Famous Authors — The Life and Works of George Orwell

George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was born on June 25, 1903 in India. His father was a civil servant in the Indian government, who worked in India until he retired. The baby Eric returned to England with his mother before he was a year old. The strong family ties to India, however, meant that he was to feel an affinity with the East Ida Blair and her two children Marjorie and Eric settled into the small town of Henley-on-Thames, some way upriver from London. Famous for its annual regatta, where crews compete from around the world, Henley is a pleasant place, surrounded by fields and meadows. Ida was 18 years younger than her husband and had a strong, independent spirit, so she could probably cope with having to run the small family on her own. At this time, the suffragette movement was trying to win the vote for women. Ida didn't march, but she strongly supported their efforts. Perhaps she passed some of her social conscience to her son. The Blairs were quite well off, so they soon moved to a larger house. Eric went to a small Anglican church school in Henley, where he won a scholarship to a preparatory school for boys called St Cyprian's. From here you stood a good chance of getting into one or other of the best schools in England. A year later, in 1912, Mr Blair retired. They moved house again and settled in a village just outside Henley. As a writer, Orwell was not slow off the mark. He early announced he was to be a writer and by the age of 11 had a patriotic poem about the First World War printed in the local newspaper. His closest friend at St Cyprian's was Cyril Connolly, who was also to succeed as a writer. Together they read Kipling and H.G. Wells and even Bernard Shaw and Samuel Butler. Blair was given Swift's Gulliver's Travels for his eighth birthday. As a satirist, Orwell has often been compared to Swift. You had to do as you were told at St Cyprian's and life was spartan and tough. He was not specially popular with the other boys and quite unpopular with his schoolmasters. However, he did well academically and in 1916 won a scholarship to Eton, the most prestigious school in England. He was placed 14th. He arrived in May 1917. It's ironic that Orwell, future champion of the poor and needy, should be in Eton, a school for the rich elite of English society. As he found, of course, the school is about much more than money and class. Eton College was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI. The town sits on the Thames across the river from the vast Windsor Castle, country home of the monarch. Brains are valued and nurtured in Eton and are even housed in a particular group of buildings apart from the other boys. Everyone, however, wears tailcoats and top hats, now as then. A rather withdrawn left-wing scepticism was considered quite respectable at Eton and Blair felt comfortable. At Eton, you can't go any higher socially and everyone knows it. So if you are so minded, a social conscience can be quite honourable and accepted. At Eton, Blair knew the best the world had to offer. So when George Orwell came to fight for truth and justice for all, he did so without regard to political dogma or party lines. Surprisingly, he enjoyed the officers' training corps. He learned the value of discipline and good organisation. He learned practical things like shooting and fieldcraft. It all helped when he left school and joined the police in Burma and when he fought in the Spanish Civil War. His favourite pastime at school was swimming. He read a lot and did not feel much academic pressure. Life was easy for him. He enjoyed his holidays too. Until he was 18, they were mostly spent with his neighbours, Prosper and Jacinta Buddicombe. With Prosper, he went shooting rabbits and fishing. He became very familiar with the countryside around Henley. With Jacinta, it was a special relationship. Although she was two years older, they read together, talked about books and relied on each other. By the time he was 16, he realised he was in love with her. But as she was older, she did not take his love seriously. In spite of his avid reading and real intellectual development, he did so little official academic work at Eton that entrance to university was impossible. He left school and joined the Burmese military police, back to Asia where he'd been born and where his father had worked. In November 1922, he arrived in Rangoon, the Burmese capital and a part of the vast British Empire. He was just 19 and it was his first taste of real life. In the 1920s, Burma was administratively part of British India. But where India had been offered advancement to self-government, Burma had not. Burmese nationalism was on the increase and even Buddhist monks travelled around preaching revolution against the British rule. Steps were taken towards self-government, but they were never enough. Part of the problem was that the nationalists themselves could never agree on who was boss or what should be done next. In Mandalay, Orwell joined this group at the police training school. After nine months of instruction in law, languages and police routines, he was sent to his first field posting. Fortunately for him, it was a relatively peaceful spot. However, he was a policeman and part of the occupying force, so naturally the Burmese were generally hostile. He didn't easily fit in with his English mates either, so his existence was solitary. Eventually, he