George Orwell, English author

Eric Blair (George Orwell r) with his mother, Ida Mable, sister Avril and father, Richard in 1916

 Trailer for the 1984 version of 1984

One of Orwell's favorite bok as a child and adult was Gulliver's Travels

Eric Arthur Blair was born June, 25 1903 and died January, 21 1950 better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist and critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published towards the end of his life

Early Life

St Cyprian's School

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 to British parents in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India.  (For a BBC story on Orwell's house in India )There, Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service dealing with the still legal opium trade with China . Richard volunteered for the war and became one of the oldest second lieutenants in the army at the age of 60 .His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (born Limouzin),was the half French daughter of a French teak merchant in Moulmein, Burma . His mother brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie, and a younger sister named Avril. He would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class".

 Education

St Cyprian's School

' ...flung...like a goldfish into a tank full of pike . '

At the age of six, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, which his sister had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have impressed the teachers very favourably, for two years later, he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Blair attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" a sarcastic quotation from William Blake's poem about happy childhood and describes physical and mental punishments .The experience left with a feeling of shames as his parents were not as rich as those of the other students and that he was ' no good.'However, in his time at St. Cyprian's, the young Blair successfully earned scholarships to both Wellington and Eton.

After one term at Wellington, Blair moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was his French teacher for one term early in his time at Eton. Later in life he wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary; some assert that he was a poor student, while others claim the contrary. He was clearly disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. During his time at the school, Blair formed lifelong friendships with a number of future British intellectuals such as Cyril Connolly, future editor of the magazine 'Horizon', in which many of Orwell's most famous essays were originally published.

       Burma and the early novels

Orwell at the Police Training School in Mandalay, Burma, 1923

' In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by a large number of people

the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.'

                                                            Shooting an Elephant

After Blair graduated from Eton, his family could not pay for university and he had no prospect of winning a scholarship, so in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police, serving in Myaungmya, Upper Burma  as assistant superintendent of police. He was in charge of a district headquaters with about 120 men and later came to be in charge of other stations including Moulmein in Lower Burma . During colonial times, Moulmein had a large expat population; an area of the city was known as 'Little England' . These experiences gave him material for the novel Burmese Days and the essays A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant .

The British had added Burma to their colonial empire after fighting in three Anglo-Burmese wars ( 1824-1826, 1852-53 and 1885 ) . Burmese anger at the British was strong and frequent riots broke out  . He came to despise what he called doing ' the dirty work of Empire'  and was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible .'  In Burma, Orwell learned first hand what it is like to govern unwilling subjects .

When he returned to England on leave in 1927 he decided to resign and become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel Burmese Days (1934) , which was first published in America, and in such essays as A Hanging (1931), and Shooting an Elephant (1936). Back in England he wrote to Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, and she and a friend found him a room in London, on the Portobello Road (a blue plaque is now on the outside of this house), where he started to write. It was from here that he sallied out one evening to Limehouse Causeway following in the footsteps of Jack London (who wrote  The people of the Abyss there while disguised as a tramp) and spent his first night in a common lodging house, probably George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he went native in his own country, dressing like other tramps and making no concessions, and recording his experiences of low life in his first published essay, 'The Spike', and the latter half of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In the spring of 1928, he moved to Paris in a cheap tenement in the Latin Quarter hoping to make a living as a freelance writer along with many others who invaded Paris at this time with similar ambitions .  He fell ill with pneumonia in February 1929 and spent weeks in a free hospital whose conditions had changed little since the 19th century .He described his experience in his essay How the poor die, which was published in 1946 . In the autumn of 1929, his lack of success reduced Blair to taking menial jobs as a dishwasher or 'plongeur' for a few weeks, principally in a fashionable hotel (the Hotel X) on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London . He was fascinated by the hierarchy of the workers and the hell of the kitchen, often running 15 miles a day while a few feet away the swells dined in elegance . He traveled to England and also tramped around under the name of P.S. Burton . It took Orwell 5 years to publish the book in 1933  after it had been rejected a few times . He told the publisher to publish it under a pseudonym as he was not proud of it and out of a list of names given him, the publisher choose the name George Orwell . After so many rejections, the naturally pessimistic Eric Blair felt this book would be a failure also .

Ill and broke, he moved back to England in 1929, using his parents' house in Southwold, Suffolk, as a base. Writing what became Burmese Days, he made frequent forays into tramping as part of what had by now become a book project on the life of the poorest people in society. Meanwhile, he became a regular contributor to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine.

