George Orwell - A Warning to Mankind Documentary

The man known to history as George Orwell was born as Eric Arthur Blair on the 25th of June 1903 in Motihari in Bengal, India, which was then part of the vast British Empire. His father Richard Walmsley Blair was born in 1857 and went to India at the age of eighteen to work in the civil service as an opium agent, overseeing the production of a drug that was mainly exported to China and proved extremely lucrative for the British Empire. Eric’s mother Ida Mabel Limouzin was 21 years old when she married her husband. Born in Surrey to

a French father and English mother, she spent her childhood in Moulmein in Burma, where the Limouzin family was well-established as merchants and traders. Ida was working as a governess at the time she married her husband and accompanied him as he moved around the country carrying out his administrative duties. At the age of 39, Richard Walmesley Blair married Ida who was half his age and with whom he would have two children. Their elder daughter Marjorie was born in 1898, and Eric was born in 1903 soon after Richard was transferred to a new post at Motihari near

the Nepalese border. Although the Blair family could claim aristocratic connections dating back to the eighteenth century, by the time of Eric’s birth they were still part of the upper-middle class, but the family’s wealth had largely gone. While Eric, as a child did not enjoy a prosperous upbringing, he nevertheless grew up with an awareness of privilege in the British social system. In 1904, Eric accompanied his mother and sister to England while his father remained in India. He was a sickly infant who frequently suffered from bouts of ill health related to his lungs, and this illness would

plague him for the rest of his life. By late 1905, the family was established in a house in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Although he was prone to spending time on his own, the adult George Orwell would later reminisce fondly about his childhood and claimed he was his mother’s favourite child. Relations between the young Eric and his father Richard were less cordial, owing largely to the fact that the two did not see much of each other until Richard’s retirement and return from India in 1912 at the age of 55. In 1907 Richard returned to England for three

months, enough time for his wife to give birth to their third child, a daughter named Avril, in 1908. Looking back, the England Orwell grew up in was a peaceful and idyllic place where young children were allowed to play freely in the streets. A sense of joy and optimism was reflected in the person of King Edward VII, the charismatic and pleasure-seeking monarch whose personality stood in contrast to that of his mother Queen Victoria. The British Empire was the global superpower and imperial officials such as Richard Blair helped to funnel the wealth of its colonies around the

world to London by controlling the maritime trade. This time of relative peace was not without tragedy, and Orwell recalled the horror he felt as he listened to the accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage to New York on the 15th of April 1912. But a much greater horror would befall Britain and the world two years later with the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, which shattered the sense of tranquillity that the 11-year-old Eric Blair had grown up with. As a child, Eric was a keen reader

of fiction and began to develop his literary talent early on. His mother had high hopes for her son’s education, and in the summer of 1911, Eric began his studies at St Cyprian’s School near Eastbourne in Sussex. The school was intended to prepare its pupils for a public-school education, and its basic curriculum included Latin, Greek, English, History, and Mathematics. During his five years at St Cyprian’s, Eric proved to be a gifted student and was consistently near the top of his class in all subjects, while also demonstrating a talent for cricket. Not long after Eric started school,

his father Richard retired and returned to England permanently, and the family moved to the village of Shiplake a couple of miles outside Henley. While in Shiplake, Eric became close friends with the three Buddicom children: Jacintha, Prosper, and Guinever. Eric and Jacintha shared a love for literature, and already at the age of eleven the young boy had aspirations to become a famous author, writing plays inspired by Shakespeare and reading them out aloud to his playmate. When war broke out in August 1914, Eric witnessed crowds of young men gathering at the station to get hold of the

evening papers as they arrived by train. Not long after the outbreak of war, the 11-year-old boy wrote a patriotic poem encouraging young Englishmen to enlist in the army during their country’s hour of need. The poem was printed in the local paper in early October and also read aloud to the school assembly at St Cyprian’s, where it was well received. Later in life, Orwell came to despise the time he spent at the school. In a 15,000-word essay which was not published until 1968, he wrote about his experiences being beaten by the headmaster, Mr Wilkes, the poor

living conditions and bad food, and the tendency of the school’s establishment to show preference to the children of wealthier families who could pay their fees in full. Based on the recollections of his schoolmates, many of these criticisms were exaggerated or untrue, and despite what he may have thought about St Cyprian’s in hindsight, the young Orwell continued to see academic success, winning the school English prize in 1915 and the Classics prize in 1916. In 1916 Eric won a Classics scholarship to Wellington College, and later that year he took the examination for Eton and came 13th. Since

there were only twelve scholarships available, he would have to wait for a vacancy in order to take up his place. After spending a term at Wellington at the beginning of 1917, Orwell headed to Eton when a vacancy opened up for him. Founded by King Henry VI in 1440, Eton College was – and still remains –the most prestigious English public school and the breeding ground for the country’s political and social elite. In his brief recollections of more than four years spent at Eton, Orwell gave the impression that he did not belong there, emphasising the fact that

he owed his place to a scholarship and was therefore socially inferior to most of the student body. In fact, as a King’s Scholar who was exempt from all fees, Eric Blair was part of an intellectual elite at the school who lived on the premises of the college rather than in the town. However, while he worked hard at St Cyprian’s, at Eton he allowed himself to relax and his academic performance suffered as a result. Despite being a Classics scholar, he came bottom in his Latin class and was soon transferred to the less demanding Classical General studies.