produced a novel, Burmese Days, which gives us clues to his response to this experience. He had no false idealism about the Burmese. They were people like the rest of us, some good, some bad. But the British ruthlessly made huge profits by trading in Burmese resources. Out of it, the Burmese got little or nothing. For Orwell, there was no justice in this and it could not go on. He had gone east to help run the empire. None of the developments in civil organization, in commerce, in railways, could make up for the fact that the British were oppressors. Orwell was away from Europe for five years. When he left in 1922, exports were rising and unemployment falling. However, soon all that changed. By 1926, there was a general strike in Britain. Mine owners were reducing wages, unemployment was shooting up, and workers and employers were locked in a deadly struggle. The right-wing government of the time sided with the employers. In Europe, torn apart in the 1914-18 war, democracy seemed to be failing. And in Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Lithuania, dictators were in power. To this little town, settled on the Suffolk coast, Orwell returned from Burma on his first leave in five years. There could hardly be a more peaceful spot on earth. His parents had retired here and it was to be his base for years to come. To his father's horror, he had decided to resign from the Burma police. He had five months' salary due, so he began to devote all his time to writing. First in London, then in Paris. Paris was full of writers. Scott Fitzgerald was here, Hemingway, and James Joyce. Orwell kept to himself. He wrote a lot, but with little success, though the newspaper Le Monde published this article. He lived in the Rue du Port de Fer on the left bank, perhaps more of a slum then than it is now. He tells us about it in Down and Out in Paris and London. In his essay, How the Poor Die, he describes a horrifyingly degrading death in a free hospital in Paris. He spent some time in this hospital with pneumonia early in 1929, so he had first-hand experience. A heavy smoker, he was plagued by ill health and lung disease for the rest of his life. By the end of summer, he was broke, so he had to pawn his clothes. He then found that without good clothes, he could only get the worst jobs. In the luxury hotel Lottie off the Rue de Rivoli, he finished up working 13 hours a day as a plongeur, or dishwasher. By Christmas, he was back at Southwell with little to show for his efforts. He went on writing, however, and began to earn a little, reviewing other people's books. These reviews were published in the Adelphi, a journal edited by Richard Rees. Although Orwell eventually wrote an unflattering description of Rees as Ravelstone in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Rees was to remain Orwell's staunch supporter. Orwell tried to experience the truth of things as much as he could. Before he went to Paris, he had begun what he called tramping. Every now and again, he joined the tramps and destitutes, posing as one of them. He stayed in common lodging houses, or even these holes-in-the-wall spikes, as they were called, where the destitute could stay. When he got back to England, he began tramping again. Not for long at a time, but always with complete seriousness. At this time, he finished Scullion's Diary, first draft of what was later to become Down and Out in Paris in London. It nearly got published a couple of times, but was eventually completely rejected. People were not ready for its grim honesty. He could not rely on his writing, so he took a job as a schoolmaster here at Hayes in Middlesex. The Hawthorns was a small private school, and Orwell was the senior of the two masters, despite his lack of experience. The boys liked him, and he was always ready to help them. He also worked on the final draft of Down and Out in Paris in London, and Victor Golancz, a radical and ambitious new publisher, agreed to bring it out. At this point, he began to use the name George Orwell. You cross the River Orwell in Suffolk on the way to Southwold, and it reaches the sea near Ipswich. In books expressing such controversial views as he had, no doubt his family were glad not to be associated with them. Down and Out sold 2,000 copies. His writing slowly began to be noticed. He published several novels. He took various part-time jobs and lived for a time over this bookshop in Hampstead. He began to mix in London literary circles, which included old Etonian friends like Cyril Connolly. He met Eileen O'Shaughnessy, brought up in north-east England. She had won a scholarship to Oxford University before working for several years in London. Orwell knew at once that he wanted to marry her, but, of course, he had no money. Things were suddenly made easy by the offer of an advance of £500 from Golancz to write a book about workers and unemployment in the industrial north of England. It was just the sort of chance he needed. Golancz was a publisher with a social conscience, certainly, but he was also a shrewd businessman, and he succeeded for a long time in balancing his ideals with practical successes. These were the middle 30s and a time of great world oppression. There were an unheard-of 3 million unemployed in Britain. Not tramps, but people who had long held good jobs, like these miners, scrambling with their families for the off cuts of coal on the slag heaps of the north. Suddenly thrown out of their