George Orwell: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · Eric Blair

A scholarship boy among the rich

1903 – 1922 · Motihari, India · Sussex · Eton

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, in British India, where his father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service — supervising the production of opium for export to China. His mother brought him to England the following year.

He described the family as lower-upper-middle class: the class that had the manners of the gentry and none of the money.

At eight he was sent to St Cyprian's, a preparatory school in Eastbourne, on reduced fees because he was clever enough to win scholarships that would advertise the school. His essay about it, 'Such, Such Were the Joys', describes beatings for bedwetting, systematic humiliation over his family's poverty, and being reminded constantly what he owed the headmistress. Written in the 1940s, it was too libellous to publish in Britain during his lifetime and appeared after his death. Some contemporaries disputed the picture; nobody disputes that the experience shaped him.

He won a King's Scholarship to Eton in 1917, where Aldous Huxley briefly taught him French. He did little work and finished near the bottom of his year, which ended any chance of a university scholarship.

Rather than let his family pay, he sat the India Office examination and in 1922, aged nineteen, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

Why this matters

Orwell's education as a poor scholarship boy among the wealthy gave him a lifelong sensitivity to how class operates through small humiliations — the subject he returned to constantly.

You have met Eric Blair. What would you ask him?

Ask Orwell

• “What did prep school teach you about class?”
• “What did 'lower-upper-middle class' mean?”
• “Why did you not go to university?”
• “How reliable is your account of St Cyprian's?”
• “What did your father actually do in India?”

Chapter 2 · Burma, Then Deliberate Poverty

Five years enforcing an empire, then washing dishes in Paris

1922 – 1935 · Burma · Paris · London · Kent

Orwell spent five years as a colonial policeman in Burma, and it destroyed any belief he had in the empire. He wrote afterwards that he had come to see imperialism as an evil thing, that he was conscious of an immense weight of guilt he had to expiate, and that in a job like his one sees the dirty work of empire at close quarters.

Two essays came out of it. 'A Hanging' describes an execution and the moment the condemned man steps aside to avoid a puddle — the point at which the narrator recognises he is watching a living person be destroyed. 'Shooting an Elephant' describes being pushed by a crowd's expectation into killing an animal he does not want to kill, and concludes that the imperialist destroys his own freedom in the act of dominating others.

He resigned in 1927 and did something unusual: he deliberately made himself poor. He lived among tramps in London and worked as a dishwasher in Paris hotel kitchens, partly to write about it and partly, as he said, to submerge himself and get right down among the oppressed. *Down and Out in Paris and London* (1933) came from it, and he adopted the pen name George Orwell for its publication — reportedly to spare his family embarrassment.

In 1936 his publisher commissioned him to report on unemployment in the industrial north. *The Road to Wigan Pier* describes going down a coal mine and crawling for hundreds of yards to reach the face, and calculates the calories a miner burns. Its second half attacks middle-class socialists for their remoteness from workers so sharply that the publisher added a foreword distancing himself from it.

He married Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1936.

Why this matters

Orwell's method — living the conditions before writing about them — set a standard for political reportage that later writers have repeatedly cited.

You have the making of a political writer. What would you ask him?

Ask Orwell

• “What did policing Burma show you about empire?”
• “What did you mean that the imperialist destroys his own freedom?”
• “Why choose to live as a tramp?”
• “Why attack fellow socialists in Wigan Pier?”
• “Why did you take a pen name?”

Chapter 3 · Spain

A bullet through the throat, and a lie he could not forget

1936 – 1938 · Barcelona · Aragón front · Morocco

Orwell went to Spain in December 1936 intending to write about the civil war and joined a militia within days. Through the Independent Labour Party he ended up in the POUM, a small anti-Stalinist Marxist party, and spent months on the Aragón front in cold, filth and near-total absence of equipment.

Barcelona in early 1937 was, for him, decisive. He found a city where workers ran the tramways and hotels, tipping had been abolished, and everyone addressed each other as comrade. He wrote that he recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

On 20 May 1937, at Huesca, a sniper's bullet passed through his throat, missing the artery by millimetres. He was told he would probably never speak normally again; his voice remained damaged.

What radicalised him permanently happened next. In May 1937 the Soviet-backed communists moved against the POUM and the anarchists in Barcelona. The party was declared illegal and accused of being a fascist front; its leader Andreu Nin was arrested and killed. Orwell and Eileen, both associated with it, went into hiding and escaped over the French border, at risk of arrest.

Then he read the coverage. Newspapers in Britain and France, following the Communist Party line, reported the POUM as fascist traitors — describing events he had witnessed in terms he knew to be false. He wrote that he saw history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines, and that this frightened him more than bombs.

*Homage to Catalonia* (1938) is the result. It sold around seven hundred copies in his lifetime.

“I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.”

— George Orwell, 'Looking Back on the Spanish War', 1943

Why this matters

Orwell's experience of newspapers reporting events he had witnessed as their opposite is the direct origin of Nineteen Eighty-Four's Ministry of Truth.

You have the war that made him. What would you ask him?

