Books v. cigarettes
In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay called ‘Books v. Cigarettes’. In the essay he examines his personal expenditure and works out that he spends around £25 a year on books and magazines. This might seem excessive to some people but, he concludes, compared to the £40 he spends on alcohol and cigarettes (a packet of woodbines every day and half a pint of mild six days a week), the cost of reading is pretty reasonable.
Inspired by this, I decided that it would be interesting to work out my own spending habits. Of course, the minute I even started thinking about how much just one recent excursion to the excellent Gerry’s Wines and Spirits emporium in Soho had set me back, I concluded that this probably wasn’t a good idea. I couldn’t face the truth.
Instead, I turned to the trusty National Statistics site for some national figures. The 2007 Family Spending survey tells me that the average yearly household expenditure for cigarettes and alcohol is £577.20 (of this, £234 is on ciggies) and for books, newspapers and magazines a lowly £176.80.
Orwell himself dug up the national stats from 1944. These revealed that individual spending on booze and smokes was around £23 per head per year. With no figures available for book sales, Orwell speculates on how much the British public spends on books - £1 a year, on around three books, is a reasonable assumption he decides.
So taking into consideration that these figures come from the midst of World War II and that books are most likely cheaper now, the market for books has actually improved. But probably not so much in other, less financial, ways. To sum up his essay Orwell writes:
‘…[this] is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100% literate and where the ordinary man spends more on cigarettes then an Indian peasant has for his whole livelihood. And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed are too expensive.’
Or perhaps as delightfully snobby Guardian writer and English Professor, John Sutherland, says in his 2006 book How to Read a Novel, ‘90% of books are crap’.
Tags: half-baked conjecture
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:53 pm
don’t want to get into the stats but does he include going to the library, talking to my dad and also seeing his lifelong habits people borrowed books more in the war, partly through poverty partly though lack of books. Orwell was posh lad at heart so maybe he had the old etonians idea of a private library. Also now a days most books are crap!
November 3rd, 2008 at 5:09 pm
He does mention libraries – the £25 figure includes his personal library subscriptions and the fact that most of his books are either second hand or review copies. But he doesn’t really factor this into his stats for the general public.
Orwell was definitely posh at heart, posher than he’d like to think anyway. This volume of essays also includes the infamous ‘Such, such were the Joys’ which lays into his prep school and how badly it treated less wealthy boys like him. Yet he fails to acknowledge that it was a very posh prep school and it did succeed in getting him into Eton (albeit on scholarship) which gave him certain advantages in life…
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I can never get over modern his prose sounds some it could easily have been in this weekends papers
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 pm
I know! And his essays are very inspirational as a blogger – ha! Voltaire also has a very fresh, readable style, although with a lot more assumed classical knowledge (as you would expect I suppose).
if you haven’t already read it, I would strongly recommend having a look at DJ Taylor’s biography of Orwell. It is absolutely fascinating.