jobs with no prospect of relief, these people were the victims of world events over which they had no control. What could be done to help them? Oswald Mosley, with his black shirts, was the British answer, in sympathy with the fascism sweeping Europe. Tough leadership, controlling everything from the centre. Industry in the service of the people. No more famine. Britain for the British. It was a powerful message, and to many, it struck home. In Wallington, in Herefordshire, Orwell found this cottage where he began writing The Road to Wigan Pier, documenting what he'd seen on his travels in the north. Here too, he began married life with Eileen. It was primitive. There was no electricity. The ceilings were so low, he banged his head all the time. Friends found visiting them a test of endurance. But Eileen didn't seem to mind, and they were married here in June 1936. Orwell was personally happier here than he had ever been in his life. But in Europe, Hitler had set up his single party dictatorship under his banner of Nazi socialism. In Russia, communism was buried under Stalin's dictatorial fist. In Spain too, the democratically elected republican government was under attack by the fascist General Franco, who had the sympathy of most of the army. The government had to rely on untrained peasants and workers to fight its cause. Sympathisers from all over Europe began to go to the help of the government. On the day after Christmas 1937, Orwell arrived in Barcelona. He was there not to write or report, but to fight fascism. He was impressed by the sense of equality amongst the people and of a shared goal between officers and men in the militia. He was hopeful. Northern Spain in January was bitterly cold. Orwell was posted here in Aragon for several months. He had joined one of the many groups fighting Franco under a socialist banner. They all fought together at the front, but behind the lines at Barcelona, things were very different. Orwell's group had the initials POUM, the Marxist Workers' Party. PUM had fallen out with the other groups backed by Russia and wanted to implement socialism right away, even as they fought. The Russians wanted socialism their way. So in Barcelona, because they didn't follow the Russian line, the POUM forces were denounced as fascist supporters of Franco. To Orwell, this was unbelievable madness. There he was, fighting against Franco, surrounded by socialist comrades of like mind, as far as he was aware. Yet in all the newspapers of Europe, his POUM group were called fascist traitors. This was a complete disregard for truth by people who were more interested in gaining their own ends and maintaining their own power than in bringing socialism to the people. In this lay the roots of his most famous book, 1984. Orwell was always to fight for justice for the common man. At the same time, he exposed the corroding effects of totality and rule, where truth is cynically and systematically distorted for unjust ends. Orwell's Spanish war ended suddenly. After four months in the field, he was shot in the neck. Nothing was damaged, and after a few weeks in hospital, he was able to return to England. Although recovered from his wound, his health increasingly troubled him. Where modern cures for tuberculosis might probably have cured him. A bleeding lung took him to a sanatorium for six months in 1939. His doctors advised spending the winter in a warm climate, but his book on the Spanish war was not selling, and they had little money. His friends came to his rescue and anonymously gave him the 300 pounds he needed to go to Morocco with Eileen. With the war in Europe starting that year, Orwell's poor health meant he was not accepted for active service. Eileen went to work for the Ministry of Food, and eventually Orwell began work as a producer at the BBC. Orwell did not need to be persuaded to approve the British war effort and the propaganda that the BBC was engaged in. He knew and understood the fascism they were fighting against. Facts were selected and distorted to suit the picture the government wished to present. Fortunately, the broadcasts under his control were not political. T.S. Eliot read his own poetry on Orwell's programme and many other literary figures gave talks. However, even at the BBC there was frustrating bureaucracy and, disillusioned, he left the organisation. He became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly socialist magazine with his own column called As I Please. In it appeared some of his best and most characteristic journalism. His column covered a huge range of subjects, from the effects of saturation bombing to the life expectancy of rose bushes. More importantly, he was at work on his greatest satire, Animal Farm. Ironically, the Russia of Stalin, pilloried by Orwell, was now fighting with the British against Hitler. The British government under Churchill even spread pro-Soviet propaganda. All over Britain, Uncle Joe Stalin was seen as a benevolent ally. As a result, no publisher would touch Orwell's savage satire on Soviet Russia. It seems that Orwell and Eileen could not have children. So in June 1944, they decided to adopt a baby boy, whom they called Richard. Orwell greatly enjoyed being a father and Eileen, less enthusiastic at first, became a devoted mother. It seemed to be a good step. His increasing connections with the world of journalism brought him a job as a war correspondent for David Astor's weekly Observer newspaper. He was