George Orwell

George Orwell — the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair — was the most influential political writer in English of the twentieth century. A novelist, essayist and journalist, he wrote two of the most widely read books of the century: Animal Farm (1945), a fable in which the animals of an English farm overthrow their human master and are betrayed by the pigs, an allegory of the Russian Revolution and Stalin; and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopia of total surveillance and thought control that gave the language “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “Newspeak” and “thoughtcrime”. His essays — “Shooting an Elephant”, “Politics and the English Language”, “Why I Write”, “Notes on Nationalism”, “Inside the Whale” — and his books of reportage on poverty and war — Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia — made him a model of honest, lucid, morally serious writing. He was a democratic socialist who fought fascism with a rifle in Spain and exposed Stalinism with his pen, and an adjective, “Orwellian”, now names the tyranny he warned against.

Life

Empire and school

Eric Blair was born on 25 June 1903 at Motihari in Bihar, India, where his father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother brought him to England as a baby. He was sent at eight to St Cyprian’s, a snobbish preparatory school in Sussex, whose cruelty and class prejudice he described in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”, and won a scholarship to Eton (1917–21), where he was taught French briefly by Aldous Huxley and was a rebellious, idle pupil. Instead of going to university, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (1922–27), an experience that left him with a deep guilt about imperialism. In “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) he described being forced, by the expectations of a jeering crowd, to shoot an elephant he did not want to kill: “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), drew on these years.

Down and out

He resigned in 1927, determined to become a writer and to expiate his guilt by sharing the lives of the poor. He lived among tramps in London, worked as a dishwasher in Paris hotels, picked hops in Kent, and wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), published under the name George Orwell (from the river in Suffolk). He taught in small private schools, worked in a bookshop, and wrote novels (A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying). In 1936 his publisher, Victor Gollancz, sent him to the depressed industrial north of England to report on unemployment; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) describes the miners’ lives with harrowing detail and then attacks middle-class socialists — “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

He married Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936.

Spain

In December 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascist rebellion. He joined the militia of the POUM, a small anti-Stalinist Marxist party, served on the Aragon front, and in May 1937, in Barcelona, witnessed street fighting between anarchists and POUM on one side and Communist-led government forces on the other. In the trenches at Huesca a sniper’s bullet passed through his throat. While he recovered, the Communists, directed by Soviet agents, suppressed the POUM as “Trotskyist fascists”; his comrades were arrested, tortured and shot; he and Eileen escaped across the border with the police on their trail. Homage to Catalonia (1938) recorded his experience and the lies told about it in the left-wing press. It was the turning point of his life: “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.”

War and Animal Farm

During the Second World War, rejected for military service because of his health, he served in the Home Guard and worked at the BBC Eastern Service, broadcasting propaganda to India (1941–43) — an experience of censorship and bureaucracy that fed Nineteen Eighty-Four. He became literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune and wrote its “As I Please” column. The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) argued for an English socialist revolution that would preserve English decency.

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (written 1943–44, published August 1945) tells how the animals of Manor Farm, inspired by the dream of old Major the boar, rebel against the drunken farmer Jones and set up a society of equals under the principles of “Animalism” — “Four legs good, two legs bad”; “All animals are equal.” The clever pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin), take control, drive out the idealistic Snowball (Trotsky) with trained dogs, rewrite history, execute dissenters after forced confessions, and exploit the loyal carthorse Boxer, who works himself to death and is sold to the knacker; the propagandist Squealer justifies everything. In the end the commandments are reduced to one — “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” — and the pigs walk on two legs, dine with the human farmers, and become indistinguishable from them: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Several publishers, including Faber (where T. S. Eliot rejected it), refused it because the Soviet Union was a wartime ally. It became a worldwide bestseller and made Orwell famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Jura and death

Eileen died suddenly in 1945 during an operation, leaving Orwell with their adopted baby son, Richard. In 1946 he moved to Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Hebridean island of Jura, and there, increasingly ill with tuberculosis, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, typing the final draft himself in 1948. It was published in June 1949. In October 1949, in University College Hospital, London, he married Sonia Brownell, an editor; he died of a burst artery in his lungs on 21 January 1950, aged forty-six. He is buried, as Eric Arthur Blair, in the churchyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.

The essays

Orwell is perhaps greatest as an essayist. “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argues that bad, vague, pretentious language makes bad thinking possible, and that “political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It ends with six rules: never use a cliché metaphor; never use a long word where a short one will do; cut every word you can; prefer the active voice; avoid jargon and foreign phrases; and “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” “Why I Write” (1946) names four motives — sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, political purpose — and wants “to make political writing into an art”. Other famous essays include “A Hanging”, “Boys’ Weeklies”, “The Art of Donald McGill”, “Notes on Nationalism”, “Reflections on Gandhi” and “Decline of the English Murder”.

Ideas

Orwell’s thought is a combination of democratic socialism — hostility to privilege, capitalism and empire — and fierce anti-totalitarianism, directed against fascism and against the Stalinism that many Western intellectuals excused. He valued truth above loyalty to one’s side, despised the orthodoxies and euphemisms of the left as much as the right, and believed that the “common decency” of ordinary people was the moral ground of politics. He was a patriot who loved English landscape, eccentricity and common life (“England Your England”). He feared the power of the modern state, propaganda and technology to control not only actions but memory and thought — the theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four. A list of suspected communist sympathisers he gave to a friend at the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department in 1949 has been controversial since its discovery.

Legacy

Orwell’s two great fables are among the best-selling books in history and are read in schools worldwide. “Orwellian” describes official lies, surveillance and the manipulation of language. Both left and right claim him. The Orwell Prize honours political writing. His plain style — “Good prose is like a windowpane” — remains a model for journalists and essayists.

In conversation

• “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” — the hypocrisy of privileged elites claiming equality.
• Orwellian — describing propaganda, surveillance and the distortion of truth by the state.
• “Good prose is like a windowpane” — the ideal of clear, transparent writing.