"Good Bad Books" is an essay by George Orwell first published in ''

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

'' 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 volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U ...

'' to outlive the complete works of

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born i ...

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 produced during the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to ...

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

Max Carrados Max Carrados is a fictional blind detective in a series of mystery stories and books by Ernest Bramah, first published in 1914. George Orwell wrote that, together with those of Doyle and R. Austin Freeman, ''Max Carrados'' and ''The Eyes of M ...

'', '' Dracula'', '' Helen's Babies'' and ''

King Solomon's Mines ''King Solomon's Mines'' (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the ...

''. The minor novelists W. L. George, Leonard Merrick, J. D. Beresford,

Ernest Raymond Ernest Raymond (31 December 1888 – 14 May 1974) was a British novelist, best known for his first novel, '' Tell England'' (1922), set in World War I. His next biggest success was ''We, the Accused'' (1935), generally thought to be a reworki ...

May Sinclair May Sinclair was the pseudonym of Mary Amelia St. Clair (24 August 1863 – 14 November 1946), a popular British writer who wrote about two dozen novels, short stories and poetry. She was an active suffragist, and member of the Woman Writers' S ...

, and

A. S. M. Hutchinson Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson (2 June 1879 – 14 March 1971), commonly known by his initials A. S. M. Hutchinson, was a British novelist. Biography Hutchinson was born on 2 June 1879 in India. His father was a distinguished soldier and his m ...

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 Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited ''BLAST,'' the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include ''Tarr'' ( ...

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 [

's 1922 melodrama] If Winter Comes (novel), ''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 Brian Leonard Redhead (28 December 1929 – 23 January 1994) was a British author, journalist and broadcaster. He was a co-presenter of the ''Today'' programme on BBC Radio 4 from 1975 until 1993, shortly before his death. He was a great lover ...

and

Kenneth McLeish John Kenneth Tyrrell McLeish, known as Kenneth McLeish (1940-1997) was a British writer, playwright and translator. McLeish, "the most widely respected and prolific translator of drama in Britain", translated all the surviving classical Greek pla ...

, 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

{{Use dmy dates, date=July 2011 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