Titans of History

Of all the writers of the 20th century, none did more to shape the way ordinary people think and speak than George Orwell. His novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four not only offer stark warnings of the dangers of tyranny and state control; they shifted political perceptions and enriched the English language itself. He was also the greatest English-language essayist of his century, always original, penetrating and eloquent. Orwell’s politics were consistently left-wing, but he scathingly cut through the rigid conventions of leftist sympathy for Stalinist mass murder. His principled criticism of the horrors of totalitarianism marked him out as an intellectual icon for people of any political hue. Even the word Orwellian has become part of the English language.

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in 1903 to an English family posted in Bengal, where his father was an officer working in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. Although Orwell moved back to England while still an infant, the experience of imperialism left a deep impression that is visible in much of his work.

In 1922 Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. His time there was the basis for brilliantly observed essays such as “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” as well as the poignant and gripping novel Burmese Days (1934). His strong sense of conscience led him to resign in 1927, and he came back to England highly disillusioned with the realities of imperial power.

It was in such a state of mind that Orwell set about turning himself into a writer. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he took a number of grim menial jobs in Paris, often as a plongeur (dishwasher) in hotel kitchens, then returned to London and “went native,” living as a tramp in hostels and boarding houses. The lice, dirt, greasy pan-scrubbing and lowlifes were all condensed into his first narrative, Down and Out in Paris and London (1932). It laid bare the misery of the very poor in Europe and started a lifelong obsession with the living conditions of the working classes.

His next book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), gave a vivid and powerful account of the everyday living conditions of miners in the urban heartlands of northwest England, with telling insights into the hardships of unemployment and poor housing. It also includes a personal account of Orwell’s own progress toward socialism. Even before the book was published, Orwell decided to put actions before words and set off for Spain in 1936 to join the Republicans in the struggle against Franco’s right-wing Nationalists. The experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil War provided the raw material for an account of his involvement, written in the first person—Homage to Catalonia (1938).

During his time in Spain, Orwell was shot in the neck, after which he returned to England. During the Second World War he took a job making BBC propaganda for the Far East, but he soon quit and concentrated his energies on writing Animal Farm (1945), an allegorical, anti-Stalinist tale of a farmyard where the pigs take over from the humans, before gradually slipping into tyrannical and corrupt ways. The pigs’ slogan—“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”—is among the most famous lines of 20th-century literature.

Orwell’s greatest contributions to the English language are found in his powerful political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In this chilling warning against the perils of state control, which reveals an astonishingly truthful understanding of the cruelty and wickedness of how communism really worked, he introduced a plethora of suggestive concepts, including the Thought Police, Room 101, Big Brother, Doublespeak and Groupthink. The novel was completed shortly before Orwell died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six, having suffered ill health for most of his adult life.

At the same time as writing his novels and other books, Orwell was producing an uninterrupted flow of columns, essays and book reviews. He dealt with all manner of topics. One of his finest essays, “Politics and the English Language,” was an extraordinary argument in which he linked lazy use of words with political oppression. But these complex ideas were always expressed in the most elegant, laconic phrases. Every essay he wrote, even when he was impassioned and angry, was delicately phrased and accessible to every reader.