George Orwell

George Orwell: The Man Who Named Our Nightmares

In March 1949, dying of tuberculosis in a wooden chalet at a Cotswolds sanatorium, Eric Blair handed a young woman named Celia Kirwan a list of names. She had just begun working for the Foreign Office's Information Research Department; the list identified writers, actors and Labour MPs he judged unsuitable as anti-communist authors. It stayed unpublished until 2003. Three months later *Nineteen Eighty-Four* appeared to critical acclaim, and the man who had spent his life warning about the state's appetite for lists had quietly handed it one.

A Lower-Upper-Middle-Class Childhood

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, into what he later called a "lower-upper-middle class" family — a phrase that is an entire social diagnosis. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a sub-deputy opium agent in the Indian Civil Service, supervising opium production for sale to China. His mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, had grown up in Moulmein, Burma. His great-great-grandfather had owned two Jamaican plantations and married an earl's daughter; the family had been sliding downhill ever since. Ida brought Eric and his older sister Marjorie to England when he was one, settling at Henley-on-Thames in 1904. He did not properly meet his father until 1912.

Eton, and the Policeman

A scholarship took him to St Cyprian's in Eastbourne in September 1911, where he was acutely conscious of being the poor boy among rich ones — an experience he returned to in the posthumously published "Such, Such Were the Joys." He came second to his schoolfellow Cyril Connolly in the Harrow History Prize and won scholarships to Wellington and Eton. He found Wellington "beastly," left after a term, and entered Eton as a King's Scholar in May 1917, where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley and neglected almost everything else.

There was no money for university. In December 1921 he passed the Imperial Police entrance examination, seventh of twenty-six, and sailed for Burma. Over five years he was posted to Myaungmya, Twante, Syriam, Insein, Moulmein and Katha, at one point policing 200,000 people. He learned fluent Burmese, attended Karen churches, and behaved unlike any British officer his colleagues had met. He also learned what he was doing there: "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 resigned effective 12 March 1928.

Down and Out by Choice

Paris, 1928: a room on the rue du Pot de Fer, dishwashing at a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, a serious illness in the free Hôpital Cochin that became the essay "How the Poor Die," and a theft that took all his money. His first professional article, "La Censure en Angleterre," ran in *Monde* on 6 October 1928. He returned to Southwold in December 1929 and tramped English roads under the alias P. S. Burton. In 1932 he chose a pen name from a shortlist that included Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways, settling on George Orwell because "It is a good round English name": Saint George, and the Suffolk river he loved. *Down and Out in Paris and London* was published by Victor Gollancz on 9 January 1933.

Wigan, and the Argument with the Left

In 1936 Gollancz sent him north. He lodged above a tripe shop in Wigan, went down Bryn Hall pit, read public-health records, sat through Communist Party meetings and watched Oswald Mosley deliver his "usual claptrap — The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews." *The Road to Wigan Pier* appeared for the Left Book Club in 1937 with a nervous disclaiming preface from Gollancz, who feared the second half — a long, self-implicating essay on class and socialism — would offend the readers it was sold to. Special Branch began watching him. On 9 June 1936 he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Spain: the Bullet and the Betrayal

He reached Barcelona around Christmas 1936, joined the POUM militia rather than the International Brigades, and was made a corporal on the strength of his police training. At six foot two he had been warned not to stand at the trench parapet; in May 1937 a sniper shot him through the throat, missing the artery by the barest margin. His voice never fully recovered. By June the POUM had been outlawed as Trotskyist and its members arrested; the Orwells lay low and escaped by train in early July. On 13 July a Valencia tribunal charged them with "rabid Trotskyism." *Homage to Catalonia* (1938) failed commercially and became, in the 1950s, one of the century's essential political books.

The Fairy Story Nobody Would Print

Declared unfit for military service in June 1940, he joined the Home Guard and lectured on street fighting and mortars. In 1941 he took full-time work producing cultural broadcasts to India for the BBC's Eastern Service. His diary for 3 July 1941 records that "we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten." He resigned in September 1943, partly because almost no Indians were listening, and became literary editor at *Tribune*, writing over eighty reviews and launching the column "As I Please."

*Animal Farm* was ready by April 1944 and nobody would touch it. Gollancz refused it as an attack on a wartime ally. T. S. Eliot refused it for Faber. Jonathan Cape agreed and then reversed after a visit from Peter Smollett, a Ministry of Information official later identified as a Soviet agent. Secker & Warburg published it on 17 August 1945. Eileen had died that March, unexpectedly, from an allergic reaction to anaesthetic; Orwell kept Richard, the son they had adopted the year before.

Jura

He moved to Barnhill, an abandoned farmhouse on Jura, in May 1946 with his two-year-old son, and wrote. He concealed a tubercular haemorrhage that February, nearly drowned crossing the Gulf of Corryvreckan in August 1947, and was in Hairmyres Hospital by Christmas with a tuberculosis diagnosis. Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health, personally authorised the import of streptomycin; David Astor helped pay for it. The manuscript of *Nineteen Eighty-Four* was finished in December 1948. He married Sonia Brownell in a hospital room on 13 October 1949 and died of a ruptured pulmonary artery on 21 January 1950, aged forty-six.

Why George Is Called a Genius

Orwell's gift was not systematic thought. He built no philosophy, and his politics were a set of loyalties rather than a doctrine. What he had was a prose instrument of freakish clarity aimed at things other writers preferred not to examine, and an ear for the way language is used to conceal. His most durable achievement is lexical: "Big Brother," "Newspeak," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," "Room 101," "memory hole" and the adjective "Orwellian" all entered English because he supplied names for things people could feel but not articulate. Irving Howe called him "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson." In 2008 *The Times* named him the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

The counter-case is real. His economics were thin, his prejudices those of his class and era, and the IRD list sits badly with a body of work whose central subject is surveillance. He was also frankly derivative: he said the modern writer who influenced him most was Somerset Maugham, "whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." George Woodcock noticed that Orwell's description of Dickens — "the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened" — fitted Orwell exactly. That is nearer the truth than genius: not a superior intelligence, but an unusually honest one, willing to indict itself first.

Legacy

The books outlived the arguments. *Nineteen Eighty-Four* placed eighth and *Animal Farm* forty-sixth in the BBC's 2003 Big Read; in 2021, readers of the *New York Times Book Review* rated *Nineteen Eighty-Four* the third-best book of the past 125 years. Both won the Prometheus Award, in 1984 and 2011. He had asked to be buried "according to the rites of the Church of England, in the nearest convenient cemetery," and David Astor arranged a grave at All Saints', Sutton Courtenay, on 26 January 1950. The headstone reads Eric Arthur Blair. The language says Orwellian.