221- ] English Literature

221- ] English Literature

George Orwell 

Biography

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His biography, Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. His new biography, Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023. D.J. Taylor is a member of the Orwell Council.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division.

Orwell’s five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there. Almost nothing is known of Orwell’s time in the province, other than that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). It also ruined his health. Although disillusioned by the Imperial ‘racket’ he had helped to administer, he left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return.

For the next five years he led a vagrant life. Some of this time was spent at his parents’ home in Southwold, Suffolk. There were periods teaching in private schools, living in Paris and masquerading as a tramp, the background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His professional alias, which combined the name of the reigning monarch with a local river, was adopted shortly before publication. His teaching career was brought to a close by a bout of pneumonia and at the end of 1934, having used a long, recuperative stay in Southwold to complete a second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he decamped to London to work in a Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and married his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences,Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Orwells began their married life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although the book’s second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on Socialism, Orwell’s political views were still not fully formed. The defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against Franco. He was wounded in the throat – the bullet passing within a few millimetres of his carotid artery – and was present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit-squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyist POUM militia, of which he had been a member. Spain made Orwell ‘believe in Socialism for the first time’, as he put it, while instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose: this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC’s atmosphere, he complained, ‘is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless’. In 1943 he secured a more congenial billet as literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he also contributed a column under the heading ‘As I Please’.

Animal Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was written by the middle of 1944. Publishers’ timidity, and the covert pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. By this time Orwell’s personal life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his sister Avril, determined to raise on his own.

Through his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel’s enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too late for its author. He was transferred to University College Hospital in September and died there on 21 January 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death he made an unexpected second marriage to Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Sitting down to read his obituaries on the day of his funeral, his friend Malcolm Muggeridge thought that he saw in them ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.

D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023.

  

220- ] English Literature

220- ] English Literature

George Orwell

Summary 

George Orwell (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London, England) was an English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The latter of these is a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.

Early life

He was born in Bengal, India, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).

Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that Orwell published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose.

Against imperialism

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among laborers and beggars; he spent a period in the impoverished sections of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the working-class people of London in their annual exodus to work in the hopfields of Kent.

Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural laborers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.

Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist.

From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II

Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise titled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.

Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party.

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four

In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother.

Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigor with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

Animal Farm, anti-utopian satire by George Orwell, published in 1945. One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (with its addendum to the animals’ seventh commandment: “All animals are equal”), the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.