The world is full of uncertainty. As the powers that be flex their strength in the hunt for the innominate enemy within, citizens are being stripped of their privacy, their security, and their identity.
It is a reality that was not just speculated, but vehemently prophesied of, by classic British author George Orwell, who famously decried “Big Brother is watching you”.
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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari (modern day Bihar) of British India, on the 25th of June, 1903. Though the family came from auspicious lineage, they were prosperous. Orwell jokingly described their position as “lower-upper-middle class”.
When Orwell turned one, his mother took him and his older sister to England. His father visited only briefly throughout his early life, but Orwell didn’t mind, thinking him meek and conservative.
Though he was often sick as a child, biographies on Orwell depict an intelligent youngster whose first word was “beastly”, and who composed his first poem at the age of four.
Whether true or not, it was clear Orwell had talent. His first success came at age 11, when a local newspaper published his poem.
“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”
This feeling of isolation stemmed from his time at St Cyprian’s boarding school, where he was sent at the age of eight. Other children ostracised him because his family was not as rich as their own. Orwell spent the next five years at the school, and hated every moment of it. He would detail his experience at the school in an essay entitled Such, Such Were the Joys, which was published posthumously.
It wasn’t all bad though. During his studies, Orwell met Cyril Connolly, who would go on to publish many of his essays as editor of Horizon.
Nearing the end of his term as St Cyprian’s, Orwell submitted two poems into the Harrow History Prize, where he was awarded second place behind Connolly, and earned a scholarship at Wellington and Eton Colleges.
Initially, no places were available at the more prestigious Eton, so Orwell studied at Wellington (a school he called, funnily enough, “beastly”) for five months until finally transferring. He remained at Eton until the age of 18.
Because of his poor academic performance, Orwell did not receive a university scholarship, and left Eton to find himself at a dead end. It was decided that he should therefore join the Imperial Police, an empirical predecessor to the Indian Police Force.
Orwell was posted in Burma. He appreciated the life the role provided him with, and soon became content with the responsibility.
That all changed when he contracted dengue fever, and returned to England on leave. While on holiday with his family, Orwell came to a revelation: he was not going back to India. It was time to finally become the writer he always envisioned he could be.
Later, Orwell would come to express guilt regarding the empirical oppression the British impressed upon the Indian people, and soon “began to look more closely at his own country, and saw that England also had its oppressed…”
Orwell moved to London to commence his career, but found doing so difficult. Esteemed poet Ruth Pitter, a family friend, advised him to travel on “occasional sorties…to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it”. In them, he found the subject of his work.
Dressing like a ‘tramp’, and calling himself P. S. Burton, Orwell spent a night in a common lodging house. In the people he met, he found the subject for his first essay, The Spike.
Not long after, Orwell moved to France, where he unsuccessfully attempted to write novels. He found more success at the time in journal articles, discussing issues such as unemployment and the homeless.
A year after arriving in France, Orwell fell seriously ill and was taken to hospital. While there, all of his money was stolen from his lodgings in the city. He took menial jobs such as dishwashing to afford to remain in-country.
In December of 1929, Orwell returned to his family’s home in Southwold, where he would spend the next five years tutoring local children, and socialising with locals who would come to heavily influence his career, all while working on his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London.
Down and Out was inspired by Orwell’s personal experience with the poor and disenfranchised across the two cities. The first draft, at the time called A Scullion’s Diary, was rejected in late-1931 by Random House head Jonathan Cape, and Faber & Faber editorial director (and later distinguished writer) T. S. Eliot.
Desiring to expand the work in the next draft, Orwell got himself arrested so he could experience Christmas in prison. Unfortunately for him, his drunk and disorderly behaviour only resulted in a two day spell in a police cell.
The following year, Orwell began reaching at the Hawthorns High School for boys. It was through associations at the school that he met Victor Gollancz, who was willing to publish Down and Out in Paris and London for a 40 pound advance. Due to the reputation of Gollancz’s publishing house as an outlet for socialist works, and to avoid the embarrassment his family might face when word spread of his time as a tramp, Orwell finally adopted his nom de plume, George Orwell, which he described as “a good round English name”.
Released on January 9, 1933, Down and Out was a great success. It would later be published by Harper and Brothers as part of its US release.
