Orwell, George
George Orwell
BORN: 1903 Motihari, India
DIED: 1950 London, England
NATIONALITY: British
GENRE: Novels, Essays
MAJOR WORKS:
Burmese Days (1934)
Coming Up for Air (1939)
Animal Farm (1945)
“Politics and the English Language” (1946)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Overview
George Orwell gained an enduring international reputation with his two last works of fiction, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Although he was never primarily a writer of speculative fiction, these works have been extremely influential in the fields of fantasy and science fiction. In these works, as in the other writing that filled the rest of his career, he gauged the contemporary European scene of the troubled 1930s and 1940s with critical insight drawn from personal experience and a deep moral commitment.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, India in 1903. At the time, India was under direct British control (it remained so until 1947). Many British government officials worked and lived there, including Orwell's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, a minor customs official in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. When Orwell was four years old, his family returned to England and settled at Henley, a village near London. His father soon returned to India.
When he was eight years old, he was sent to a private preparatory school in Sussex. He later claimed that his experiences there determined his views on the English class system (Orwell was a socialist who rejected the British idea of hereditary social classes). From there he went by scholarship to two private secondary schools: Wellington for one term and Eton for four-and-a-half years.
Orwell then joined the Indian Imperial Police, receiving his training in Burma (modern Myanmar, which was also at the time under British control), where he served from 1922 to 1927. While home on leave in England, he made the important decision not to return to Burma. His experiences there had given him a distaste for imperialism, and his feeling about his experiences can be seen in Burmese Days (1934).
The Long Struggle to Make Writing a Career Orwell attempted to establish himself as a writer—with very little success at first. He lived virtually as a tramp in London and Paris in the late 1920s, finally settling in 1929 in his parents' home in Suffolk. Still attempting to establish himself as a writer, he earned his living by teaching and by penning occasional articles, while he completed several versions of his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris, a recounting of his rough-and- tumble life in the two European capitals. He was earning his living as a teacher when the book was scheduled for publication, and he preferred to publish it under a pseudonym. From a list of four possible names submitted to his publisher, he chose “George Orwell,” taking the name “Orwell” from a Suffolk river.
First Novels Spring from Early Experience Orwell's Down and Out was issued in 1933. During the next three years he supported himself by teaching, reviewing, and clerking in a bookshop and began spending longer periods away from his parents' Suffolk home. In 1934 he published Burmese Days, followed shortly thereafter by A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
In the spring of 1936 he moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. His reputation up to this time as a writer and journalist was based mainly on his accounts of poverty and hard times, and his next book was a commission in this direction: the Left Book Club authorized him to write an inquiry into the life of the poor and unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was divided into two parts: the first part was a typical reporting essay, and the second part was an essay on class and socialism. It marked his birth as a political writer, an identity that lasted for the rest of his life.
The Spanish Civil War In July of 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, with the forces of the Spanish Republic on one side and the ultranationalist forces of General Francisco Franco on the other. Franco's forces prevailed by 1939, and he set himself as the country's dictator. Many foreigners, including many artists and intellectuals, spoke out in support of the Republicans, and some volunteered for military service in the Republican Army—Orwell among them. He arrived in Barcelona in 1936 and joined the militia of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), serving with them in action in January 1937. Transferring to the British Independent Labour party contingent serving with the POUM militia, he was promoted first to corporal and then to lieutenant before being wounded in the middle of May. During his convalescence, the POUM was declared illegal, and he fled into France in June. His experiences in Spain caused him to become disillusioned with the leftist philosophy associated with the Soviet Union, but inspired him to become a revolutionary socialist.
After his return to England, Orwell began writing Homage to Catalonia (1938), a book about his Spanish experience, which completed his disengagement from the orthodox left. He then wished to return to India to write a book, but he became ill with tuberculosis and was forced to convalesce.
World War II When World War II began, he again wanted to help out. The army, however, rejected him as physically unfit, though later he served for a period in the home guard and as a fire watcher. Instead, moving to London in 1940, he began writing “London Letters” for Partisan Review and joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a producer in the Indian section, remaining in this position until 1943. BBC's main purpose was to help boost the morale of Indian soldiers fighting in British service. Orwell's involvement in what was basically a propaganda operation was both frustrating and a learning experience for him and may be counted among the sources of inspiration for his two subsequent masterpieces, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both of which deal satirically with government use of propaganda.
