George Orwell

George Orwell spent only forty-six years alive, but somehow managed to become an imperial policeman, dishwasher, tramp, schoolteacher, bookseller, soldier, war correspondent, BBC broadcaster, political journalist, critic, novelist and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

The author the world remembers as George Orwell was actually born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, then part of British India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Orwell later described his family's social position with his characteristically precise class-consciousness as belonging to the “lower-upper-middle class.” He was brought back to England as a small child and grew up largely apart from his father.[1]

Today Orwell is overwhelmingly associated with two books: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, usually published as 1984. But concentrating only on those novels misses much of what made him extraordinary. Orwell's fiction emerged from an unusually physical life. He deliberately placed himself in situations most literary intellectuals observed from a distance: colonial Burma, cheap lodging houses, Parisian restaurant kitchens, English coal-mining towns and the trenches of the Spanish Civil War.

His writing repeatedly returned to the same fundamental question: what happens when powerful institutions are allowed to decide what ordinary people are permitted to see, say and believe?

That question explains why terms Orwell invented or popularized—Big Brother, the Ministry of Truth, Newspeak, doublethink, Thought Police and Room 101—remain part of everyday political language more than seventy years after his death.

Eric Blair Before He Became George Orwell

Orwell's childhood already contained many of the contradictions that would later preoccupy his writing.

He was connected to the British establishment but never especially wealthy. He received an elite education partly because of scholarships, yet developed an intense awareness of class divisions. He was British but had been born inside the British Empire. And before becoming one of imperialism's most memorable critics, he personally worked for the imperial system.

As a boy, Eric Blair attended St Cyprian's School in Eastbourne, where another future literary figure, Cyril Connolly, was a fellow pupil. He won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, arriving there in 1917. At Eton, however, he was far from the model student his scholarship might suggest. Orwell's biographer D. J. Taylor describes him as having largely “slacked” during his later school years. He left Eton in 1921 rather than continuing to university.

There is one particularly interesting literary connection from his education: Aldous Huxley, the future author of Brave New World, briefly taught Orwell at Eton during the First World War. Huxley taught English and French there in 1917–1918, and Eton's own historical archive identifies Eric Blair among his pupils.[2]

Orwell knew very early that he wanted to write. In his later essay Why I Write, he recalled realizing around the age of five or six that he wanted to become a writer. His earliest surviving work was far removed from the anti-authoritarian Orwell people know today: at eleven he published a patriotic poem during the First World War.[3]

The political Orwell had not yet been created.

Burma would help create him.

Burma: The Imperial Policeman Who Turned Against Empire

Instead of university, Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. In 1922, at nineteen, he sailed for Burma, now Myanmar.[1]

He stayed roughly five years.

This period became crucial to understanding George Orwell's political views. He was not observing colonialism from a university seminar or newspaper office; he was participating in its enforcement.

His experiences later supplied material for his first novel, Burmese Days, and two of his most famous essays, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant. The Orwell Foundation describes his time in Burma as formative in turning him against imperialism.

Shooting an Elephant became particularly famous because Orwell turned an apparently straightforward incident involving a colonial police officer into something much larger: an examination of how power can trap the person exercising it as well as the person subjected to it.

This became a recurring Orwell idea. Systems of domination deform almost everyone inside them.

He returned to England on medical leave in 1927 and resigned from the police.

It was an extraordinary decision. He was abandoning a secure career in the British Empire without having established himself as a writer.

For several years, failure seemed considerably more likely than fame.

Poverty, Paris and the Creation of “George Orwell”

After Burma, Blair tried to understand poverty by getting extremely close to it.

He lived cheaply in Paris, worked in restaurant kitchens as a plongeur—essentially a dishwasher and kitchen laborer—and later spent time among tramps and inhabitants of lodging houses in England. Those experiences became the basis of Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.[4]

It was his first full-length published book.

It was also the book that introduced readers to George Orwell.

