George Orwell

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Eric Arthur Blair

Born Eric Arthur Blair
25 June 1903(1903-06-25)
Motihari, Bihar, India
Died 21 January 1950 (aged 46)
London, England
Pen name George Orwell
Occupation Writer; author, journalist
Notable work(s) Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Influences
Influenced

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903[1][2] – 21 January 1950) was an English journalist, political essayist and novelist who wrote under the pseudonym George Orwell.

His writing is marked by concise descriptions of social conditions and events and a contempt for all types of authority. He is most famous for two novels critical of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (a satire of Stalinism).

Contents

Biography

Early life

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 to British parents[3] in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), had a French father who was involved in speculative ventures in Burma where she grew up. She took her son Eric to England when he was one year old and apart from a three-month visit to England in 1907 Richard Blair did not enter his son's life until Eric was nine years old. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. His great-grandfather Charles Blair had been a wealthy plantation owner in Jamaica and his grandfather a clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not. Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class".[4]

Education

At six, Eric attended the Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, where he impressed the teachers. Blair's mother wanted him to have a good public school education, but the family finances were against this unless he could obtain a scholarship. Her brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, recommended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win a scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. At the school, Blair formed a life-long friendship with Cyril Connolly (future editor of Horizon magazine, who later published many of his essays). Years later, Blair mordantly recalled the school in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys". However, while there he wrote two poems that were published in his local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton.

After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar (1917–1921), and Aldous Huxley was his French tutor. Later, Blair wrote of having been relatively happy at Eton, because it allowed students much independence. His academic performance reports indicate that he ceased serious work there, and various explanations have been offered for this. His parents could not afford to send him to Oxbridge without another scholarship, and they concluded from the poor results that he would not be able to obtain one. Instead, it was decided that Blair should join the Indian Imperial Police. To do this it was necessary to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time and Blair was enrolled at a "crammer" there called "Craighurst" where he brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam coming seventh out of twenty-seven.

Burma and the early novels

Blair's grandmother lived at Moulmein, and with family connections in the area, his choice of posting was Burma. In October 1922, he sailed on board SS Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later he arrived at Rangoon and made the journey to Mandalay the site of the police training school. After a short posting at Maymyo Burma's principal hill station he was posted to the remote area of Mayaungma at the beginning of 1924. His imperial policeman's life gave him considerable responsibilities for a young man of his age while his contemporaries were still at university in England. He was then posted to Twante where as sub-divisional officer he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924 he was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, which was closer to Rangoon and in September 1925 went to Insein the home of the second-largest jail in Burma. He moved to Moulmein where his grandmother lived in April 1926 and at the end of that year went on to Katha. There he contracted Dengue fever in 1927. He was entitled to leave in England in that year and in view of his illness was allowed to go home in July. While on leave in England in 1927, he reappraised his life and resigned from the Indian Imperial Police with the intention of becoming a writer.

The Burma police experience yielded the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "A Hanging" (1931) and "Shooting an Elephant" (1936). In England, he wrote to family acquaintance, Ruth Pitter and she and a friend found him rooms in Portobello Road (today, a blue plaque commemorates his residence there), where he began writing. From there, he sallied to the Limehouse Causeway (following Jack London's footsteps) spending 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 a tramp, making no concessions to middle class mores and expectations, and recorded his experiences of the low life in "The Spike", his first published essay, and the latter half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

He moved to Paris in spring of 1928, where his Aunt Nellie lived (and later died), hoping to earn a freelance writer's living; failure reduced him to menial jobs such as dishwasher in the fashionable Hotel X, on the rue de Rivoli in 1929, all told in Down and Out in Paris and London. The record does not indicate if he had the book in mind as the terminus of those low life experiences.

In later 1929, he returned to England, to his parents' house in Southwold, ill and penniless, where he wrote Burmese Days, and also frequently foraying to tramping in researching a book on the life of society's poorest people. Meanwhile, he regularly contributed to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine.

