If you are interested in reading more about this writer, here is a brief (well, actually, it's quite long!!) biography. I will post a model commentary for the assessment text as soon as everyone has completed it, in a day or two.
AK
George Orwell
George Orwell is the
pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (
25 June 1903[1][2] –
21 January 1950) who was an
English writer and
journalist well-noted as a novelist, critic, and commentator on politics and culture.
George Orwell is one of the most admired
English-language essayists of the twentieth century, and most famous for two
novels critical of
totalitarianism in general (
Nineteen Eighty-Four), and
Stalinism in particular (
Animal Farm), which he wrote and published towards the end of his life.
Early life
Eric Arthur Blair was born on
25 June 1903 to
British parents
[3] in
Motihari,
Bengal Presidency,
British India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the
Opium Department of
the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), took him to
England when he was one year old. He did not see his father again until 1907, during Richard's three-month visit to England. Eric had two sisters; Marjorie, the elder, and Avril, the younger. He later described his family as "
lower-upper-middle class".
[4]Education
At six, Eric attended the
Anglican parish school in
Henley-on-Thames, where he impressed the teachers. Blair's mother wanted him to have a good public school education, but the family finances were against this unless he could obtain a scholarship. Her brother Charles Limouzin, who lived on the South Coast, recommended
St Cyprian's School,
Eastbourne,
Sussex. The headmaster undertook to help Blair to win a scholarship, and made a private financial arrangement which allowed Blair's parents to pay only half the normal fees. At the school, Blair formed a life-long friendship with
Cyril Connolly (future editor of
Horizon magazine, who later published many of his essays). Years later, Blair mordantly recalled the school in the essay "
Such, Such Were the Joys". However, while there he wrote two poems that were published in his local newspaper, came second to Connolly in the
Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to
Wellington and
Eton.
After a term at Wellington College, Blair transferred to Eton College, where he was a
King's Scholar (1917–1921), and
Aldous Huxley was his French tutor. Later, Blair wrote of having been relatively happy at Eton, because it allowed students much independence. His academic performance reports indicate that he ceased serious work there, and various explanations have been offered for this. His parents could not afford to send him to
Oxbridge without another scholarship, and they concluded from the poor results that he would not be able to obtain one.
Burma and the early novelsOn finishing school at Eton, the family could not finance university; his father thought his scholarship prospects poor, so, in 1922, Eric Arthur Blair joined the
Indian Imperial Police, serving at
Katha and
Moulmein in
Burma. His imperial policeman's life led him to hate
imperialism; on leave in England, he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police in 1927, to become a writer.
The Burma police experience yielded the novel
Burmese Days (1934) and the essays "
A Hanging" (1931) and "
Shooting an Elephant" (1936). In England, he wrote to family acquaintance,
Ruth Pitter and she and a friend found him rooms in
Portobello Road (today, a
blue plaque commemorates his residence there), where he began writing. From there, he sallied to the
Limehouse Causeway (following
Jack London's footsteps) spending his first night in a common
lodging house, probably George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he "went native" (in his own country), dressing like a
tramp, making no concessions to middle class mores and expectations, and recorded his experiences of the low life in "The Spike", his first published essay, and the latter half of his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
He moved to Paris in spring of 1928, where his Aunt Nellie lived (and later died), hoping to earn a freelance writer's living; failure reduced him to menial jobs such as dishwasher in the fashionable Hotel X, on the
rue de Rivoli in 1929, all told in Down and Out in Paris and London. The record does not indicate if he had the book in mind as the terminus of those low life experiences.
In later 1929, he returned to England, to his parents' house in
Southwold,
Suffolk, ill and penniless, where he wrote Burmese Days, and also frequently foraying to tramping in researching a book on the life of society's poorest people. Meanwhile, he regularly contributed to
John Middleton Murry's
New Adelphi magazine.
He completed Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932; it was published early the next year, while he taught at Frays College, near
Hayes,
Middlesex. He took the job to escape dire poverty; during this period, he obtained the
literary agent services of Leonard Moore. Just before publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, Eric Arthur Blair adopted the
nom de plume George Orwell. In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November) he left the choice of pseudonym to him and to publisher
Victor Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting these pseudonyms: P. S. Burton (a tramping name), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways.
