# data[].attributes.body
"something was true if it describes things as they are" (Correspondence Theory)

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"something is true if it fits within a framework of other claims, for instance, as a ‘true’ mathematical statement does." (Coherence Theory)

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"something was true if it had useful consequences" (Pragmatic Theory)

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truth | The Macquarie Dictionary - Credo Reference

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1. that which is true; the true or actual facts of a case to tell the truth., truths 2.

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"a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like"

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"genuineness, reality, or actual existence."

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"agreement with a standard, rule, or the like."

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Truth has had many different meanings over the years, but they all have some connection to being in agreement with something universal and undeniable.

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There are a multitude of different philosophical definitions of truth. There are different kinds of truth and truth is criticized constantly in the philosophical world.

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GEORGE ORWELL (b. 1903–d. 1950) | People You Should Know - Credo Reference

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GEORGE ORWELL (B. 1903--D.1950). (2017). In N. Faulkner, L. Coakley, & E. Lachner (Eds.), People you should know. Britannica Digital Learning. Credo Reference: https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/ebpeople/george_orwell_b_1903_d_1950/1

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"real name was Eric Arthur Blair, and he was born in 1903 at Montihari in Bengal, India, where his father was a minor British official. His family had social status but little money, a fact that influenced Orwell's later attitude toward the English class system and the empire's treatment of its subject peoples. In about 1911 the family returned to England."

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"attended Eton in the years 1917 to 1921 but decided against going on to a university. Instead he went to Burma (now Myanmar) as a member of the British imperial police."

# data[].attributes.body
" He then spent several years among the poor and outcast of Europe and among the unemployed miners in the north of England."

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Orwell has lived a long and eventful life filled with experiences. Orwell has been everywhere in the social hierarchy, from being in law enforcement to being a poor miner, he understands a lot about the systems and inner workings of society far more than the average person does.

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TRUTH THEORIES | Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language - Credo Reference

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Truth theories are philosophical attempts to pin down the concept of truth. Truth is arguably one of the most central issues in philosophy and...

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"In philosophy, the predicate ‘true’ is always in contrast with ‘false’, unlike popular usage where it is often opposed to ‘fictitious’, ‘fake’ or ‘spurious’."

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" The liar paradox illustrates an early conundrum which any theory of truth worth the name should avoid. Consider the sentence, ‘I am lying’. If one asks whether this sentence is true or false, one is soon confronted with a paradox. If it is true, then the speaker is admitting that he/she is lying or that what he/she is saying is false. On the other hand, if it is false, then we have the speaker’s word that he/she is not lying or that what he/she is saying is true."

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"Another property of truth is that a sentence, once true, will always be true no matter what the specific circumstances of its utterance, making due allowances for such elements as ‘tomorrow’ that, as it were, date the sentence. In other words, truth is not only a universal but also an eternal property. Furthermore, it is an inalienable property."

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Truth isn't just the simple idea most people believe (Truth is the opposite of a lie), but it is a perplexing universal property. Almost all philosophical editions of truth try to work around the liar's paradox, but it seems the human race has not been able to figure out the real identity of truth.

