If George Orwell had died in 1939 before the outbreak of war (something perfectly possible, for in the previous year he suffered a bad haemorrhage and spent nearly six months in a sanatorium), he would be recorded in literary histories of the period as an interesting maverick who wrote some not very successful novels, a lively account of a few hard weeks in Paris, a quirky book about the miners that was somehow combined with an attack on sandalled vegetarian socialists, and another about the Spanish Civil War that some reviewers praised but nobody read. Six hundred of the 1500 print-run for Homage to Catalonia were unsold when Orwell died in January 1950.

Later fame has blurred the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this comparative disregard lasted well into the war years. His ‘As I please’ column in Tribune amused and irritated, the articles on boys’ weeklies and vulgar comic postcards were a novel approach to popular culture, but they seemed enjoyable lightweight pieces. When Professor Rodden says that between 1936 and 1939 ‘Orwell’s reputation quickly expanded,’ instancing the large sales of The Road to Wigan Pier, and that ‘for the first time the “Orwell persona” was at issue,’ he is simply mistaken, in part no doubt because he views the English scene from across the Atlantic. The sales were large because the book was a Left Book Club selection, disliked by many members, and you could have attended many literary gatherings in pre-war London without hearing the Orwell persona mentioned. Nor is it right, at least in relation to Britain, to say that the Book of the Month Club selection of Animal Farm was ‘probably the single most significant event for expanding Orwell’s reputation in his lifetime’. If one had to name a year when he was first taken seriously as writer and thinker it would be 1946, after the appearance of Animal Farm in the previous year, and publication of his essays on nationalism, James Burnham, and the totalitarian approach to literature, in the short-lived but influential magazine Polemic.

This is not just nit-picking. That first appreciation of Orwell as an important writer and original thinker was a socio-literary one, and so was the reaction of admiration blended with repulsion when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. They were a long way from the creation of Orwell as a myth, an icon and an industry that is the subject of Mr Rodden’s book. The details he gives of the Orwell industry are staggering. Early in 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four began to sell more than fifty thousand copies a day in the US, and in a Harris Poll 27 per cent of Americans claimed to have read it, though Rodden doubts the accuracy of the percentage. In Britain the sales during 1984 were 430,000, with Animal Farm not far behind. By the early Seventies the two books were selling nearly a million copies a year in the UK and the US, with the essays, novels and Homage to Catalonia carried along in their wake. The publisher Tom Rosenthal, totting up the royalties earned during six months by a backlist of Seeker foreign authors including Mishima, Moravia, Svevo, Gide, Colette, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Grass, Böll and half a dozen others, found that the whole lot added up to half Orwell’s earnings in the same period. New editions of four books have just been published, said to be ‘authoritative texts’ although in some the variants from the original editions are very slight. A new biography approved by the Orwell estate is on the way – surprisingly, because it is hard to see what important factual material it could add to Bernard Crick’s book.

Rodden pays particular attention to Orwell’s changing reputation in West Germany and the Soviet Union. In both countries special emphasis has been placed on his last two fictions, with Nineteen Eighty-Four on the best-seller list for a period of nearly two years in the run-up to 1984, and terms from the book like Zweidenken, Doppledenken and die Gedankenpolizei (doublethink and Thought Police) commonly used in the media. In the Soviet Union the changes Rodden charts are very interesting. ‘The Stalin-era Enemy of mankind turns into Comrade Orwell in the Eighties,’ as he puts it. Orwell went through the lackey of Wall Street phrase to the discovery that Nineteen Eighty-Four was really an attack on the United States and the FBI, and that Orwell himself was a good fellow who ‘shared dry crusts with the clochards of Paris’. The present situation, as described by Rodden, is that an unabridged edition of the dystopia is in hand, and some chapters of Animal Farm have been published. That is probably not quite up to date. In a Soviet Union where Robert Conquest was fêted on a recent visit, and his The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are being serialised, there is not likely to be any flinching at Orwell.