GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950)
LIFE
Eric Blair, India, 1903
Son of a minor colonial official, taken to England and educated at Eton
Can’t stand lack of privacy, punishments, pressure to conformity to values of English school
tradition
Eton development of independent-minded personality, indifference to accepted values,
profession of atheism and socialism
Indian Imperial Service, in Burma serving from 1922 to 1927
1927 left and decided not to come back : wanted to escape from British imperialism in India and
from every from of man’s dominion over man
London social experiment : second-hand clothes, living in common lodging-houses in East End
= direct experience of poverty and how institutions for poor worked
After a period in Paris, decided to publish works with the pseudonym of George Orwell
George= Englishness, plain speaking and common sense
Orwell = name of a river in Suffolk, county he was fond of
Down and Out in Paris and London 1st non-fiction narrative, experiences among the poor
Burmese Days experience in the colonial service
1936 marriage with Eileen O’Shaughnessy, shared interest in literature and socialism
Same year commissioned by a left publisher, investigation about conditions among miners, factory
workers in the industrial North The Road to Wigan Pier
December 1936 to Catalonia with his wife reports about Spanish Civil War : joined POUM
(Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) and fought in the trenches Homage to Catalonia
Back in England adoption of a son, Richard, Eileen dies in 1945
WWII London 1941 joined BBC radio, 1943 began writing Animal Farm, published 1945
Last book = Nineteen Eighty-Four, published 1949, a year before his death
ARTIST’S DEVELOPMENT
Deep understanding of English character, of its insistence on common sense BUT experiences
allowed him to judge his country from the outside, its strengths and weaknesses
receptive of new ideas and impressions, unresolved conflict between middle-class background/
emotional identification with working class
Attempt of definition of writer : 20s language and form to express tragic post-war/30s social
commitment over form and left-wing sympathies
writing interpreted reality and served a useful social function (political themes)
Writer = independent, no good writing could come following a party line
SOCIAL THEMES
Dickens choice of social themes, realistic and factual language, vision of human fraternity and
of the misery caused by poverty and deprivation
Insisted on tolerance, justice, warning against increasing artificiality of urban civilisation
Critic to totalitarianism = violation of liberty, helping his readers to recognise tyranny