At any rate, his poor academic performance meant that the prospect of going to university at Oxford or Cambridge was increasingly distant. By the time Orwell began his studies at Eton in May 1917, the early enthusiasm for the Great War had waned as a stalemate developed along the Western front and both sides were firmly entrenched. Aside from the fact that older teachers had been brought out of retirement to replace the younger men who joined the army, the schoolchildren at Eton no longer took much notice of the war, which merely carried on in the background, and even

the Russian Revolution of that year seems to have passed by without much interest. Nevertheless, the war had a profound impact on the Blair family, and in 1917 the 60-year-old Richard Blair enlisted as a second lieutenant and went to France, while Ida went to London to work in the Ministry of Pensions. The Blairs had moved back to Henley in 1915, but the house was let out to tenants, and Eric and his younger sister Avril spent their holidays with the Buddicoms. Eric continued to confide in Jacintha about his literary ambitions and inspirations, and at this time he

was particularly influenced by the work of G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, and D.H. Lawrence. Even after the war, following Richard Blair’s return from France in 1919, Eric continued to spend most of his time with the Buddicoms, and his affections for Jacintha, expressed through poems he wrote her, bordered on the romantic. By 1920, Eric had one more year at Eton and his parents began to discuss his future. Eric hoped to go to university, an aspiration that was shared by his mother, but Richard Blair was insistent that his son should follow in his footsteps into the Imperial civil

service. In the end, the father prevailed, although in any case the prospects of Eric obtaining a scholarship at Oxford were minimal given his poor academic performance at Eton. After a final term at Eton at the end of 1921, he packed his bags and left for the seaside town of Southwold in Suffolk, where his parents had moved for their retirement. In June 1922, a couple of days after his nineteenth birthday, Orwell took and passed the entrance exam for the Indian Imperial Police, a respectable if not glamorous career. He requested a posting to Burma where his mother

had spent much of her childhood and where his maternal grandmother still lived. After spending the summer with the Buddicoms, he sailed from Liverpool on the 27th of October and arrived at the Burmese capital of Yangon a month later. On the 28th of November, he boarded the train to the police training college in Mandalay. By the time of Orwell’s arrival in Burma, the country had only recently been annexed by the British Empire, when in 1885 British and Indian troops occupied the royal palace in Mandalay and forced King Thibaw to abdicate his throne. The British conquest of

Burma was primarily motivated by commercial reasons such as gaining access to cheap rice, oil, and timber. In contrast to most other colonies, the British eliminated the existing Burmese political institutions and formally annexed it to India, leaving the country under effective military rule. By the time Orwell arrived to join the police force, the political disturbances which had plagued Burma since the British conquest were declining, but the crime rate was increasing. In 1924 there were 800 murders over the year and the prison population stood at around 16,000. Moreover, a new arrival from Europe would have found the

country a strange and inhospitable place, with a climate that combined scorching heat with a prolonged monsoon season and frequent wild animal attacks which killed over a hundred people a year. During his training, Orwell learned Burmese quickly and was apparently able to speak to Burmese priests within a few years, but he remained unsociable and lacked the ability for heavy drinking that the Burmese police force was known for. After completing his training, in January 1924 Orwell was assigned to Myuangma in the delta of the Irrawaddy River, around a hundred miles to the west of Yangon. As an

assistant of the District Superintendent, he was in charge of a police station of between twenty and thirty people. Later that year he was moved to Twantay, only thirty miles from Yangon but still a two-day journey by steamboat, where as a Sub-Division Officer he was to oversee the police station and also gather intelligence in the local villages. By the end of the year, he was promoted to Assistant District Superintendent and posted to Syriam, where his main duties were to protect the operations of the Burmah Oil Company refinery. Orwell was happier in Syriam, situated across the Bago

River from Yangon, one of the few places in the country where he could enjoy Western-style luxuries. In April 1926, he was transferred to Moulmein, another attractive posting since it enabled him to make the acquaintance of his grandmother and his aunt. At the end of the year, he was moved to Kahta on the banks of the Irrawaddy to the west of Mandalay, where he caught dengue fever and in July 1927 he was granted a six month leave of absence to return to England and recuperate. Although he had been granted his leave due to his illness, after

leaving Burma in late July 1927 Orwell would never return. Nevertheless, the four and a half years Orwell spent in Burma left a great impression on him and on his literary career. He recognised the brutality of British imperial rule but was also shocked by some of the practices of the native Burmese, which Europeans of the time would have considered backward and primitive. During a family holiday to Cornwall in September 1927, he announced that he was resigning from the Burma Police and would instead pursue a career as a writer. The unexpected declaration provoked a bitter reaction from

his parents and caused Orwell to be estranged from his father for several years. During that autumn he travelled to Cambridge to visit an old tutor at Eton and asked for advice about embarking on a literary career. Following the suggestion to move where writers and editors could be found, Orwell decided to move to London and found lodgings on Portobello Road in west London. In late 1927, he decided to put on ragged clothes and make a visit to Limehouse in the working-class East End of London, the first of many tramping expeditions. While Orwell was genuinely sympathetic to

the British working class and was struck by their kindness to him, he was also seeking material for his writing. In early 1928, motivated by favourable exchange rates and a desire to place himself in one of the most literary cities in Europe, Orwell moved to Paris. During this period, he wrote a number of short pieces for literary magazines, though none were published. He saw more success in his journalism, writing articles about censorship in England and the condition of the British working class using the material he gathered in London, as well as a piece inspired by his

