Essay Review - George Orwell - The Art Of Donald McGill

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1941 - Penguin Collected Essays. Up to the mid-1990's as political correctness stifled fun to death, saucy seaside postcards were as much a part of a visit to the British seaside as donkey rides and candy floss. Orwell describes such cards in the early war years at their peak of popularity, when the leading artist behind them was Donald McGill. As Orwell points out, McGill was a trade name given to a whole team of artists. McGill himself could not possibly have personally designed all the cards that carried his name. Such cards were vulgar, banal and often downright rude. Everyone depicted in them was a crude grotesque caricature. Older married women were bloated overweight figures with thin, muscle-free small husbands in tow, though the hen-peked husband would often risk turning his eyes to the more curvaceously drawn women walking by. Backsides were often huge, faces red with embarrassment, noses even redder from extreme alcohol intake. Girls would giggle as a Scotsman walked away, having somehow sneaked a peak up his kilt. Sometimes even in Orwell's day, the cards would go too far and shops would be raided by the authorities for stocking them. This situation got worse in later years. To Orwell, as to me, such cards (a huge influence on the comedy of Benny Hill), were an expression of innocent mucky fun. They cocked a snook at the conventions of polite social moral values. The church and state would see every unmarried man and woman being chaste and polite, while every married couple should practice fidelity. The cards show the part of us that wishes it was not so, and pulls a tongue out at the establishment and the way life is. Orwell sees such cards as reflecting the Chauceresque Miller, or Sancho Panza in Cervantes's Don Quixote. Such comedy could by the start of the war, only be seen in the music hall and vaudeville comedy of Max Miller, or on seaside postcards by the likes of McGill. They were never intended to be mistaken for high art. This is a fine essay, that seems even more relevant now that such cards are all but extinct. Orwell said in 1941 how sad it would be not to see such cards again, and oh boy was he right. Arthur Chappell