He completed Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932; it was published early the next year, while he taught at Frays College, near Hayes, Middlesex. He took the job to escape dire poverty; during this period, he obtained the literary agent services of Leonard Moore. Just before publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, Eric Arthur Blair adopted the nom de plume George Orwell. In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November) he left the choice of pseudonym to him and to publisher Victor Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting these pseudonyms: P. S. Burton (a tramping name), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways.[5]

As a writer, George Orwell drew upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold for the novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), written in 1934 at his parents' house after sickness and parental urging forced his foregoing the teaching life. From late 1934 to early 1936 he was a part-time assistant in the Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead. Having led a lonely, solitary existence, he wanted to enjoy the company of young writers; Hampstead was an intellectual's town with many houses offering cheap bedsit rooms. Those experiences germinated into the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Road to Wigan Pier

In early 1936, Victor Gollancz, of the Left Book Club, commissioned George Orwell to write an account of working class poverty in economically depressed northern England. His account, The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937. Orwell did his leg-and-homework as a social reporter: he gained entry to many houses in Wigan to see how people lived; took systematic notes of housing conditions and wages earned; and spent days in the local public library consulting public health records and reports on mine working conditions.

The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier documents his social investigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It begins with an evocative description of working life in the coal mines. The second half is a long essay of his upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, including a denunciation of the Left's irresponsible elements. Publisher Gollancz feared the second half would offend Left Book Club readers; he inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain.

Soon after researching the The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

The Spanish Civil War, and Catalonia

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. In conversation with Philip Mairet, editor of New English Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism ... somebody's got to stop it'.[6] 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".[7] 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".

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

After the Spanish ordeal, and writing about it, Orwell's formation ended; his finest writing, best essays, and great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed his Wallington house, and he and Eileen moved to No. 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, in the genteel Marylebone neighbourhood near Regent's Park, central London, Orwell supporting himself as a freelance reviewer for the New English Weekly (mainly), Time and Tide, and the New Statesman. Soon after the war began, he joined the Home Guard (and was awarded the "British Campaign Medals/Defence Medal") attending Tom Wintringham's home guard school and championing Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard.

In 1941, Orwell worked for BBC's Eastern Service, supervising Indian broadcasts meant to stimulate India's war participation against the approaching Japanese army. About being a propagandist, he wrote of feeling like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". Still, he devoted much effort to the opportunity of working closely with the likes of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson; the war-time Ministry of Information, at Senate House, University of London, inspired the Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's BBC resignation followed a report confirming his fears about the broadcasts: few Indians listened. He wanted to become a war correspondent, and was impatient to begin working on Animal Farm. Despite the good salary, he resigned from BBC in September 1943, and in November became literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche (Kimche had been Box to Orwell's Cox when they were half-time assistants at the Booklover's Corner book shop in Hampstead, 1934–35). Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing the regular column "As I Please". Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge had returned from overseas to finish the war in London; the three regularly lunched together at either the Bodega, off the Strand, or the Bourgogne, in Soho, sometimes joined by Julian Symons (then seemingly true disciple to Orwell) and David Astor, editor-owner of The Observer.

In 1944, Orwell finished the anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm published (Britain, 17 August 1945, U.S., 26 August 1946) to critical and popular success. Harcourt Brace Editor Frank Morley went to Britain soon after the war to learn what currently interested readers, clerking a week or so at the Cambridge book shop Bowes and Bowes. The first day, customers continually requested a sold-out book — the second impression of Animal Farm; on reading the shop's remaining copy, he went to London and bought the American publishing rights; the royalties were George Orwell's first, proper, adult income.

With Animal Farm at the printer's, with war's end in view, Orwell's desire to be in the thick of the action quickened. David Astor asked him to be the Observer war correspondent reporting the liberation of France and the early occupation of Germany; Orwell quit Tribune.

