside George Orwell: A Biography  by Gordon Bowker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.  George Orwell: Diaries , edited by Peter Davison, Harvil Secker, 2009.

Winter 2019

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Ekostories by Isaac Yuen

Nature | culture | art, george orwell’s some thoughts on the common toad.

It was a joy to discover for the first time, Orwell’s quietly devastating account of time spent at a London workhouse in The Spike , his reflections on the ugly facets of colonialism in Shooting an Elephant , and his comment on the futility of vengeance, distilled into one waxy yellow face, in Revenge is Sour . Whatever the subject matter, Orwell had a knack for getting to its root with a concrete metaphor or an unforgettable statement. As an essayist, there is no greater skill than to be able to convey exactly what one intends, vividly and without doubt. For this is the writer’s truth, and Orwell spoke it as well as anyone.

Nature appreciation was not something I associated with Orwell, yet the more of his essays I read, the more I got the sense that the man, especially in his later years, harboured a profound fondness for not only his fellow men, but for other living things. In  Some Thoughts on the Common Toad , he managed to weave urban wildlife, politics, and personal post-war reflections together so seamlessly that I felt compelled to explore it as an Ekostory. The following entry looks not only at the ideas contained within the short piece, but also the skill in its construction. The entire essay, about 1,600 words in length, can be read HERE .

Orwell’s Praise of the Neglected

Orwell begins the essay by selecting the common toad as his personal herald of spring’s arrival. The prose in the introduction is exquisite, gains power when read aloud. I found myself mouthing each line as David Attenborough would narrate the script of a nature documentary:

“At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 214

It’s a lovely and intensely evocative passage. Orwell then proceeds to place the toad on a pedestal usually reserved for birds and flowers with a provocative statement:

“This allows on to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 214

Normally driven to write about societal injustices, Orwell speaks here in praise of a neglected denizen of the earth. His keen eye, usually used to detect and expose lies, reveals beauty in a creature generally detested and vilified. Nature is easy to love when it takes the form of a blushing rose or a soaring hawk. But here Orwell demonstrates that its ephemeral wonders exist all around us, even in a lowly denizen of the earth.

The Miracle of Spring

A trillium, a herald of spring introduced to me by one who was dear to my heart. From wikimedia commons, by Paul Johnston .

After describing the toad’s mating habits (“intense sexiness” is a phrase I hope to work into my writing), Orwell returns to the arrival of spring in a post-war London and conveys its significance in one line:

“Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 216

The sentence’s simplicity belies its emotional and temporal heft. By capitalizing Winter, Orwell reinforces the image of an eternal season, unbroken, everlasting, a rigid time existing without possibility, freedom, and choice. His sentiment undoubtedly reflects the thoughts of many who lived through the war in constant fear and uncertainty.

It is in this context that Orwell describes the spring of 1946, the first post-war Spring, as a miracle. Release comes in the form of Nature, caring not of confident ideologies, exploding bombs, or the hopes of men. Spring arrives as it always does, free to all, and brings about change not only for the hibernating toad, but also to London after half a decade of darkness and despair.

Spring on Prince George Ave, London. From wikimedia commons, by  Christine Matthews .

The section ends with a glowing account (by Orwellian standards) of the season’s transformative powers on the people and creatures of the city: Thickening leaves of chestnut trees; Brighter blues of policemen uniforms; new hues on nervous sparrows; a smile on the face of the fishmonger. The descriptions are uncomplicated, without flourish, but together they leave upon the mind an indelible impression of urban renewal and hope.

Going Against the Grain

Orwell proceeds to mount a defense for the inevitable backlash surrounding his praise of spring and the toad. The fact that he had to justify his foray into the softer side of life provides deep insight into the psyche of post-WWII culture. Fondness for nature was dismissed as antiquated and sentimental. To waste energy on the natural world and its small joys at the beginnings of the Atomic Age , critics contended, was at best backwards thinking, and at worst dangerous in its promotion of political quietism and inaction.

