Orwell had a big problem with Kipling's use of dialect in stories and poems; no soldier would recognise Kipling's dialogue: it often appears as comic stylised cockney; he looks down from a distorting class perspective Orwell concludes and goes on to translate barrack room ballads back into
standard English to get away from this romantic, empire-glorifying view.
Kipling spent several years as a provincial journalist in India mixing with soldiers, engineers and local people-a great lover of detail and the world of things. He even imagines a story about a bridge building project told from the point of the view of the worker and specifies it should not be patronizing albeit narrated in dialect. Why would Kipling suddenly abandon a desire to make close observation in place of comic romanticisation? Maybe people actually say 'follow me 'ome '
The problem lies with Orwell. Little survives of Orwell's speaking voice but people who knew him said that if he met working people he lapsed into Windsor Cockney (fancy a nice cappa tea lav) like the speakers who he ridicules in Kipling's Barrack Room ballads. Kipling was comfortable with people of all backgrounds and races; Orwell wasn't.
