George Orwell

• 1. Introduction

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  George Orwell did not exist on any birth certificate. The man behind the name was Eric Arthur Blair, born on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari, in the Bengal Presidency of British India. He chose his pen name late, in a letter to his agent dated the 15th of November 1932, leaving the final decision to others. From a shortlist that included P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles, and H. Lewis Allways, he settled on George Orwell because, as he put it, "It is a good round English name." George honoured the patron saint of England. Orwell came from the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite places. The name would outlive the man and seed an adjective. "Orwellian" now sits in the English language alongside his coinages: "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". How did a colonial policeman who hated the empire he served become the writer who gave totalitarianism its vocabulary? What turned a man who deliberately slept in lodging houses dressed as a tramp into the author of two of the most read books of the century? And why did he spend his final, dying years on a remote Scottish island, burning his furniture to survive a winter while finishing his last novel?

• 2. The Down And Out Years

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  On his first night exploring the poorer parts of London, Blair set out to Limehouse Causeway and slept in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's "kip". He had returned from Burma with a plan that looked, to anyone watching, like ruin. He dressed like a tramp, adopted the name P.S. Burton, and "went native" in his own country. These were the first of occasional sorties he made over roughly five years into the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabited it. He admired the American writer Jack London, especially The People of the Abyss, and copied his method of disguise. In early 1928 Blair moved to Paris, living in the rue du Pot de Fer in a working-class district of the 5th arrondissement. His aunt Nellie Limouzin lived in the city with the Esperantist Eugène Lanti and supplied social and financial support. He took menial jobs, including dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli. He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin, a free hospital where medical students trained. Soon after, all his money was stolen from his lodging house. "In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject." The results of these years filled his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published by Victor Gollancz on the 9th of January 1933. Reviews were favourable. Cecil Day-Lewis praised Orwell's "clarity and good sense", and the trade press compared his eccentric characters to those of Dickens. He had wanted a different name partly to spare his family any embarrassment over his time as a tramp, a wish that gave the world George Orwell.

• 3. Policing An Empire He Hated

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  In October 1922 Blair sailed aboard the SS Herefordshire to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He was appointed an Assistant District Superintendent on probation on the 29th of November 1922, at a pay of 525 rupees per month. He was nineteen, holding real responsibility while most of his contemporaries were still at university in England. Posted to Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. The work bred a deep internal conflict. "I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible," he recalled. He remembered "the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance". In Burma he became an outsider, spending time alone, reading, and attending the churches of the Karen ethnic group. A colleague, Roger Beadon, recalled he learned the language fast and could speak "very high-flown Burmese" with Burmese priests. He changed his appearance for life, adopting a pencil moustache and a small untidy blue circle tattooed on each knuckle, the kind rural Burmese believed protected against bullets and snake bites. In Katha in 1927 he contracted dengue fever. On leave in Cornwall that September he reappraised his life, decided against returning, and resigned to become a writer, with effect from the 12th of March 1928. The experience fed the novel Burmese Days and the essays "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant".

• 4. Catalonia And The Lie

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  Henry Miller told Orwell, over dinner in Paris on the way to Spain, that going to fight was "sheer stupidity" and that his ideas about combating fascism and defending democracy "were all baloney". Orwell went anyway, setting out around the 23rd of December 1936. In Barcelona he met John McNair of the Independent Labour Party. The Republican side was a fractious alliance, and he was at first exasperated by its "kaleidoscope" of parties and unions. Because the ILP was linked to the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, he joined the POUM and was sent to the Aragon Front under Georges Kopp. By January 1937 he was at Alcubierre, 1,500 feet above sea level, in deep winter, shocked by the lack of munitions, food, and firewood. His wife Eileen volunteered in McNair's office and visited, bringing English tea, chocolate, and cigars. At 6 feet 2 inches, Orwell stood taller than the Spanish fighters and had been warned against the trench parapet. A sniper's bullet struck him in the throat. Unable to speak, blood pouring from his mouth, he was carried to Siétamo and on to a hospital in Lleida. The bullet had missed his main artery by the barest margin. He was declared medically unfit for service. Then the political ground collapsed beneath him. The pro-Soviet Communist press accused the POUM of collaborating with the fascists, and the party was outlawed. Kopp was arrested. Orwell and Eileen lay low, broke cover to try to help Kopp, and finally escaped Spain by train. On the 13th of July 1937 a deposition charged them with "rabid Trotskyism". That campaign of lies had a lasting effect, and produced Homage to Catalonia in 1938.