time in Burma. During his first year in Paris, Orwell lived in the bohemian Latin Quarter among fellow writers and artists, and he was often seen at social events with his aunt Nellie Limouzin who lived nearby. After being hospitalised with influenza in March 1929, Orwell spent several months living in destitution alongside a Russian friend, with whom he worked as a dishwasher in a large hotel and later a restaurant. Since Aunt Nellie could have provided him with financial support if he ran out of money, it is likely that Orwell’s decision was primarily motivated by literary research. Living

and working alongside the Parisian downtrodden, Orwell experienced and witnessed the dirt and squalor which he would describe in his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. After almost two years in Paris, Orwell returned to Southwold in December 1929. While still in Paris, he had written a piece called ‘The Spike,’ referencing his experiences as a tramp in London. He submitted it to the Adelphi magazine which accepted it for publication but after several revisions it was still not published until 1931. The Adelphi was a progressive magazine and its editors at the time,

Sir Richard Rees and Max Plowman, were both involved in working class organisations. After their first meeting in 1930, Orwell became close friends with both men until the end of his life. Despite his strained relationship with his father and the town’s reputation as a retreat for the British upper classes, Orwell continued to be based in Southwold for much of the next five years, working out of his bedroom in the family house and occasionally scandalising the family with his unconventional way of life. In addition to writing about his experiences in France, Orwell worked as a book reviewer

for the Adelphi and by 1931 he was a regular contributor to its pages. He supplemented his income by tutoring the children of family friends but also went tramping in London regularly, and on one occasion was working as a cleaner for a family in Limehouse whose children were bemused by his posh accent. In September 1931 Orwell spent a couple of weeks in Kent working in the hop fields, an activity which served as a summer holiday for the workers in the East End of London. Orwell kept a detailed diary of his expedition during which he and the

men he had befriended on the way from London were forced to steal supplies and food in order to survive. The financial situation was so desperate that Orwell had to write to Southwold asking his family for ten shillings, but once he reached the hop-fields he noted the remarkable generosity of his fellow pickers in providing him with food. Although he tried to maintain a cockney accent to fit in with his company, on occasion Orwell would revert to his normal manner of speaking. This only served to elicit greater sympathy from his companions, who concluded that he had ‘come

down in the world.’ After fifteen days of working for over ten hours a day in the fields, Orwell was paid on the 19th of September, making sixteen shillings from the experience after deducting the train fares. Back in London, he wrote up his hop-picking diary while working in the Billingsgate fish market. The living conditions at his cheap lodgings in Tooley Street near London Bridge proved so revolting that Orwell asked his parents for money and moved to the far more respectable Harrow Road in West London. In early 1932, Orwell managed to secure the services of Leonard Moore

as his literary agent. At the time he was seeking publication for the manuscript of ‘A Scullion’s Diary,’ an account based on his experiences in Paris which had been sent to the poet T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, who found it interesting but too short. While he was continuing to struggle with his literary career, he found a job as a master at Hawthorns High School for Boys in Hayes on the western outskirts of London, which he described as ‘one of the most godforsaken places I have struck.’ In June, he received news from Moore that the publisher

Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish ‘A Scullion’s Diary’ for an advance of £40. After making the suggested edits, it was published under the title Down and Out in Paris and London in January 1933. Its author had insisted on using a pseudonym rather than his real name of Eric Blair, and eventually chose the name George Orwell on the basis that ‘it’s a good round English name.’ The name George was derived from Saint George, the patron saint of England, while Orwell comes from the River Orwell which runs through Ipswich in Suffolk. It had taken five years since

his return from Burma, but the 29-year-old Eric Arthur Blair was now a published novelist under the name of George Orwell. Although Down and Out received favourable reviews and was listed among the ‘best sellers of the week’ by the Sunday Express, Orwell’s life and career remained unstable. Although his contemporaries recognised his intelligence and wit, his writing was unoriginal and seemed old-fashioned for the time. By the time he was almost thirty, he was an unhappy man and had attempted to seek comfort in religion by attending the Anglican church in Hayes, although he would later be critical of

religious practice. He was not earning enough money from writing to make a living, forcing him to do a teaching job he did not much enjoy, and in 1933 he transferred to Fray’s College in Uxbridge to teach French. In the meantime, he had suffered setbacks in his romantic life in Southwold. In 1930 he proposed to Brenda Salkeld, the daughter of a clergyman who taught at a nearby school, who preferred to remain friends. In 1931 he was in an intimate relationship with Eleanor Jacques, but she was already romantically involved with Orwell’s friend Dennis Collings and would marry

him in 1934. In January 1933 Orwell sent Moore a hundred pages of Burmese Days, a novel inspired by his time in Burma, and by November he managed to deliver the completed manuscript. After falling dangerously ill with pneumonia in late December, in the New Year Orwell returned to Southwold to recuperate, where he received the news that Gollancz had turned down Burmese Days, afraid that he would be sued for libel. As a result, the novel was first published in the United States in October 1934 by his American publisher Harper Brothers. The novel is set in the fictional