He and Astor were close; Astor is believed to be the model for the rich publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Orwell strongly influenced Astor's editorial policies. Astor died in 2001 and is buried in the grave beside Orwell's. Orwell never revealed his pen name, keeping his identity secret and thinking his work did not need a revealed author.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and final years

Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, born in May 1944. Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in spring 1945. While he was sick there, his wife died in Newcastle during an operation to remove a tumour. She had not told him about this operation due to concerns about 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.[8]

He wrote much of the novel while living at Barnhill,[9] a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura which lies in the Gulf stream off the west coast of Scotland. It was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near to the northern end of the island, situated at the end of a five-mile (8 km), heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the laird, or landowner, Margaret Fletcher lived, and where the paved road, the only one on the island, came to an end.

In 1948, he co-edited a collection entitled British Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds.

In 1949, Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which the Labour government had set up to publish anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping a friend in a cause — anti-Stalinism — that they both supported. There is no indication that Orwell abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings — or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. In fact, one of the people on the list, Peter Smollett, the head of the Soviet section in the Ministry of Information, was later (after the opening of KGB archives) proven to be a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, and "almost certainly the person on whose advice the publisher Jonathan Cape turned down Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text", although Orwell was unaware of this.[10]

In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.[11]

Death

George Orwell's grave
George Orwell's grave

Orwell died in London from tuberculosis, at the age of 46.[12] He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25, 1903, died January 21, 1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen-name. He had wanted to be buried in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die, but the graveyards in central London had no space. Fearing that he might have to be cremated, against his wishes, his widow appealed to his friends to see if any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. Orwell's friend David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay and negotiated with the vicar for Orwell to be buried there, although he had no connection with the village.

Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government.

Legacy

Literary criticism

Throughout his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer, writing works so long and sophisticated they have had an influence on literary criticism. In the celebrated conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens one seems to see Orwell himself:

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

Rules for writers

In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell provides six rules for writers:[13]

  • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  • If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  • Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
  • Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  • Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Political views

Orwell's political views shifted over time, but he was a man of the political left throughout his life as a writer. In his earlier days he occasionally described himself as a "Tory anarchist". His time in Burma made him a staunch opponent of imperialism, and his experience of poverty while researching Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier turned him into a socialist. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it," he wrote in 1946.

It was the Spanish Civil War that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed the success of the anarcho-syndicalist communities, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists and other revolutionaries by the Soviet-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party.

At the time, like most other left-wingers in the United Kingdom, he was still opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany — but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the outbreak of the Second World War, he changed his mind. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". He supported the war effort but detected (wrongly as it turned out) a mood that would lead to a revolutionary socialist movement among the British people. "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary," he wrote in Tribune, the Labour left's weekly, in December 1940.

By 1943, his thinking had moved on. He joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1945 general election and was broadly supportive of its actions in office, though he was sharply critical of its timidity on certain key questions and despised the pro-Soviet stance of many Labour left-wingers.

Although he was never either a Trotskyist or an anarchist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. He wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier that 'I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.' In typical Orwellian style, he continues to deconstruct his own opinion as 'sentimental nonsense'. He continues 'it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly'. Many of his closest friends in the mid-1940s were part of the small anarchist scene in London.[citation needed]

Orwell had little sympathy with Zionism and opposed the creation of the state of Israel. In 1945, Orwell wrote that "few English people realise that the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue and that an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably side with the Arabs".

While Orwell was concerned that the Palestinian Arabs be treated fairly, he was equally concerned with fairness to Jews in general: writing in the spring of 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain," for the "Contemporary Jewish Record." Antisemitism, Orwell warned, was "on the increase," and was "quite irrational and will not yield to arguments." He thought "the only useful approach" would be a psychological one, to discover "why" antisemites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others." (pp 332-341, As I Please: 1943-1945.) In his magnum opus, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he showed the Party enlisting antisemitic passions in the Two Minute Hates for Goldstein, their archetypal traitor.

Orwell was also a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay 'Toward European Unity', which first appeared in Partisan Review.

Work

During the majority of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and the class divide generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."

Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect developments in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Elements in Nineteen Eighty-Four satirize "opium for the masses" found as central-character Winston Smith does (witness the newspapers filled with "sex, sport, and astrology" which the Ministry of Truth peddles to the proles). Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world filled with state control, the former was written later and considers perpetual war preparation in a nuclear age; the latter is more optimistic.