Eric Blair adopted the pseudonym shortly before publication. According to D. J. Taylor's biography for the Orwell Foundation, the name combined the name of the reigning monarch, George V, with a local English river—the River Orwell in Suffolk.[1]

The transformation was useful psychologically as well as professionally. “Eric Blair” could remain the private individual; “George Orwell” became the writer.

Down and Out in Paris and London also established something essential about George Orwell's writing style: he preferred experience to abstraction.

Rather than simply writing that poverty was degrading, he described what poverty did to someone's meals, clothes, sleep, conversations, dignity and sense of time. That commitment to concrete observation would stay with him throughout his career.

The Bookseller, Eileen O'Shaughnessy and the Road to Wigan

Orwell spent periods teaching and, after another bout of illness, eventually found work in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead.

This period helped inspire his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but something more important happened personally: Orwell met Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Eileen was intelligent, highly educated and independently minded. She had studied English at Oxford and later educational psychology at University College London. She and Orwell met in 1935 and married in 1936.[5]

Modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized that Eileen should not be treated merely as “George Orwell's wife.” Her surviving correspondence demonstrates her wit, political awareness and involvement in Orwell's working life, and recent Orwell Foundation scholarship describes her influence on his work as more extensive than was once acknowledged.[6]

Around the same time, publisher Victor Gollancz commissioned Orwell to investigate unemployment and working conditions in northern England.[7]

Orwell spent the early months of 1936 traveling through Lancashire and Yorkshire, visiting homes and industrial communities and descending into coal mines.

The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937.[7]

The first half is social reportage; the second is an argument about socialism, class and the political failures Orwell believed prevented socialism from attracting ordinary English people. The book is important because it shows Orwell developing politically in public rather than presenting himself as a man who had always possessed a finished ideology.

Then Spain changed him permanently.

George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War

At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain, originally intending to write about the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, he joined the fighting.

He served with the militia associated with the POUM, an anti-Stalinist Marxist organization fighting against Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces.[8]

Orwell was physically hard to miss—he stood well over six feet tall—and in May 1937 he was struck by a bullet through the neck.[8]

He survived.

But the bullet was not the only thing that transformed him.

While Orwell was fighting against fascism, conflict erupted within the Republican side itself. Soviet-aligned communists moved against rival leftist organizations including the POUM. Orwell and Eileen eventually had to escape Spain after the POUM was suppressed.

That experience was decisive.

Orwell remained a man of the political left, but he became fiercely hostile to Stalinism and totalitarianism. In Why I Write, he later explained that after the events of 1936–37, his serious writing was directed against totalitarianism and in favor of what he understood as democratic socialism.[3]

So, was George Orwell a socialist?

Yes.

One of the greatest misconceptions about Orwell is that because Animal Farm attacked Stalin's Soviet Union, Orwell must have rejected socialism altogether. He did not. His politics were better characterized as democratic socialist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and intensely anti-authoritarian.

What Spain destroyed was not his belief in social equality but his willingness to excuse dictatorship when it came from the political left.

He recorded the experience in Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938. His regular publisher, Victor Gollancz, declined to publish it, and Secker & Warburg eventually did.[8]

Orwell's Relationships Were More Complicated Than the Legend

Eileen was the central relationship of Orwell's adult life, but surviving correspondence reveals a considerably messier romantic history than older biographies sometimes suggested.

In 2021, Orwell's adopted son Richard Blair donated fifty letters to the Orwell Archive at University College London. They documented Orwell's relationships with Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jaques, two women he had known in Southwold.[9]

Orwell proposed marriage to both women at different points, both declined, and both remained significant friends. The letters also reveal overlapping romantic attachments during the years in which Orwell was struggling to establish himself as a writer.

That makes Orwell more complicated—and more human—than the austere public photograph with the cigarette and moustache sometimes suggests.

With Eileen, he eventually created something resembling a family life. In 1944, George and Eileen adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair.

Less than a year later their lives were shattered.

Eileen underwent an operation in March 1945 and unexpectedly died during it. Surviving letters in the UCL Orwell Archive include messages she wrote to Orwell immediately before the operation.[10]

Orwell became a single father.