[5]As a writer, George Orwell drew upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold for the novel
A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), written in 1934 at his parents' house after sickness and parental urging forced his foregoing the teaching life. From late 1934 to early 1936 he was a part-time assistant in the Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in
Hampstead. Having led a lonely, solitary existence, he wanted to enjoy the company of young writers; Hampstead was an intellectual's town with many houses offering cheap
bedsit rooms. Those experiences germinated into the novel
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
The Road to Wigan PierIn early 1936, Victor Gollancz, of the
Left Book Club, commissioned George Orwell to write an account of
working class poverty in economically depressed
northern England. His account,
The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937. Orwell did his leg-and-homework as a social reporter: he gained entry to many houses in
Wigan to see how people lived; took systematic notes of housing conditions and wages earned; and spent days in the local public library consulting public health records and reports on mine working conditions.
The first half of The Road to Wigan Pier documents his social investigations of
Lancashire and
Yorkshire. It begins with an evocative description of working life in the
coal mines. The second half is a long essay of his upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, including a denunciation of the Left's irresponsible elements. Publisher Gollancz feared the second half would offend
Left Book Club readers; he inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in
Spain.
Soon after researching the The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell married
Eileen O'Shaughnessy.
The Spanish Civil War, and Catalonia
In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain as a fighter for
the Republican side in the
Spanish Civil War that was provoked by
Francisco Franco's
Fascist uprising. In conversation with Philip Mairet, editor of New English Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism . . . somebody's got to stop it'.
[6] To Orwell, liberty and democracy went together, guaranteeing, among other things, the
freedom of the artist; the present capitalist civilization was corrupt, but fascism would be morally calamitous.
John McNair (1887–1968), quotes him: 'He then said that this [writing a book] was quite secondary, and [that] his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism'. Orwell went alone; his wife, Eileen, joined him later. He joined the
Independent Labour Party contingent, which consisted of some twenty-five Britons who had joined the militia of the
Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM - Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), a revolutionary
communist party. The POUM, and the radical wing of the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Catalonia's dominant left-wing force), believed General Franco could be defeated only if the Republic's working class overthrew capitalism — a position at fundamental odds with the Spanish Communist Party, and its allies, which (backed by
Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with the
bourgeois parties to defeat the fascist Nationalists. After July 1936 there was profound
social revolution in
Catalonia,
Aragón, and wherever the CNT was strong, an
egalitarian spirit sympathetically described in
Homage to Catalonia.
Fortuitously, Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the Communist
International Brigades, but his experiences — especially his and Eileen's narrow escaping a June 1937 Communist purge in Barcelona — much increased his sympathies for the POUM, making him a life-long
anti-Stalinist and firm believer in what he termed
Democratic Socialism, socialism with free debate and free elections.
In combat, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. At first, he feared his voice would be reduced to a permanent, painful whisper; this was not to be so, though the injury affected his voice, giving it "a strange, compelling quietness".
[7] He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all".
George and Eileen Orwell then lived in
Morocco for half a year so he could recover from his wound. In that time, he wrote
Coming Up for Air, his last novel before
World War II. It is the most English of his novels; alarums of war mingle with images of idyllic
Thames-side
Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, Bowling posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler: "Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it . . . They're something quite new — something that's never been heard of before".
World War II and Animal FarmAfter the Spanish ordeal, and writing about it, Orwell's formation ended; his finest writing, best essays, and great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed his Wallington house, and he and Eileen moved to No. 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, in the genteel
Marylebone neighbourhood near
Regent's Park,
central London, Orwell supporting himself as a freelance reviewer for the
New English Weekly (mainly),
Time and Tide, and the
New Statesman. Soon after the war began, he joined the
Home Guard (and was awarded the "British Campaign Medals/Defence Medal") attending
Tom Wintringham's home guard school and championing Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard.
