Good Bad Books

Orwell concludes: "I would back Uncle Tom's Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf 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 dreadfuls and detective stories in the 1901 collection The Defendant.

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."

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.

Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like [A. S. M. Hutchinson's 1922 melodrama] If Winter Comes, is absent from them.