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Save Save Remove

World War II
1939 to 1945 Global conflict involving every major power in the world. The Allies originally consisted of Great Britain, France, and China, but... lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetuer adipiscing elit proin risus praesent lectus vestibulum quam sapien varius ut blandit non interdum in ante vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae duis faucibus accumsan odio curabitur convallis duis consequat dui nec nisi volutpat eleifend donec ut dolor morbi vel lectus in quam fringilla rhoncus mauris enim leo rhoncus sed vestibulum sit amet cursus id turpis integer aliquet massa id lobortis convallis tortor risus dapibus augue vel accumsan tellus nisi eu orci mauris lacinia sapien quis libero nullam sit amet turpis elementum ligula vehicula consequat morbi a ipsum integer a nibh in quis justo maecenas rhoncus aliquam lacus morbi quis tortor id nulla ultrices aliquet maecenas leo odio condimentum id luctus nec molestie sed justo pellentesque viverra pede ac diam cras pellentesque volutpat dui maecenas tristique est et tempus semper est quam pharetra magna ac consequat metus sapien ut nunc vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae mauris viverra diam vitae quam suspendisse potenti nullam porttitor lacus at turpis donec posuere metus vitae ipsum aliquam non mauris morbi non lectus aliquam sit amet diam in magna bibendum imperdiet nullam orci pede venenatis non sodales sed tincidunt eu felis fusce posuere felis sed lacus morbi sem mauris laoreet ut rhoncus aliquet pulvinar sed nisl nunc rhoncus dui vel sem sed sagittis nam congue risus semper porta volutpat quam pede lobortis ligula sit amet eleifend pede libero quis orci nullam molestie nibh in lectus pellentesque at nulla suspendisse potenti cras in purus eu magna vulputate luctus cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus vivamus vestibulum sagittis sapien cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus etiam vel augue vestibulum rutrum rutrum neque aenean auctor gravida sem praesent id massa id nisl venenatis lacinia aenean sit amet justo morbi ut odio cras mi pede malesuada in imperdiet et commodo vulputate justo in blandit ultrices enim lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetuer adipiscing elit proin interdum mauris non ligula pellentesque ultrices phasellus id sapien in sapien iaculis congue vivamus metus arcu adipiscing molestie hendrerit at vulputate vitae nisl aenean lectus pellentesque eget nunc donec quis orci eget orci vehicula condimentum curabitur in libero ut massa volutpat convallis morbi odio odio elementum eu interdum eu tincidunt in leo maecenas pulvinar lobortis est phasellus sit amet erat nulla tempus vivamus in felis eu sapien cursus vestibulum proin eu mi nulla ac enim in tempor turpis nec euismod scelerisque quam turpis adipiscing lorem vitae mattis nibh ligula nec sem duis aliquam convallis nunc proin at turpis a pede posuere nonummy integer non velit donec diam neque vestibulum eget vulputate ut ultrices vel augue vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae donec pharetra magna vestibulum aliquet ultrices erat tortor sollicitudin mi sit amet lobortis sapien sapien non mi integer ac neque duis bibendum morbi non quam nec dui luctus rutrum nulla tellus in sagittis dui vel nisl duis ac nibh fusce lacus purus aliquet at feugiat non pretium quis lectus suspendisse potenti in eleifend quam a odio in hac habitasse platea dictumst maecenas ut massa quis augue luctus tincidunt nulla mollis molestie lorem quisque ut erat curabitur gravida nisi at nibh in hac habitasse platea dictumst aliquam augue quam sollicitudin vitae consectetuer eget rutrum at lorem integer tincidunt ante vel ipsum praesent blandit lacinia erat vestibulum sed magna at nunc commodo placerat praesent blandit nam nulla integer pede justo lacinia eget tincidunt eget tempus vel pede morbi porttitor lorem id ligula suspendisse ornare consequat lectus in est risus auctor sed tristique in tempus sit amet sem fusce consequat nulla nisl nunc nisl duis bibendum felis sed interdum venenatis turpis enim blandit mi in porttitor pede justo eu massa donec dapibus duis at velit eu est congue elementum in hac habitasse platea dictumst morbi vestibulum velit id pretium iaculis diam erat fermentum justo nec condimentum neque sapien placerat ante nulla justo aliquam quis turpis eget elit sodales scelerisque mauris sit amet eros suspendisse accumsan tortor quis turpis sed ante vivamus tortor duis mattis egestas metus aenean fermentum donec ut mauris eget massa tempor convallis nulla neque libero convallis eget eleifend luctus ultricies eu nibh quisque id justo sit amet sapien dignissim vestibulum vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae nulla dapibus dolor vel est donec odio justo sollicitudin ut suscipit a feugiat et eros vestibulum ac est lacinia nisi venenatis tristique fusce congue diam id ornare imperdiet sapien urna pretium nisl ut volutpat sapien arcu sed augue aliquam erat volutpat in congue etiam justo etiam pretium iaculis justo in hac habitasse platea dictumst etiam faucibus cursus urna ut tellus nulla ut erat id mauris vulputate elementum nullam varius nulla facilisi cras non velit nec nisi vulputate nonummy maecenas tincidunt lacus at velit vivamus vel nulla eget eros elementum pellentesque quisque porta volutpat erat quisque erat eros viverra eget congue eget semper rutrum nulla nunc purus phasellus in felis donec semper sapien a libero nam dui proin leo odio porttitor id consequat in consequat ut nulla sed accumsan felis ut at dolor quis odio consequat varius integer ac leo pellentesque ultrices mattis odio donec vitae nisi nam ultrices libero non mattis pulvinar nulla pede ullamcorper augue a suscipit nulla elit ac nulla sed vel enim sit amet nunc viverra dapibus nulla suscipit ligula in lacus curabitur at ipsum ac tellus semper interdum mauris ullamcorper purus sit amet nulla quisque arcu libero rutrum ac lobortis vel dapibus at diam nam tristique tortor eu pede