town of Kyauktada, based on Katha, the Burmese town where Orwell had his final posting before his return to England. Its main character John Flory is an unmarried teak merchant who is bored by the company of the local European community and prefers the company of an Indian hospital doctor. Flory falls in love with Elizabeth Lackersteen, the niece of the manager of a timber firm, and dismisses his Burmese mistress. However, the arrival of an army officer named Lieutenant Verrall prompts Elizabeth to transfer her affections to the man with greater prospects. In the meantime, Flory defends the reputation

of his Indian friend Dr Veraswami against attacks on him by U Po Kyin, a corrupt Burmese businessman. Kyin’s efforts create tensions between the Burmese and European populations, and Flory becomes a hero when he helps to bring an anti-British riot under control. After Verrall leaves Elizabeth without saying goodbye, she returns to Flory, only to abandon him for a second time when U Po Kyin bribes his former mistress to make a public scene about their affair, causing a despairing Flory to shoot himself. While awaiting the publication of Burmese Days, Orwell wrote the novel A Clergyman’s Daughter over

a six-month period, presenting Moore with the manuscript in early October 1934. The novel’s heroine Dorothy Hare is the daughter of a Suffolk rector who ends up in London after suffering a mental breakdown. The novel follows her journey as she joins a group of tramps hop-picking in Kent, she ends up in a prostitutes’ boarding house in London, then spends a night begging on the streets in Trafalgar Square, and finds work at a private school in west London before eventually being rescued by a friend and returning home. The plot and the character of Dorothy seems to serve

as a means for Orwell to reflect on his personal experiences in rural Suffolk and among the London poor, offering social commentary in the process. Perhaps for this reason, Orwell came to dislike the book and did not allow it to be reprinted in his lifetime. In late October, thanks to Aunt Nellie’s influence, Orwell managed to secure a part-time job as an assistant at Booklovers’ Corner, a bookshop in Hampstead in northwest London run by Francis Westrope and his wife Myfanwy. With accommodation included at the Westropes’ flat, Orwell was living in London permanently for the first time with

access to the literary world, and by working five-and-a-half hours a day, he could dedicate his free time to writing. For most of the fifteen months he spent at the bookshop, Orwell worked on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a novel about a poet who struggles to gain recognition from a literary elite that is mostly closed to him. Once again, there are autobiographical elements to the story, although Orwell himself was by now no longer a total outsider to the London literary scene. During this time Orwell was also exposed to the left-wing politics of the Westropes, longstanding members of

the Independent Labour Party, a radical and revolutionary sect which remained within the larger mainstream Labour Party. Although Orwell had not yet developed a defined set of political beliefs, his anti-Imperialism and sense of fairness had already been drawing him towards socialism. Orwell spent much of late 1934 and 1935 in lengthy discussions with Gollancz about his manuscripts. A Clergyman’s Daughter was published in March 1935 to mixed reviews which praised the treatment of specific scenes but were more critical of the style and plot. Gollancz was now confident enough to publish Burmese Days after Orwell agreed to carry out

a thorough check of the lists of British officials in Burma to ensure that nobody shared their name with any of his characters. In late June, the novel was published in the UK and received mostly positive reviews, including one in the New Statesman from the writer Cyril Connolly, an old friend from St Cyprian’s and Eton. This led to a reunion between the two men after thirteen years, and they remained close friends until Orwell’s death. Meanwhile, in spring 1935 Orwell met Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a psychology student at University College London. Almost immediately after their meeting Orwell was intent

on marrying Eileen and the two went on frequent dates over the course of the year, though Eileen did not immediately agree to his proposal and planned to finish her course before making a decision. While continuing work on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell became a regular book reviewer for the New English Weekly, a literary journal launched in 1932. After Orwell submitted the manuscript for Aspidistra on the 15th of January 1936, Gollancz suggested that he should go to northern England to provide a piece of commentary about the social conditions, contributing to the literature of deprivation written during

the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the 31st of January Orwell left London with no precise idea where he was going, and by the 3rd of February he reached Manchester. Using a list of the Adelphi’s regional representatives sent by Richard Rees, Orwell found places to stay in Wigan, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, and Barnsley over the next two months. He kept a detailed diary about his meetings with working class people in the docks and mines and recorded his shock at the extreme deprivation he saw. During his stay in Barnsley, he attended a meeting addressed by Sir Oswald

Mosley, a former Labour minister who had become the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Developed by Italian leader Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, fascism was a political ideology which channelled popular frustration about economic hardship into hatred for minority groups. In 1933 Germany came under fascist rule as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power, and the effects of economic depression made Britain susceptible to such an ideology. Orwell was dismayed by both the violence displayed by Mosley’s blackshirt supporters and his ability to persuade his audience of his ideas. After returning to London at the end of

March, from the 2nd of April, Orwell moved to a tiny cottage in the small village of Wallington in Hertfordshire, which he would use as a weekend retreat for over a decade. When Orwell received news that Keep the Aspidistra Flying had been published, he was already transforming the diary of his northern journey into a novel that would become The Road to Wigan Pier. It is unclear whether Eileen was living with Orwell when he moved to Wallington, but on the 9th of June 1936 the two were married at the local village church. Since George Orwell was only

a literary pseudonym and Eric Blair was still known by that name by his friends and acquaintances, Eileen took the surname Blair. Eileen had abandoned her degree and may have expected to be involved in her husband’s work but instead found herself largely excluded from it. By the end of the year Orwell finished writing The Road to Wigan Pier and sent the manuscript to Gollancz on the 15th of December. The first half of the book documents his investigations of living conditions in the north of England, while the second half features an essay about his political beliefs and