Orwell's Satirical Masterpieces The year 1943 was an important one in Orwell's life for several reasons. His mother died in March; he left the BBC to become literary editor of the Tribune; and he began book reviewing on a more regular basis. But the most significant event occurred late that year, when he commenced writing his novel Animal Farm, which relates what happens to animals who free themselves and then are again enslaved through violence and fraud. Orwell had completed this fantasy satire by February 1944, but several publishers rejected it on political grounds. It was not published, however, until August 1945, when the war was over, purportedly because of paper rationing but mostly because of the unmistakable fact that it parodied the history of the Soviet Union, then an important war ally.
Toward the end of World War II, Orwell traveled to France, Germany, and Austria as a reporter. His wife died in March of 1945. The next year he settled with his youngest sister as his housekeeper on Jura, off the coast of Scotland. By then, his health was steadily deteriorating and his tuberculosis flared up frequently, but his physical weakness did not prevent him from writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. By the end of 1948 he was seriously ill. He entered a London hospital in September 1949 and the next month married Sonia Brownell. He died only months after that, in London, on January 21, 1950.
Works in Literary Context
Influences Critics have noted that Orwell took from an eclectic group of influences, including Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, Gustav Flaubert, Aldus Huxley, James Joyce, Jack London, W. Somerset Maugham, and Emile Zola, among others.
Dystopias: A Bleak Vision of the Future It has also often been pointed out that in creating Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell drew on earlier dystopian novels. A dystopia is a vision of society, often a future society, that is the opposite of paradise, or utopia. It is a vision of society gone horribly wrong. Nineteen Eighty-Four bears some similarity to H. G. Wells's dystopic When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), in which the protagonist is transported into a world of technological tyranny two hundred years into the future. Wells had been Orwell's favorite author when he was young. He shared not only Wells's fascination with utopian thinking but also his critical attitude toward the British class system.
However, Wells's later belief in science and rationality as the ultimate problem solvers had, in Orwell's opinion, been outdated since World War I. After all, both Hitler and Stalin had been able to harness science in the service of their dictatorships. Some scholars have also pointed to Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin (writing as Murray Constantine) as a likely model. A more significant influence on Orwell's novel was probably We (1924), by Russian novelist Evgeny Zamyatin. In Zamyatin's dystopia, individuality has been all but obliterated; personal names have been replaced by numbers; people's lives are regulated down to the minutest details. Those who do not conform are tortured into submission by corrective brain treatment with X-rays, or publicly executed by a chemical process that might be described as vaporization, the word used in Nineteen Eighty-Four about the sudden disappearance of unwanted persons. Orwell reviewed Zamyatin's novel in 1946 and found that it was a better novel than Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) insofar as it provided a more credible motive for the power elite to stay on top than Huxley had done. In Orwell's view no totalitarian system could exist without a ruling class motivated by power hunger, the wish to exercise power over others and keep it at any cost.
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES
Orwell's famous contemporaries include:
Rachel Carson (1907–1964): Marine biologist, environmentalist, naturalist, and science writer whose work, Silent Spring (1962), was instrumental in the advent of the ecology movement and global environmentalism.
Zora Neale Hurston (1903–1960): African-American writer who paved the way during the Harlem Renaissance for future African-American women writers.
James Joyce (1882–1941): Modernist Irish expatriate writer who is typically considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Leon Trotsky (1879–1940): Bolshevik revolutionary who as People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs and of War and founding commander of the Red Party was exiled for his failed opposition to Stalin. He was later assassinated in Mexico.
The Left In the early part of the twentieth century, many intellectuals and artists were sympathetic toward the Soviet Union because they had hopes that the great suffering experience by the majority of Russians under tsarist domination would be alleviated by a pure communist form of government. Quite simply, a government that valued the well-being of all its citizens seemed preferable to a government that seemed concerned only with the desires of wealthy landowners. Those who sided with the Marxists were called “leftist,” and they stood in opposition to “right-wing” politicians who favored traditional social structures and governmental authority.
