“What muck & filth is normally flowing through the air”: The Cultural Politics of Atmosphere in the Work of George Orwell

Criticism has tended to view George Orwell's radio career in terms of his relationship to imperial politics or his relationship to late modernism. Orwell, however, had a longer and more complex relationship to radio than his BBC years. His views on radio changed significantly between the late thirties and the end of his BBC career in 1943. His earlier work rejected the radio as a form of cultural and national pollution. In his later work, Orwell develops a media theory that starts to think of the airwaves as a cultural environment. Where radio had once stood for the polluted “muck & filth” of modernity's bad air, in his later work it becomes a vehicle that might just bring poetry back into the national culture.