The man known to history as George Orwell
was born as Eric Arthur Blair on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari in Bengal, India,
which was then part of the vast British Empire. His father Richard Walmsley Blair was born
in 1857 and went to India at the age of eighteen to work in the civil service as an opium agent,
overseeing the production of a drug that was mainly exported to China and proved extremely
lucrative for the British Empire. Eric’s mother Ida Mabel Limouzin was 21
years old when she married her husband. Born in Surrey to a French father and English
mother, she spent her childhood in Moulmein in Burma, where the Limouzin family was well-established
as merchants and traders. Ida was working as a governess at the time
she married her husband and accompanied him as he moved around the country carrying out
his administrative duties. At the age of 39, Richard Walmesley Blair
married Ida who was half his age and with whom he would have two children. Their elder daughter Marjorie was born in
1898, and Eric was born in 1903 soon after Richard was transferred to a new post at Motihari
near the Nepalese border. Although the Blair family could claim aristocratic
connections dating back to the eighteenth century, by the time of Eric’s birth they
were still part of the upper-middle class, but the family’s wealth had largely gone. While Eric, as a child did not enjoy a prosperous
upbringing, he nevertheless grew up with an awareness of privilege in the British social
system. In 1904, Eric accompanied his mother and sister
to England while his father remained in India. He was a sickly infant who frequently suffered
from bouts of ill health related to his lungs, and this illness would plague him for the
rest of his life. By late 1905, the family was established in
a house in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Although he was prone to spending time on
his own, the adult George Orwell would later reminisce fondly about his childhood and claimed
he was his mother’s favourite child. Relations between the young Eric and his father
Richard were less cordial, owing largely to the fact that the two did not see much of
each other until Richard’s retirement and return from India in 1912 at the age of 55. In 1907 Richard returned to England for three
months, enough time for his wife to give birth to their third child, a daughter named Avril,
in 1908. Looking back, the England Orwell grew up in
was a peaceful and idyllic place where young children were allowed to play freely in the
streets. A sense of joy and optimism was reflected
in the person of King Edward VII, the charismatic and pleasure-seeking monarch whose personality
stood in contrast to that of his mother Queen Victoria. The British Empire was the global superpower
and imperial officials such as Richard Blair helped to funnel the wealth of its colonies
around the world to London by controlling the maritime trade. This time of relative peace was not without
tragedy, and Orwell recalled the horror he felt as he listened to the accounts of the
sinking of the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage to New York on the 15th of April 1912. But a much greater horror would befall Britain
and the world two years later with the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914,
which shattered the sense of tranquillity that the 11-year-old Eric Blair had grown
up with. As a child, Eric was a keen reader of fiction
and began to develop his literary talent early on. His mother had high hopes for her son’s
education, and in the summer of 1911, Eric began his studies at St Cyprian’s School
near Eastbourne in Sussex. The school was intended to prepare its pupils
for a public-school education, and its basic curriculum included Latin, Greek, English,
History, and Mathematics. During his five years at St Cyprian’s, Eric
proved to be a gifted student and was consistently near the top of his class in all subjects,
while also demonstrating a talent for cricket. Not long after Eric started school, his father
Richard retired and returned to England permanently, and the family moved to the village of Shiplake
a couple of miles outside Henley. While in Shiplake, Eric became close friends
with the three Buddicom children: Jacintha, Prosper, and Guinever. Eric and Jacintha shared a love for literature,
and already at the age of eleven the young boy had aspirations to become a famous author,
writing plays inspired by Shakespeare and reading them out aloud to his playmate. When war broke out in August 1914, Eric witnessed
crowds of young men gathering at the station to get hold of the evening papers as they
arrived by train. Not long after the outbreak of war, the 11-year-old
boy wrote a patriotic poem encouraging young Englishmen to enlist in the army during their
country’s hour of need. The poem was printed in the local paper in
early October and also read aloud to the school assembly at St Cyprian’s, where it was well
received. Later in life, Orwell came to despise the
time he spent at the school. In a 15,000-word essay which was not published
until 1968, he wrote about his experiences being beaten by the headmaster, Mr Wilkes,
the poor living conditions and bad food, and the tendency of the school’s establishment
to show preference to the children of wealthier families who could pay their fees in full. Based on the recollections of his schoolmates,
many of these criticisms were exaggerated or untrue, and despite what he may have thought
about St Cyprian’s in hindsight, the young Orwell continued to see academic success,
winning the school English prize in 1915 and the Classics prize in 1916. In 1916 Eric won a Classics scholarship to
Wellington College, and later that year he took the examination for Eton and came 13th. Since there were only twelve scholarships
available, he would have to wait for a vacancy in order to take up his place. After spending a term at Wellington at the
beginning of 1917, Orwell headed to Eton when a vacancy opened up for him. Founded by King Henry VI in 1440, Eton College
was – and still remains –the most prestigious English public school and the breeding ground
for the country’s political and social elite. In his brief recollections of more than four
years spent at Eton, Orwell gave the impression that he did not belong there, emphasising
the fact that he owed his place to a scholarship and was therefore socially inferior to most
of the student body. In fact, as a King’s Scholar who was exempt
from all fees, Eric Blair was part of an intellectual elite at the school who lived on the premises
of the college rather than in the town. However, while he worked hard at St Cyprian’s,
at Eton he allowed himself to relax and his academic performance suffered as a result. Despite being a Classics scholar, he came
bottom in his Latin class and was soon transferred to the less demanding Classical General studies. At any rate, his poor academic performance