To Orwell the factional fighting during the Spanish Civil War between leftist political parties that were supposed to be united in their war against fascism was a shock, and Homage to Catalonia marks a turning point in his political outlook. He saw himself as a socialist and continued to do so for the rest of his life, but he was never a member of a political party. For him, socialism was first of all a matter of “justice and common decency.” Even before Spain, Orwell had expressed impatience with the Marxist theorizing of left-wing intellectuals, and in Spain the Communists, Orwell realized, were employing methods for acquiring power similar to those employed by the Fascists. The common man was the sufferer. His feelings about the corruption of both right-wing and left-wing politics are clear in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
Works in Critical Context
Orwell's work generally received praise in his lifetime and after. Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are still widely assigned for classroom study. Orwell's socialism made him the target for some politically motivated critical attacks, but as Cold-War tensions have faded, Orwell's personal politics have seemed less controversial and his work has enjoyed a period of renewed critical attention.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) The horrors Orwell envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four were criticized for being excessive or unbelievable. Undaunted, Orwell emphasized that the novel was meant as a satire, displaying certain totalitarian ideas in their extreme consequence. Conversely, in a review of Orwell's posthumously published Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950) E. M. Forster wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four that “There is not a monster in that hateful apocalypse which does not exist in embryo today.” It is difficult to point to any major inconsistency that may detract from the overall impact of Orwell's vision, and its detailed realism makes it all the more distressing. The book made Time's 2005 list of the one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.
Responses to Literature
- While Reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, consider the different personalities in the book. Who is meek and easily intimidated? Who is likely to resist suppression/oppression? Where do you think you would have been on the spectrum of personalities? How would you have responded—as a rebel against the absurdity? As a non-confrontational one who wants no trouble?
- Orwell's novel Animal Farm was controversial at the time of its publication because its events mirrored events taking place in the Soviet Union, a wartime ally of Great Britain. Use the library and the Web to research the power struggle between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky so that you can compare the novel's fantasy plot to the reality of the historical events.
- Orwell fought in and wrote about the bloody Spanish Civil War that began in 1936. One of the worst atrocities of that war was the Nazi saturation bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica, which became the subject matter of a mural by Pablo Picasso. Research the painting in the library and on the Web. How does Picasso's depiction of the Spanish Civil War compare to that of Orwell. It might be useful to note that Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party.
COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE
Orwell's most significant works are what are considered dystopian novels as well as commentaries on the absurdity of totalitarian cultures. Here are a few works by other writers who explore such issues:
The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Margaret Atwood. In this dystopian novel, Canadian author Atwood speculates on a horrifying future of gender division, reproductive control, and takeover of society by the small class of elite.
Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by Ray Bradbury. In this dystopian novel, the theme of totalitarian suppression of the masses is reflected in the storyline, one which includes burning of books (which are illegal) as the basis for the plot.
A Clockwork Orange (1962), by Anthony Burgess. In this futuristic work (which has its own dictionary), the powers that be have select ways for treating the truants and thugs in the small gang called the Droogs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Larkin, Emma. Finding George Orwell in Burma. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Writing Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton, 2000.
Rodden, John, Thomas Cushman, eds. George Orwell: Into the Twenty First Century. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2005.
Taylor, D. J. Orwell: The Life. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.
Periodicals
Kearney, Anthony.”Orwell's ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’.” The Explicator 54.4 (1996): 238.
Meyers, Jeffrey. “George Orwell and the Art of Writing.” The Kenyon Review 27.4 (2005): 92.
Rodden, John. “Appreciating Animal Farm in the New Millenium.”Modern Age 27.4 (2003): 67.
Rossi, John P. “The Enduring Relevance of George Orwell.” Contemporary Review 283.1652 (2003): 172
Web sites
George Orwell.org. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Retrieved January 31, 2008, from http://www.george-orwell.org
NetCharles. Charles' George Orwell Links. Retrieved January 31, 2008, from http://www.netcharles.com/orwell
Online Literature Network. George Orwell. Retrieved January 31, 2008 from http://www.netcharles.com/orwell
Orwell, George
George Orwell
Born: June 25, 1903
Motihari, India
Died: January 21, 1950
London, England
English writer, novelist, and essayist
The English novelist and essayist, George Orwell, is best known for his satirical (using wit or sarcasm to point out and devalue sin or silliness) novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.
Early years
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, India, to Richard and Ida Mabel Blair. He had an older sister and a younger sister. His father was a minor customs official in the Indian Civil Service. When Orwell was four years old, his family returned to England, where they settled at Henley, a village near London, England. His father soon returned to India.
