A very interesting article by George Orwell from 1943 in which Orwell weighed in on the art and value of pamphleteering. [link: 3Quarks Daily]
The interesting fact, not easily explicable, is that pamphleteering has revived upon an enormous scale since about 1935, and has done so without producing anything of real value. My own collection, made during the past six years, runs into several hundreds, but probably does not represent anywhere near 10 per cent of the total output. Some of these pamphlets have had huge sales, especially the religio-patriotic ones, such as those of Mr. Ferris, B.A., and the scurrilous ones, such as Hitler’s Last Will and Testament, which is said to have sold several millions. Directly political pamphlets sometimes sell in big numbers, but the circulation of any pamphlet which is “party line” (any party) is likely to be spurious. Looking through my collection, I find that it is practically all trash, interesting only to bibliophiles. Though I have classified current pamphlets under nine headings they could be finally reduced to two main schools, roughly describable as Party Line and Astrology. There is totalitarian rubbish and paranoiac rubbish, but in each case it is rubbish. Even the well-informed Fabian pamphlets are hopelessly dull, considered as reading matter. The liveliest pamphlets are almost always non- party, a good example being Bless ’em All, which should be regarded as a pamphlet, though it costs one and sixpence.
The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form. Yet lively pamphlets are very few, and the only explanation I can offer – a rather lame one – is that the publishing trade and the literary papers have never made the reading public pamphlet-conscious. One difficulty of collecting pamphlets is they are not issued in any regular manner, cannot always be procured even in the libraries of museums, and are seldom advertised and still more seldom reviewed.
A good writer with something he passionately wanted to say – and the essence of pamphleteering is to have something you want to say now, to as many people as possible – would hesitate to cast it in pamphlet form, because he would hardly know how to set about getting it published, and would be doubtful whether the people he wanted to reach would ever read it. Probably he would water his idea down into a newspaper article or pad it out into a book. As a result most pamphlets are either written by lonely lunatics, or belong to the subworld of the crank religions, or are issued by political parties. The normal way of publishing a pamphlet is through a political party, and the party will see to it that any "deviation" – and hence any literary value – is kept out.
So what about modern day pamphleteering? Do blogs qualify? I think so. When before in our history have the disparate, emphatic, unfiltered and urgent voices of so many been heard in the public sphere? I think Orwell would have approved of the ubiquitous and cacophonous "machine", the literary merit of most blogs notwithstanding. I had once alluded to the blogging phenomenon as the equivalent of old time pamphleteering. I think Sinclair Lewis too would have approved of the modern day self appointed town criers – especially during the times of Bush-Cheney, when as Orwell noted, "organised lying exists on a scale never before known."
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