As Orwell prepared for his next novel, Burmese Days, he developed pneumonia. While in hospital, he feared for his life. Though he would eventually recover, Orwell never returned to teaching.
Burmese Days depicted the dark truth about colonialism, and was so damning in its findings that Gollancz refused to release it in fear of being sued for libel. Regardless, Harper published the novel in the United States.
He became increasingly interested in politics, though for the time being his work remained focused on personal experiences. Experimental novel A Clergyman’s Daughter was released in 1935, inspired by his life as a teacher, followed by 1936’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which denounced the value of money in a happy life.
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness,” he would state.
He supported himself by writing reviews for the New English Weekly, where he championed the idea that the ‘face’ of a great author could be found within their work.
Orwell released The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, an evocative tale about life in the coal mines. The story concluded with an essay in which Orwell highlighted his blooming political conscience by arguing in favour of Socialism.
Upon the novel’s release, Orwell was already in Spain, fighting for the Republicans against monarchist General Francisco Franco in the Second Spanish Civil War. Initially, he saw little action, but while on the frontlines his large frame (he was 6’2″, significantly taller than any of his Spanish counterparts) made for an easy target for enemy snipers. He was shot in the throat; the bullet missed his main artery by the most narrow of margins, and left him barely able to speak for some time upon recovery.
Orwell was declared medically unfit and released from hospital, barely avoiding arrest by Franco’s troops, who were close to achieving total control of the country.
He returned home to find his views on the war were considered unfavourable, and that communist media was publishing attacks on The Road to Wigan Pier. Not long after, he returned to hospital, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He would suffer under its conditions for the rest of his life.
After writing a variety of essays and reviews, Orwell was called up in 1939 to serve the military at the outbreak of World War II, but was naturally declared unfit for duty.
Though he did not experience the war first-hand, he was taken on for ‘war work’ as part of the BBC’s Eastern Service, running counter propaganda in India against German communications that threatened to undermine the nation’s imperial links.
As the tide of the war turned, and Russia sided with the Allies, Orwell found himself disgusted by what he was witnessing.
“One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten.”
In reaction, he began working on Animal Farm in 1943, shortly after the death of his mother. He resigned from the BBC, to make the novel a priority. It was completed in April 1944, but Gollancz refused to publish it, seeing it as an attack on the Soviet regime, which had been a crucial ally during the war. He received similar responses from other companies, until Jonathan Cape agreed to release it.
The decision, however, was quickly reversed, after Cape met with Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information. It would be later revealed that Smollett was a Soviet agent.
Orwell did not give up, but things got worse before they got better. His wife Eileen, who had stayed with him for nine years, died under anaesthetic in March 1945. Eileen had only casually mentioned the procedure to Orwell, not wanting to worry him about the cost.
After several gruelling months following the unexpected death of his wife, Orwell finally managed to sign a deal with Secker & Warburg for the publication of Animal Farm in August, 1945.
Resonating strongly in the post-war climate, Orwell became a sought after figure in the literary realm, having been dubbed one of the greatest consciences of the generation.
He released a collection of 130 articles in Critical Essays, and worked as a reporter over the next four years, before releasing his best known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1949.
The novel was released to great critical and commercial success, and as the technology and philosophies Orwell warned about in his words came into existence over the following decades, it garnered more and more intention.
By the time Nineteen Eighty-Four was released, Orwell was physically weak, as the tuberculosis took hold of his lungs.
He courted Sonia Brownell, who agreed to marry him shortly before he was sent to London’s University College Hospital. They married on October 13.
Shortly after, on January 21, 1950, an artery burst in George Orwell’s lungs. He died, aged 46.
His influence on not just writing, but the entire English language over such a short life, was profound. In Politics and the English Language, he defined six key rules for writers:
- Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
It could easily be argued that his most potent influence was on how society viewed and analysed systems of power. The term Orwellian has come to describe any authoritarian or totalitarian social practice that could be linked to the dystopian future he described in his final work.
He also coined a range of terms that have now entered the popular sphere of conscience, including cold war, thought police, newspeak, thoughtcrime and, of course, Big Brother.
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” he declared. As we face a future clouded in lies, fear, and the toxic will of those who would destroy the independent spirit, may humanity never forget the warnings of George Orwell.