George Orwell (1903-1950)

Biography 

Vital Statistics:
- Name: BLAIR, Eric Arthur
- Born: June 25, 1903; Motihari, Bengal, India
- Died: January 21, 1950; London, England

 

The British author George Orwell achieved prominence in the late 1940's as the author of two brilliant satires attacking totalitarianism. Familiarity with the novels, documentaries, essays and criticism he wrote during the 1930's and later stablished him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century.

Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in 1903 in the Indian Village Motihari, which lies near to the border of Nepal. At that time India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair's father Richard, held a post as agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair's paternal grandfather had also been part of the British Raj, and had served in the Indian Army. The Blairs led a relatively privileged and fairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire. Although the Blair family was not very wealthy - Orwell later described them ironically as "lower-upper-middle class". They were like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihood and prospects.

In 1907 when Eric had about eight years, the family returned to England and lived at Henley, though the father continued to work in India until he retired in 1912.With some difficulty, Blair's parents sent their son to a private preparatory school in Sussex at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen he won a scholarship to Wellington, and soon after another to Eton, the famous public school. In 1922, after finishing Eton, Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. In doing so he was already breaking away from the path most of his school-fellows would take, for Eton often led to either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead he was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma, an served for five years in the police force there. In 1927 he resigned, there are at least two reasons for this: firstly, his life as a policeman was a distraction from the life he really wanted, which was to be a writer; and secondly, he had come to feel that, as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer believe. Even as early as this his ideas about writing and his political ideas were closely linked. It was not simply that he wished to break away from British imperialism in India: he wished to "escape from ... every form of man's dominion over man", as he said in Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the social structure out of which he came dependent.

Success in life, in the terms in which his family would understand success, seemed necessarily to involve exploitation of the weak, at home and abroad. This meant that Eric Blair would somehow have to shed his old identity and take on a new. This is exactly what he tried to do: he tried to change himself from Eric Blair, old Etonian an English colonial policemen, into George Orwell, classless antiauthoritarian. It will be clear that Orwell's reasons for taking the name Orwell are much more complicated than those writers usually have when adopting a pen-name.

He turned his back on English Imperialism and on his own inherited values, by taking a drastic step. For six months after his return from Burma he went on living among the poor in the east of London. Later he went to Paris, where he lived and worked in a working-class quarter. Once again his journey was downward in to the life to which he felt he should expose himself, the life of poverty-stricken, or of those who barely scarped a living. In 1929 he returned to England, where he lived for a time as a tramp. He described his experiences in his first book Down And Out In Paris And London, which was published in 1933. It was not a novel; it was a kind of documentary account of life about which not many of those who would read the book at the time would know very much. And this was the point of it: he wished to bring the English middle class, of which he was a member, to an understanding of what life they led an enjoyed, was founded upon, the life under their very noses.

In 1936 he wrote The Road to Wigan Pier, it was a journey away from the comparative comfort of the middle class life. His account of mining communities in the north of England in this book is full of detail, and conveys to the reader what is like to go down a mine. When the Left Book Club read what he had written about the English class system and English socialism in the The Road to Wigan Pier, they were not pleased, because in the second half of the book Orwell criticised the English socialism, because in his eyes it was mostly unrealistic, and another fact criticised by Orwell was that most of the socialists tended to be members of the Middle class.

He went to Spain at the end of 1936, with the idea of writing newspaper articles on the Civil War which had broken out there. The conflict in Spain was between the communist, socialist Republic, and General Franco's Fascist military rebellion. When Orwell arrived at Barcelona he was astonished at the atmosphere he found there: what had seemed impossible in England seemed a fact of daily life in Spain. Class distinction seemed to have vanished. There was a shortage of everything, but there was equality. Orwell joined in the struggle, by enlisting in the militia of POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), with which the British Labour Party had an association. For the first time in his life socialism seemed a reality, something for which it was worth fighting for. Three and a half month later when he returned to Barcelona, he found it a changed city. No longer a place where the socialist word comrade was really felt to mean something, it was a city returning to "normal". Even worse, he was to find that the group he was with, the POUM, was now accused of being a Fascist militia, secretly helping Franco. Orwell had to sleep in the open to avoid showing his papers, and eventually managed to escape into France with his wife. His account of his time in Spain was published in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His experiences in Spain left two impressions on Orwell's mind: firstly, they showed him that socialism in action was a human possibility, if only a temporary one. He never forgot the exhilaration of those first days in Barcelona, when a new society seemed possible, where "comradeship" instead of being just a socialist abuse of language, was reality. But secondly, the experience of the city returning to normal, he saw as a gloomy confirmation of the fact that there will always be different classes, that there is something in the human nature that seeks violence, conflict, power over others. It will be clear that these two impressions, of hope on the one hand, and despair on the other are entirely contradiction. Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of his return to Barcelona (there were street fights between different groups of socialists). Orwell left Spain with a hopeful impression.

In 1938 Orwell became ill with tuberculosis, and spent the winter in Morocco. While there he wrote his next book, a novel entitled Coming up for Air, published in1939, the year the long threatened war between England and Germany broke out. Orwell wanted to fight, as he has done in Spain, against the fascist enemy, but he was declared unfit.

In 1941 he has joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as talks producer in the Indian section of the eastern service. He served in the Home Guard, a wartime civilian body for local defence. In 1943 he left the BBC to become literary editor of the tribune, and began writing Animal Farm. Towards the end of war Orwell went to Europe as a reporter.

Late in 1945 he went to the island of Jura off the Scottish coast, and settled there in 1946. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four there. The islands climate was unsuitable for someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the bleakness of human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed he said that the book wouldn't have been so gloomy if he had not been so ill. Later that year he married Sonia Bronwell. He died in January.

 

               

             

             
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