Orwell counters both claims. He rejects the idea that a love for Nature only surfaces in those removed from it, citing that humans have always valued it throughout history and continue to so in cultures with strong agricultural roots. He approaches the second critique slant, suggesting that a utopia achieved through technological and social perfection in which one cannot stop to literally smell the roses is perhaps not one worth living in. In the climax of the entire piece, Orwell pens a statement that is as relevant today as it was the day he inscribed it to paper:

“I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 218

In this passage, I get a glimpse of the man behind the persona of George Orwell, and I cannot help but admire him. In 1946, Eric Blair was in declining health, physically and mentally worn by first-hand experiences with colonialism, poverty, and war. Yet through this slew of self-imposed and circumstantial challenges, he managed to preserve the sensitivity of a child. In Why I Write (a piece I urge every writer to read), he speaks of his inability and unwillingness to abandon the worldview he acquired in childhood. “Only child life,” he writes in Such, Such were the Joys , the last essay before his death, “is real life.” This undiminished capacity for wonder and empathy established Blair’s humanity, provided grounding for his moral authority, and helped forge his enduring legacy as one of 20th century’s greatest writers.

The Quiet Power of Orwell

Hypnotoad from Futurama . Orwell’s not quite that good.

Few essayists can match Orwell’s muted gravitas and persuasive power. George Packer,  the author of the foreword and editor of the two volume Orwell essay collection, Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art is Propaganda , comments that “he is emphatic, but he is rarely didactic; a characteristic tone of the Orwell essay is its lack of expressed outrage. Again, he is saying: ‘This is how things are – like it or not.'” (p. xxiv)  It is with this quiet power that Orwell ends  Some Thoughts of the Common Toad . It is a plainly-worded tour-de-force, packed with inevitable evils and sad truths, but tempered with unassailable defiance and warmth:

  “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process are able to prevent it.” – Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 218

 I hope one day I can write something as quietly powerful. Until next time.

Related Ekostories

• A Boy and His Plants: The Curious Garden
• Journey to the Far Side: There’s a Hair in My Dirt!

Orwell, George., ed. George Packer.   Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2008. Print.

10 Comments

• September 12, 2013

This is quite an interesting exploration of the art of the personal essay. A friend sent me this book ages ago; it’s a book I return to every year or so, and which I get something new out of every time I re-read it.

http://www.amazon.ca/Art-Personal-Essay-Anthology-Classical/dp/038542339X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379017293&sr=1-1&keywords=personal+essay

Thanks Russell, that definitely looks like something I’m interested in checking out!

I was not aware that Orwell wrote essays. I will try to get a copy, thank you for the hint. I was also not aware that toad’s eyes are so beautiful. They actually are. 🙂

The author of the foreword mentioned that aside from “Politics and the English Language” and “Shooting an Elephant”, many of his essays are not widely read. I highly recommend the two volume collection, sorted into narrative and critical essays if you’re interested.

I am. I like reading essays and non-fiction more than fiction.

• September 13, 2013

It’s funny you should write this I am taking a Critical Reading and Writing course right now and we are just studying Politics and the English Language. Orwell’s writing style is intricate and fascinating.

That was one of the first pieces we were introduced to in Creative Writing as well. Next to Animal Farm and 1984, that’s probably his most famous piece of writing.

• September 14, 2013

Isaac, you don’t give yourself enough credit in calling yourself an “aspiring” essayist. You’re already an essayist. Maybe you’re still relatively new at it, but you’re doing it every week. Your essays are so comprehensive and thought-provoking, and sure to only get better as you continue writing. 🙂

Thank you for your kind words, Jonanne. It’s funny, my confidence level as a writer goes through crazy swings. Sometimes I feel like I’m making significant improvement; other times I look back at past pieces and wonder how who actually wrote them. I guess that’s part of the creative process: each work begins anew with its highs and lows.

Pingback: Tuesday Writing Prompt: A personal narrative | Write on the World

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George Orwell

Some thoughts on the common toad.

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