attitudes to socialism. After some difficulty, it was published in March 1937. In late 1936 Orwell was keeping a close eye on events in Spain, where in July the Republican government was facing a military revolt led by General Francisco Franco in Morocco. The conflict soon became a full-scale civil war, and the Republican government decided to arm the trade union militias for its defence. By the end of 1936 Franco’s Nationalists began to receive support from German and Italian fascists, while the Soviet Union mobilised its network of European Communists to form international brigades to support the Republicans. In

late 1936 Orwell decided to go to Spain and arrived in Barcelona at the end of December, where he hoped to write about the situation in Spain to spread awareness among the English working class and was also keen to fight. Using his connections to the Independent Labour Party, he joined a militia unit organised by the United Workers Marxist Party, a revolutionary organisation but one opposed to the Soviet Union and its leader Joseph Stalin. In early January 1937, the unit was sent to the Aragon Front near Zaragoza, though they lacked the supplies to do much fighting and

were reduced to patrol duty. Although observers recognised that he was capable of bravery in the firing line, when he was off duty Orwell spent most of his time sitting by himself reading or writing. In March, Orwell received a visit from Eileen, who had decided to go to Spain herself in February to support the cause in a back-office role. By this point Orwell’s unit had been transferred to join the Republican army besieging the city of Huesca. In one of the most dramatic episodes of his military career, he was part of a company which captured an enemy

redoubt but was counterattacked from an enemy position. Orwell threw a bomb at the attackers to suppress the enemy fire, winning time for him and his comrades to retreat. In late April, he was back in Barcelona seeking a transfer to the Madrid Front, which meant joining the Communist International Brigade. Before he was able to leave, Orwell was involved in the infighting between the anti-Franco forces as the Civil Guard attempted to take control of the city from the workers militias on behalf of the Republican government that was increasingly under Soviet influence. For three days, Orwell was barricaded

in a rooftop observatory before government troops arrived on the 6th of May and disbanded the militias. In these circumstances, Orwell decided to return to the Aragon Front, where on the 20th of May he was shot through the throat by an enemy sniper. After being moved around several hospitals, he was declared unfit and received his discharge papers. When he returned to Barcelona on the 21st of June, Orwell and Eileen were caught up in the government’s suppression of the United Workers Marxist Party and everyone associated with it, and only narrowly escaped Spain after receiving their passports from

the British consulate. The six months Orwell spent in Spain had a great impact on the rest of his life. Not only did it transform his attitude towards politics, but also, Spain features heavily in his book reviews and the articles he wrote, as well as this, Orwell’s experiences in Barcelona contributed to his anti-Communist and anti-Stalinist views. After his return to England, an article he submitted offering an eyewitness account of the events in Barcelona was rejected by the New Statesman on the grounds that articles critical of the Republican government were effectively pro-Franco propaganda. Orwell spent the second

half of 1937 in Wallington working on an extended account of his Spanish adventures which would become Homage to Catalonia. As the autumn wore on, Orwell kept a close eye on news of Spain, resigned to the fact that Franco’s slow but steady advance into Republican territory would be unstoppable. By the end of the year the book was finished and sent to his new publisher, Secker & Warburg, as Orwell feared that Gollancz would reject the title due to its anti-Stalinist tendencies. When Homage to Catalonia was published in April 1938, despite some positive reviews it proved a commercial

failure, selling fewer than 700 copies by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Orwell had been seriously ill since early March with lung problems and spent more than five months at Preston Hall sanatorium in Kent, during which time, he joined the Independent Labour Party, declaring that the Communists were no more than a front for Soviet policy, while the Labour Party had become part of the mainstream elite. In September, Orwell went to Morocco accompanied by Eileen, but while the trip was supposed to restore his health, he resented the six months he spent in the country. Keen to

return to England, he spent his time writing Coming up for Air, a novel which sees the protagonist George Bowling motivated by nostalgia to visit his hometown in Oxfordshire, only to find it completely unrecognisable, prompting him to lament the march of progress and modernity, driven by commercialism and capitalism. Orwell delivered the manuscript to Moore upon his return to England on the 30th of March 1939, and the book proved far more successful than Homage to Catalonia after its publication by Gollancz in June, selling out its first edition of 2,000 copies. At the end of June, Orwell travelled

to Southwold to be at the bedside of his dying father, after which he returned to Wallington, keeping a diary chronicling the international events which would result in the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Shortly before the outbreak of war, Eileen found work in the government’s Censorship Department in London, where Orwell had expected to join her but instead spent the next nine months in Wallington. Although he had previously been opposed to the war, when it actually happened, Orwell was motivated by a sense of patriotic duty and sought to play a part in the

war effort despite his health issues. Orwell was far from the only writer in the country who wondered if their work was of any value during a time of war, but as he was unable to find a more useful occupation, he continued to work on his collection of essays Inside the Whale, which was published by Gollancz in March 1940. Orwell also found a new outlet for his work in the form of Horizon, a monthly literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly which was launched on New Year’s Day 1940. By May, Orwell and Eileen moved into a new

flat in London near Regent’s Park, from where they received news about the evacuation of Dunkirk and the surrender of France on the 17th of June. The events in France were also the cause of personal tragedy for the Orwells, who received news that Eileen’s beloved brother Laurence had been killed while serving as a medic for the British Expeditionary Force. The collapse of France led to fears of a German invasion of England and prompted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to announce the creation of the Local Defence Volunteers, soon renamed the Home Guard, to serve as a last line

of defence. In mid-June, Orwell enthusiastically joined a company of around ten volunteers in St John’s Wood and was soon promoted to sergeant. The group’s activities consisted of meeting twice a week carrying out guard duty at the local telephone exchange and other strategic points. In addition to these duties, Orwell joined a project convened by Fred Warburg – the publisher of Homage to Catalonia – to bring writers together to write about issues relating to the war. To begin the series, Orwell agreed to write a book about the prospect of a democratic socialist Britain. Written during the London