meant that the prospect of going to university at Oxford or Cambridge was increasingly distant. By the time Orwell began his studies at Eton
in May 1917, the early enthusiasm for the Great War had waned as a stalemate developed
along the Western front and both sides were firmly entrenched. Aside from the fact that older teachers had
been brought out of retirement to replace the younger men who joined the army, the schoolchildren
at Eton no longer took much notice of the war, which merely carried on in the background,
and even the Russian Revolution of that year seems to have passed by without much interest. Nevertheless, the war had a profound impact
on the Blair family, and in 1917 the 60-year-old Richard Blair enlisted as a second lieutenant
and went to France, while Ida went to London to work in the Ministry of Pensions. The Blairs had moved back to Henley in 1915,
but the house was let out to tenants, and Eric and his younger sister Avril spent their
holidays with the Buddicoms. Eric continued to confide in Jacintha about
his literary ambitions and inspirations, and at this time he was particularly influenced
by the work of G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, and D.H. Lawrence. Even after the war, following Richard Blair’s
return from France in 1919, Eric continued to spend most of his time with the Buddicoms,
and his affections for Jacintha, expressed through poems he wrote her, bordered on the
romantic. By 1920, Eric had one more year at Eton and
his parents began to discuss his future. Eric hoped to go to university, an aspiration
that was shared by his mother, but Richard Blair was insistent that his son should follow
in his footsteps into the Imperial civil service. In the end, the father prevailed, although
in any case the prospects of Eric obtaining a scholarship at Oxford were minimal given
his poor academic performance at Eton. After a final term at Eton at the end of 1921,
he packed his bags and left for the seaside town of Southwold in Suffolk, where his parents
had moved for their retirement. In June 1922, a couple of days after his nineteenth
birthday, Orwell took and passed the entrance exam for the Indian Imperial Police, a respectable
if not glamorous career. He requested a posting to Burma where his
mother had spent much of her childhood and where his maternal grandmother still lived. After spending the summer with the Buddicoms,
he sailed from Liverpool on the 27th of October and arrived at the Burmese capital of Yangon
a month later. On the 28th of November, he boarded the train
to the police training college in Mandalay. By the time of Orwell’s arrival in Burma,
the country had only recently been annexed by the British Empire, when in 1885 British
and Indian troops occupied the royal palace in Mandalay and forced King Thibaw to abdicate
his throne. The British conquest of Burma was primarily
motivated by commercial reasons such as gaining access to cheap rice, oil, and timber. In contrast to most other colonies, the British
eliminated the existing Burmese political institutions and formally annexed it to India,
leaving the country under effective military rule. By the time Orwell arrived to join the police
force, the political disturbances which had plagued Burma since the British conquest were
declining, but the crime rate was increasing. In 1924 there were 800 murders over the year
and the prison population stood at around 16,000. Moreover, a new arrival from Europe would
have found the country a strange and inhospitable place, with a climate that combined scorching
heat with a prolonged monsoon season and frequent wild animal attacks which killed over a hundred
people a year. During his training, Orwell learned Burmese
quickly and was apparently able to speak to Burmese priests within a few years, but he
remained unsociable and lacked the ability for heavy drinking that the Burmese police
force was known for. After completing his training, in January
1924 Orwell was assigned to Myuangma in the delta of the Irrawaddy River, around a hundred
miles to the west of Yangon. As an assistant of the District Superintendent,
he was in charge of a police station of between twenty and thirty people. Later that year he was moved to Twantay, only
thirty miles from Yangon but still a two-day journey by steamboat, where as a Sub-Division
Officer he was to oversee the police station and also gather intelligence in the local
villages. By the end of the year, he was promoted to
Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, where his main duties were to protect
the operations of the Burmah Oil Company refinery. Orwell was happier in Syriam, situated across
the Bago River from Yangon, one of the few places in the country where he could enjoy
Western-style luxuries. In April 1926, he was transferred to Moulmein,
another attractive posting since it enabled him to make the acquaintance of his grandmother
and his aunt. At the end of the year, he was moved to Kahta
on the banks of the Irrawaddy to the west of Mandalay, where he caught dengue fever
and in July 1927 he was granted a six month leave of absence to return to England and
recuperate. Although he had been granted his leave due
to his illness, after leaving Burma in late July 1927 Orwell would never return. Nevertheless, the four and a half years Orwell
spent in Burma left a great impression on him and on his literary career. He recognised the brutality of British imperial
rule but was also shocked by some of the practices of the native Burmese, which Europeans of
the time would have considered backward and primitive. During a family holiday to Cornwall in September
1927, he announced that he was resigning from the Burma Police and would instead pursue
a career as a writer. The unexpected declaration provoked a bitter
reaction from his parents and caused Orwell to be estranged from his father for several
years. During that autumn he travelled to Cambridge
to visit an old tutor at Eton and asked for advice about embarking on a literary career. Following the suggestion to move where writers
and editors could be found, Orwell decided to move to London and found lodgings on Portobello
Road in west London. In late 1927, he decided to put on ragged
clothes and make a visit to Limehouse in the working-class East End of London, the first
of many tramping expeditions. While Orwell was genuinely sympathetic to
the British working class and was struck by their kindness to him, he was also seeking
material for his writing. In early 1928, motivated by favourable exchange
rates and a desire to place himself in one of the most literary cities in Europe, Orwell
moved to Paris. During this period, he wrote a number of short
pieces for literary magazines, though none were published. He saw more success in his journalism, writing
articles about censorship in England and the condition of the British working class using
the material he gathered in London, as well as a piece inspired by his time in Burma. During his first year in Paris, Orwell lived