As a child, Orwell was shy and lacked self-confidence. He suffered from bronchitis all his life. He spent long hours reading and was especially interested in science fiction, ghost stories, William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) plays, and fiction by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). When Orwell was eight years old, he was sent to a private preparatory school in Sussex, England. He later claimed that his experiences there determined his views on the English class system. From there he went by scholarship to two private secondary schools: Wellington for one term and Eton for four and a half years.
Orwell then joined the Indian Imperial Police, receiving his training in Burma, where he served from 1922 to 1927. While home on leave in England, Orwell made the important decision not to return to Burma, but to pursue writing. His resignation from the Indian Imperial Police became effective on January 1, 1928. Later evidence suggests that he had come to understand the imperialism for which he was serving, and had rejected it. Imperialism is a political and economic practice whereby a nation increases its power by gaining control or ownership of other territories.
Establishment as a writer
Shortly after making this decision Orwell stayed in Notting Hill, a poor section in London's East End, and in a working-class district of Paris, France. He wrote two novels, both lost, during his stay in Paris, and he published a few articles in French and English. After working as a kitchen porter and dishwasher, and suffering from pneumonia (a lung disease), he returned to his parents' house in Suffolk, England, toward the end of 1929.
Back in England, Orwell earned his living by teaching and by writing occasional articles, while he completed several versions of his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris. This novel recorded his experiences in the East End and in Paris. Because he was earning his living as a teacher when his novel was scheduled for publication, he preferred to publish it under a pseudonym (a made-up name used by an author to disguise his or her true identity). From a list of four possible names submitted to his publisher, he chose "George Orwell."
First novels
Orwell's Down and Out was issued in 1933. During the next three years he supported himself by teaching, reviewing, and clerking in a bookshop. In 1934 he published Burmese Days. The plot of this novel concerns personal intrigue (plotting) among an isolated group of Europeans in Burma (a country now known as Myanmar). Two more novels followed: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
In the spring of 1936 Orwell moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. The Left Book Club authorized Orwell to write an inquiry into the lives of the poor and unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) included an essay on class and socialism (a social system in which the production of goods and distribution of wealth is controlled centrally). It marked Orwell's birth as a political writer, an identity that lasted for the rest of his life.
Political commitments and essays
In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out. Orwell arrived in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of autumn and joined the militia (a group of citizens who serve in the armed forces of a country). Orwell was wounded in the middle of May 1937. During his recovery, the militia was declared illegal, and he fled into France in June. His experiences in Spain had made him into a revolutionary socialist, one who advocated change to a socialist form of society through rebellion of the people.
After Orwell returned to England, he began writing Homage to Catalonia (1938), which describes his disappointment with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. He then wished to return to India to write a book, but he became ill with tuberculosis (a serious disease of the lungs). He was treated in a hospital until late in the summer of 1938. He spent the following winter in Morocco, where he wrote Coming Up for Air(1939). After he returned to England, Orwell authored several of his best-known essays. These include the essays on Dickens and on boys' weeklies and "Inside the Whale."
After World War II (1939–1945; a war fought between the Axis: Italy, Germany, and Japan, and the Allies: England, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States) began, Orwell wanted to enlist. The army, however, rejected him as physically unfit. Later he served for a period in the home guard and as a fire watcher. The Orwells moved to London in May 1940. In early 1941 George Orwell began writing "London Letters" for Partisan Review, and in August he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a producer in the Indian section. He remained in this position until 1943.
First masterpiece
In 1943 Orwell's mother died; he left the BBC to become literary editor of the Tribune; and he began reviewing books on a more regular basis. By February 1944 Orwell had completed Animal Farm, but several publishers rejected it on political grounds. It finally appeared in August 1945. This fable intends to enforce a useful truth, the failure of communism, through animals that speak and act like humans.
Toward the end of World War II, Orwell traveled to France, Germany, and Austria as a reporter. His wife died in March 1945. The next year he settled on Jura off the coast of Scotland, with his youngest sister as his housekeeper.
Crowning achievement
Although Orwell's health was now steadily falling apart, he started work on Nineteen Eighty-four. Published in 1949, this book is an elaborate satire (a literary work that uncovers the corrupt morals of humans) on modern politics, foretelling a world in which humans are made less than human in a world where citizens are at the mercy of the state's absolute control. Orwell entered a London hospital in September 1949 and the next month married Sonia Brownell. He died in London on January 21, 1950.