Blitz while bombs were falling around him, The Lion and the Unicorn begins with an examination of what it means to be English. Orwell then argues that the failure at Dunkirk was the failure of capitalism, and that Britain could only win the war with a socialist government, a sign of his belief that only the people and workers could effectively defend democracy. At the beginning of 1941, Orwell was commissioned to write a regular ‘London Letter’ for the American political journal Partisan Review. Over the new few years this served as an outlet for Orwell’s experiences of the Home

Front as well as his hopes for the social and economic transformation of the country after the war. He also defended the Home Guard as a viable fighting force, and welcomed the introduction of younger working-class volunteers signing up to gain some soldiering experience before they joined the armed forces. Despite the German bombing campaign and the destruction of much of London’s financial district and the East End, Orwell observed that his fellow Londoners viewed the war with a combination of helplessness and disinterest, since by 1941 the prospect of a German invasion was rather remote after the Royal Air

Force successfully prevented the Germans from obtaining air superiority during the Battle of Britain. But even as the invasion threat receded, Orwell’s spirits were dampened by news of British and Allied setbacks in Greece, North Africa, and the Middle East. The news of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on the 22nd of June did not give Orwell much hope, instead he seemed convinced that the Germans would not have launched the campaign unless they were sure they could defeat the Soviets rapidly. Orwell had been back in London looking for a wartime job for over a year when in

August 1941 he was offered the job of a radio producer at the BBC’s Indian Section. Since he retained an affection for the country of his birth and was happy to make any contribution to the war effort, Orwell accepted. The job involved preparing three daily news commentaries in English which were broadcast to India as well as the Japanese-occupied territories of Malaya and Indonesia. There were further news summaries to be translated into local languages, as well as political and cultural programmes. Orwell relished the opportunity to bring together writers with an Indian background and sought to promote their

work to a wider audience. Since India was still subject to political agitation by nationalists demanding independence, Orwell had to tread a fine line and came to resent the interference of third parties such as the government’s India Office who occasionally complained about his output and the guests he invited. In March 1942, when he resumed his diary after a six-month break, Orwell commented that ‘all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.’ He wondered if he had any listeners, and it was only later in the 1940s that he learned that his broadcasts served

as lifelines to people living under Japanese occupation. Orwell’s preoccupation with Indian affairs during his time at the BBC influenced his literary output, as demonstrated in an essay published in Horizon in 1942 on Rudyard Kipling in which Orwell highlighted the economic exploitation of India while being unable to hide an admiration for the men of action who built the empire. With a keen interest in the future of India after the war, Orwell closely followed the diplomatic mission led by Sir Stafford Cripps, recently appointed Leader of the House of Commons in the wartime government. Cripps went to India

in March 1942 with proposals to secure the support of the Indian nationalists during the war in return for self-government after it, but the mission was a failure after his terms proved unacceptable to both the British government and Indian nationalists. Orwell admired Cripps for his willingness to stick to his principles, and he was not alone in regarding him as a potential rival to Churchill as the leader of a radical wartime government. With further setbacks in the East and the Japanese overrunning Burma, Cripps seemed to be biding his time to issue a revolutionary challenge to Churchill. However,

by late 1942, the war was beginning to shift in the Allies’ favour as the German advance stalled at Stalingrad while the British seized the upper hand in North Africa. Increasingly disillusioned by his work at the BBC, Orwell submitted his resignation in September 1943 and left his desk on the 24th of November. He took the job of literary editor at the Tribune, a left-wing weekly newspaper launched in 1937 with financial backing from Stafford Cripps and edited by the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan. Although Orwell’s journalism for the Tribune carried an anti-Soviet strain which irritated much of the

readership during the wartime alliance, he was glad to have Bevan’s support. Orwell also wrote a column for the Tribune entitled ‘As I Please’ which touched on all sorts of subjects from his thoughts about the war to the roses at his cottage in Wallington. In addition to his day job, Orwell continued to write for the Partisan Review and Horizon, and he had also been contributing to the Observer newspaper since late 1941. Furthermore, throughout 1943 Orwell was working on a new novel warning about the dangers of totalitarianism in the form of an allegory of the Soviet Union

set on a farm where the animals overthrow the humans. By February 1944, the manuscript was complete but Orwell knew that he would have difficulty finding a publisher of Animal Farm during an era of positive feelings for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell spent the early months of 1944 trying to find a publisher, knowing that Gollancz would not be prepared to publish a satire of the Soviet Union despite turning against Stalinism. In May, Jonathan Cape read the manuscript and was inclined to publish it, but at the end of June he informed Leonard Moore that he had

