The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell

In the first chapter of his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell offered what was probably his earliest extended contribution to the ‘battle of the brows’ that had been raging in the periodical press and on the airwaves for more than a decade. The ‘middlebrow’ was not mentioned even once in that chapter, but it was indisputably present: an implied though unnamed category that the book’s intentionally exasperating protagonist — an autobiographical caricature of Orwell himself — dismisses alongside both the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. In the introductory description, the narrator underlines the fact that Gordon Comstock, an aspiring writer earning his keep as a bookshop assistant, has ‘what people call a “good” forehead — high, that is’ (Orwell, 1936a: p. 4). But his lack of capital — literal, rather than cultural — prevents him from fitting comfortably into his natural niche. As Gordon surveys the bookshelves in the shop, his eyes gravitate to

the contemporary stuff. Priestley’s latest. Dinky little books of reprinted ‘middles’. Cheer-up ‘humour’ from Herbert and Knox and Milne. Some highbrow stuff as well. A novel or two by Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Smart pseudo-Strachey predigested biographies. Snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews. (Orwell, 1936a: p. 7)