The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the Shire is certainly where Middle-earth comes nearest to the 20th century, and that the people who had commented that the "Scouring of the Shire" was about Tolkien's contemporary England were not wholly wrong. Shippey suggests however that rather than seeing the chapter as an allegory of postwar England, it could be taken as an account of "a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence." Shippey draws a parallel with a contemporary work, George Orwell's 1938 novel "Coming Up for Air", where England is subjected to a "similar diagnosis" of leaderless inertia.