Orwell’s marvelous “smelly little orthodoxies” quip comes from his
monograph-book on Charles Dickens, published in 1939 and collected in
“Dickens, Dali and Others.” It’s from Chapter Six, which you can find on the
Web at www.dickens-literature.com.
In the passage, Orwell writes about how, when you read a memorable writer,
you can see a face speaking to you behind the words you’re reading:
“In the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s
photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty,
with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger
in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who
is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not
frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry ‹ in other words, of a
nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal
hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our
souls.”
By the way, the last words Orwell ever wrote were these astoundingly
memorable ones: “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” He died a few
weeks later — at the overwhelmingly sad age of 47.