George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950),[2] known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic.[3] His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.[4][5][6][7]
As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.[8]
Orwell’s work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective “Orwellian”—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “unperson”, and “thoughtcrime”,[9][10] as well as providing direct inspiration for the neologism “groupthink”.
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, British India.[11] His great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica.[12] His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman.[13] Eric Blair described his family as “lower-upper-middle class”.[14] His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service.[15] His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures.[12] Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older; and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and Marjorie to England.[16][n 1] His birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari is now a historical monument.[17]
In 1904, Ida Blair settled with her children at Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Eric was brought up in the company of his mother and sisters, and apart from a brief visit in mid-1907,[18] he did not see his father until 1912.[13] Aged five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. It was a Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns.[19] His mother wanted him to have a public school education, but his family could not afford the fees. Through the social connections of Ida Blair’s brother Charles Limouzin, Blair gained a scholarship to St Cyprian’s School, Eastbourne, East Sussex.[13] Arriving in September 1911, he boarded at the school for the next five years, returning home only for school holidays. Although he knew nothing of the reduced fees, he “soon recognised that he was from a poorer home”.[20] Blair hated the school[21] and many years later wrote an essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”, published posthumously, based on his time there. At St Cyprian’s, Blair first met Cyril Connolly, who became a writer and who, as the editor of Horizon, published several of Orwell’s essays.[22]
Before the First World War, the family moved to Shiplake, Oxfordshire, where Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their daughter Jacintha. When they first met, he was standing on his head in a field. Asked why, he said, “You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up.”[23] Jacintha and Eric read and wrote poetry, and dreamed of becoming famous writers. He said that he might write a book in the style of H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia. During this period, he also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with Jacintha’s brother and sister.[23]