Blair completed Down and Out in 1932, and it was published early the next year while he was working briefly as a schoolteacher at a private school called Frays College near Hayes, Middlesex. He took the job as an escape from dire poverty and it was during this period that he managed to obtain a literary agent called Leonard Moore. Blair also adopted the pen name George Orwell just before Down and Out was published. In a November 15 letter to Leonard Moore, his agent, he left the choice of a pseudonym to Moore and to Victor Gollancz, the publisher. Four days later, Blair wrote Moore and suggested P. S. Burton, a name he used "when tramping," adding three other possibilities: Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways.

Orwell drew on his work as a teacher and on his life in Southwold for the novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), which he wrote at his parents' house in 1934 after ill-health and the urgings of his parents forced him to give up teaching. From late 1934 to early 1936 he worked part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, Booklover's Corner, in Hampstead. Having led a lonely and very solitary existence, he wanted to enjoy the company of other young writers, and Hampstead was a place for intellectuals, as well as having many houses with cheap bedsitters. He worked his experiences into the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

    The Road to Wigan Pier

In early 1936, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write an account of poverty among the working class in the depressed areas of northern England, which appeared in 1937 as The Road to Wigan Pier.  He went to Wigan, Liverpool, Sheffeld and Barnsley to study working class life . the title was taken from a North Country joke, that if you couldn't afford to go to Blackpool, you would say you would take your vacation on Wigan pier .He was taken into many houses, simply saying that he wanted to see how people lived. He made systematic notes on housing conditions and wages and spent several days in the local Public Library consulting reports on public health and conditions in the mines. He did his homework as a social investigator. The first half of the book is a social documentary of his investigative touring in Lancashire and Yorkshire, beginning with an evocative description of work in the coal mines. The second half of the book, a long essay in which Orwell recounts his personal upbringing and development of political conscience, includes a very strong denunciation of what he saw as irresponsible elements of the left. Gollancz feared that the second half would offend Left Book Club readers, and inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain.

Soon after completing his research for the book, Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Spanish Civil War 

Orwell, the tall figure in the middle fighting in Spain with the Marxist POUM Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista.

      Orwell's wife Eileen is seated to his left .Orwell was shot in the throat His wife helped him escape to France after the members of the POUM were arrested by the republicans .

In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain as a fighter for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War that was provoked by Francisco Franco's Fascist uprising.  He did not join the International Brigade as as most leftest did , but the little known Marxist POUM .In conversation with Philip Mairet, editor of New English Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism ... somebody's got to stop it'.To Orwell, liberty and democracy went together, guaranteeing, among other things, the freedom of the artist; the present capitalist civilization was corrupt, but fascism would be morally calamitous.

John McNair (1887–1968), quotes him: 'He then said that this [writing a book] was quite secondary, and [that] his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism'. Orwell went alone; his wife, Eileen, joined him later. He joined the Independent Labour Party contingent, which consisted of some twenty-five Britons who had joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM - Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), a revolutionary communist party. The POUM, and the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Catalonia's dominant left-wing force), believed General Franco could be defeated only if the Republic's working class overthrew capitalism — a position at fundamental odds with the Spanish Communist Party, and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with the bourgeois parties to defeat the fascist Nationalists. After July 1936 there was profound social revolution in Catalonia, Aragón, and wherever the CNT was strong, an egalitarian spirit sympathetically described in Homage to Catalonia.

Fortuitously, Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the Communist International Brigades, but his experiences — especially his and Eileen's narrow escape during a Communist purge in Barcelona in June 1937 — much increased his sympathies for the POUM, making him a life-long anti-Stalinist and firm believer in what he termed Democratic Socialism, socialism with free debate and free elections.

In combat, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. At first, he feared his voice would be reduced to a permanent, painful whisper; this was not to be so, though the injury affected his voice, giving it "a strange, compelling quietness". He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all".

' People then had something we haven't got now. They didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of..'

                            Coming up for Air

George and Eileen Orwell then lived in Morocco for half a year so he could recover from his wound. In that time, he wrote Coming Up for Air, his last novel before World War II. It is the most English of his novels; alarums of war mingle with images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, Bowling posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler: "Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it ... They're something quite new — something that's never been heard of before".

              World War II and Animal Farm

Senate House University of London, site of the wartime Ministry of Information

In the years before the war, in the late 30s, Orwell was anti-war, thinking that Britain would become fascist in order to fight fascism . But after the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939 and the war loomed large he became patriotic. He tried to join the armed forced, but was rejected for health reasons, a deep disappointment to him , but he was able to join the Home Guard . Orwell moved to London during the Blitz ' You can't leave when people are being bombed to hell.'

