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Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by
the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a
novelist, critic, 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
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 to British parents in Motihari, Bengal
Presidency, British India. There, Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked
for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née
Limouzin), 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
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". 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, the future editor of the Horizon magazine, in which many of Orwell's most
famous essays were originally published.
Burma and the
early novels
After Blair finished his studies at 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 at Katha and Moulmein in Burma. He came to hate
imperialism, and 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) 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 bedroom 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 —
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, where his Aunt Nellie lived and died,
hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. In the autumn of 1929, his lack of
success reduced Blair to taking menial jobs as a dishwasher 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 (1933),
although there is no indication that he had the book in mind at the time.
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).
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 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.
First
marriage
Soon after completing his research for the book, Orwell married Eileen
O'Shaughnessy.
Spanish Civil War
and Homage to Catalonia
In December 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain primarily to fight, not to write, for
the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco's Fascist
uprising. In a conversation with Philip Mairet, the editor of the New English
Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism … somebody's got to stop it.' . To Orwell,
liberty and democracy went together and, among other things, guaranteed the freedom
of the artist; the present capitalist civilization was corrupt, but Fascism would
be morally calamitous. John McNair (1887–1968) is also quoted as saying in a
conversation with Orwell: 'He then said that this (writing a book) was quite
secondary and his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism.' He went
alone, and his wife joined him later. He joined the Independent Labour Party
contingent, a group of some twenty-five Britons who joined the militia of the
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM - Partido Obrero de Unificación
Marxista), a revolutionary Spanish communist political party with which the ILP was
allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the
dominant force on the left in Catalonia), believed that Franco could be defeated
only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism — a position
fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies,
which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties
to defeat the Nationalists. In the months after July 1936 there was a profound
social revolution in Catalonia, Aragon and other areas where the CNT was
particularly strong. Orwell sympathetically describes the egalitarian spirit of
revolutionary Barcelona when he arrived in Homage to Catalonia.
According to his own account, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the Communist-run
International Brigades by chance — but his experiences, in particular his and his
wife's narrow escape from the Communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly
increased his sympathy for POUM and made him a life-long anti-Stalinist and a firm
believer in what he termed Democratic Socialism, that is to say, in socialism
combined with free debate and free elections.
During his military service, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. 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."
The Orwells then spent six months in Morocco in order to recover from his wound,
and during this period, he wrote his last pre-war novel, Coming Up For Air. As the
most English of all his novels, the alarms of war mingle with idyllic images of a
Thames-side Edwardian childhood enjoyed by its protagonist, George Bowling. Much of
the novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of old
England. There were also massive and new external threats and George Bowling puts
the totalitarian hypothesis of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler in homely
terms: "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."
The Second World
War and Animal Farm
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.
Orwell's decision to resign from the BBC followed a report confirming his fears
about the broadcasts: very few Indians were listening. He wanted to become a war
correspondent and also seems to have been impatient to begin work on Animal
Farm.
Despite the good salary, he resigned in September 1943 and in November became the
literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and
Jon Kimche (it was Kimche who had been Box to Orwell's Cox when they both worked as
half-time assistants in the Hampstead bookshop in 1934–35). Orwell was on the staff
until early 1945, contributing a regular column titled "As I Please." Anthony
Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge had returned from overseas to finish the war in
London. All three took to lunching regularly, usually at the Bodega just off the
Strand or the Bourgogne in Soho, sometimes joined by Julian Symons (who seemed at
the time to be Orwell's true disciple), and David Astor, editor/owner of The
Observer.
In 1944, Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was first
published in Britain on 17 August 1945 and in the U.S.A on the 26 August 1946 with
great critical and popular success. Frank Morley, an editor at Harcourt Brace, had
come to Britain as soon as he could at the end of the War to see what readers were
currently interested in. He asked to serve a week or so in Bowes and Bowes, the
Cambridge bookshop. On his first day there customers kept asking for a book that
had sold out — the second impression of Animal Farm. He left the counter, read the
single copy left in the postal orders' department, went to London and bought the
American rights. The royalties from Animal Farm were to provide Orwell with a
comfortable income for the first time in his adult life.
While Animal Farm was at the printer, and with the end of the War in sight, Orwell
felt his old desire growing to be somehow in the thick of the action. David Astor
asked him to act as a war correspondent for the Observer to cover the liberation of
France and the early occupation of Germany, so Orwell left Tribune to become a war
correspondent. Orwell was a close friend of Astor (some say the model for the
wealthy publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and his ideas had a strong
influence on Astor's editorial policies. Astor, who died in 2001, is buried in the
grave next to Orwell.
Nineteen
Eighty-Four and final years
Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in spring 1945. While he was sick there, his
wife died during an operation in Newcastle to remove a tumour (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 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. See Nineteen Eighty-Four for more
information.
He wrote much of the novel while living at Barnhill, 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, lying at the end of a five-mile heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where
the laird or landowner, Margaret Fletcher, lived and where the paved road, the only
road 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 British Ministry of Information, has later on
(after the opening of KGB archives) been proved 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.
In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.
Death
Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from tuberculosis. He may have contracted it
during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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George
Orwell - Manifestor - Biography