Orwell's work is strongly autobiographical (based on the events of his own life) and combines elements of his own middle-class experience with his desire to cause social reform. He was critical of intellectuals whose political viewpoints struck him as superficial. His strong stand against communism (a system in which the government controls all businesses) resulted from his experience of its methods gained as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War.
For More Information
Boerst, William J. Generous Anger: The Story of George Orwell. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 2001.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton, 2000.
Shelden, Michael. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
George Orwell
George Orwell
The British novelist and essayist George Orwell (1903-1950) is best known for his satirical novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.
George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair at Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a minor customs official in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. When Orwell was 4 years old, his family returned to England, where they settled at Henley, a village near London. His father soon returned to India. When Orwell was 8 years old, he was sent to a private preparatory school in Sussex. He later claimed that his experiences there determined his views on the English class system. From there he went by scholarship to two private secondary schools: Wellington for one term and Eton for 4 1/2 years.
Orwell then joined the Indian Imperial Police, receiving his training in Burma, where he served from 1922 to 1927. While home on leave in England, Orwell made the important decision not to return to Burma. His resignation from the Indian Imperial Police became effective on Jan. 1, 1928. He had wanted to become a writer since his adolescence, and he had come to believe that the Imperial Police was in this respect an unsuitable profession. Later evidence also suggests that he had come to understand the imperialism which he was serving and had rejected it.
Establishment as a Writer
In the first 6 months after his decision, Orwell went on what he thought of as an expedition to the East End of London to become acquainted with the poor people of England. As a base, he rented a room in Notting Hill. In the spring he rented a room in a working-class district of Paris. It seems clear that his main objective was to establish himself as a writer, and the choice of Paris was characteristic of the period. Orwell wrote two novels, both lost, during his stay in Paris, and he published a few articles in French and English. After stints as a kitchen porter and dishwasher and a bout with pneumonia, he returned to England toward the end of 1929.
Orwell used his parents' home in Suffolk as a base, still attempting to establish himself as a writer. He earned his living by teaching and by writing occasional articles, while he completed several versions of his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris. This novel recorded his experiences in the East End and in Paris, and as he was earning his living as a teacher when it was scheduled for publication, he preferred to publish it under a pseudonym. From a list of four possible names submitted to his publisher, he chose "George Orwell." The Orwell is a Suffolk river.
First Novels
Orwell's Down and Out was issued in 1933. During the next 3 years he supported himself by teaching, reviewing, and clerking in a bookshop and began spending longer periods away from his parents' Suffolk home. In 1934 he published Burmese Days. The plot of this novel concerns personal intrigue among an isolated group of Europeans in an Eastern station. Two more novels followed: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
In the spring of 1936 Orwell moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. His reputation up to this time, as writer and journalist, was based mainly on his accounts of poverty and hard times. His next book was a commission in this direction. The Left Book Club authorized him to write an inquiry into the life of the poor and unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was divided into two parts. The first was typical reporting, but the second part was an essay on class and socialism. It marked Orwell's birth as a political writer, an identity that lasted for the rest of his life.
Political Commitments and Essays
In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out. By the end of that autumn, Orwell was readying himself to go to Spain to gather material for articles and perhaps to take part in the war. After his arrival in Barcelona, he joined the militia of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) and served with them in action in January 1937. Transferring to the British Independent Labour party contingent serving with the POUM militia, Orwell was promoted first to corporal and then to lieutenant before being wounded in the middle of May. During his convalescence, the POUM was declared illegal, and he fled into France in June. His experiences in Spain had made him into a revolutionary socialist.
After his return to England, Orwell began writing Homage to Catalonia (1938), which completed his disengagement from the orthodox left. He then wished to return to India to write a book, but he became ill with tuberculosis. He entered a sanatorium where he remained until late in the summer of 1938. Orwell spent the following winter in Morocco, where he wrote Coming Up for Air (1939). After he returned to England, Orwell authored several of his best-known essays. These include the essays on Dickens and on boys' weeklies and "Inside the Whale."
After World War II began, Orwell believed that "now we are in this bloody war we have got to win it and I would like to lend a hand." The army, however, rejected him as physically unfit, but later he served for a period in the home guard and as a fire watcher. The Orwells moved to London in May 1940. In early 1941 he commenced writing "London Letters" for Partisan Review, and in August he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a producer in the Indian section. He remained in this position until 1943.