Ask Orwell

• “What did Barcelona look like when the workers ran it?”
• “What happened when you were shot?”
• “Why did the communists turn on the POUM?”
• “What frightened you about the newspaper reports?”
• “Why did Homage to Catalonia sell so few copies?”

Chapter 4 · Animal Farm

A book nobody would publish

1939 – 1945 · London · Hertfordshire

Orwell was rejected for military service on medical grounds — tuberculosis had been diagnosed in 1938 — and served in the Home Guard. From 1941 to 1943 he worked for the BBC Eastern Service, producing broadcasts intended to keep Indian opinion favourable to the war. He described it as a job that combined propaganda with a fair degree of pointlessness, and the experience — the censorship, the committee rooms, the canteen — went straight into *Nineteen Eighty-Four*. He resigned to become literary editor of *Tribune*, where his 'As I Please' column let him write about anything from Soviet policy to the correct way to make tea.

*Animal Farm* was finished in 1944. It is a fable in which farm animals overthrow their farmer and establish equality, and the pigs gradually become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced — a precise allegory of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal, ending with a commandment amended to say that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Britain was allied to the Soviet Union, and publishers refused it. Jonathan Cape declined after consulting the Ministry of Information. Faber declined in a letter from T. S. Eliot, who admired the writing but thought the timing wrong and, remarkably, that the pigs' viewpoint had something to be said for it. Orwell considered publishing it himself as a pamphlet.

Secker & Warburg published it in August 1945, days after the war ended. It sold enormously and made him financially secure for the first time at forty-two.

Eileen died in March 1945 during an operation, under anaesthetic, while he was abroad. They had adopted a son, Richard, the year before. Orwell was left a widower with a baby and a lung disease.

Why this matters

The refusal of publishers to print Animal Farm while the USSR was an ally is a documented case of political convenience operating as censorship in a free country.

You have the fable. What would you ask him?

Ask Orwell

• “Why write the Russian Revolution as a farmyard story?”
• “Why would nobody publish it?”
• “What did working at the BBC teach you?”
• “Were you attacking revolution or its betrayal?”
• “How did you manage after Eileen died?”

Chapter 5 · Jura

Writing Nineteen Eighty-Four while dying

1946 – 1950 and after · Jura · Gloucestershire · London

In 1946 Orwell moved to a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura in the Hebrides, several miles from a road. It was a poor choice for a man with advanced tuberculosis, and he knew it. He wrote *Nineteen Eighty-Four* there, much of it in bed, and typed the final draft himself because he could not find a typist willing to come.

The novel supplied English with a permanent vocabulary: Big Brother, thoughtcrime, doublethink, Newspeak, memory hole, unperson, room 101, and the adjective Orwellian. Its central claim is not merely that a state can watch you, but that it can control the past by continuously rewriting it, and can attack the possibility of thought by shrinking the language available. The Party's demand is not obedience but belief — that two plus two makes five if the Party says so.

Orwell said explicitly that the book was not a prediction and not an attack on socialism, which he continued to support, but a warning about what totalitarianism could become anywhere, including Britain.

It was published on 8 June 1949 to immediate acclaim. He married Sonia Brownell in a hospital room in October, and died on 21 January 1950 when an artery in his lung burst. He was forty-six. He was buried under his own name, Eric Arthur Blair, in a Berkshire churchyard.

One episode requires stating. In 1949, from his sanatorium, he gave his friend Celia Kirwan — who worked for the Foreign Office's Information Research Department, an anti-communist propaganda unit — a list of writers and journalists he judged unsuitable to write for it because of their Soviet sympathies. The list, released in 1998, contained around three dozen names, some with crude notes. Defenders point out that it was a note about who should not be commissioned for propaganda work, not a denunciation to police. Critics note that a writer whose great subject was surveillance supplied a government with a list of names. Both are true.

Why this matters

Nineteen Eighty-Four gave every subsequent discussion of surveillance, propaganda and political language its vocabulary — which is why the word Orwellian is used by people who have never read him.

You have the last book. What would you ask him?

Ask Orwell

• “Why is controlling the past so important to the Party?”
• “What is Newspeak designed to do?”
• “Why do you insist the book is not an attack on socialism?”
• “Why did you give the government a list of names?”
• “What would you make of the word 'Orwellian' today?”

What Orwell changed

Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are among the most widely read political books ever written, and the vocabulary of the latter — Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak, thoughtcrime — is now standard in discussions of surveillance and propaganda. His essay 'Politics and the English Language' remains a set text on how vague language conceals political intent.

A debate that continues

His 1949 list of suspected communist sympathisers, released in 1998, is still argued over — whether it was a limited note about propaganda commissioning or a betrayal of his own principles — as is the accuracy of his memoir of St Cyprian's.

Keep exploring — ask Orwell

• “How do you write clearly about politics without lying?”
• “What did you see in Spain that you never got over?”
• “What would you warn a reader about today?”

Related lives

• Karl Marx — Author of Das Kapital
• J. B. Priestley — Author of An Inspector Calls
• Arthur Miller — Conscience of the American Stage

Related themes

Totalitarianism and propaganda · The Spanish Civil War · Language and political power