taken advice from an official in the Ministry of Information not to publish a book so offensive to the Soviets. Orwell had resisted contacting Warburg since he knew the firm was suffering from a wartime paper shortage, but in July he received reassurances that they were prepared to publish Animal Farm if they could get the paper to print it on. By September, Warburg agreed to publish it the following year, although given the publisher’s difficulties, the book would not be published until August 1945. While Orwell was labouring to find a publisher for Animal Farm, his family life was

also experiencing considerable changes. He had been married to Eileen for eight years but during that period they had been unable to conceive a child. They decided to adopt a child from Newcastle, where her sister-in-law Gwen O’Shaughnessy worked with unmarried mothers. The couple adopted an illegitimate boy born on the 14th of May 1944 who was later given the name Richard Horatio Blair, though the baby was first taken to Greystone, the O’Shaughnessy’s family house twenty-five miles south of Newcastle. At the end of June, the Orwells’ flat had been bombed, and it was only in October that they

moved into a new flat in Islington and were able to bring Richard down from Newcastle. In 1942, Eileen had left the Ministry of Information for a job at the Ministry of Food but chose to leave in order to take full-time responsibility for the baby. In February 1945, Orwell accepted the job of war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News and left for Paris, while Eileen and Richard went to live at Greystone. While in London arranging legal formalities of Richard’s adoption, Eileen fell ill and a medical examination found several tumours on her uterus. She

was advised to have an immediate hysterectomy scheduled for the 29th of March in hospital in Newcastle. Shortly after being placed under anaesthetic, she died of cardiac failure at the age of 39. Orwell himself had been taken ill in Paris, but upon receiving news of his wife’s death returned to England immediately. Although Orwell was shocked and desperately unhappy, after Eileen’s funeral in Newcastle he decided to return to his duties as a wartime correspondent on the continent. Back on the continent, Orwell followed the Allied advance eastwards into Germany, reporting on the devastation caused by the war. He

stayed on for a couple of weeks after the German surrender on the 8th of May recording the rounding-up of the remnants of the German army, before returning to London by the end of the month. By the end of June, he found a nurse for Richard, who was brought back to the Islington flat in July. The publication of Animal Farm in August was an incredible success, selling almost 5,000 copies in six weeks, and established Orwell as one of the leading writers of the day. In a short novel of a hundred pages, Orwell describes how the animals

take over a poorly run farm by overthrowing the human farmer in a revolution led by the pigs Snowball and Napoleon. After an initial improvement in conditions, Snowball and Napoleon fall out over plans to modernise the farm, prompting Napoleon to send dogs to chase Snowball out of the farm. Through the help of a young pig named Squealer, Napoleon is able to persuade the animals that Snowball has been trying to sabotage the farm and orders his dogs to execute the animals suspected of retaining sympathies to his rival. By the end of the book, most of the animals

are impoverished while the pigs begin to increasingly act like humans. Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an attack on Stalin’s dictatorial methods, his misrepresentation of reality, and the way in which he established an entrenched elite that resembled the old Russian aristocracy in many ways and betrayed the principles of socialism. Napoleon and Snowball in Animal Farm represent Stalin and his rival Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary leader who had been Vladimir Lenin’s right-hand man following the Revolution of 1917 and was widely expected to become leader after Lenin’s death in 1924. Instead, Trotsky and his allies were outmanoeuvred by

Stalin during the 1920s. Although he was exiled in 1929, Trotsky continued to be hounded by Stalin’s agents and those who opposed Stalin in the Soviet Union continued to be denounced as Trotskyists and purged from the party, and Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940. After the astonishing success of the book, Orwell was afraid that it would be used by British conservatives as an attack on socialism rather than Stalin and was keen to make it clear that he was still a keen socialist. Orwell welcomed the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government

in July 1945, but his hopes for more radical political change were not realised. He started to work on a new novel set in a dystopian totalitarian society and hoped to get away from London. Shortly before her death, Eileen had written to her husband observing that he was being overworked with everything he was writing for the newspapers and journals, and the couple discussed moving out to the country where Orwell would have more time to work on his fiction. By September 1945, Orwell was making plans to move to the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides

and rented a farmhouse called Barnhill, staying in London for the time being while the house was being renovated. Although he managed to establish some form of routine in his Islington flat with Richard and his housekeeper-nurse Susan Watson, Orwell was in poor health and desperately lonely, prompting him to make marriage proposals to several younger women, all of whom turned him down. Orwell planned to go to Jura in the spring of 1946, but a tubercular haemorrhage at the end of February and his sister Marjorie’s death prevented him from doing so until the end of May. At Barnhill,

Orwell was accompanied by his surviving sister Avril, his adopted son Richard and his nurse Susan. While the house itself was a pleasant retreat, it was located seven miles from the nearest village of Ardlussa, forcing Orwell to buy a motorbike to ride to the village and back to collect groceries and other supplies. The remoteness of Barnhill worked to Orwell’s advantage by giving him the time he needed to rest and focus on his novel-writing, although it made it extremely difficult for him to keep in touch with his friends in London. Some of those invited to Jura decided

against making a visit upon realising it would take the best part of two days and a combination of trains, buses, and boats, followed by a taxi ride at the end of the journey, which might require the visitor to get out and walk depending on the weather and the condition of the road. Although he promised his agent Leonard Moore that he expected to complete most of the latest novel by early autumn, the many distractions which came with life on a remote Scottish island hindered progress. During the 1930s and ‘40s Orwell had witnessed the totalitarian regimes of

Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union with alarm, and during the war he was uncomfortable with the methods used by the British government to control and censor information. He believed that the foundations of totalitarianism lay in the misuse of language to manipulate the truth and was pessimistic about humanity’s tendency to be subject to such manipulation. Orwell intended this novel as a warning to mankind and was desperate to make progress on it despite his failing health. By September he had written around fifty pages when he returned to London to catch up with friends and make professional arrangements.

