George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal. Orwell is his pen name and he is best known as George Orwell. His father was a member of the Indian Civil Service and Orwell described their lives as “lower-upper middle class”.
Orwell moved to England with his mother and sister in 1907 to be brought up in a more traditional Christian environment. He entered in the public school system and was admitted to Eaton College in 1917 on a scholarship. During his time at Eaton he wrote for college periodicals. He later said he knew he must be a writer at age 5.
Orwell did as little as possible at Eaton in terms of school work, preferring to immerse himself in the writing of famous authors such as Swift, Sterne, and Jack London. Although he managed to finish his final exams, he finished 138 out of 167 and failed to win a university scholarship. He broke away from the tradition path of Eaton graduates and instead of going on to Oxford or Cambridge, joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922, serving in India and Burma.
Orwell left the police force while home on leave in 1927. He had come to feel that by serving on the police force, he was supporting a political system he did not believe in anymore. Besides he wanted to write.
Orwell took a small apartment in London and lived poorly while teaching himself to become a better writer. In the spring of 1928, he took the drastic step of giving up his apartment and living with the poor, first in London, then in Paris. He wanted to understand the revulsion members of his own class felt for the poor.
He returned at the end of 1929 and began to write of his experiences in an autobiographical form. The eventual title of the book was “Down and Out in Paris and London”. The book was initially rejected a number of times but after numerous revisions, was finally published under the pen name, George Orwell. In doing so, Eric Blair had reinvented himself from a middle class civil servant to a classless anti-authoritarian.
Orwell published his recollections of his time in Burma in 1934 and followed it up by “A Clergyman’s Daughter” in 1935 and “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” in 1936, Orwell had a vision of himself as an exposer of moral truth and representative of English conscience. Both themes would resonate in subsequent writing. He wrote “The Road to Wigan Pier” in 1936, and also opened a village shop where he worked in the morning ad wrote in the afternoon. He had met Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and married her in 1936.
Orwell moved to Spain with his wife at the end of 1936, with the thought of writing newspaper articles about the Spanish Civil War, which had broken out. He was fascinated by the equality he found in the socialist environment of Barcelona. Classes had disappeared and all were equal. He joined the Marxist Militia. He was wounded in the throat and returned to Barcelona and found a changed city. Socialism had disappeared and he was accused of being a secret Fascist in support of France and he and his wife were forced to flee to France.
Orwell’s experiences and his thought and feelings about those experiences were the subject of “Homage to Catalonia” written in 1938. He was exhilarated by the initial classless experiences, but then depressed by the return of the city to a system of classes. This confirmed for him that there would always be different classes and there seemed to be something in human nature that sought violence, conflict, and power other others.
Orwell became ill with tuberculosis in 1938 and went to Morocco to recover. During his time there he wrote “Coming up for Air” published in 1939. When war broke out between England and Germany, he wanted to join and fight the fascists but was declared unfit for duty.
Orwell joined the BBC in 1941. He was a producer in the India section of the eastern service. He also served in the Home Guard during this time.
Orwell left the BBC in 1943 to become the literary editor of the Tribune. He also began writing one of his most famous novels “Animal Farm” which was published in 1945. It was a beast-fable which attacked Stalinism, which Orwell believed had corrupted the once bright promise of communism. It was highly successful and profitable.
Orwell and his wife adopted a son, Richard, in 1944. In 1945, his wife died during a relatively minor operation, which was very hard on him. This, coupled with the fame that came with Animal Farm” encouraged him to move away form the limelight and he settled on Jura, an island off the Scottish coast I 1946.
Orwell began to write “Nineteen Eighty Four”. It was a novel about his fears about an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future. The book may have been inspired by his wartime work for the BBC, which gave him a first-hand experience with bureaucratic hypocrisy that could have accounted for his invention of “newspeak” which was the truth defying language used in the book by Big Brother.
Orwell published the book in 1949. The dark tones of the book may have been exacerbated by his tuberculosis, which worsened due to the climate on Jura. He married Sonia Brownell in 1949, who helped him with the care of Richard. The marriage was short-lived as he died on January 21, 1950 of a tubercular hemorrhage as he was about to depart for a sanitarium in Switzerland. He was 47.
