George Orwell

1

20th Century Lives:

George Orwell.

Julia Routledge.

www.explaininghistory.com

Publisher Information

George Orwell published in 2014 by Explaining History (20th Century Lives).

www.explaininghistory.com

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding cover other than that which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent reader.

Copyright 2014 Julia Routledge.

The right of Julia Routledge to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Introduction

‘I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,

And woke to find it true;

I wasn’t born for an age like this;

Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?’

First published in the Adelphi in December 1936

At the end of 1935, George Orwell found himself mired in indecision and uncertainty. Aged thirty-two, he had already spent five years serving in Burma under the Indian Imperial Police, before going on to live with tramps in Paris and London for two more. At this time in his life, however, the events that would hone his political instincts to razor-sharp precision had not yet transpired. Instead, his innate abhorrence of authority had been amplified, his deep awareness of the working classes had been born, and his disillusionment with the reality of colonialism had begun. It would take the very foundations of Europe to be rocked, first by the Spanish Civil War and then by Hitler’s real emergence on to the world stage, for him to discover his true calling:

‘Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like ours, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.’ ‘Why I Write’, Essay

Orwell’s starting point was ‘always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.’ Whether manifested in frank admissions concerning imperialism, or in an allegory of totalitarianism, his primary concern was to expose lies and guard the truth. In the turbulent era against which his life was set, it could be said that he wrote not out of choice, but out of compulsion to preserve his moral integrity. His very best work is searing both in its intensity and in its clarity: political purpose was the kindling to his linguistic ability.

In this book, I shall seek to provide an insight into the mind of this intellectual thinker and his opinions on some of the most significant issues of his time. Of course, for full justice to be done to Orwell’s talent, his work must be relished in its original form. This work is therefore designed to introduce one of the most enduring writers of the 20th century to those who are approaching him for the first time, and to reaffirm his skill and significance in the minds of those who are already au fait with his genius.

Eric Arthur Blair: The Man Behind The Pen Name

In his press card portrait, a young man regards the camera knowingly. He looks older than his years, yet a twinkle can be discerned in his slightly hooded eyes. A mop of dark hair elongates his head, and a crisp, respectable moustache sits upon his upper lip. It is the face of a man who has seen suffering, and knows perhaps that he is destined to witness yet more. It is also, however, the face of a man who will challenge these events with unwavering decency.

Eric Arthur Blair is thirty in this photograph. Although he died in 1950, Blair appears to have eluded the grasp of modern media: no copy of his voice survives, and he was never captured on film. Still, his life was well documented, despite his request that no biographies of him be written. It was not until 1980, at the behest of his widow, Sonia Brownell, that an official account of his life was published by the left-wing political academic, Bernard Crick. Previously, an attempt had been made by Malcolm Muggeridge to pen a biography; unfortunately, this fell through and was abandoned. It was not until Brownell’s death that a flurry of biographies began to emerge, for this was a life so fascinating that it simply demanded to be explored.

Eric Blair was born on 25th June 1903 in fairly unremarkable circumstances in the lake town of Motihari in India. In a squat brick bungalow, which has subsequently lasted over a century and survived a shattering earthquake in 1934, Ida Mabel Blair gave birth to a son, whom she named Eric Arthur. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, had been employed in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service since he was eighteen, and belonged to a line of upper class country men. Ida had been raised in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father worked, and they had married when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-nine. In the words of Bernard Crick, ‘Life had not dealt Richard Blair, as he might have put it, a particularly good set of cards.’ George Orwell: A Life

Richard’s family was one of gentility: his grandfather had married into aristocracy and held great wealth through his plantations and slaves in Jamaica. His union with Lady Mary Fane, the daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, was a fruitful one, producing ten children, but the repercussions of this were to affect his youngest son, Eric’s grandfather, in particular. His father’s fortune had bled away by the time he came of age and this son of nobility therefore found himself, as the last child, in the undesirable position of having to generate his own income. Having spent a year in Cambridge, he then began to travel as in the Empire, and entered the clergy. His peripatetic work took him to places as diverse as Tasmania and Calcutta. Finally, after around fifteen years abroad, he returned to England in 1854 and took up the post of the vicar of Milbourne St. Andrew in Dorset. His son, Richard, then joined the Indian Civil Service at the age of eighteen.

This was young Eric’s background: later in his life, he termed his family as ‘lower-middle-upper class.’ In ‘The Road To Wigan Pier,’ he elaborated upon this, in relation to his public school education:

‘I only went to an expensive public school because I happened to win a scholarship. This is the common experience of boys of the lower-middle-upper class, the sons of clergymen, Anglo-Indian officials etc., and the effects it had on me were probably the usual ones. On the one hand it made me cling tighter than ever to my gentility; on the other hand, it filled me with resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who took care to let me know it. I despised anyone who was not describable as a ‘gentleman,’ but I also hated the hoggishly rich, especially those who had grown rich too recently. The correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money. This is part of the credo of the lower-upper-middle class. It has a romantic, Jacobite-in-exile feeling about it which is very comforting.’ The Road To Wigan Pier

When her son was one, Ida took the difficult decision to move to England with him and his sister, Mabel, who was five years his elder. In the 21st century, we live in a global community where distance is no obstacle; in contrast, when the children set sail in 1904, they would not see their father until his retirement in 1912, apart from a brief three-month visit he made in 1907. Such arrangements were, however, more common than might be thought, for there were many benefits to raising young children in England, rather than abroad in India.

And so Ida was left to forge a new life for herself independently of her husband, and the trio settled in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Little is known about these early days, for no records survive save his mother’s diary from 1905, a copy of which can be found in the Orwell Archives. Most of the entries comprise only a handful of words observing any salient point from the day. Nevertheless, from these notes we can discern both a picture of the Blairs’ quotidian activity, and also an impression of Ida’s character. Her son’s poor health was also frequently documented: on Monday 6th February, for example, he was diagnosed with bronchitis. These chronic chest problems were to plague Orwell throughout his life, before eventually causing his untimely demise from tuberculosis in 1950.

Unsurprisingly, Eric himself did not recall much about this early period in his life. We know that he enjoyed outdoor activities such as shooting and fishing, and that he entertained a deep fondness for animals, stating that

‘Most of the good memories of my childhood, and up to the age about twenty, are in some way connected with animals.’ Such, Such Were The Joys

He was sent to the same small convent school as his sister, and, from there, was selected to sit a scholarship to St. Cyprian’s School in Sussex. With assistance from the headmaster, Vaughn Wilkes, he managed to secure an award that subsidised half the fees, and so, in September 1911, Eric arrived there as a young boarder. His experiences over the next five years would provide the material for a quasi-autobiographical essay written in 1947, entitled ‘Such, Such Were The Joys.’

He considered this polemic against his former school to be too inflammatory for publication - the experience had clearly remained with him all those years – and it was not until 1952 that it was featured in ‘Partisan Review.’ The claims made in the essay still proved contentious, with many of his contemporaries and biographers disputing