Meanwhile, a BBC radio adaptation of Animal Farm went out on the airwaves in January 1947, and Orwell switched to Secker & Warburg as his main publisher after persuading Victor Gollancz to release him from his contract. By April, Orwell was back at Barnhill and keen to finish the novel by early 1948 but was prevented from doing so by continued ill health. After falling out with Orwell’s sister Avril, Susan Watson had left Barnhill for good the previous autumn, but Richard Rees took it upon himself to spend most of the year at Barnhill looking after Orwell. He had

almost finished writing the first draft of the novel, but a planned trip to London in November was abandoned when it was clear that he was too ill to travel. A doctor travelling up to Ardlussa diagnosed him with tuberculosis and shortly before Christmas, Orwell was admitted to hospital near Glasgow. His condition improved in the spring and he went back to Jura where he returned to work on the second draft of the novel, acting against the advice of his doctors to rest for six hours a day. By October the manuscript was ready to be typed up but

Orwell was once again seriously ill and asked Warburg to find a typist who would be willing to travel up to Barnhill, but when none could be found by mid-November the author set to work, carrying out the task himself. Orwell and his publisher chose the title Nineteen Eighty-Four for the novel, choosing a year in the future when the events described might take place. In the new year of 1949, Orwell left Jura for the last time to stay at a sanatorium in the Cotswolds. Meanwhile, Warburg was appalled by what he had read in Orwell’s manuscript, reading it

as a satirical attack on the Soviet Union and fearing it might be used as anti-Soviet propaganda. In fact, the setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the Soviet Union but an extreme version of wartime England. In the novel, England is called Airstrip One and forms part of Oceania, which engaged in a struggle for global dominance against its rivals Eurasia and Eastasia. Big Brother, the leader of Oceania, is seen everywhere on posters and television screens, in public and in private. The Party maintains its control by keeping close surveillance of people using two-way televisions and listening devices controlled

by the Thought Police. The main character, Winston Smith, is a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth whose job it is to falsify history by censoring and rewriting back copies of The Times newspaper. To further underline the idea that the novel is set in England, Orwell’s description of the Ministry of Truth was inspired by the University of London’s Senate House building, which had housed the wartime Ministry of Information, while its interior is reminiscent of the BBC’s offices in which Orwell worked during the war. Winston is secretly opposed to his regime and denounces Big Brother in his

diary – written in a small corner of his room out of range of the surveillance devices – despite knowing that he was committing a thought crime. When a young woman named Julia confides that she is also opposed to Big Brother, the two have an affair but are eventually caught by the Thought Police and imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. Subject to torture in Room 101, which contains each prisoner’s worst fear, Winston and Julia denounce each other and Winston ends the novel declaring his love for Big Brother. Despite signalling that he would like to write more

novels, Orwell’s health did not improve and he seemed to realise he was dying. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June with 25,000 copies printed on both sides of the Atlantic accompanied by booming sales and positive reviews which raised its author’s spirits but did little to improve his physical health. In September Orwell moved to University College Hospital in London, a short distance away from the University of London’s Senate House which had housed the wartime Ministry of Information and served as the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth. He seemed to hold out hope for recovery and proposed to

Sonia Brownell, a woman fifteen years younger than him who worked for Cyril Connolly at Horizon and who had turned him down a few years earlier. On this occasion Sonia accepted and the couple were married on the 13th of October, with the groom sitting up on his hospital bed, but despite a temporary uplift in the weeks following the wedding, Orwell’s condition worsened. In the new year, arrangements were made for Orwell to travel to Switzerland, not so much in the hope that his health would improve, but that he could die in a more peaceful environment. Four days

before the scheduled departure date, George Orwell died on the 21st of January 1950 at the age of 46. The man born Eric Blair seemed destined for the unspectacular life of a respectable civil servant of the British Empire. However, after returning home from Burma in 1927 and declaring his intention to become a writer, he spent the rest of his life trying to discard his privileged upbringing. After many adventures in the guise of a tramp and some early journal contributions, he achieved his aim of being a published novelist in 1933 under the name George Orwell. Increasingly exposed

to left-wing politics, the six months Orwell spent in Spain in 1937 shortly after getting married proved formative for his political consciousness, prompting him to embrace a brand of independent anti-Soviet socialism. Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Orwell longed to contribute to the war effort but later felt disillusioned by his work at the BBC and the censorship he was subject to. His ideas about Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and his experiences in wartime Britain inspired his most famous literary creations, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but by the time these novels were published, elevating Orwell to a

position amongst the great writers of his day, he had already suffered the tragedy of his wife Eileen’s death and was dealing with his own declining health. Even his literary success came at a cost, with his writings not only interpreted as a criticism of the Soviet Union but on socialism in general, in spite of his own left-wing political views, ultimately, his criticism was perhaps not of socialism itself but of authoritarianism in general but this is a subject which still attracts debate and political analysis to this day. What do you think of George Orwell? Was he a

great novelist with profound insights into human society, or was he a mediocre writer whose influential political satires have only served to undermine the political causes he championed? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.