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Eric Arthur Blair ('' and '' Nineteen Eighty-Four ''. EARLY LIFE Eric Blair was born on June 25 , 1903 in Motihari , Bihar , in India , during the period when India was part of the British Empire under the British Raj . There, Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the Opium department of the Civil Service . His mother, Ida Mabel Blair, brought him to the United Kingdom at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907 , when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie, and a younger sister named Avril. He would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class." EDUCATION At the age of six, Blair was sent to a small , in Eastbourne , Sussex . Blair attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay " Such, Such Were The Joys ", describing the stifling limits placed on his development by the Warden. "They officials were my benefactors", writes Orwell, "sacrificing financial gain in order that the cleverest might bring academic accolades to the school". "Our brains were a gold-mine in which he Warden had sunk money, and the dividends must be squeezed out of us". However, in his time at St Cyprian's, the young Blair successfully earned scholarships to both Wellington College and Eton College . After a year at Wellington , Blair moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921 . Later in life he wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary; some assert that he was a poor student, while others claim the contrary. He was clearly disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. During his time at the school, Blair made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals such as Cyril Connolly , the future editor of the ''Horizon'' magazine, in which many of Orwell's most famous essays were originally published. BURMA AND THE EARLY NOVELS After Blair finished his studies at Eton, his family could not pay for university and he had no prospect of winning a scholarship, so in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma . He came to hate Imperialism , and when he returned to England on leave in 1927 he decided to resign and become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel '' Burmese Days '' ( 1934 ) and in such essays as '' A Hanging '' ( 1931 ), and '' Shooting An Elephant '' ( 1936 ). In 1928 , he moved to Paris, where his aunt lived, hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. But his lack of success forced him into menial jobs – which he later described in his first book, '' Down And Out In Paris And London '' (1933), although there is no indication that he had the book in mind at the time. Ill and broke, he moved back to England in 1929 , using his parents' house in Southwold , Suffolk , as a base. Writing what became ''Burmese Days'', he made frequent forays into tramping as part of what had by now become a book project on the life of the underclass. Meanwhile, he became a regular contributor to John Middleton Murry 's ''New Adelphi'' magazine. Blair completed ''Down and Out'' in 1932 , and it was published early the next year while he was working briefly as a schoolteacher at a private school in Hayes , Middlesex . Blair adopted the pen-name George Orwell just before ''Down and Out'' was published. It is unknown exactly why he chose this name. He knew and liked the River Orwell in Suffolk and apparently found the plainness of the first name George attractive. He rejected two other possible pen-names: Kenneth Miles and H Lewis Allways. Orwell drew on his teaching experiences for the novel '' A Clergyman's Daughter '' ( 1935 ), which he wrote at his parents' place in 1934 after ill-health forced him to give up teaching. From late 1934 to early 1936 he worked part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead , an experience later partially recounted in the novel '' Keep The Aspidistra Flying '' ( 1936 ). ''THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER'' In early 1936, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write an account of life in the depressed areas of northern England, which appeared in 1937 as '' The Road To Wigan Pier ''. Soon after completing his research for the book, Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy . THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND ''HOMAGE TO CATALONIA'' In December 1936 , Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco 's Nationalist uprising. Although he travelled alone to Spain, he became part of the Independent Labour Party Contingent , a group of some 25 Britons who joined the militia of the Workers' Party Of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary socialist party with which the ILP was allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the dominant force on the left in Catalonia), believed that Franco could be defeated only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism — a position fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties to defeat the Nationalists. In the months after July 1936 there was a profound Social Revolution in Catalonia , Aragon and other areas where the CNT was particularly strong. Orwell sympathetically describes the Egalitarian spirit of revolutionary Barcelona when he arrived in '' Homage To Catalonia ''. By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the communist-run International Brigades by chance — but his experiences, in particular his narrow escape from the communist suppression of the POUM in June 1937, made him sympathetic towards the POUM and turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. During his military service, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. He wrote in ''Homage to Catalonia'' that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND ''ANIMAL FARM'' Back in the United Kingdom, Orwell supported himself by writing freelance reviews, mainly for the ''New English Weekly'' (until he broke with it over its pacifism in 1940 ) and then mostly for ''Time and Tide'' and the '' New Statesman ''. He joined the Home Guard soon after the war began (and was later awarded the Defence Medal ). In 1941 Orwell took a job at the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for the United Kingdom's war efforts. He was well aware that he was engaged in Propaganda , and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot". The wartime Ministry Of Information , based at Senate House (University Of London) , was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four . Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of '' Tribune ,'' the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche . Orwell was on the staff until early 1945, contributing a regular column titled "As I Please." In 1944 , Orwell finished his anti- Stalinist allegory '' Animal Farm '', which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from ''Animal Farm'' were to provide Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. While ''Animal Farm'' was at the printer, Orwell left ''Tribune'' to become (briefly) a war correspondent for ''Observer'' . He was a close friend of the ''Observer'''s editor/owner, David Astor , and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. (Astor, who died in 2001, is buried in the grave next to Orwell.) THE ROAD TO ''NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR'' George Orwell returned from Europe in spring 1945, shortly after his wife died during an operation (they had recently adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, who was born in May 1944 ). For the next three years Orwell mixed journalistic work — mainly for ''Tribune'', the ''Observer'' and the ''Manchester Evening News'', though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines — with writing his best-known work, '' Nineteen Eighty-Four '', which was published in 1949. The title is believed to derive from the year in which it was finished—1948—with the last two digits transposed. Originally, Orwell titled the book ''The Last Man in Europe'', but his publisher, Frederic Warburg, suggested the change. (Crick, Bernard. "Introduction," to George Orwell, ''Nineteen Eighty Four'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)). He wrote much of the novel while living in a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura , off the coast of Scotland , to which he moved in 1946 despite increasingly bad health. In that he consistently promoted in his later writings — or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all, at one time or another, made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married , 1903 , died January 21st , 1950 . Orwell's adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government, and had no interest in writing. POLITICAL VIEWS Orwell's political views changed over time, but there can be no doubt that he was a man of the left throughout his life as a writer. His time in Burma made him a staunch opponent of imperialism, and his experience of poverty while researching ''Down and Out in Paris and London'' and ''The Road to Wigan Pier'' turned him into a socialist. "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against Totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism , as I understand it," he wrote in 1946. It was Spain, however, that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed at first hand the suppression of the revolutionary left by the Soviet-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party. At the time, like most other left-wingers in the United Kingdom, he was still opposed to rearmament against Hitlerite Germany — but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the Second World War, he changed his mind. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". He supported the war effort but detected (wrongly as it turned out) a mood that would lead to a revolutionary socialist movement among the British people. "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary," he wrote in ''Tribune'', the Labour left's weekly, in December 1940. By 1943, his thinking had moved on. He joined the staff of ''Tribune'' as literary editor, and from then until his death was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) democratic socialist. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1945 general election and was broadly supportive of its actions in office, though he was sharply critical of its timidity on certain key questions and despised the pro-Soviet stance of many Labour left-wingers. Although he was never either a Trotskyist or an Anarchist , he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. Many of his closest friends in the mid-1940s were part of the small anarchist scene in London. |
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