Orwell, George

I

Introduction

Orwell, George, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), British novelist, essayist, and critic whose brilliant reporting and political conscience fashioned an impassioned picture of his life and times.

II

Early Works

Orwell was born in Motihari, India, but grew up in England where he was educated at Eton College. He served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar) from 1922 to 1927, when he returned to England determined to make a career as a writer. Orwell firmly believed in the importance of experience to his writing, most of which is autobiographical in nature, but developed to suit his literary and political purposes. He lived for several years in poverty, in London and then in Paris. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), an account of the sordid conditions of the homeless poor, is based upon his first-hand observations. This was followed by Burmese Days (1934), an indictment of English imperialism largely based on his time in Burma. To support himself he wrote book reviews, poetry, and articles for Adelphi, a literary journal, taught in schools, and worked as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop. His next two novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), reflect these occupations and his developing political beliefs.

III

Later Works

Orwell was wary of all organized political parties, and considered himself a libertarian socialist, concerned with humanitarian issues and committed to speaking out against all forms of intolerance and injustice. These views were firmly in place by the time he finished his next two works. He wrote again of the miserable conditions of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a harrowing report on the conditions of unemployed coal miners in northern England. Orwell lived in northern England for over two months, talking to miners, their families, their neighbours, and trade union officials. He went down the mines, and endured the same conditions as the miners in order to see for himself the hardships of a life quite alien to his own. He was appalled by “the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances”.

Orwell kept a small village shop while writing this book, and on its completion travelled to Spain where he was wounded by a sniper while fighting for the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War. His description of his experiences, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), forms one of the most moving accounts of this war. Orwell believed the ideals for which he had fought were betrayed when fellow soldiers were arrested for fighting with their eventually outlawed militia. His description of the power struggles in Barcelona offered a glimpse of what was to come in his later work:

Coming Up for Air (1939), written while Orwell convalesced from one of a number of lung ailments, voiced his concerns about the rise of totalitarianism. Deemed medically unfit to fight in World War II, Orwell served in the Home Guard, wrote book reviews, critical articles, and essays for a number of journals, was literary editor of the journal Tribune, and worked for the BBC, in charge of educational programmes broadcast to India.

He also wrote the witty allegorical fable Animal Farm (1945), a condemnation of totalitarian society based on the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Stalin. The animals, dissatisfied with their servitude to humans, take over their farm intending to run things fairly, but are betrayed by the pigs who adopt the commandment, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. The tone is ultimately one of pessimism, suggesting that all revolutions will fail to realize their original ideals because there will always be someone to help the “pigs” gain their evil ends:

Orwell continued his condemnation of fascism in the satirical, futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which presents a terrifying picture of life under the constant surveillance of “Big Brother”. He depicted a totalitarian regime that outlawed truth, love, thought, and the concept of the individual, and controlled its populace with fear, brute force, and propaganda. Winston Smith dares to resist, and clings to the notion that something of him will survive the terrifying consequences that await him in Room 101 at the hands of the Thought Police: “They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

The financial security and international recognition Orwell enjoyed from these two works was short-lived. Orwell died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950 in London and was buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Works published posthumously include Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950), models of expository prose; Such, Such Were the Joys (1953), recalling the hardships of his schooldays; and The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, which was published in four volumes in 1968.