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So the question that hangs over Orwell is the one that always hangs over so many well-heeled revolutionaries: did he want to level up society or level it down? The evidence points to the latter. The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal--the one that was, ironically en…

Orwell was suspicious of this indeterminate, petit bourgeois class, because it wanted to change itself first, and society second.

[...] This semi-fictional England, beautifully described in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' and given body in his popular columns, was a rather shabby, stoical, anti-American ideally classless place, devoted to small English pleasures like marmalade and suet pudding and fishing in country ponds, puritan…

he was greatly talented at describing closed worlds, and adumbrating their conventions

he seems, self-abnegatingly, to want to taste the sweat on the meat, as a salty political reminder.