SOURCE: "Raffles and Miss Blandish," in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945, Vol. III, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 212-24.

In the following excerpt from a review that appeared in Horizon magazine in 1944, Orwell discusses the social implications of the Raffles character.

At this date, the charm of Raffles is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. However, the truly dramatic thing about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of by-word even to this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as "a Raffles in real life"), is the fact that he is a...