Life & Wisdom Quote by George Orwell

Orwell’s line lands like a compliment delivered with a thief’s grin. “Well worth stealing” is a deliberately vulgar way to praise Dickens: not the polite admiration of the syllabus, but the kind of admiration that shows up in a writer’s nervous system, where influence is less citation than larceny. The joke is that literary “theft” is both immoral and unavoidable. Dickens is so usable - so full of scenes, sentences, types, and moral pressure - that he tempts even principled writers into pocketing his tricks.

The subtext is Orwell’s impatience with the sanctimony that surrounds Great Authors. Dickens isn’t a museum piece to be respected from a distance; he’s a working engine. Steal him because he works. That phrasing also smuggles in Orwell’s view of craft as something closer to journalism than priesthood: writers borrow, remix, adapt. Genius isn’t purity; it’s extraction.

Context matters: Orwell wrote seriously about Dickens (most famously in his 1939 essay), praising his vitality while scrutinizing his politics - radical in sympathy, conservative in solutions. Calling Dickens “worth stealing” hints at this double relationship. Orwell wants the energy, the anger, the eye for power and cruelty, without inheriting the fog of Victorian sentimentality or the evasions of reform-by-kindness.

It’s also a small defense of influence against the anxieties of originality. Orwell, a writer obsessed with intellectual honesty, gives himself and others permission to take what’s useful from the past. Not plagiarism, but the frank admission that literature advances through tasteful crime.