Orwell, George (1903–1950)

George Orwell was a political writer and an ethical socialist. He propagated the ideal of a society governed by truth, liberty, and free speech and warned [Page 1066]against the lethal exercise of total power. Orwell (he adopted the pseudonym in 1933) was born Eric Blair into what he called the English lower-upper-middle class in India in 1903, where his father was working for the English administration. The following year, he was sent with his mother to England. He studied at St. Cyprian's boarding school and then at one of the most expensive and prestigious English public schools—Eton, where he first started writing. He disregarded the option typical for an Eton graduate of a university education at Oxford or Cambridge and applied instead for a position in the Indian Imperial Police.

His service in Burma, where he had wished to be posted, did not suit his character, as he soon discovered, and made him hate imperialism. His early novel, Burmese Days (1934), breathes with this professed hatred for imperial despotism. After he resigned in 1927, he resolved to become a writer. From 1928 to 1929 he lived in Paris, doing menial jobs and barely surviving, but steadily writing, though without publishing success. On his return to England, he lived for many months as a tramp among his most unfortunate compatriots. His experiences of squalor and misery were vividly captured in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Later, when no longer pressed by poverty himself, he deliberately settled among the miners in the north of England and embarked on a study of their life. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is the fictional outcome of his discoveries. As he wrote later, he became pro-socialist more out of a feeling of revulsion and a sense of outrage against the way the poorer industrial workers were downtrodden and neglected than out of any theoretical predisposition to a society based on centralized planning.

In 1936, Orwell went to fight in the Civil War in Spain in defense of the Republican government and against the Fascist rebellion led by General Franco. Here for the first time he was attracted to and believed in socialism. But he was soon repelled by the Spanish communists, who organized manhunts against all their allies on the Republican side who were suspected of dissenting views. He survived his near-fatal bullet wound to write Homage to Catalonia (1938). The book was a remarkable literary achievement, signifying the emergence of the Orwellian style—plain, simple, crystal clear, and direct—and an example of intellectual honesty. The book was, however, disowned by leftists in Britain and elsewhere, who believed that what was necessary in the world at that moment was solidarity against the advancement of international fascism, not communism. His critique was of totalitarian communism, whereas the left felt totalitarian Fascism was more of a threat at the time. Then and later, Orwell refused to accept that two wrongs could make a right. Consequently, all his writing after 1936, as he was to assess it, denounced, directly or indirectly, totalitarianism and affirmed democratic socialism.

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