Inside the Whale and Other Essays is a book of essays written by George Orwell in 1940. It includes the eponymous essay "Inside the Whale".

Inside the Whale was published by Victor Gollancz as a book of essays on 11 March 1940. Orwell refers to it as a "book" in part three of the essay. ("While I have been writing this book another European war has broken out."), as well as in letters he wrote to Geoffrey Gorer and Humphry House, an English scholar, the following month.^[1] Gollancz initially printed 1,100 copies in March 1940, with some copies destroyed by Nazi bombing of England.

• "Inside the Whale" (1939)
• "Charles Dickens" (1940)
• "Boys' Weeklies" (1940)

A collection of essays with the same title was published in 1962 in the UK by Penguin Books.^[2] This edition was a reprint of an earlier collection entitled Selected Essays published in 1957. The collection contains the following essays:

• "Inside the Whale"
• "Down the Mine" (a passage from The Road to Wigan Pier)
• "England Your England"
• "Shooting an Elephant"
• "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"
• "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels"
• "Politics and the English Language"
• "The Prevention of Literature"
• "Boys' Weeklies"

The back cover of the 1962 edition notes that the front cover is a photograph of a selection of books from George Orwell's personal library. These are

• For the Time Being by W. H Auden
• Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly
• Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling
• Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
• Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
• Last Poems by A. E. Housman
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Ulysses by James Joyce

kept upright by a black elephant bookend.

• Bibliography of George Orwell