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1939 to 1945 Global conflict involving every major power in the world. The Allies originally consisted of Great Britain, France, and China, but... lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetuer adipiscing elit proin risus praesent lectus vestibulum quam sapien varius ut blandit non interdum in ante vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae duis faucibus accumsan odio curabitur convallis duis consequat dui nec nisi volutpat eleifend donec ut dolor morbi vel lectus in quam fringilla rhoncus mauris enim leo rhoncus sed vestibulum sit amet cursus id turpis integer aliquet massa id lobortis convallis tortor risus dapibus augue vel accumsan tellus nisi eu orci mauris lacinia sapien quis libero nullam sit amet turpis elementum ligula vehicula consequat morbi a ipsum integer a nibh in quis justo maecenas rhoncus aliquam lacus morbi quis tortor id nulla ultrices aliquet maecenas leo odio condimentum id luctus nec molestie sed justo pellentesque viverra pede ac diam cras pellentesque volutpat dui maecenas tristique est et tempus semper est quam pharetra magna ac consequat metus sapien ut nunc vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae mauris viverra diam vitae quam suspendisse potenti nullam porttitor lacus at turpis donec posuere metus vitae ipsum aliquam non mauris morbi non lectus aliquam sit amet diam in magna bibendum imperdiet nullam orci pede venenatis non sodales sed tincidunt eu felis fusce posuere felis sed lacus morbi sem mauris laoreet ut rhoncus aliquet pulvinar sed nisl nunc rhoncus dui vel sem sed sagittis nam congue risus semper porta volutpat quam pede lobortis ligula sit amet eleifend pede libero quis orci nullam molestie nibh in lectus pellentesque at nulla suspendisse potenti cras in purus eu magna vulputate luctus cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus vivamus vestibulum sagittis sapien cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus etiam vel augue vestibulum rutrum rutrum neque aenean auctor gravida sem praesent id massa id nisl venenatis lacinia aenean sit amet justo morbi ut odio cras mi pede malesuada in imperdiet et commodo vulputate justo in blandit ultrices enim lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetuer adipiscing elit proin interdum mauris non ligula pellentesque ultrices phasellus id sapien in sapien iaculis congue vivamus metus arcu adipiscing molestie hendrerit at vulputate vitae nisl aenean lectus pellentesque eget nunc donec quis orci eget orci vehicula condimentum curabitur in libero ut massa volutpat convallis morbi odio odio elementum eu interdum eu tincidunt in leo maecenas pulvinar lobortis est phasellus sit amet erat nulla tempus vivamus in felis eu sapien cursus vestibulum proin eu mi nulla ac enim in tempor turpis nec euismod scelerisque quam turpis adipiscing lorem vitae mattis nibh ligula nec sem duis aliquam convallis nunc proin at turpis a pede posuere nonummy integer non velit donec diam neque vestibulum eget vulputate ut ultrices vel augue vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae donec pharetra magna vestibulum aliquet ultrices erat tortor sollicitudin mi sit amet lobortis sapien sapien non mi integer ac neque duis bibendum morbi non quam nec dui luctus rutrum nulla tellus in sagittis dui vel nisl duis ac nibh fusce lacus purus aliquet at feugiat non pretium quis lectus suspendisse potenti in eleifend quam a odio in hac habitasse platea dictumst maecenas ut massa quis augue luctus tincidunt nulla mollis molestie lorem quisque ut erat curabitur gravida nisi at nibh in hac habitasse platea dictumst aliquam augue quam sollicitudin vitae consectetuer eget rutrum at lorem integer tincidunt ante vel ipsum praesent blandit lacinia erat vestibulum sed magna at nunc commodo placerat praesent blandit nam nulla integer pede justo lacinia eget tincidunt eget tempus vel pede morbi porttitor lorem id ligula suspendisse ornare consequat lectus in est risus auctor sed tristique in tempus sit amet sem fusce consequat nulla nisl nunc nisl duis bibendum felis sed interdum venenatis turpis enim blandit mi in porttitor pede justo eu massa donec dapibus duis at velit eu est congue elementum in hac habitasse platea dictumst morbi vestibulum velit id pretium iaculis diam erat fermentum justo nec condimentum neque sapien placerat ante nulla justo aliquam quis turpis eget elit sodales scelerisque mauris sit amet eros suspendisse accumsan tortor quis turpis sed ante vivamus tortor duis mattis egestas metus aenean fermentum donec ut mauris eget massa tempor convallis nulla neque libero convallis eget eleifend luctus ultricies eu nibh quisque id justo sit amet sapien dignissim vestibulum vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia curae nulla dapibus dolor vel est donec odio justo sollicitudin ut suscipit a feugiat et eros vestibulum ac est lacinia nisi venenatis tristique fusce congue diam id ornare imperdiet sapien urna pretium nisl ut volutpat sapien arcu sed augue aliquam erat volutpat in congue etiam justo etiam pretium iaculis justo in hac habitasse platea dictumst etiam faucibus cursus urna ut tellus nulla ut erat id mauris vulputate elementum nullam varius nulla facilisi cras non velit nec nisi vulputate nonummy maecenas tincidunt lacus at velit vivamus vel nulla eget eros elementum pellentesque quisque porta volutpat erat quisque erat eros viverra eget congue eget semper rutrum nulla nunc purus phasellus in felis donec semper sapien a libero nam dui proin leo odio porttitor id consequat in consequat ut nulla sed accumsan felis ut at dolor quis odio consequat varius integer ac leo pellentesque ultrices mattis odio donec vitae nisi nam ultrices libero non mattis pulvinar nulla pede ullamcorper augue a suscipit nulla elit ac nulla sed vel enim sit amet nunc viverra dapibus nulla suscipit ligula in lacus curabitur at ipsum ac tellus semper interdum mauris ullamcorper purus sit amet nulla quisque arcu libero rutrum ac lobortis vel dapibus at diam nam tristique tortor eu pede

