Eric Arthur Blair, who would later take the pen name George Orwell, was born on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair was a middle-level civil servant in India and his mother, Ida Mabel Blair was the daughter of a teak merchant in Burma (modern day Myanmar).
In 1911, at eight years of age, Eric returned with his parents to England where he was enrolled in the St. Cyprian’s boarding school in Sussex. In these early years, Eric was distinguished by his high intelligence, but his inability to connect with his classmates left him feeling isolated and depressed–a condition he would later describe in some depth in his posthumous publication Such, Such were the Joys.
Eric’s intellectual prowess won him scholarships to Wellington College and the highly prestigious Eton College. He attended Wellington for a short time, and then, in 1917, he moved on to Eton where Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was one of his teachers. After 4 years at Eton, Eric decided that instead of graduating he would return to his his mother’s roots in Myannmar. There, he took a job as assistant superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. During this five-year period from 1922 to 1927, he became increasingly aware of the feelings of resentment that the citizens of India and Myanmar felt under the British subjugation. This experience would have a profound influence on his later writing about the dangers of authoritarian governments.
On January 1, 1928, Eric quit has job with the police in Myanmar, in a personal rebellion against the caste system in Myanmar that had prevented him from interacting with people in the working classes and the “untouchables,” Seeking a closer connection with those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, he returned to England where he lived the life of a vagrant among the inhabitants of the slums of London. He subsequently travelled to France where he took menial jobs, including work as a dishwasher in Parisian hotels. Out of these experiences, emerged his first publication in 1933, under the pseudonym George Orwell and titled Down and Out in Paris and London.
The popularity of this first publication set George Orwell on a new occupation as a novelist. In the years that followed, he published: Burmese Days (1934), based on his experiences in Myanmar, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a documentary account of his observations of working-class life in the industrial north of England, Homage to Catalonia (1938), a personal account of his experiences fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Animal Farm (1945) a satirical allegory of Soviet totalitarianism, particularly targeting Stalinism. and ultimately Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel exploring themes of surveillance, totalitarianism, and individual freedom.
During his early experiences with the evils of imperialism, Orwell moved toward socialism as a form of government that might be more egalitarian. However, in The Road to Wigan Pier, he issued a harsh criticism of some of the socialist movements. Shortly after its publication in 1937, Orwell was in Barcelona fighting against the dictatorship of Franco and the Soviet army. It was this experience that taught him the dangers of Communism and inspired his classic Animal Farm, with its ironic mantra, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” This publication brought him international recognition and a significant income.
It has been suggested that the title of Orwell’s futuristic final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four was chosen as a permutation of the digits in the year in which it was written, i.e., 1948. In this dystopian novel, Orwell warns of the dangers of totalitarian government, termed “Big Brother” that controls the media and eradicates dissent. He delivers a prescient portrayal of the threat of an all-pervasive government in a technology-rich environment empowered by the tools for mind control and information distortion.
On January 21, 1950, George Orwell died in London, England surrendering to complications resulting from his battle with tuberculosis. His dystopian novels, in particular, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four provide deep insights into social injustice and are often included in school and college curricula as required reading.