First Masterpiece
The year 1943 was an important one in Orwell's life for several reasons. His mother died in March; he left the BBC to become literary editor of the Tribune; and he began book reviewing on a more regular basis. But the most important event occurred late that year, when he commenced the writing of Animal Farm. Orwell had completed this satire by February 1944, but several publishers rejected it on political grounds. It finally appeared in August 1945. This fantasy relates what happens to animals who free themselves and then are again enslaved through violence and fraud.
Toward the end of World War II, Orwell traveled to France, Germany, and Austria as a reporter. His wife died in March 1945. The next year he settled on Jura off the coast of Scotland, with his youngest sister as his housekeeper.
Crowning Achievement
By now, Orwell's health was steadily deteriorating. Renewed tuberculosis early in 1947 did not prevent the composition of the first draft of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-four. The second draft was written in 1948 during several attacks of the disease. By the end of 1948 Orwell was seriously ill. Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) is an elaborate satire on modern politics, prophesying a world perpetually laid waste by warring dictators.
Orwell entered a London hospital in September 1949 and the next month married Sonia Brownell. He died in London on Jan. 21, 1950.
Orwell's singleness of purpose in pursuit of his material and the uncompromising honesty that defined him both as a man and as a writer made him critical of intellectuals whose political viewpoints struck him as dilettante. Thus, though a writer of the left, he wrote the most savage criticism of his generation against left-wing authors, and his strong stand against communism resulted from his experience of its methods gained as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War.
Further Reading
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (1968), is an invaluable addition to Orwell studies. Probably the most significant work on Orwell is George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (1966). Other useful studies of Orwell as man and artist include Tom Hopkinson, George Orwell (1953); John Atkins, George Orwell (1954); Laurence Brander, George Orwell (1954); Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (1956); Richard J. Vorhees, The Paradox of George Orwell (1961); Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1962); Edward M. Thomas, Orwell (1965); Ruth Ann Lief, Home to Oceania: The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell (1969), particularly for students already familiar with Orwell's writing; and Raymond Williams, George Orwell (1971). □
ORWELL, George
Attitude to English
Like others of his time, background, and social position, Orwell was a polyglot: LATIN and GREEK; FRENCH; Hindustani and Burmese; SPANISH. He did not, however, accept contemporary standards for English; he often derided the variety of BrE common among his fellow Etonians, along with the variety employed on the BBC, seeing them as dangerous establishment tools. In its place, he advocated an artificial amalgam of lower-class varieties, including the dropped aitch, to be taught in schools. Orwell was not averse to the official promulgation of an invented variety of English. The Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not, therefore, evil simply because it is artificial, but because its goals are untruth and mind control, and because its means to this end are the suppression of words for forbidden concepts (like honour, justice) and the ready conversion of parts of speech (like the verb speak as a noun, instead of speech). Orwell was in most ways a language conservative while he was a social individualist and a political adherent of ‘democratic socialism’, as he called it. His books sometimes champion those who speak non-standard English, but his essays severely oppose linguistic change and by implication condemn the diversity that change brings.Rules for writing English
In ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell wrote that ‘one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases: (1) Never use a METAPHOR, SIMILE or other FIGURE OF SPEECH which you are used to seeing in print. (2) Never use a LONG WORD where a short one will do. (3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (4) Never use the PASSIVE when you can use the ACTIVE. (5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a JARGON word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.’ The double implication (that half a dozen rules would ‘cover most cases’, and that all writers worthy of the name would agree about what was ‘outright barbarous’) reveals Orwell's conservative stand on the complexities of language variety. See SATIRE, USAGE GUIDANCE AND CRITICISM.Orwell, George
The experience of fighting with the POUM militia against fascists in Spain, which almost led to his death, cemented Orwell's socialist ideas. Homage to Catalonia (1938), which aroused great hostility, was a graphic description of the Spanish revolution. Animal Farm (1945), the result of these experiences, launched an acerbic satirical attack on Stalinism. His final book, written in solitude on the Isle of Jura, was 1984 (1949), a grim warning of the dangers of totalitarianism. Over the course of his life Orwell developed a distinctive and quintessentially English revolutionary libertarian socialism of his own, which continued to inspire long after his life was cut short by tuberculosis in 1950.
Lewis Mates
Orwell, George
http://www.msxnet.org/orwell