Influence on the English language

Some of Nineteen Eighty-Four's lexicon has entered into the English language.

  • Orwell expounded on the importance of honest and clear language (and, conversely, on how misleading and vague language can be a tool of political manipulation) in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. The language of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is Newspeak: a thoroughly politicised and obfuscatory language designed to make independent thought impossible by limiting acceptable word choices.
  • Another phrase is 'Big Brother', or 'Big Brother is watching you'. Today, security cameras are often thought to be modern society's big brother. The current television reality show Big Brother carries that title because of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
  • The same novel spawned the title of another television series, Room 101.
  • The phrase 'thought police' is also derived from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and might be used to refer to any alleged violation of the right to the free expression of opinion. It is particularly used in contexts where free expression is proclaimed and expected to exist.
  • Doublethink is a Newspeak term from Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both.

Variations of the slogan "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", from Animal Farm, are sometimes used to satirise situations where equality exists in theory and rhetoric but not in practice with various idioms. For example, an allegation that rich people are treated more leniently by the courts despite legal equality before the law might be summarised as "all criminals are equal, but some are more equal than others". This appears to echo the phrase Primus inter pares - the Latin for "First amongst equals", which is usually applied to the head of a democratic state.

Although the origins of the term are debatable, Orwell may have been the first to use the term cold war. He used it in an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945 in Tribune, he wrote:

"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."

Literary influences

In an autobiographical sketch Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote:

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book The Road. Orwell's investigation of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier strongly resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor in order to investigate the lives of the poor in London.

In the essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) he wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them."

Other writers admired by Orwell included Ralph Waldo Emerson, G. K. Chesterton, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Yevgeny Zamyatin.[14] He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling[15],[16] praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors.[17]

Orwell also publicly defended P. G. Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser; a defence based on Wodehouse's lack of interest in and ignorance of politics.

Intelligence

Predictably, the Special Branch in the UK, the police intelligence group, spied on Orwell during the greater part of his life.[1]. The dossier published by Britain's National Archives mentions that according to one investigator, Orwell's tendency of clothing himself "in Bohemian fashion," revealed that the author was "a Communist":[2]

"This man has advanced Communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."[3]

Conversely, there has been speculation about the extent of Orwell's links to Britain's secret service, MI5, and some have even claimed that he was in the service's employ.[18] The evidence for this claim is contested.

Orwell also had an NKVD file due to his involvement with the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War.[citation needed]

Personal life

Blair's mother settled at Henley on Thames in 1905 after she bought her son back to England. He was brought up without paternal influence, his father remaining in India for most of his early childhood, in the company of his mother and sisters. His mother's diary for 1905 indicates a lively round of social activity and artistic interests. They moved to Shiplake before World War I, and Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially Jacintha Buddicom whose account "Eric and Us" provides an independent insight into the Blair's childhood. On their first encounter he was standing on his head in a field, claiming "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up". They read and wrote poetry, and dreamt of intellectual adventures. He told her that he might write a book in similar style to that of H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia. Simultaneously, he enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.[19]

George Orwell and Cyril Connolly were contemporaries at St Cyprian's and at Eton, though they hardly spoke at Eton as they were in separate years. Connolly also provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise.[20] They later became friends; Connolly helping a prep school companion by introducing him to London literary circles. At St Cyprian's Blair claimed that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship; he alleged that was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents, so accounting for his lackadaisical approach to studies at Eton. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in Such, Such Were the Joys, claiming he was a specially happy child, yet acknowledging he was a boy, aloof and undemonstrative, who did not need a wide circle of friends. He and she lost touch shortly after Orwell went to Burma, becoming unsympathetic to him because of letters he wrote complaining about his life; she ceased replying.[21]

Whilst living in poor lodgings on Portobello Road on returning from Burma, his family friend recalls:

“ That winter was very cold. Orwell had very little money, indeed. I think he must have suffered in that unheated room, after the climate of Burma ... Oh yes, he was already writing. Trying to write that is – it didn't come easily ... To us, at that time, he was a wrong-headed young man who had thrown away a good career, and was vain enough to think he could be an author. But the formidable look was not there for nothing. He had the gift, he had the courage, he had the persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition, until he became an acknowledged master of English prose. [Ruth Pitter, BBC Overseas Service broadcast, 3 January 1956] ”

In The Road to Wigan Pier he writes of tramping and poverty:

“ When I thought of poverty, I thought of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. These were the 'lowest of the low', and these were the people with whom I wanted to get into contact. What I profoundly wanted at that time was to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether. ”

The business relationship between Orwell and Victor Gollancz, his first publisher, was stiff: for example, in letters, Orwell always addressed him by surname, as "Gollancz". Two items in their relation are of particular interest. The first, Orwell apparently never voiced objection to Gollancz's apologetic preface to A Road to Wigan Pier; the second, he released Orwell from his contract (at Orwell's request) so that Secker & Warburg could publish his fiction. Gollancz's refusal to publish Animal Farm considerably delayed the book's publication. As a Soviet sympathizer, Gollancz was more interested in his non-fiction writing, finding Animal Farm politically too hot.

Eileen O'Shaughnessy was warned off Orwell by friends who warned that she did not know what she was taking on. After her death during a hysterectomy, in a letter to a friend, Orwell refers to her as 'a faithful old stick'; the depth of his love for her remains ambiguous. Eileen's symptoms may partly account for Orwell's infidelities in the war's last years, but, in a letter to a woman to whom he proposed marriage: 'I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc.'[22] Bernard Crick compares them to Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford: 'Certainly with a great writer the writing comes first. One thinks of Thomas Hardy, subtle in his characters, but obtuse to the actual suffering of his first wife.' Nevertheless, Orwell was very lonely after Eileen's death, and desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard; he proposed marriage to four women, eventually, Sonia Brownwell accepted.

Bob Edwards, who fought with him in Spain, said: 'He had a phobia against rats. We got used to them. They used to gnaw at our boots during the night, but George just couldn't get used to the presence of rats and one day, late in the evening, he caused us great embarrassment ... he got out his gun and shot it ... the whole front, and both sides, went into action.'

On Sundays, Orwell liked very rare roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding dripping with gravy, and good Yarmouth kippers at high tea. (p.501) ... He liked his tea, as well as his tobacco, strong, sometimes putting twelve spoonfuls into a huge brown teapot requiring both hands to lift.[23]

His wardrobe was famously casual: 'an awful pair of thick corduroy trousers', a pair of thick, grey flannel trousers, a 'rather nice' black corduroy jacket, a shaggy, battered, green-grey Harris tweed jacket, and a 'best suit' of dark-grey-to-black herringbone tweed of old-fashioned cut.[24]

Younger sister, Avril, joined him at Barnhill, Jura, as housekeeper. Like her brother, she was of tough character, and eventually drove away Richard Orwell's nanny, because the house was too small for both women. Orwell also nearly died during an unfortunate boating expedition in that time.

Of Orwell, Bernard Crick writes:

“ ... he was both a brave man and one who drove himself hard, for the sake, first, of 'writing' and then more and more for an integrated sense of what he had to write. Orwell was unusually reticent to his friends about his background and his life, his openness was all in print for literary or moral effect; he tried to keep his small circle of good friends well apart – people are still surprised to learn who else at the time he knew; he did not confide in people easily, not talk about his emotions – even to women with whom he was close; he was not fully integrate as a person, not quite comfortable within his own skin, until late in his life – and he was many-faceted, not a simple man at all. ”

Shelden noted Orwell’s obsessive belief in his failure, and the deep inadequacy haunting him through his career:

“ Playing the loser was a form of revenge against the winners, a way of repudiating the corrupt nature of conventional success – the scheming, the greed, the sacrifice of principles. Yet, it was also a form of self-rebuke, a way of keeping one’s own pride and ambition in check.[25] ”

