"Politics and the English Language" was first noted in Orwell's payment book of 11 December 1945.[7] The essay was originally published in the April 1946 issue of the journal Horizon (volume 13, issue 76, pages 252–265);[8] it was Orwell's last major article for the journal.[9] The essay was originally intended for George Weidenfeld's Contact magazine but it was turned down.
From the time of his wife's death in March 1945 Orwell had maintained a high output rate, with some 130 literary contributions, many of them lengthy. Animal Farm had been published in August 1945 and Orwell was experiencing a time of critical and commercial literary success. He was seriously ill in February and desperate to get away from London to the island of Jura, Scotland, where he wanted to start work on Nineteen Eighty-Four.[8]
"Politics and the English Language" was published nearly simultaneously with another of Orwell's essays, "The Prevention of Literature". Both reflect Orwell's concern with truth and how truth depends upon the use of language. Orwell noted the deliberate use of misleading language to hide unpleasant political and military facts and also identified a laxity of language among those he identified as pro-Soviet. In "The Prevention of Literature" he also speculated on the type of literature which, under a future totalitarian society, he predicted would be formulaic and low-grade sensationalism. Around the same time, Orwell wrote an unsigned editorial for Polemic in response to an attack from Modern Quarterly. In this he highlights the double-talk and appalling prose of J. D. Bernal in the same magazine, and cites Edmund Wilson's damnation of the prose of Joseph E. Davies in Mission to Moscow.