in the bohemian Latin Quarter among fellow writers and artists, and he was often seen
at social events with his aunt Nellie Limouzin who lived nearby. After being hospitalised with influenza in
March 1929, Orwell spent several months living in destitution alongside a Russian friend,
with whom he worked as a dishwasher in a large hotel and later a restaurant. Since Aunt Nellie could have provided him
with financial support if he ran out of money, it is likely that Orwell’s decision was
primarily motivated by literary research. Living and working alongside the Parisian
downtrodden, Orwell experienced and witnessed the dirt and squalor which he would describe
in his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. After almost two years in Paris, Orwell returned
to Southwold in December 1929. While still in Paris, he had written a piece
called ‘The Spike,’ referencing his experiences as a tramp in London. He submitted it to the Adelphi magazine which
accepted it for publication but after several revisions it was still not published until
1931. The Adelphi was a progressive magazine and
its editors at the time, Sir Richard Rees and Max Plowman, were both involved in working
class organisations. After their first meeting in 1930, Orwell
became close friends with both men until the end of his life. Despite his strained relationship with his
father and the town’s reputation as a retreat for the British upper classes, Orwell continued
to be based in Southwold for much of the next five years, working out of his bedroom in
the family house and occasionally scandalising the family with his unconventional way of
life. In addition to writing about his experiences
in France, Orwell worked as a book reviewer for the Adelphi and by 1931 he was a regular
contributor to its pages. He supplemented his income by tutoring the
children of family friends but also went tramping in London regularly, and on one occasion was
working as a cleaner for a family in Limehouse whose children were bemused by his posh accent. In September 1931 Orwell spent a couple of
weeks in Kent working in the hop fields, an activity which served as a summer holiday
for the workers in the East End of London. Orwell kept a detailed diary of his expedition
during which he and the men he had befriended on the way from London were forced to steal
supplies and food in order to survive. The financial situation was so desperate that
Orwell had to write to Southwold asking his family for ten shillings, but once he reached
the hop-fields he noted the remarkable generosity of his fellow pickers in providing him with
food. Although he tried to maintain a cockney accent
to fit in with his company, on occasion Orwell would revert to his normal manner of speaking. This only served to elicit greater sympathy
from his companions, who concluded that he had ‘come down in the world.’ After fifteen days of working for over ten
hours a day in the fields, Orwell was paid on the 19th of September, making sixteen shillings
from the experience after deducting the train fares. Back in London, he wrote up his hop-picking
diary while working in the Billingsgate fish market. The living conditions at his cheap lodgings
in Tooley Street near London Bridge proved so revolting that Orwell asked his parents
for money and moved to the far more respectable Harrow Road in West London. In early 1932, Orwell managed to secure the
services of Leonard Moore as his literary agent. At the time he was seeking publication for
the manuscript of ‘A Scullion’s Diary,’ an account based on his experiences in Paris
which had been sent to the poet T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, who found it interesting
but too short. While he was continuing to struggle with his
literary career, he found a job as a master at Hawthorns High School for Boys in Hayes
on the western outskirts of London, which he described as ‘one of the most godforsaken
places I have struck.’ In June, he received news from Moore that
the publisher Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish ‘A Scullion’s Diary’ for
an advance of £40. After making the suggested edits, it was published
under the title Down and Out in Paris and London in January 1933. Its author had insisted on using a pseudonym
rather than his real name of Eric Blair, and eventually chose the name George Orwell on
the basis that ‘it’s a good round English name.’ The name George was derived from Saint George,
the patron saint of England, while Orwell comes from the River Orwell which runs through
Ipswich in Suffolk. It had taken five years since his return from
Burma, but the 29-year-old Eric Arthur Blair was now a published novelist under the name
of George Orwell. Although Down and Out received favourable
reviews and was listed among the ‘best sellers of the week’ by the Sunday Express, Orwell’s
life and career remained unstable. Although his contemporaries recognised his
intelligence and wit, his writing was unoriginal and seemed old-fashioned for the time. By the time he was almost thirty, he was an
unhappy man and had attempted to seek comfort in religion by attending the Anglican church
in Hayes, although he would later be critical of religious practice. He was not earning enough money from writing
to make a living, forcing him to do a teaching job he did not much enjoy, and in 1933 he
transferred to Fray’s College in Uxbridge to teach French. In the meantime, he had suffered setbacks
in his romantic life in Southwold. In 1930 he proposed to Brenda Salkeld, the
daughter of a clergyman who taught at a nearby school, who preferred to remain friends. In 1931 he was in an intimate relationship
with Eleanor Jacques, but she was already romantically involved with Orwell’s friend
Dennis Collings and would marry him in 1934. In January 1933 Orwell sent Moore a hundred
pages of Burmese Days, a novel inspired by his time in Burma, and by November he managed
to deliver the completed manuscript. After falling dangerously ill with pneumonia
in late December, in the New Year Orwell returned to Southwold to recuperate, where he received
the news that Gollancz had turned down Burmese Days, afraid that he would be sued for libel. As a result, the novel was first published
in the United States in October 1934 by his American publisher Harper Brothers. The novel is set in the fictional town of
Kyauktada, based on Katha, the Burmese town where Orwell had his final posting before
his return to England. Its main character John Flory is an unmarried
teak merchant who is bored by the company of the local European community and prefers
the company of an Indian hospital doctor. Flory falls in love with Elizabeth Lackersteen,
the niece of the manager of a timber firm, and dismisses his Burmese mistress. However, the arrival of an army officer named
Lieutenant Verrall prompts Elizabeth to transfer her affections to the man with greater prospects. In the meantime, Flory defends the reputation