After the ordeals of Spain and writing the book about it, most of Orwell's formative experiences were over. His finest writing, his best essays and his great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed up his house in Wallington and he and Eileen moved into 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, NW1. He supported himself by writing freelance reviews, mainly for the New English Weekly but also for Time and Tide and the New Statesman. He joined the British Home Guard soon after the war began (and was later awarded the "British Campaign Medals/Defence medal").

In 1941 Orwell took a job at the BBC Eastern Service, supervising broadcasts to India aimed at stimulating Indian interest in the war effort, at a time when the Japanese army was at India's doorstep. He was well aware that he was engaged in propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot".

The wartime "Ministry of Information", which was based at Senate House University of London, was the inspiration for the "Ministry of Truth" in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nonetheless, Orwell devoted a good deal of effort to his BBC work, which gave him an opportunity to work closely with people like T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand and William Empson.

Post War and death  

   Nineteen Eighty-Four and final years

Barnhill, Orwell's isolated house on the island of Jura

' If I can live another ten years, I think I have another three worthwhile books in me.

 BBC 1954 production on 1954

Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in spring 1945 while as a war correspondent for the Observer . While he was sick there, his wife died during an operation in Newcastle to remove a tumor (they had recently adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, who was born in May 1944). She had not told him about this operation due to concerns on the cost and the fact that she thought she would make a speedy recovery.

For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work mainly for the Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Originally, Orwell was undecided between titling the book The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four but his publisher, Fredric Warburg, helped him choose. The title was not the year Orwell had initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984.

Sonia Brownell

He wrote much of the novel while living one the remote Scottish island of Jura, where he moved in 1945 .Orwell needed isolation to write the novel that was to become 1984 and had been evolving in his mind since 1943 .He also wished his adoptive son Richard could enjoy the freedom of the countryside and do a bit of fishing. The last years of his life was spent fighting tuberculosis and pushing himself  finish Nineteen Eighty-Four . By Christmas 1947, he had to go to the hospital near Glasgow for tuberculosis of the left lung and spent 6 months there . To the horror of his friends he returned to Jura with its cold, damp climate to finish the book . His lungs once again began to trouble him, but he did nothing to seek treatment .Towards the end of '47, he typed the 120,000 words of the book by himself as no typist could be found to go to the island . Orwell felt he could have produced a much better work if he had not been so ill . He went to a sanatorium at Gloucestershire to recover, but was destined to never leave there . Orwell met Sonia Brownell in 1945 , who was famous for her beauty and was active in the literary world .

" I don't believe that the kind of society I describe will arrive, but I believe something resembling it could arrive .'

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 6, 1949. Publication was speeded up as fast as possible as it was feared Orwell might not live long enough to see it published .The book was not meant to been seen as a prophecy of how the future would be in 1984, but of the Cold war world of 1948 ( the last two digits transposed ) of rationing, war damage fear of a new world war . Shortly after the book was published Orwell made a statement that the book should not be viewed as an attack on the British Labor Party or Socialism .

In September Orwell was transferred to a University College hospital in London . On October 13, he was married to Sonia Brownell in a bedside ceremony . He died of a haemorrhage on the night of January 21, 1950 at the age of 46 . He thought he had a good chance of recovery and was planning to a trip to Switzerland with Sonia . Three days before his death, he wanted his tombstone to simply read " Here lies Eric Arthur Blair born June 25, 1903, died January 21, 1950.'  and not his more famous pen name .He  named his wife as beneficiary . He also asked that no biographies be written of him as it was not relevant to an author's work , which of course was impossible to enforce .

Orwell did not die rich, or even with a best seller, in 1950 the paperback editions of 1984 and Animal Farm had not yet appeared . Orwell was buried at All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire .

Orwell's Grave at FindAGrave.com

1984 (1984 version)

Richard Burton's last movie

 1984

(1954 version)

 George Orwell

biographies

1984 soundtrack

Eurymithics

1984 movie posters

George Orwell Quotes

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

 "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

I don't believe that the kind of society I describe will arrive, but I believe something resembling it could arrive

(Orwell on 1984 )

 "As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents "

  "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by a large number of people

the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me."

                                                            Shooting an Elephant

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

 

"Good writing is like a windowpane.  "

"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."

"Four legs good, two legs bad. "

"Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. "

 The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.  "

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

"Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

"People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes"

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. "

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

 

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", 1946

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", 1946

Links

Other Historical Websites

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