off to Cologne and everything seemed to be going well. Then he fell quite seriously ill. But instead of comforting letters from Eileen, he got the devastating and almost unbearable news of her sudden death during an operation for cancer. After the war, the world changed and Russia and Stalin began to be seen in their true light. Animal Farm was published and was an immediate success. He could afford a housekeeper to help him look after Richard and decided to leave London for good. Jura is an island off the west coast of Scotland. The climate is mild, but his farmhouse was remote. In this peaceful place, he struggled with his failing health and over the next two years wrote his savage and terrifying indictment of totalitarianism, 1984. What danger could he meet here? Well, of course, he nearly drowned trying to cross the notorious whirlpool of Koryv Rekon. It was a challenge he couldn't resist. Then his remote location meant that he had to retype his manuscript himself, an effort which greatly increased his labor. At last, it was done. The book 1984 was an immediate and huge success. He had reputation and financial security, but it had come too late. From this time on, he spent his time in hospitals and sanatoria. In September 1949, he was moved here to University College Hospital in London and he never gave up hope. Sonia Brownwell had been a friend for some years and was now managing all his affairs. He felt that if he took good care, he still had some years of life left. They were married in October in the hospital. Some months later, they planned to go to a sanatorium in Switzerland and all their preparations were made. However, on the night of June 21st, 1950, Eric Blair, alias George Orwell, died. It was not a long life, but he could hardly have given more to the world than he did in his two great novels, Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell's Work Orwell's work falls roughly into three groups. Miscellaneous essays and short stories. What can best be described as documentary pieces and novels. Miscellaneous essays and short stories. Orwell wrote a large number of essays and short stories for journals and newspapers and they are available in various collections. Some of the titles of these give an idea of his wide range of interests. All are well written and interesting today. A Smoking Room Story A Scullion's Diary Culture and Democracy Dickens, Dali and others In Defence of the Novel Inside the Whale, a book of essays about artists and political commitment. Notes on Nationalism Politics versus Literature Reflections on Gandhi Shooting an Elephant Why I Write Documentary Pieces The Road to Wigan Pier is a piece of realistic documentary writing about the mining and cotton town Wigan in the industrial heart of England where for a time Orwell lived. The workers there suffered unemployment and poverty and Orwell's sympathetic analysis of their plight had a huge effect. The book sold 43,000 copies through the Golan's Left Book Club. Homage to Catalonia is an account of the Spanish Civil War based around his own experiences. It reflects, amongst other things, his chilling view of Communism. Novels Down and Out in Paris and London A journalistic novel about the world of the Tramps amongst whom Orwell had lived for a time. It had a modest success but in 1940 Penguin reprinted it and sold 40,000 copies. Burmese Days A novel based on his experiences in Burma. Some people have seen it as his best writing. His friend Cyril Connolly reviewed it and wrote I recommend it to anyone who enjoys a spate of efficient indignation, graphic description, excellent narrative, excitement and irony tempered with vitriol. A Clergyman's Daughter is a novel about a middle-class school teacher. Gollancz published it against the advice of his readers. It is not political and the main character is not deeply conveyed but she is the beginning of the style of characterisation he used in later works such as 1984. It's all setting and situation preying upon the human spirit. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a novel about young Gordon Comstock who works in a bookshop in Hampstead. Orwell's early novels were all so close to his own life that his publishers had anxieties about libel. The Hero is full of self-pity about his own personal failure and his pessimism and poverty make the book a gloomy read but the well-known theme of a struggling artist trying to preserve his integrity meant that it was published and it sold. Coming Up for Air is a novel about the horrors of war impinging on a peaceful Edwardian childhood. He was finding that in literature rather than journalism he could express his views on society more subtly and effectively. Animal Farm is a powerful novel about a small society determined to live in total equality with disastrous effects. It is wryly amusing and horrifying all in one. For anyone who thinks, cares and reads this book is not to be missed. A fine cartoon film has been made of it. 1984 brilliantly envisages social life under totalitarian rule. It has been one of the most influential books of the 20th century and we now know of course that by the time 1984 was actually reached the huge totalitarian communist state of the USSR was fast crumbling. The essence of Orwell's work. In Animal Farm we see Orwell at his best. He had come to feel that a novelist had to engage in moral questions but not promote answers. In this book he found the perfect form for his talents.