According to T.R. Fyvel:

“ His crucial experience ... was his struggle to turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty, failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to turn the experience into literature.[26] ”

Bibliography

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Novels

Books based on personal experiences

Essays

Main article: Essays of George Orwell

Penguin Books George Orwell: Essays, with an Introduction by Bernard Crick

Poems

  • "Romance"
  • "A Little Poem"
  • "Awake! Young Men of England"
  • "Kitchener"
  • "Our Minds are Married, But we are Too Young"
  • "The Pagan"
  • "The Lesser Evil"
  • "Poem from Burma"

Source: George Orwell's Poems

About George Orwell

See also

References

  1. ^ George Orwell. The Orwell Reader. Retrieved on 2007-08-26.
  2. ^ George Orwell. History Guide. Retrieved on 2007-08-26.
  3. ^ Michael O'Connor (2003). Review of Gordon Bowker's "Inside George Orwell".
  4. ^ "Moving Up With George Orwell", New York Times, January 22, 1950, Sunday. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "Despite ill health, politics, and war, all of which combined to hamper, and at times paralyze, his work, George Orwell, at 47, has come a long way. Born in Bengal, of an Anglo-Indian family, he served with the Indian Imperial police in Burma between 1922 and 1927." 
  5. ^ Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.)Orwell: An Age Like This, letters 31 and 33 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World)
  6. ^ Letter of Philip Mairet to Ian Angus, 9 January 1964
  7. ^ "George Orwell", Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved on 2007-08-21. "pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter 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 as the work ..." 
  8. ^ (1984) Crick, Bernard. "Introduction to George Orwell", Nineteen Eighty-Three (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
  9. ^ Barnhill is located at 56° 06' 39" N 5° 41' 30" W (British national grid reference system NR705970)
  10. ^ Timothy Garton Ash: "Orwell's List" in "The New York Review of Books", Number 14, 25 September 2003
  11. ^ "George Orwell's Widow; Edited Husband's Works", Associated Press, December 12, 1980, Friday. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "London, Friday, December 12 (Associated Press) Sonia Orwell, widow of the writer George Orwell, died here yesterday, The Times of London reported today. The newspaper gave no details." 
  12. ^ "George Orwell, Author, 46, Dead. British Writer, Acclaimed for His '1984' and 'Animal Farm,' is Victim of Tuberculosis. Two Novels Popular Here Distaste for Imperialism", New York Times, January 22, 1950, Sunday. Retrieved on 2007-07-21. "London, January 21, 1950. George Orwell, noted British novelist, died of tuberculosis in a hospital here today at the age of 46." 
  13. ^ George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
  14. ^ Letter to Gleb Struve, 17 February 1944, Orwell: Essays, Journalism and Letters Vol 3, ed Sonia Brownell and Ian Angus
  15. ^ Malcolm Muggeridge: Introduction
  16. ^ http://www.hoover.org/publications/uk/2939606.html
  17. ^ George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling
  18. ^ "Orwell and the secret state: close encounters of a strange kind?", by Richard Keeble, Media Lens, Monday, October 10, 2005.
  19. ^ Jacintha Buddicom Eric and Us Frewin 1974.
  20. ^ Cyril Connolly Enemies of Promise 1938 ISBN0-233-97936-0
  21. ^ Jacintha Buddicom Eric and Us Frewin 1974.
  22. ^ George Orwell: A Life, Bernard Crick, p.480
  23. ^ George Orwell: A Life, Bernard Crick, p.502
  24. ^ George Orwell: A Life, Bernard Crick, p.504
  25. ^ Michael Shelden Orwell: The Authorised Biography Heinnemann 1991
  26. ^ T.R. Fyvel, A Case for George Orwell?, Twentieth Century, September 1956, pp.257-8

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Persondata
NAME Orwell, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blair, Eric Arthur
SHORT DESCRIPTION British author and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1903(1903-06-25)
PLACE OF BIRTH Motihari, Bihar, India
DATE OF DEATH January 21, 1950
PLACE OF DEATH London, England