of his Indian friend Dr Veraswami against attacks on him by U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese
businessman. Kyin’s efforts create tensions between the
Burmese and European populations, and Flory becomes a hero when he helps to bring an anti-British
riot under control. After Verrall leaves Elizabeth without saying
goodbye, she returns to Flory, only to abandon him for a second time when U Po Kyin bribes
his former mistress to make a public scene about their affair, causing a despairing Flory
to shoot himself. While awaiting the publication of Burmese
Days, Orwell wrote the novel A Clergyman’s Daughter over a six-month period, presenting
Moore with the manuscript in early October 1934. The novel’s heroine Dorothy Hare is the
daughter of a Suffolk rector who ends up in London after suffering a mental breakdown. The novel follows her journey as she joins
a group of tramps hop-picking in Kent, she ends up in a prostitutes’ boarding house
in London, then spends a night begging on the streets in Trafalgar Square, and finds
work at a private school in west London before eventually being rescued by a friend and returning
home. The plot and the character of Dorothy seems
to serve as a means for Orwell to reflect on his personal experiences in rural Suffolk
and among the London poor, offering social commentary in the process. Perhaps for this reason, Orwell came to dislike
the book and did not allow it to be reprinted in his lifetime. In late October, thanks to Aunt Nellie’s
influence, Orwell managed to secure a part-time job as an assistant at Booklovers’ Corner,
a bookshop in Hampstead in northwest London run by Francis Westrope and his wife Myfanwy. With accommodation included at the Westropes’
flat, Orwell was living in London permanently for the first time with access to the literary
world, and by working five-and-a-half hours a day, he could dedicate his free time to
writing. For most of the fifteen months he spent at
the bookshop, Orwell worked on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a novel about a poet who struggles
to gain recognition from a literary elite that is mostly closed to him. Once again, there are autobiographical elements
to the story, although Orwell himself was by now no longer a total outsider to the London
literary scene. During this time Orwell was also exposed to
the left-wing politics of the Westropes, longstanding members of the Independent Labour Party, a
radical and revolutionary sect which remained within the larger mainstream Labour Party. Although Orwell had not yet developed a defined
set of political beliefs, his anti-Imperialism and sense of fairness had already been drawing
him towards socialism. Orwell spent much of late 1934 and 1935 in
lengthy discussions with Gollancz about his manuscripts. A Clergyman’s Daughter was published in
March 1935 to mixed reviews which praised the treatment of specific scenes but were
more critical of the style and plot. Gollancz was now confident enough to publish
Burmese Days after Orwell agreed to carry out a thorough check of the lists of British
officials in Burma to ensure that nobody shared their name with any of his characters. In late June, the novel was published in the
UK and received mostly positive reviews, including one in the New Statesman from the writer Cyril
Connolly, an old friend from St Cyprian’s and Eton. This led to a reunion between the two men
after thirteen years, and they remained close friends until Orwell’s death. Meanwhile, in spring 1935 Orwell met Eileen
O’Shaughnessy, a psychology student at University College London. Almost immediately after their meeting Orwell
was intent on marrying Eileen and the two went on frequent dates over the course of
the year, though Eileen did not immediately agree to his proposal and planned to finish
her course before making a decision. While continuing work on Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, Orwell became a regular book reviewer for the New English Weekly, a literary journal
launched in 1932. After Orwell submitted the manuscript for
Aspidistra on the 15th of January 1936, Gollancz suggested that he should go to northern England
to provide a piece of commentary about the social conditions, contributing to the literature
of deprivation written during the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the 31st of January Orwell left London
with no precise idea where he was going, and by the 3rd of February he reached Manchester. Using a list of the Adelphi’s regional representatives
sent by Richard Rees, Orwell found places to stay in Wigan, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds,
and Barnsley over the next two months. He kept a detailed diary about his meetings
with working class people in the docks and mines and recorded his shock at the extreme
deprivation he saw. During his stay in Barnsley, he attended a
meeting addressed by Sir Oswald Mosley, a former Labour minister who had become the
leader of the British Union of Fascists. Developed by Italian leader Benito Mussolini
in the 1920s, fascism was a political ideology which channelled popular frustration about
economic hardship into hatred for minority groups. In 1933 Germany came under fascist rule as
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power, and the effects of economic depression made
Britain susceptible to such an ideology. Orwell was dismayed by both the violence displayed
by Mosley’s blackshirt supporters and his ability to persuade his audience of his ideas. After returning to London at the end of March,
from the 2nd of April, Orwell moved to a tiny cottage in the small village of Wallington
in Hertfordshire, which he would use as a weekend retreat for over a decade. When Orwell received news that Keep the Aspidistra
Flying had been published, he was already transforming the diary of his northern journey
into a novel that would become The Road to Wigan Pier. It is unclear whether Eileen was living with
Orwell when he moved to Wallington, but on the 9th of June 1936 the two were married
at the local village church. Since George Orwell was only a literary pseudonym
and Eric Blair was still known by that name by his friends and acquaintances, Eileen took
the surname Blair. Eileen had abandoned her degree and may have
expected to be involved in her husband’s work but instead found herself largely excluded
from it. By the end of the year Orwell finished writing
The Road to Wigan Pier and sent the manuscript to Gollancz on the 15th of December. The first half of the book documents his investigations
of living conditions in the north of England, while the second half features an essay about
his political beliefs and attitudes to socialism. After some difficulty, it was published in
March 1937. In late 1936 Orwell was keeping a close eye
on events in Spain, where in July the Republican government was facing a military revolt led
by General Francisco Franco in Morocco. The conflict soon became a full-scale civil
