"Good Bad Books" is an essay by

George Orwell Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to a ...

first published in ''

Tribune Tribune () was the title of various elected officials in ancient Rome. The two most important were the Tribune of the Plebs, tribunes of the plebs and the military tribunes. For most of Roman history, a college of ten tribunes of the plebs ac ...

'' on 2 November 1945. After Orwell's death, the essay was republished in '' Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays'' (1950). The essay examines the lasting popularity of works not usually considered great literature. Orwell defines a "good bad book" as "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished." Orwell concludes: "I would back ''

Uncle Tom's Cabin ''Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly'' is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two Volume (bibliography), volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans ...

'' to outlive the complete works of

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th-century modernist authors. She helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device. Vir ...

or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies." He acknowledges G. K. Chesterton as the originator of the term, as seen in his defences of

penny dreadful Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular Serial (literature), serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typical ...

s and detective stories in the 1901 collection ''The Defendant''.

Orwell's examples

Orwell claims that "perhaps the supreme example of the 'good bad' book is ''

''. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other." Other examples he gives include the

Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes () is a Detective fiction, fictional detective created by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "Private investigator, consulting detective" in his stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with obser ...

and Raffles stories, R. Austin Freeman's stories ''The Singing Bone'', ''The Eye of Osiris'' and others, '' Max Carrados'', ''

Dracula ''Dracula'' is an 1897 Gothic fiction, Gothic horror fiction, horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. The narrative is Epistolary novel, related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens ...

'', '' Helen's Babies'' and '' King Solomon's Mines''. The minor novelists

W. L. George Walter Lionel George (20 March 1882, Paris, France – 30 January 1926) was an English writer, chiefly known for his popular fiction, which included feminism, feminist, pacifism, pacifist, and Labour movement, pro-labour themes. Life Although b ...

, Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford, Ernest Raymond, May Sinclair, and A. S. M. Hutchinson are also mentioned as writers "whom it is quite impossible to call 'good' by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste." He presented Vorticist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis as the exemplar of a writer who is cerebral without being artistic. Orwell wrote, "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as ''Tarr'' or ''Snooty Baronet''. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like A. S. M. Hutchinson's 1922 melodrama">/nowiki> A. S. M. Hutchinson's 1922 melodrama/nowiki> ''If Winter Comes'', is absent from them."Fifty Orwell Essays
A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Related essays by Orwell

Orwell also discusses '' Helen's Babies'' by John Habberton in his 1946 essay " Riding Down from Bangor".

Other uses

The notion is inverted in ''The Anti-Booklist'' by Brian Redhead and Kenneth McLeish, in which the authors critique a range of "bad good" books, generally thought to be "good books".Brian Redhead with Kenneth McLeish (eds.), ''The Anti-Booklist''. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981.

References

External links

"Good Bad Books"
at The Orwell Foundation {{Crimethink Essays by George Orwell 1945 essays Works originally published in Tribune (magazine)

Orwell's examples

Related essays by Orwell

Other uses

See also

References

Further reading

External links