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Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903–January 21, 1950),
better known by the pen-name George Orwell, was a British author and journalist best known
for his allegorical political
novels, Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four (the latter giving rise to
the term Orwellian).
Biography
Eric Blair was born in Bengal, 1903 in the British colony of India, 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 until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister
named Avril. Young Eric was a hardworking student, and won scholarships first to St. Cyprian's School (which he described in his essay "Such, Such Were The Joys") and then Eton College, which he attended from 1917 to
1921. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma
in 1922, but returned to England and resigned in 1928
having grown to hate imperialism (as can be seen in his first novel
Burmese Days, published in 1934). He adopted his pen-name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi.
Blair 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 work using his pen name. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill-health
forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead.
A member of the Independent Labour Party, Orwell
felt impelled to fight as an infantryman in the anti-Stalinist POUM, or Workers' Party of Marxist
Unification during the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia he described his feelings at the apparent
absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also
depicted what he believed was the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist
Party, which was abetted by the Soviet Union. During his tour of duty
in Spain he was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in his book Homage to Catalonia.
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 and in 1941 began work for the BBC
Eastern Service, mostly working on programs 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 quit this job in 1943 to
become literary editor of Tribune magazine, a left-wing journal sponsored by a group of Labour Party MPs.
In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was
published the following year with great critical and popular success.
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. He attibutes the gloominess of the novel to this stay, and his
illness.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen
O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair. Tragically she died in 1945 during an operation. In the
fall of 1949 shortly before his death he married Sonia Brownell.
In 1949 Orwell spoke to the Information Research Department, an organization run by the government to encourage the
publication of anti-communist propaganda. He offered them information on the "crypto-communist leanings" of some of his fellow writers and
advice on how best to spread the anti-communist message. Orwell's motives for this are unclear, though it does not necessarily
follow that he had abandoned socialism - merely that he detested Stalinism, as he
had already made very clear in his earlier published works. Some have also speculated that he was mentally unstable at the time
as the result of the tuberculosis from which he suffered.
Orwell died at the age of 47 from tuberculosis, which he 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. He is buried in All Saint's Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire under
his real name Eric Arthur Blair.
Belief in the occult
A biography Inside George Orwell, written by Gordon Bowker and published in 2003, suggested that George
Orwell believed in paranormal phenomena, and was deeply affected by many
inexplicable incidents throughout his life. The book cites a letter written on his deathbed by Sir Steven Runciman, the medieval
historian who befriended Orwell in Eton. The letter indicates that Orwell became
interested in voodoo black magic after reading Ingoldsby Legends written by
R.H. Barham, which described killing by black magic.
Runciman and Orwell decided to put these occult learning to practice, when they used a wax image to harm an older boy Peter
Yorke, whom they both "disliked for being unkind to his juniors". Runciman says in his "confessional" letter:
- He wanted to stick a pin into the heart of our image, but that frightened me, so we compromised by breaking off his right
leg – and he did break his leg a few days later playing football and he died young.
Although Runciman did not reveal the time and mode of his death, records show that Yorke died of acute lymphatic leukaemia in July 1917, only
three months after Orwell had entered Eton. The book also notes that Orwell confided in a few friends that his adoption of a
pen-name was in fact, to prevent his enemies from using his real name to work magic against him. Orwell is also said to have been
frequently troubled by visions of his death, and ghost sightings throughout his life, conflicting with the rationalistic image that Orwell is often credited with.
Orwell's Work
During most of his professional life time Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his activities during the Spanish Civil War), and Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these
cities).
Orwell is best remembered today for two of his novels: 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. Both of
these books are often viewed as critical of socialism per se, but this view is probably only credible to those who are
ignorant of Orwell's own socialist opinions.
Such has been the influence of Orwell's work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, that the term
Orwellian has entered into the English language to
mean "characteristic of the totalitarianism depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four".
Another widely-known work of Orwell is his classic essay "Politics and the English Language", in which he decries the effects of political
propaganda, officialese, and superficial thinking on literary styles,
vocabulary, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the declining power of language to capture and express
reality with honesty is also reflected in his invention of "Newspeak", the language
of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in
which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that
contradict the official line - and, in time, even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
Orwell was a committed socialist for most of his life, as a result of many of
the experiences described in his books. This was in opposition to his middle-class upbringing. "You have nothing to lose but your aitches" as he once said in mocking of middle-class taboos about pronunciation.
Quotation
- "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 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" [1]
Books
Essays
- A Good Word For The Vicar of Bray
- A Hanging
- A Nice Cup of
Tea
- AntiSemitism In Britain, see Anti Semitism
- Arthur Koestler
- Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, see Salvador Dalí.
- Books vs.
Cigarettes
- Bookshop
Memories
- Boys' Weeklies and Frank Richards's Reply
- Charles Dickens, see Charles
Dickens.
- Charles Reade
- Confessions of a Book Reviewer
- Decline of the English Murder
- Down The Mine
- Freedom of the
Park
- Future of a Ruined Germany
- Good Bad
Books
- How The Poor
Die
- In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse, see P.G. Wodehouse
- Inside The
Whale
- James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution
- Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, see King Lear,
Leo Tolstoy
- Looking Back On The Spanish War, see Spanish Civil War
- Mark Twain -- The Licensed Jester, see Mark Twain
- Marrakech
- Nonsense
Poetry
- North And
South
- Notes on
Nationalism, see nationalism
- Pleasure
Spots
- Poetry and the Microphone
- Politics and the English
Language
- Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's
Travels
- Raffles and Miss Blandish
- Reflections
on Gandhi, see Mahatma Gandhi.
- Revenge is
Sour
- Riding
Down The Bangor
- Rudyard Kipling, see Rudyard
Kipling.
- Shooting an Elephant(1937)
- Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
- Spilling The Spanish Beans
- Such, Such Were The Joys, see public school, Eton
- The
Art of Donald McGill, see Donald McGill
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism And The English
Genius
- The Prevention of Literature
- The
Spike
- The Sporting
Spirit
- W B Yeats
(essay), see W. B. Yeats.
- Wells, Hitler And The World State, see Adolf Hitler
- Why I Write
- Writers and the Leviathan
- You and
the Atomic Bomb, see Atomic
Bomb.
See also
- James Burnham, whose book The Managerial Revolution was a
major influence on the development of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- Max Barry, the author of a recent dystopian novel influenced heavily by
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
External links
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