war, and the Republican government decided to arm the trade union militias for its defence. By the end of 1936 Franco’s Nationalists
began to receive support from German and Italian fascists, while the Soviet Union mobilised
its network of European Communists to form international brigades to support the Republicans. In late 1936 Orwell decided to go to Spain
and arrived in Barcelona at the end of December, where he hoped to write about the situation
in Spain to spread awareness among the English working class and was also keen to fight. Using his connections to the Independent Labour
Party, he joined a militia unit organised by the United Workers Marxist Party, a revolutionary
organisation but one opposed to the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin. In early January 1937, the unit was sent to
the Aragon Front near Zaragoza, though they lacked the supplies to do much fighting and
were reduced to patrol duty. Although observers recognised that he was
capable of bravery in the firing line, when he was off duty Orwell spent most of his time
sitting by himself reading or writing. In March, Orwell received a visit from Eileen,
who had decided to go to Spain herself in February to support the cause in a back-office
role. By this point Orwell’s unit had been transferred
to join the Republican army besieging the city of Huesca. In one of the most dramatic episodes of his
military career, he was part of a company which captured an enemy redoubt but was counterattacked
from an enemy position. Orwell threw a bomb at the attackers to suppress
the enemy fire, winning time for him and his comrades to retreat. In late April, he was back in Barcelona seeking
a transfer to the Madrid Front, which meant joining the Communist International Brigade. Before he was able to leave, Orwell was involved
in the infighting between the anti-Franco forces as the Civil Guard attempted to take
control of the city from the workers militias on behalf of the Republican government that
was increasingly under Soviet influence. For three days, Orwell was barricaded in a
rooftop observatory before government troops arrived on the 6th of May and disbanded the
militias. In these circumstances, Orwell decided to
return to the Aragon Front, where on the 20th of May he was shot through the throat by an
enemy sniper. After being moved around several hospitals,
he was declared unfit and received his discharge papers. When he returned to Barcelona on the 21st
of June, Orwell and Eileen were caught up in the government’s suppression of the United
Workers Marxist Party and everyone associated with it, and only narrowly escaped Spain after
receiving their passports from the British consulate. The six months Orwell spent in Spain had a
great impact on the rest of his life. Not only did it transform his attitude towards
politics, but also, Spain features heavily in his book reviews and the articles he wrote,
as well as this, Orwell’s experiences in Barcelona contributed to his anti-Communist
and anti-Stalinist views. After his return to England, an article he
submitted offering an eyewitness account of the events in Barcelona was rejected by the
New Statesman on the grounds that articles critical of the Republican government were
effectively pro-Franco propaganda. Orwell spent the second half of 1937 in Wallington
working on an extended account of his Spanish adventures which would become Homage to Catalonia. As the autumn wore on, Orwell kept a close
eye on news of Spain, resigned to the fact that Franco’s slow but steady advance into
Republican territory would be unstoppable. By the end of the year the book was finished
and sent to his new publisher, Secker & Warburg, as Orwell feared that Gollancz would reject
the title due to its anti-Stalinist tendencies. When Homage to Catalonia was published in
April 1938, despite some positive reviews it proved a commercial failure, selling fewer
than 700 copies by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Orwell had been seriously ill since
early March with lung problems and spent more than five months at Preston Hall sanatorium
in Kent, during which time, he joined the Independent Labour Party, declaring that the
Communists were no more than a front for Soviet policy, while the Labour Party had become
part of the mainstream elite. In September, Orwell went to Morocco accompanied
by Eileen, but while the trip was supposed to restore his health, he resented the six
months he spent in the country. Keen to return to England, he spent his time
writing Coming up for Air, a novel which sees the protagonist George Bowling motivated by
nostalgia to visit his hometown in Oxfordshire, only to find it completely unrecognisable,
prompting him to lament the march of progress and modernity, driven by commercialism and
capitalism. Orwell delivered the manuscript to Moore upon
his return to England on the 30th of March 1939, and the book proved far more successful
than Homage to Catalonia after its publication by Gollancz in June, selling out its first
edition of 2,000 copies. At the end of June, Orwell travelled to Southwold
to be at the bedside of his dying father, after which he returned to Wallington, keeping
a diary chronicling the international events which would result in the outbreak of the
Second World War in September 1939. Shortly before the outbreak of war, Eileen
found work in the government’s Censorship Department in London, where Orwell had expected
to join her but instead spent the next nine months in Wallington. Although he had previously been opposed to
the war, when it actually happened, Orwell was motivated by a sense of patriotic duty
and sought to play a part in the war effort despite his health issues. Orwell was far from the only writer in the
country who wondered if their work was of any value during a time of war, but as he
was unable to find a more useful occupation, he continued to work on his collection of
essays Inside the Whale, which was published by Gollancz in March 1940. Orwell also found a new outlet for his work
in the form of Horizon, a monthly literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly which was
launched on New Year’s Day 1940. By May, Orwell and Eileen moved into a new
flat in London near Regent’s Park, from where they received news about the evacuation
of Dunkirk and the surrender of France on the 17th of June. The events in France were also the cause of
personal tragedy for the Orwells, who received news that Eileen’s beloved brother Laurence
had been killed while serving as a medic for the British Expeditionary Force. The collapse of France led to fears of a German
invasion of England and prompted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to announce the creation of the
Local Defence Volunteers, soon renamed the Home Guard, to serve as a last line of defence. In mid-June, Orwell enthusiastically joined
a company of around ten volunteers in St John’s Wood and was soon promoted to sergeant. The group’s activities consisted of meeting