George Orwell at the BBC

The Second World War gave Orwell another uncomfortable encounter with institutional power.

He wanted to contribute to the war effort but was rejected for regular military service on health grounds. He served in the Home Guard and in 1941 began working for the BBC Eastern Service.[11]

His job involved producing cultural and political broadcasts for audiences in India and elsewhere in the region.

In other words, one of history's most famous critics of propaganda spent part of the war producing wartime propaganda.

The contradiction was not lost on him.

Orwell increasingly disliked the bureaucracy and limitations of BBC work and left in 1943. He subsequently became literary editor of the socialist weekly Tribune, where his regular “As I Please” column gave him freedom to write about politics, books, language, popular culture and ordinary English life.[11]

These years produced some of Orwell's finest essays.

George Orwell's Writing Style

Orwell's reputation rests almost as much on his prose style as on his political ideas.

His goal was not merely to make sentences simpler. He believed bad language could make bad thinking easier.

In Politics and the English Language, published in 1946, Orwell attacked stale metaphors, unnecessary jargon, inflated vocabulary, vague abstractions and political euphemisms. His basic principle was that writers should determine exactly what they mean and then choose language capable of expressing it clearly.

That principle explains many characteristics of George Orwell's writing style:

• straightforward sentences without unnecessary ornament;
• concrete images rather than abstract generalities;
• close observation of physical details;
• distrust of clichés and euphemisms;
• dry humor and irony;
• willingness to include uncomfortable facts that weakened his own side of an argument;
• political arguments expressed through stories, characters and tangible objects.

Orwell was not actually an advocate of boring prose. He cared enormously about rhythm, imagery and beauty.

In Why I Write, he explained that writing came from several motives at once: personal ambition, aesthetic pleasure, the desire to record reality and the desire to affect politics. His ambition was ultimately to make political writing into an art rather than force readers to choose between politics and literature.

That combination explains why Orwell remains unusually readable. His essays frequently begin with something specific—a hanging, an elephant, a cup of tea, a bookshop, a coal mine—and slowly reveal the larger political question hiding inside it.

The Writers Who Influenced George Orwell

Orwell had an unusually broad reading life, and several writers repeatedly shaped his thinking.

Jonathan Swift was enormously important. Orwell admired Gulliver's Travels, and Swift's ability to use apparently simple fantasy as devastating political satire has an obvious connection to Animal Farm.

Charles Dickens was another major influence. Orwell wrote extensively about him and admired his moral imagination, memorable characters and instinctive hatred of cruelty, even while criticizing the limits of Dickens's politics.

H. G. Wells fascinated the young Orwell. Wells's speculative fiction and visions of future societies helped create the intellectual environment from which dystopian literature eventually emerged, although the older Orwell increasingly argued with Wells's faith in rational planning and scientific progress.

Jack London offered another model: the writer as participant-observer who entered uncomfortable environments and reported what he discovered. Scholars have specifically compared Orwell's social investigations to London's approach.

Orwell also read Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and a remarkably varied assortment of popular fiction.

One delightful detail from studies of Orwell's personal library is that he remembered Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland as having exerted a peculiar influence on what eventually became Animal Farm.

Orwell's influences therefore did not form a single political tradition. He absorbed children's literature, Victorian novels, science fiction, journalism, satire and popular entertainment and turned them into something recognizably his own.

Animal Farm: The Book Publishers Were Afraid to Touch

Orwell conceived the central idea behind Animal Farm years before he actually wrote it. The novel itself was composed principally during 1943 and 1944.

Its target was the corruption of the Russian Revolution under Stalin.

That created a serious publishing problem.

Britain and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany, and a satire portraying Stalinism as a betrayal of revolutionary ideals was politically awkward. Orwell's manuscript was rejected by several publishers. One famous rejection came from T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber.

Eventually Secker & Warburg accepted it.

Animal Farm was published on August 17, 1945.

The timing transformed Orwell's career. The war in Europe had ended, attitudes toward the Soviet Union were shifting, and the short fable could be read both as a story about farm animals and as an extraordinarily compact account of how revolutions can reproduce the oppression they were created to destroy.

