In this blog post, we look back at how George Orwell’s life and ideas were reflected in his major works.
The short life of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), known by the pen name George Orwell, is just as worth examining as his works. Although he was born in Bengal, India, because his father served as a low-ranking official in British colonial India, he soon returned to England and grew up as a bright boy from a poor family. A brooding loner who struggled to fit in with his peers, he attended prestigious schools such as Wellington and Eton; among his teachers at Eton was Aldous Huxley.
Instead of attending university, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps and went to what was then British Burma to serve as a deputy commander in the Indian Imperial Police; however, for someone who had wanted to be a writer since childhood, the duties of a colonial police officer were not a good fit. As time passed and he came to understand the lives of the oppressed Burmese people, he began to view his position as a source of shame.
In 1927, while on leave in England, he finally decided not to return to Burma. From then on, he deliberately sought out the company of the poor and the outcasts in an effort to alleviate his guilt as a colonial police officer. He lived in rags in a cheap boarding house in London’s East End alongside laborers and beggars; he worked as a dishwasher in the slums of Paris; and he harvested hops in Kent with a group of seasonal vagrants. Although he may not have realized it at the time, this period of wandering—much like his experience as a colonial policeman—provided the spiritual backdrop for all his later works.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the late 1930s, he joined the Republican forces as a militiaman, was promoted to second lieutenant, and was seriously wounded in the Battle of Teruel. The international militia, composed of volunteers from around the world, numbered approximately 35,000. In 1937, in Barcelona, he witnessed Communists cracking down on their political opponents and, fearing for his life, left Spain.
Later, after being exempted from military service during World War II, he joined the BBC, and in 1943, he worked as the literary editor for the left-wing newspaper ‘The Tribune’. Amid the historical turmoil of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, he came to realize all too painfully just how great a threat fascism and war posed to humanity.
Around this time, he completed the political allegory ‘Animal Farm’. Set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s betrayal of that revolution, the novel—published in 1945—not only brought him fame but also provided him with the first taste of financial stability he had ever known.
With the proceeds from ‘Animal Farm’, he purchased a home on a remote island off the coast of London, creating an environment conducive to writing. There, while battling tuberculosis, he began writing his final and most celebrated masterpiece, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. This novel became the last work he published during his lifetime and has since established itself as a classic of dystopian fiction. While there are various theories regarding why he included the year “1984” in the title, the prevailing view is that it is a reversal of the year 1948.
Orwell lived his entire life as a socialist; although he briefly identified as an anarchist shortly after returning from Burma, he openly declared himself a socialist beginning in the 1930s. However, he could not become a communist—a movement that was spreading like a fad among intellectuals at the time—because he believed it was incompatible with intellectual freedom. While he is commonly known as an anti-communist who opposed Stalinism, and his major works are often read in that context, strictly speaking, he was a democratic socialist who warned against totalitarianism and criticized corrupt forms of socialism.
He was active during the Great Depression, a time when the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini was rampant, and socialism was fractured into various factions, creating an urgent need to define what “true socialism” really was. Orwell judged that misguided socialism was more dangerous than the totalitarianism of fascism or oppressive capitalism, and that judgment was embodied in ‘1984’, which he himself called his “final warning.”
In an interview with the BBC conducted from his sickbed shortly before his death, he warned in a soft but clear voice of the dangers into which the world was slipping, saying, “You must not let that happen; it is your responsibility.”