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World War II | The Great American History Fact-Finder - Credo Reference

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Save Save Save Remove Remove World War II 1939 to 1945 Global conflict involving every major power in the world. The Allies originally consisted of Great Britain, France, and China, but...

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"Hitler's attempt to bomb England into surrendering, took place in August through October of 1940. London and other cities were bombed daily by the Nazis, but Royal Air Force fighter planes engaged in around-the-clock dogfights with the German planes"

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"In Europe, German forces reached Stalingrad on August 22, 1942, and started a siege that ended when they entered the city on September 13. The harsh winter and lack of supplies caused thousands of German soldiers to starve or freeze to death, and on February 2, 1943, the last of these troops surrendered, halting Germany's eastward advance."

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"Europe in December 1943, Eisenhower coordinated the plan to cross the English Channel in early June 1944 and invade Normandy on the coast of northern France. Called Operation Overlord, the invasion began June 6, 1944 (D-Day), and resulted in capture of the beaches of Normandy."

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During the writing of both Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell lived in an environment filled with uncertainty, bombings, and military forces. These events shaped both books.

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First Chapter

As a young man Eric Blair was fascinated by ghost stories and intrigued by black magic. Once, seemingly to deadly effect, he laid a curse on a schoolboy who had offended him. On another occasion he reported seeing a ghost. Later, he told a friend that he used a pseudonym so that no enemy could take his name and work magic against him. In dreams he looked for symbols and interpretations, and more than once had highly prophetic visions. None of this quite fits with the widely held image of a man who transformed himself into the writer of clear-headed, rational and lucid prose, George Orwell. But behind every bearer of a pseudonym there stands an individual life, an individual who can appear in various guises and a life which can come to us in different versions. That is because personalities and lives are kaleidoscopic - records, images glimpsed behind words or lodged in reminiscence, fragments viewed and re-viewed through the mirrors of memory and conscious reflection, all projected in turn in new configurations through the eyes of biographers.