Characters including Napoleon, Snowball, Boxer and Squealer entered literary culture, and Animal Farm became one of the books most closely associated with Orwell's name.

Its success finally gave Orwell something he had lacked for most of his career: financial security.

His health, however, was deteriorating.

1984: The Last Book

After Eileen's death, Orwell increasingly sought somewhere isolated where he could write.

With help from his friend David Astor, he found a house called Barnhill on the remote Scottish island of Jura.

There, while raising Richard with help from his sister Avril and while becoming increasingly ill with tuberculosis, Orwell worked on the novel that would make his name synonymous with modern authoritarianism.

The book was Nineteen Eighty-Four, usually written as 1984.

Orwell completed the final manuscript near the end of 1948. The process severely strained his already fragile health, and he subsequently required lengthy hospitalization. The novel was published in June 1949.

The 1984 book tells the story of Winston Smith, a minor Party employee whose job involves altering historical records at the Ministry of Truth so that the past continually agrees with whatever the government currently claims.

Around that premise Orwell created an extraordinary political vocabulary.

There is Big Brother, the supposedly all-seeing leader.

There is Newspeak, a language engineered to reduce the range of possible thought.

There is doublethink, the ability to accept mutually contradictory ideas when the Party demands it.

There are the Thought Police, who pursue forbidden thinking.

And there is Room 101, associated with the state's ultimate ability to break individual resistance.

These ideas explain the modern meaning of the word Orwellian.

Something is generally described as Orwellian when it involves authoritarian control, pervasive surveillance, propaganda, political manipulation of language or attempts to rewrite reality itself.

Ironically, the word has become so popular that it is frequently used to describe things Orwell never would have recognized as Orwellian.

George Orwell's Final Marriage and Death

By the time 1984 appeared, Orwell was seriously ill.

While being treated for tuberculosis at University College Hospital in London, he married Sonia Brownell on October 13, 1949.

Sonia was connected to the London literary world and had worked at the influential magazine Horizon. Their marriage lasted only a little more than three months.

George Orwell died on January 21, 1950, aged forty-six.

The cause was tuberculosis.

He died just as 1984 was becoming an international sensation.

Richard was only five. After Orwell's death he was largely raised by Orwell's sister Avril. Sonia subsequently played a major role in preserving Orwell's manuscripts and literary estate; material from his papers eventually helped establish the George Orwell Archive at University College London, now one of the world's most important collections relating to his life.

Why George Orwell Still Matters

Orwell's lasting importance comes from something larger than his ability to predict surveillance technology.

He did not really write 1984 as a fortune-teller predicting exactly what the year 1984 would look like.

He wrote warnings.

His life had given him direct experience of empire, poverty, class divisions, war, propaganda, revolutionary politics, ideological persecution and bureaucratic institutions. Again and again he saw how easily abstract political ideals could obscure what was happening to actual human beings.

That is why Orwell constantly returned to concrete reality.

Who has enough food?

Who controls the newspaper?

Who changes yesterday's statement?

Who is allowed to criticize the people supposedly acting on their behalf?

What happens when a political movement begins changing the meaning of words?

And what happens when loyalty to a cause becomes more important than acknowledging that something is true?

Those questions have outlived nearly every government and political controversy Orwell originally wrote about.

That may be the most remarkable thing about George Orwell.

He died in 1950.

But we are still using his vocabulary to explain the world.

Major Books by George Orwell

For readers looking for the principal George Orwell books in order, his major book-length works are:

• Down and Out in Paris and London — 1933
• Burmese Days — 1934 in the United States; 1935 in Britain
• A Clergyman's Daughter — 1935
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying — 1936
• The Road to Wigan Pier — 1937
• Homage to Catalonia — 1938
• Coming Up for Air — 1939
• Animal Farm — 1945
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) — 1949

Orwell also produced an enormous body of journalism, reviews and essays, including Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, The Prevention of Literature, Notes on Nationalism, and many others. The Orwell Foundation's bibliography separates his six novels from his principal nonfiction books and extensive essay writing.