twice a week carrying out guard duty at the local telephone exchange and other strategic
points. In addition to these duties, Orwell joined
a project convened by Fred Warburg – the publisher of Homage to Catalonia – to bring
writers together to write about issues relating to the war. To begin the series, Orwell agreed to write
a book about the prospect of a democratic socialist Britain. Written during the London Blitz while bombs
were falling around him, The Lion and the Unicorn begins with an examination of what
it means to be English. Orwell then argues that the failure at Dunkirk
was the failure of capitalism, and that Britain could only win the war with a socialist government,
a sign of his belief that only the people and workers could effectively defend democracy. At the beginning of 1941, Orwell was commissioned
to write a regular ‘London Letter’ for the American political journal Partisan Review. Over the new few years this served as an outlet
for Orwell’s experiences of the Home Front as well as his hopes for the social and economic
transformation of the country after the war. He also defended the Home Guard as a viable
fighting force, and welcomed the introduction of younger working-class volunteers signing
up to gain some soldiering experience before they joined the armed forces. Despite the German bombing campaign and the
destruction of much of London’s financial district and the East End, Orwell observed
that his fellow Londoners viewed the war with a combination of helplessness and disinterest,
since by 1941 the prospect of a German invasion was rather remote after the Royal Air Force
successfully prevented the Germans from obtaining air superiority during the Battle of Britain. But even as the invasion threat receded, Orwell’s
spirits were dampened by news of British and Allied setbacks in Greece, North Africa, and
the Middle East. The news of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet
Union on the 22nd of June did not give Orwell much hope, instead he seemed convinced that
the Germans would not have launched the campaign unless they were sure they could defeat the
Soviets rapidly. Orwell had been back in London looking for
a wartime job for over a year when in August 1941 he was offered the job of a radio producer
at the BBC’s Indian Section. Since he retained an affection for the country
of his birth and was happy to make any contribution to the war effort, Orwell accepted. The job involved preparing three daily news
commentaries in English which were broadcast to India as well as the Japanese-occupied
territories of Malaya and Indonesia. There were further news summaries to be translated
into local languages, as well as political and cultural programmes. Orwell relished the opportunity to bring together
writers with an Indian background and sought to promote their work to a wider audience. Since India was still subject to political
agitation by nationalists demanding independence, Orwell had to tread a fine line and came to
resent the interference of third parties such as the government’s India Office who occasionally
complained about his output and the guests he invited. In March 1942, when he resumed his diary after
a six-month break, Orwell commented that ‘all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly
worse than useless.’ He wondered if he had any listeners, and it
was only later in the 1940s that he learned that his broadcasts served as lifelines to
people living under Japanese occupation. Orwell’s preoccupation with Indian affairs
during his time at the BBC influenced his literary output, as demonstrated in an essay
published in Horizon in 1942 on Rudyard Kipling in which Orwell highlighted the economic exploitation
of India while being unable to hide an admiration for the men of action who built the empire. With a keen interest in the future of India
after the war, Orwell closely followed the diplomatic mission led by Sir Stafford Cripps,
recently appointed Leader of the House of Commons in the wartime government. Cripps went to India in March 1942 with proposals
to secure the support of the Indian nationalists during the war in return for self-government
after it, but the mission was a failure after his terms proved unacceptable to both the
British government and Indian nationalists. Orwell admired Cripps for his willingness
to stick to his principles, and he was not alone in regarding him as a potential rival
to Churchill as the leader of a radical wartime government. With further setbacks in the East and the
Japanese overrunning Burma, Cripps seemed to be biding his time to issue a revolutionary
challenge to Churchill. However, by late 1942, the war was beginning
to shift in the Allies’ favour as the German advance stalled at Stalingrad while the British
seized the upper hand in North Africa. Increasingly disillusioned by his work at
the BBC, Orwell submitted his resignation in September 1943 and left his desk on the
24th of November. He took the job of literary editor at the
Tribune, a left-wing weekly newspaper launched in 1937 with financial backing from Stafford
Cripps and edited by the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan. Although Orwell’s journalism for the Tribune
carried an anti-Soviet strain which irritated much of the readership during the wartime
alliance, he was glad to have Bevan’s support. Orwell also wrote a column for the Tribune
entitled ‘As I Please’ which touched on all sorts of subjects from his thoughts about
the war to the roses at his cottage in Wallington. In addition to his day job, Orwell continued
to write for the Partisan Review and Horizon, and he had also been contributing to the Observer
newspaper since late 1941. Furthermore, throughout 1943 Orwell was working
on a new novel warning about the dangers of totalitarianism in the form of an allegory
of the Soviet Union set on a farm where the animals overthrow the humans. By February 1944, the manuscript was complete
but Orwell knew that he would have difficulty finding a publisher of Animal Farm during
an era of positive feelings for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell spent the early months of 1944 trying
to find a publisher, knowing that Gollancz would not be prepared to publish a satire
of the Soviet Union despite turning against Stalinism. In May, Jonathan Cape read the manuscript
and was inclined to publish it, but at the end of June he informed Leonard Moore that
he had taken advice from an official in the Ministry of Information not to publish a book
so offensive to the Soviets. Orwell had resisted contacting Warburg since
he knew the firm was suffering from a wartime paper shortage, but in July he received reassurances
that they were prepared to publish Animal Farm if they could get the paper to print
it on. By September, Warburg agreed to publish it
the following year, although given the publisher’s difficulties, the book would not be published