In a strange vision, at the age of twenty-six, Eric Blair (not yet 'George Orwell') seems to have foreseen his own death. Lying ill with pneumonia in a squalid Paris hospital ward in 1929, he saw in a bed opposite a man who had just died - pale, wasted, lifeless.

Numéro 57 's eyes were still open, his mouth also open, his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed me however was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but now it was little darker than the sheets. As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face, it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of 'natural' death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then ... that's what is waiting for you, 20, 30, 40 years hence.

Just over twenty years later, Orwell himself, wizened and enfeebled by tuberculosis, lay at the brink of death in a hospital bed, the very image of the old Frenchman he had once watched die. As his time approached, in his solitary remorseless way, he observed his own slow deterioration. In 1948, having caught sight of his naked reflection in a sanatorium mirror, he projected his own horrifying likeness on to Winston Smith, the persecuted protagonist of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four . Smith, too, is confronted by the ravaged spectre of a tortured man seemingly close to death:

A bowed, grey coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face ... cheekbones above which his eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it was his own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt ... But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs ... The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.

This was The Picture of Dorian Gray reversed. The cruel self-portrait, the emaciated wreck, was the reality; the man he longed to be - handsome and attractive to women - lay hidden in the attic, or at least in a secretive corner of his imagination. The reality on his deathbed testified to a harsh life of self-denial and self-mortification for sins both real and imagined. It is tempting to see in O'Brien, Winston's torturer, the sadistic alter ego of George Orwell, intent on rendering him less than human, and in Winston himself the masochistic alter ego, the mirror-image self of the same complex character. This picture of the crushed and beaten man is Orwell, transforming personal suffering into art. The passage quoted embodies two other significant characteristics of the man - an impulse towards prophecy and a compulsion to be candid, the latter a quality he both valued and feared. So, while in many ways he could be brutally honest about himself, some aspects of him remained concealed behind a carefully constructed persona, secret sides of himself he seems to have feared and which he may have hoped would remain hidden, even beyond the grave.

The ancestry of this strange, guilt-ridden ascetic, with English, French and long-obscure Scottish connections, has been chronicled previously, though details remain somewhat sketchy, and therefore difficult to vivify. Some hints and clues and new revelations, however, do bring some life to names inscribed in dusty records.

Two geographical axes enable us to map the family inheritance. One links Hardy's Dorset to Kipling's India; the other connects a town in central France, celebrated for its delicate enamel paintings, to a bustling port in Burma. In his first work of fiction, Burmese Days , Orwell sets out to debunk the Kiplingesque myth of the 'white man's burden', the story unfolding with all the tragic inevitability of a Hardy novel. In no other work of his would these diverse strands of his distant heritage come together quite so evidently, except perhaps in the autobiographical sections of The Road to Wigan Pier , and a long work, a family saga projected before his death, which died with him.

On his father's side there were West Indian slave-owners, minor aristocrats and upstanding servants of Empire; on his mother's were French colonials, shipbuilders and timber merchants. He would come, as a young man, to despise those who profited from colonialism, as he found himself doing for a time, even though he sneakingly admired the people who made the system work. He poured scorn on Anglo-Indian imperialists, even while admiring their bard, Kipling, for portraying them so honestly. He was ashamed of what Europeans like his maternal ancestors had done in Burma, yet he embraced his Gallic heritage and immersed himself in French literature. Despite attending the most prestigious school in England, he rejected the easy path to wealth and privilege, and denied himself the many comforts which conformity would have brought. The rest of his life is a story of adventures, often reckless adventures, invariably destined to fail, as he was only too ready to admit. As he wrote, 'Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.' The one adventure which did succeed for him was his venture into literature, though even that path, too, was strewn with disasters, and lasting success eluded him until the very end of his life.

