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Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 21
January 1950), better known by the pen name George Orwell, was a British
author. Noted as a political and cultural commentator, as well as an
accomplished novelist, Orwell is among the most widely admired
English-language essayists of the twentieth century. He is possibly best
known for two novels written towards the end of his life, in the 1940s;
the political allegory Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which
describes a totalitarian dystopia so vividly that the adjective
"Orwellian" is now used to describe totalitarian mechanisms of thought
control.
****
Biography
Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari,
Bihar, India, in the then British dominion of India (British Raj), where
his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil
Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He
did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England
for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named
Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic
humour, he would later describe his family's background as
"lower-upper-middle class."
Education
At the age of six, Blair was sent to a
small Anglican parish school in Henley, which his sister had attended
before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have
impressed the teachers very favourably, for two years later he was
recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory
schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne,
Sussex. Young Eric attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed
his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he
would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the
essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," but there he earned scholarships to
both Wellington and Eton colleges.
After a term at Wellington, Eric moved to
Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he
wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its
students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing
serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance
at Eton vary: some claim he was a poor student, others deny this. He was
clearly disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they
perceived as disrespect for their authority. In any event, during his
time at the school Eric made lifetime friendships with a number of
future British intellectuals such as Cyril Connolly, the future editor
of the Horizon magazine where many of Orwell's most famous essays were
originally published.
Burma and afterwards
After finishing his studies at Eton, having
no prospect of gaining a university scholarship, and his family's means
being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial
Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having
grown to hate imperialism, as shown by his novel Burmese Days, published
in 1934, and by such essays as "A Hanging", and "Shooting an Elephant."
He lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes
doing itinerant work, as he recalled in Down and Out in Paris and
London, his first major work. He eventually found work as a
schoolteacher, but ill health forced him to give this up to work
part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, an
experience later partially recounted in the novel Keep the Aspidistra
Flying.
Eric Blair became George Orwell in 1933,
while the author was writing for the New Adelphi, and living in Hayes,
Middlesex while working as a schoolmaster. He adopted a pen name in
order not to embarrass his parents with Down and Out in Paris and
London. He considered such possible pseudonyms as "Kenneth Miles" and
"H. Lewis Allways" before settling on a name that stressed his lifelong
affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the
patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while
the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.
Blair also thought that a last name beginning with the letter "O" would
best position his books on bookseller's shelves.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to
Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair
(b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation.
Spanish Civil War
In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain to
fight in the Spanish Civil War with the republicans. During his military
service, he was shot through the neck, and barely survived. In order to
recuperate, he spent six months in Morocco. His book Homage to Catalonia
describes his experiences in Spain.
World War II and after
Orwell began supporting himself by writing
book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II
he was a member of the Home Guard for which he received the Defence
medal. In 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on
programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war
efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote
that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty
boot." Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary
editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and
Jon Kimche. Orwell contributed a regular column entitled "As I Please."
In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist
allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great
critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided
Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life.
From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later
contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close
friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a
strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known
work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the
novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.
In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend,
Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit,
the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour
government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He
gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable
as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not
published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the
editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the
actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for
handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is
the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause
anti-Stalinism that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell
ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in
his later writings or that he believed the writers he named should be
suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at
one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public
pronouncements.
In October 1949, shortly before his death,
he married Sonia Brownell. Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from
tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period
described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of
hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial
in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints'
Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here
lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.
Orwell's work
During most of his career Orwell was best
known for his journalism, both in the British in books of reportage such
as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish
Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of
poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier which described the
living conditions of poor miners in northern England. According to
Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest of his day and the foremost architect
of the English essay since Hazlitt."
Contemporary readers are more often
introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously
successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is an
allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian
Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of
the results of totalitarianism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a
staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a
man of the left and, in his own words, a "democratic socialist".
Literary influences
Orwell claimed that his writing style was
most similar to that of Somerset Maugham. In his literary essays, he
also strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book "The
Road". Orwell's descent into the lives of the poor in "The Road to Wigan
Pier" strongly resembles that of Jack London's "The People of the
Abyss", in which London disguises himself as a poverty stricken American
sailor in order to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his
literary essays, Orwell also praises Charles Dickens and Herman
Melville, the author of Moby Dick. Another of his favourite authors was
Jonathan Swift and in particular his book Gulliver's Travels.
Quotations from George Orwell
-
"The majority of pacifists either
belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who
object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond
that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose
real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western
democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda
usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other,
but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual
pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial
disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the
United States." Notes on Nationalism, May 1945.
-
"The Spanish war and other events in
193637 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every
line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been
written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for
democratic socialism, as I understand it." From the essay "Why I
Write"
-
"Plenty of people who are quite capable
of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2,
become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of
their own income." From the essay "Antisemitism in Britain"
-
"What purpose is served by saying that
men like Maxton are in Fascist pay?... It is as though in the middle
of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming
that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy." From "Homage to
Catalonia" (1938).
-
"All animals are equal, but some
animals are more equal than others". From Animal Farm (1945).
-
"One cannot really be a Catholic and
grown up." From "Manuscript Notebook," (1949).
-
"The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a
remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." From the
essay "Notes on Nationalism" (1945).
-
"Serious sport has nothing to do with
fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness,
disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence:
in other words it is war minus the shooting." From the essay "The
Sporting Spirit" (1945).
-
"If liberty means anything at all it
means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear". From
the Preface of Animal Farm The Freedom of the Press
-
"There are families in which the father
will say to his child, You'll get a thick ear if you do that
again, while the mother, her eyes brimming over with tears, will
take the child in her arms and murmur lovingly, Now, darling, is it
kind to Mummy to do that? And who would maintain that the second
method is less tyrannous than the first? The distinction that really
matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having
and not having the appetite for power." From the essay "Lear,
Tolstoy, and the Fool" (1947).
-
"No one can look back on his schooldays
and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy".
Miscellaneous trivia
Aldous Huxley was Orwell's French teacher
for a term early in his Eton career.
His wife Eileen was once a student of J.R.R.
Tolkien.
Despite being remembered for his radio
broadcasts for the BBC during the war no recording of Orwell speaking
was known until 2002. The only known film footage of Orwell is from him
at Eton playing the Eton Wall Game.
Orwell had a Soviet secret police file
partly due to his anti-Stalinist "Animal Farm".
Orwell actually coined the term Cold War.
In an essay titled "You and the Atomic Bomb" on October 19, 1945 in
Tribune, Orwell wrote:
"We may be heading not for general
breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of
antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few
people have yet considered its ideological implications this is, the
kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that
would probably prevail in a State which was once unconquerable and in a
permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."
Books
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Burmese Days (1934)
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)
The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the
English Genius (1941)
Animal Farm (1945)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Essays
Main description: Essays of George Orwell
"A Hanging" (1931)
"Shooting an Elephant" (1936)
"Charles Dickens" (1939)
"Boys' Weeklies" (1940)
"Inside the Whale" (1940)
"Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941)
"The Art of Donald McGill" (1941)
"Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943)
"W. B. Yeats" (1943)
"Benefit of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador
Dali" (1944)
"Arthur Koestler" (1944)
"Notes on Nationalism" (1945)
"How the Poor Die" (1946)
"Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of
Gulliver's Travels" (1946)
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946)
"Decline of the English Murder" (1946)
"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" (1946)
"A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" (1946)
"In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse" (1946)
"Why I Write" (1946)
"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
"Such, Such Were the Joys" (1946)
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1947)
"Reflections on Gandhi" (1949)
****
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