until August 1945. While Orwell was labouring to find a publisher
for Animal Farm, his family life was also experiencing considerable changes. He had been married to Eileen for eight years
but during that period they had been unable to conceive a child. They decided to adopt a child from Newcastle,
where her sister-in-law Gwen O’Shaughnessy worked with unmarried mothers. The couple adopted an illegitimate boy born
on the 14th of May 1944 who was later given the name Richard Horatio Blair, though the
baby was first taken to Greystone, the O’Shaughnessy’s family house twenty-five miles south of Newcastle. At the end of June, the Orwells’ flat had
been bombed, and it was only in October that they moved into a new flat in Islington and
were able to bring Richard down from Newcastle. In 1942, Eileen had left the Ministry of Information
for a job at the Ministry of Food but chose to leave in order to take full-time responsibility
for the baby. In February 1945, Orwell accepted the job
of war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News and left for Paris,
while Eileen and Richard went to live at Greystone. While in London arranging legal formalities
of Richard’s adoption, Eileen fell ill and a medical examination found several tumours
on her uterus. She was advised to have an immediate hysterectomy
scheduled for the 29th of March in hospital in Newcastle. Shortly after being placed under anaesthetic,
she died of cardiac failure at the age of 39. Orwell himself had been taken ill in Paris,
but upon receiving news of his wife’s death returned to England immediately. Although Orwell was shocked and desperately
unhappy, after Eileen’s funeral in Newcastle he decided to return to his duties as a wartime
correspondent on the continent. Back on the continent, Orwell followed the
Allied advance eastwards into Germany, reporting on the devastation caused by the war. He stayed on for a couple of weeks after the
German surrender on the 8th of May recording the rounding-up of the remnants of the German
army, before returning to London by the end of the month. By the end of June, he found a nurse for Richard,
who was brought back to the Islington flat in July. The publication of Animal Farm in August was
an incredible success, selling almost 5,000 copies in six weeks, and established Orwell
as one of the leading writers of the day. In a short novel of a hundred pages, Orwell
describes how the animals take over a poorly run farm by overthrowing the human farmer
in a revolution led by the pigs Snowball and Napoleon. After an initial improvement in conditions,
Snowball and Napoleon fall out over plans to modernise the farm, prompting Napoleon
to send dogs to chase Snowball out of the farm. Through the help of a young pig named Squealer,
Napoleon is able to persuade the animals that Snowball has been trying to sabotage the farm
and orders his dogs to execute the animals suspected of retaining sympathies to his rival. By the end of the book, most of the animals
are impoverished while the pigs begin to increasingly act like humans. Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an attack on Stalin’s
dictatorial methods, his misrepresentation of reality, and the way in which he established
an entrenched elite that resembled the old Russian aristocracy in many ways and betrayed
the principles of socialism. Napoleon and Snowball in Animal Farm represent
Stalin and his rival Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary leader who had been Vladimir
Lenin’s right-hand man following the Revolution of 1917 and was widely expected to become
leader after Lenin’s death in 1924. Instead, Trotsky and his allies were outmanoeuvred
by Stalin during the 1920s. Although he was exiled in 1929, Trotsky continued
to be hounded by Stalin’s agents and those who opposed Stalin in the Soviet Union continued
to be denounced as Trotskyists and purged from the party, and Trotsky himself was assassinated
by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940. After the astonishing success of the book,
Orwell was afraid that it would be used by British conservatives as an attack on socialism
rather than Stalin and was keen to make it clear that he was still a keen socialist. Orwell welcomed the election of Clement Attlee’s
Labour government in July 1945, but his hopes for more radical political change were not
realised. He started to work on a new novel set in a
dystopian totalitarian society and hoped to get away from London. Shortly before her death, Eileen had written
to her husband observing that he was being overworked with everything he was writing
for the newspapers and journals, and the couple discussed moving out to the country where
Orwell would have more time to work on his fiction. By September 1945, Orwell was making plans
to move to the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and rented a farmhouse
called Barnhill, staying in London for the time being while the house was being renovated. Although he managed to establish some form
of routine in his Islington flat with Richard and his housekeeper-nurse Susan Watson, Orwell
was in poor health and desperately lonely, prompting him to make marriage proposals to
several younger women, all of whom turned him down. Orwell planned to go to Jura in the spring
of 1946, but a tubercular haemorrhage at the end of February and his sister Marjorie’s
death prevented him from doing so until the end of May. At Barnhill, Orwell was accompanied by his
surviving sister Avril, his adopted son Richard and his nurse Susan. While the house itself was a pleasant retreat,
it was located seven miles from the nearest village of Ardlussa, forcing Orwell to buy
a motorbike to ride to the village and back to collect groceries and other supplies. The remoteness of Barnhill worked to Orwell’s
advantage by giving him the time he needed to rest and focus on his novel-writing, although
it made it extremely difficult for him to keep in touch with his friends in London. Some of those invited to Jura decided against
making a visit upon realising it would take the best part of two days and a combination
of trains, buses, and boats, followed by a taxi ride at the end of the journey, which
might require the visitor to get out and walk depending on the weather and the condition
of the road. Although he promised his agent Leonard Moore
that he expected to complete most of the latest novel by early autumn, the many distractions
which came with life on a remote Scottish island hindered progress. During the 1930s and ‘40s Orwell had witnessed
the totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union with alarm, and
during the war he was uncomfortable with the methods used by the British government to
control and censor information. He believed that the foundations of totalitarianism
lay in the misuse of language to manipulate the truth and was pessimistic about humanity’s
tendency to be subject to such manipulation. Orwell intended this novel as a warning to