In 1941, Orwell worked for
BBC's Eastern Service, supervising Indian broadcasts meant to stimulate India's war participation against the approaching
Japanese army. About being a propagandist, he wrote of feeling like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". Still, he devoted much effort to the opportunity of working closely with the likes of
T. S. Eliot,
E. M. Forster,
Mulk Raj Anand, and
William Empson; the war-time
Ministry of Information, at
Senate House,
University of London, inspired the
Ministry of Truth in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's BBC resignation followed a report confirming his fears about the broadcasts: few Indians listened. He wanted to become a
war correspondent, and was impatient to begin working on
Animal Farm. Despite the good salary, he resigned from BBC in September 1943, and in November became
literary editor of the
left-wing weekly magazine
Tribune, then edited by
Aneurin Bevan and
Jon Kimche (Kimche had been
Box to Orwell's
Cox when they were half-time assistants at the Booklover's Corner book shop in Hampstead, 1934–35). Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing the regular column "As I Please".
Anthony Powell and
Malcolm Muggeridge had returned from overseas to finish the war in London; the three regularly lunched together at either the Bodega, off
the Strand, or the Bourgogne, in
Soho, sometimes joined by
Julian Symons (then seemingly true disciple to Orwell) and
David Astor, editor-owner of
The Observer.
In 1944, Orwell finished the anti-Stalinist
allegory Animal Farm published (Britain, 17 August 1945, U.S., 26 August 1946) to critical and popular success.
Harcourt Brace Editor Frank Morley went to Britain soon after the war to learn what currently interested readers, clerking a week or so at the Cambridge book shop Bowes and Bowes. The first day, customers continually requested a sold-out book — the second impression of Animal Farm; on reading the shop's remaining copy, he went to London and bought the American publishing rights; the royalties were George Orwell's first, proper, adult income.
With Animal Farm at the printer's, with war's end in view, Orwell's desire to be in the thick of the action quickened. David Astor asked him to be the Observer war correspondent reporting the
liberation of France and the early
occupation of Germany; Orwell quit
Tribune.
He and Astor were close; Astor is believed to be the model for the rich publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Orwell strongly influenced Astor's editorial policies. Astor died in 2001 and is buried in the grave beside Orwell's. Orwell never revealed his pen name, keeping his identity secret and thinking his work did not need a revealed author.
Nineteen Eighty-Four and final yearsOrwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, born in May 1944. Orwell was taken ill again in
Cologne in spring 1945. While he was sick there, his wife died in
Newcastle during an operation to remove a tumour. She had not told him about this operation due to concerns about the cost and the fact that she thought she would make a speedy recovery.
For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work — mainly for the Tribune, the Observer and the
Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and
literary magazines — with writing his best-known work,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Originally, Orwell was undecided between titling the book The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four but his publisher,
Fredric Warburg, helped him choose. The title was not the year Orwell had initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984.
[8]He wrote much of the novel while living at Barnhill,
[9] a remote farmhouse on the island of
Jura which lies in the
Gulf stream off the west coast of
Scotland. It was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near to the northern end of the island, situated at the end of a five-mile (8 km), heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the
laird, or landowner, Margaret Fletcher lived, and where the paved road, the only one on the island, came to an end.
In 1948, he co-edited a collection entitled British Pamphleteers with
Reginald Reynolds.
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 the
Labour government had set up to publish
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 a friend in a cause — anti-Stalinism — that they both supported. There is no indication that Orwell 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 made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. In fact, one of the people on the list, Peter Smollett, the head of the
Soviet section in the Ministry of Information, was later (after the opening of
KGB archives) proven to be a Soviet agent, recruited by
Kim Philby, and "almost certainly the person on whose advice the publisher
Jonathan Cape turned down Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text", although Orwell was unaware of this.
[10]In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married
Sonia Brownell.
[11]Death Orwell died in London from
tuberculosis, at the age of 46.
[12] 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 25,
1903, died
January 21,
1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen-name. He had wanted to be buried in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die, but the graveyards in central London had no space. Fearing that he might have to be cremated, against his wishes, his widow appealed to his friends to see if any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. Orwell's friend David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay and negotiated with the vicar for Orwell to be buried there, although he had no connection with the village.
Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government.