• 5. Two Books That Changed The Language

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  Animal Farm nearly never reached print. Gollancz refused it as an attack on the Soviet Union, a crucial wartime ally. T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber refused it too. Jonathan Cape agreed, then reversed his plan after a visit to Peter Smollett, a Ministry of Information official later identified as a Soviet agent. Secker & Warburg finally published Animal Farm: A Fairy Story in Britain on the 17th of August 1945, and in America on the 26th of August 1946. Its resonance in the post-war climate made Orwell a sought-after figure. He had begun the book around March 1943, when his mother died. He drew on his interest in fairy tales, a genre he loved, and on the 24th of November 1943 his radio adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes was broadcast. Animal Farm is often read as reflecting the degeneration of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in June 1949 to critical acclaim, depicts life under totalitarian rule. The two novels earned lasting honours. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four shared the Prometheus Award with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Animal Farm won it in 2011. In the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll, Nineteen Eighty-Four was listed at number 8 and Animal Farm at number 46. In 2021, readers of the New York Times Book Review rated Nineteen Eighty-Four third among the best books of the past 125 years. For most of his career, though, Orwell was best known not as a novelist but as a journalist.

• 6. The Essayist And Critic

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  Irving Howe called Orwell "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson". The judgment fits a man who supported himself as a book-reviewer throughout his life and whose reviews shaped literary criticism. Writing about Charles Dickens in 1940, Orwell described seeing "a face somewhere behind the page" of strongly individual writing. The face he found in Dickens was "a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls". George Woodcock suggested those words also described Orwell himself. Orwell named the writers he never tired of in a 1940 autobiographical piece: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert, and among moderns James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence. He said W. Somerset Maugham influenced him most, admiring his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. He called Gulliver's Travels one of six books he would preserve when all others were destroyed. His judgments could be sharply double-edged. He praised Rudyard Kipling as a "good bad poet" whose work was nonetheless "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting". He reviewed Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon in 1941 and called it most valuable "as an interpretation of the Moscow 'confessions' by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods". His 1945 essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse argued that Wodehouse's wartime broadcasts from Germany did not make him a traitor, and accused the Ministry of Information of exaggerating his actions. One commission, though, was refused: in 1946 the British Council asked him to write about British food, then declined to publish "British Cookery" because of wartime rationing.

• 7. Jura And The Last Winter

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  On the 22nd of May 1946 Orwell set off with his two-year-old son to live at Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. He treated the boy as a mini-adult. Conditions were primitive, with no outbuildings, but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place appealed to him. His son later learned that Orwell feared passing tuberculosis to him through hugging or kissing, and worried it might interfere with their bond. The illness had already announced itself; he suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised it. David Astor had been instrumental in arranging his place on Jura, where Astor's family owned Scottish estates. Orwell endured one of the coldest British winters on record in London, burning his furniture and his child's toys amid a national fuel shortage. On the 19th of August 1947 he led a disastrous boating expedition that nearly cost lives in the Gulf of Corryvreckan and left him soaked. A week before Christmas 1947 he was in Hairmyres Hospital with tuberculosis diagnosed. The request to import the new drug streptomycin reached Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health. Orwell began the course around the 19th or the 20th of February 1948 but developed toxic epidermal necrolysis, a rare side effect. By December 1948, back on Jura, he had finished the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His grief was already long: Eileen had died on the 29th of March 1945 of an allergic reaction to an anaesthetic during a hysterectomy, leaving him with their adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair.

• 8. A Marriage In A Hospital Room

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  Orwell's wedding to Sonia Brownell took place in a hospital room on the 13th of October 1949, with David Astor as best man. Brownell was believed to be the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four. She took charge of his affairs and attended him diligently, and Anthony Powell said she cheered him up greatly, though others argued she may have been drawn to his fame. By the previous year he had become comparatively well off; the success of Animal Farm prompted him to set up George Orwell Productions Ltd on the 12th of September 1947 to handle his copyright and royalties. In March 1949, while at a sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire, he was visited by Celia Kirwan, then working for the Foreign Office's Information Research Department. He gave her a list of people he considered unsuitable as IRD authors because of pro-communist leanings, a list not published until 2003. To promote Animal Farm, the IRD commissioned cartoon strips drawn by Norman Pett for newspapers across the globe. At the age of 46, Orwell suffered a pulmonary artery rupture due to complications of tuberculosis and died in the early morning of the 21st of January 1950. He had asked to be buried according to the rites of the Church of England in the nearest convenient cemetery. London's graveyards had no space, so David Astor arranged for him to be interred at All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay, on the 26th of January 1950. Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge organised the funeral, and Powell chose the hymns. In 2008, a national newspaper named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945, a verdict that placed the lower-upper-middle-class boy from Motihari near the very top of his own language.