George Orwell

English novelist, essayist and journalist (1903–1950), author of 1984 and Animal Farm, and the writer whose name became an adjective for the machinery he described.

He was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service on the export of opium. He called the family ‘lower upper middle class’ — genteel without the money to sustain it — and the gap between what such a family expected and what it could afford is where his lifelong preoccupation with class begins. Scholarships carried him to prep school and to Eton, where his French master was Aldous Huxley. His parents could not fund university, so he sat the exam for the Indian Imperial Police and went to Burma, experiencing repression, punishment and surveillance from the administering side — the material of Burmese Days and of the essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’.

He returned to England in 1928 and took his pen name from the King and the Suffolk river, wanting something solidly English. Five books followed — Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air — none of them successful, and all built on a protagonist trapped by his times who tries to escape and fails.

The Spanish Civil War made him political. Fighting for the Republicans in the POUM militia, what marked him was not the fascists but the rift in Barcelona, where orthodox Stalinist communists turned on the sectarian militias alongside them. He came home shot through the neck, wrote Homage to Catalonia, and was fixed thereafter on Stalinism and on what totalitarian orthodoxy does to truth and language. During the Second World War he produced propaganda for the BBC’s Asian service, in an office building with a dingy canteen, attending editorial meetings in Broadcasting House’s Room 101.

His wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy died in 1945 under anaesthetic for a routine operation, leaving him with an adopted infant son he refused to give up. He wrote 1984 on the Scottish island of Jura across the coldest winters of the century, without electricity or hot water, tuberculosis advancing, and typed the manuscript himself against medical advice — sitting up in bed, chain-smoking, coughing blood, four thousand words a day. He died on 21 January 1950, aged forty-six, of a burst artery in a ruined lung.

The contradictions were not resolved at the end. A lifelong atheist, he asked for a Church of England burial; an anti-establishment writer, he was attended in his last illness almost wholly by old Etonians, one of whom secured his grave at Sutton Courtenay, where he had no connection beyond that friend’s family estate. Shortly before his death he gave a Foreign Office contact a list of writers and politicians he thought too close to communism to be relied on — having just written a novel about denunciation. The wiki’s source treats this as genuinely awkward rather than disqualifying, and notes that Orwell himself claimed both sides of politics too readily: he saw himself as a man of the left while being in many ways a small-c conservative, and came most alive attacking other socialists.

In the wiki

Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on 1984, Newspeak, and Orwell's Vision of Power for Its Own Sake — the fullest treatment: his life, the writing of 1984 on Jura, the debt to Zamyatin’s We, and a sustained argument between the hosts over whether the novel’s portrayal of women is a character’s failing or the author’s
Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Brave New World, Fordism, and Huxley's Ambivalent Dystopia — Orwell seen from his old teacher’s side, including the condescending letter Huxley sent him on the publication of 1984

George Orwell

In the wiki

See also