The British author George Orwell, pen name for Eric Blair, achieved prominence in the late 1940’s as the author of two brilliant satires. He wrote documentaries, essays, and criticism during the 1930’s and later established himself 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 an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.
Blair’s paternal grandfather, too, had been part f the British Raj, and had served in the Indian Army. Eric’s mother, Ida Mabel Blair, the daughter of a French tradesman, was about eighteen years younger than her husband Richard Blair was. Eric had an elder sister called Marjorie. 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 (Gross, p. 109). They owned no property and had no extensive investments; they were like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihoo! d and prospects.
Even though the father continued to work in India until he retired in 1912, in 1907, the family returned to England and lived at Henley. 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 Eaton, the famous public school (Gross, p. 12). His parents had forced him to work at a dreary preparatory school, and now after winning the scholarship, he was not any more interested in further mental exertion unrelated to his rivate ambition. ^At the beginning of Why/Write, he explains that from the age of five or six he knew he would be, ^must be,^ a writer (Gross, p. 115). ^ But to become a writer one had to read literature. But English literature was not a major subject at Eaton, where most boys came from backgrounds either irremediably unliterary or so literary that to teach them English Literature would be absurd.
One of Eric’s tutors later declared that his famous pupil had done absolutely no work for five years. This was, of course, untrue: Eric has apprenticed himself to the masters of English prose who most appealed to him, ncluding Swift, Sterne and Jack London (Gross, p. 117). However, he has finished the final examinations at Eaton as 138th of 167. He neglected to win a university scholarship, and in 1922, Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police (Gross, p. 118). In doing so he was already breaking away from the path most of his schoolfellows would take, for Eaton often led to either Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma and served for five years in the police force there. ^In 1927,while home on leave, he resigned. There are at least two reasons for this. First, is life as a policeman was a distraction from the life he really wanted, which was to be a writer. And second, he had come to feel that, as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer believe (Stringer, p. 412). ^ Even as early as this, his notions 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 (Stringer, 413). ^ Back in London he settled down in a gritty bedroom in Portobello Road. There, at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach himself how to write. His neighbors were impressed by his determination. Week after week he remained in his unheated bedroom, thawing his hands over a candle when they became too numb to write.
In spring of 1928 he turned his back on his own inherited values, by taking a drastic step. For more than one year he went on living among the poor, first in London then in Paris. For him, the poor were victims of injustice, playing the same part as the Burmese played in their country. One reason for going o live among the poor was to over come a repulsion which he saw as typical for his own class. At Paris he lived and worked in a working class quarter. At the time, he tells us, Paris was full of artists and would-be artists.
There Orwell led a life that was far from bohemian. When he eventually got a job, he worked as a dishwasher. Once again his journey was d! ownward into the life to which he felt he should expose himself, the life of poverty-stricken, or of those who barely scraped up a living (Stringer, p. 415). When he came back to London, he again lived for a couple of months among the tramps and poor people. In December 1929, Eric spent Christmas with his family. At his visit he announced that he’s going to write a book about his time in Paris.
The original version of Down and Out, entitled ^A Scullion^s Diary,^ was completed in October 1930 and came to only 35,000 words for Orwell had used only a part of his material. After two rejections from publishers Orwell wrote Burmese Days, published in 1934, a book based on his experiences in the colonial service. We owe the rescue of Down and Out to Mabel Firez: she was asked to destroy the script, but save the paper clips. Instead, she took the manuscript and brought it to Leonard Monroe, literary agent at the house Gollancz, and bullied him to read it.
Soon it was accepted – on condition that all curses were deleted and certain names changed. ^Having completed this last revision Eric wrote to Victor Gollancz: ^I would prefer the book to! be published pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use this pseudonym again’ (Stringer, p. 419). ^ But Orwell’s reasons for taking the name Orwell are much more complicated than those writers usually have when adopting a pen name. In effect it 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 policeman, into George Orwell, classless antiauthoritarian (Gross, p. 131). ^ Down and Out in Paris and London, 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 about, 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 and enjoyed, was founded pon, the life under their very noses (Gross, p. 44). ^
Here we see two typical aspects of Orwell as a writer: his idea of himself as the exposure of painful truth, which people for various reasons do not wish to look at; and his idea of himself as a representative of the English moral conscience (Gross, p. 148). His next book was A Clergyman^s Daughter (1935) and Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936). He opened a village shop in Wellington, Hertfordshire, in 1936, where he did business in the mornings, and wrote in the afternoons. The same year he married Eileen O ‘Shaughnessy. In that year he also received a commission from the Left
Book Club to examine the conditions of the poor and unemployed. This resulted in The Road to Wilgan Pier. He went on living among the poor about whom he was to write his book. Once again 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 it 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 Road to Wigan Pier they were not pleased, and when the book was published it contained a preface by
Victor Gollancz taking issue with many of ! Orwell’s main points. The Left Book Club wasn’t pleased because in the second half of the book Orwell criticized the English socialism, because in his eyes it was mostly unrealistic. Another fact criticized by Orwell was that most of the socialists tended to be members of the Middle class (Stringer, p. 438). ^The kind of socialist Orwell makes fun of is the sort who spouts phrases like ^proletarian solidarity^, and who puts of decent people, the people for whom Orwell wants to write (Stringer, p. 439).
Having completed The Road to Wigan Pier he went to Spain at the end of 936, 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 Unificacin de Marxista), with which the British Labor Party had an association. For the first time in his life socialism seemed a reality, something for which was worth fighting for. He was wounded in the throat. Three and a half months 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 his group that 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. First, 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 was reality. Second, the experience of the city returning to normal, he saw as a gloomy confirmation of the fact that there will always be different classes. He saw that there is something in the human nature that seeks iolence, conflict, and power over others. ! It will be clear that these two impressions, of hope on one hand, and despair on the other are entirely contradiction.
Nevertheless, despite the despair and confusion of his return to Barcelona, street fights between different groups of socialists broke out again, Orwell left Spain with a hopeful impression (Stringer, p. 441-446). 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 in 1939, 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 joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as talks producer in the Indian section of the eastern service. He served in the Home Guard, a wartime civilian body for local defense. In 1943, he left the BBC to become literary editor of the tribune, and began writing Animal Farm. In 1944, the Orwells adopted a son, but in 1945 his wife died during an operation. Towards the end of the war Orwell went to Europe as a reporter (Stringer, p. 448-449). Late in 1945, he went to the island of Jura off he Scottish coast, and settled there.
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 had he not been so ill. His wedding to Sonia Bronwell took place at his bedside in University College Hospital. By the time of his death in January 1950, he had been judged a major author by cities on both sides of the Atlantic, and his value as a cultural critic has been increasingly widely recognized (Stringer, p. 450).