mankind and was desperate to make progress on it despite his failing health. By September he had written around fifty pages
when he returned to London to catch up with friends and make professional arrangements. Meanwhile, a BBC radio adaptation of Animal
Farm went out on the airwaves in January 1947, and Orwell switched to Secker & Warburg as
his main publisher after persuading Victor Gollancz to release him from his contract. By April, Orwell was back at Barnhill and
keen to finish the novel by early 1948 but was prevented from doing so by continued ill
health. After falling out with Orwell’s sister Avril,
Susan Watson had left Barnhill for good the previous autumn, but Richard Rees took it
upon himself to spend most of the year at Barnhill looking after Orwell. He had almost finished writing the first draft
of the novel, but a planned trip to London in November was abandoned when it was clear
that he was too ill to travel. A doctor travelling up to Ardlussa diagnosed
him with tuberculosis and shortly before Christmas, Orwell was admitted to hospital near Glasgow. His condition improved in the spring and he
went back to Jura where he returned to work on the second draft of the novel, acting against
the advice of his doctors to rest for six hours a day. By October the manuscript was ready to be
typed up but Orwell was once again seriously ill and asked Warburg to find a typist who
would be willing to travel up to Barnhill, but when none could be found by mid-November
the author set to work, carrying out the task himself. Orwell and his publisher chose the title Nineteen
Eighty-Four for the novel, choosing a year in the future when the events described might
take place. In the new year of 1949, Orwell left Jura
for the last time to stay at a sanatorium in the Cotswolds. Meanwhile, Warburg was appalled by what he
had read in Orwell’s manuscript, reading it as a satirical attack on the Soviet Union
and fearing it might be used as anti-Soviet propaganda. In fact, the setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four
is not the Soviet Union but an extreme version of wartime England. In the novel, England is called Airstrip One
and forms part of Oceania, which engaged in a struggle for global dominance against its
rivals Eurasia and Eastasia. Big Brother, the leader of Oceania, is seen
everywhere on posters and television screens, in public and in private. The Party maintains its control by keeping
close surveillance of people using two-way televisions and listening devices controlled
by the Thought Police. The main character, Winston Smith, is a bureaucrat
at the Ministry of Truth whose job it is to falsify history by censoring and rewriting
back copies of The Times newspaper. To further underline the idea that the novel
is set in England, Orwell’s description of the Ministry of Truth was inspired by the
University of London’s Senate House building, which had housed the wartime Ministry of Information,
while its interior is reminiscent of the BBC’s offices in which Orwell worked during the
war. Winston is secretly opposed to his regime
and denounces Big Brother in his diary – written in a small corner of his room out of range
of the surveillance devices – despite knowing that he was committing a thought crime. When a young woman named Julia confides that
she is also opposed to Big Brother, the two have an affair but are eventually caught by
the Thought Police and imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. Subject to torture in Room 101, which contains
each prisoner’s worst fear, Winston and Julia denounce each other and Winston ends
the novel declaring his love for Big Brother. Despite signalling that he would like to write
more novels, Orwell’s health did not improve and he seemed to realise he was dying. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June
with 25,000 copies printed on both sides of the Atlantic accompanied by booming sales
and positive reviews which raised its author’s spirits but did little to improve his physical
health. In September Orwell moved to University College
Hospital in London, a short distance away from the University of London’s Senate House
which had housed the wartime Ministry of Information and served as the inspiration for the Ministry
of Truth. He seemed to hold out hope for recovery and
proposed to Sonia Brownell, a woman fifteen years younger than him who worked for Cyril
Connolly at Horizon and who had turned him down a few years earlier. On this occasion Sonia accepted and the couple
were married on the 13th of October, with the groom sitting up on his hospital bed,
but despite a temporary uplift in the weeks following the wedding, Orwell’s condition
worsened. In the new year, arrangements were made for
Orwell to travel to Switzerland, not so much in the hope that his health would improve,
but that he could die in a more peaceful environment. Four days before the scheduled departure date,
George Orwell died on the 21st of January 1950 at the age of 46. The man born Eric Blair seemed destined for
the unspectacular life of a respectable civil servant of the British Empire. However, after returning home from Burma in
1927 and declaring his intention to become a writer, he spent the rest of his life trying
to discard his privileged upbringing. After many adventures in the guise of a tramp
and some early journal contributions, he achieved his aim of being a published novelist in 1933
under the name George Orwell. Increasingly exposed to left-wing politics,
the six months Orwell spent in Spain in 1937 shortly after getting married proved formative
for his political consciousness, prompting him to embrace a brand of independent anti-Soviet
socialism. Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Orwell
longed to contribute to the war effort but later felt disillusioned by his work at the
BBC and the censorship he was subject to. His ideas about Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism
and his experiences in wartime Britain inspired his most famous literary creations, Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but by the time these novels were published, elevating
Orwell to a position amongst the great writers of his day, he had already suffered the tragedy
of his wife Eileen’s death and was dealing with his own declining health. Even his literary success came at a cost,
with his writings not only interpreted as a criticism of the Soviet Union but on socialism
in general, in spite of his own left-wing political views, ultimately, his criticism
was perhaps not of socialism itself but of authoritarianism in general but this is a
subject which still attracts debate and political analysis to this day. What do you think of George Orwell? Was he a great novelist with profound insights
into human society, or was he a mediocre writer whose influential political satires have only
served to undermine the political causes he championed? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
