6/22/2023 0 Comments Blitz Writing by Inez Holden![]() ![]() The choice between Virginia Woolf or Arnold Kettle, Eliot or Tennyson, was one that sorted the refined few from the common herd. One response to the ubiquity of lowbrow literature was to go pointedly highbrow. The ‘yellow press’, romantic novels, Titbits and ‘penny dreadfuls’ were all writing that sold to a working-class audience taught to read in the Victorian Board Schools established by the Foster Education Act (1870). Leavis’s Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930). It was a common fear of writers at the time that their art would be swept aside by the growth of popular culture-best expressed in F. In fact Donald McGill painted most of them in his front room, in Blackheath, and then later a few streets away from Orwell, in Belsize Park - just another artist, struggling to meet a deadline. In his essay ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ George Orwell imagined that the author was a trade name for a great factory of saucy seaside postcards - ‘it would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they have any real aesthetic value’. Kristin Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ![]()
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