A taste for adventure marks his family history on both sides - in colonial exploits and exploitations. In the eighteenth century the enterprise of the Blairs led to wealth and marriage into the nobility, only to be followed by slow decline into respectable obscurity. Charles Blair, Eric's great-grandfather, was born in 1743, probably of Scottish ancestry. By way of Jamaican sugar plantations and the slave trade he became sufficiently prosperous to be an acceptable husband for Lady Mary Fane, youngest daughter of the Earl of Westmoreland, to whom he was married in 1765. The Fanes were enthusiastic field sportsmen. Their ranks include Masters of Hounds and army cavalry officers as well as a Commander of the British Army in Burma. Eric was keenly aware of his Blair ancestry - the procession of ghostly forebears, their names inscribed in the Blair family Bible inherited from his father, an oil painting of Lady Mary Blair and a set of leather-bound volumes once owned by his great-uncle, Captain Horatio Blair, to which he became sentimentally attached. Unlike the worthy captain, he never developed a yen for the sea, but field sports, especially shooting and fishing, became lifelong passions. In novels such as A Clergyman's Daughter and Coming Up For Air he wrote knowingly about the fate of worn-out aristocrats and their declining families, and in his wartime call-to-arms, The Lion and the Unicorn , he observed that 'England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus' which nevertheless 'somehow ... decayed [and] lost its ability, its daring, finally its ruthlessness.'

However, back in the eighteenth century, at least, Blairs were thriving. The parvenu Charles Blair and Jane, his Lady wife, produced at least nine children, four of whom died young - Henry Charles was killed at nineteen while serving as captain in the 23rd Regiment of Foot in St Domingo. Of the surviving five, last in the line was Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, Eric's paternal grandfather. There were Blair cousins, too, including the first Horatio, born in 1808 and named, presumably, in honour of the great Nelson, killed at Trafalgar just three years earlier.

Thomas Richard was born in the year of his father's death, 1802, and grew up with his siblings and widowed mother at Ensbury in Dorset. In accordance with family tradition, the children were educated privately, though not entirely ineffectually. Thomas gained entrance to Pembroke College, Oxford, where for a year he read Theology as a Fellow Commoner with high-table privileges, before setting off for the colonies as an acolyte of the Anglican Church. Why he failed to complete his Oxford years and disappeared so precipitately to the colonies is unknown, but he was first ordained a deacon of the Church of England in Calcutta in 1839, then in 1843 as a priest in Tasmania. Legend has it that in the 1830s, sailing home on leave from India, his ship called at Cape Town where he met and proposed to Emily Hare, intending to marry her on his return. However, on arrival, he found her already married. Apparently unconcerned, he simply said, 'Well, never mind, I'll have Fanny' - Francis Hare, her fifteen-year-old sister. His first child, Horatio, was born in Calcutta in 1838. There followed a daughter, Augusta Michel and two sons, Dawson, and Richard Walmsley Blair, born nine months apart in 1857.

Three years earlier, Thomas had returned to England and, through his Westmorland connections, was handed the vicarage of Milborne St Andrew, a small village in his home county of Dorset. Milborne stands a few miles north of Tolpuddle, where in 1834 six farm labourers attempted to set up a union and were transported to Australia - a martyrdom still celebrated by English socialists. The parish included the hamlet of Dewlish, where Fanes formed the squirearchy, and in this essentially feudal setting, Thomas remained vicar for thirteen years, until his death in 1867.

There was a touch of arrogance in old Thomas, and the village retains one controversial memorial to him. In 1856, considering the existing vicarage not quite dignified enough for the grandson of an earl, he excited great local hostility by building a new one at considerable cost to the parish. Although Eric would turn atheist and spend his life attacking institutional religions, he always had a lingering affection for the Anglican Church, identifying with its dissenting martyrs and allowing it to confirm, marry and ultimately to bury him. And, while he declared war on the capitalist class and embraced the basic philosophy of socialism there was a lingering streak of the nineteenth-century Tory in his make-up. No doubt it was with the High Church Blairs in mind that he commended his favourite eighteenth-century novelist, Smollett, for writing mostly about 'the kind of people who are cousins to a landowner, and take their manners from the aristocracy'. The nineteenth-century industrial middle classes, on the other hand, who were catered for by the Low and Nonconformist Churches, and engineered the rise of capitalism, could be happily despised.

Like the rest of his brothers, Richard was privately tutored, in his case at Bath in neighbouring Somerset, continuing there until he was eighteen. As with most upper-middle-class families of the time there was great emphasis on public service. Thomas's cousin Horatio (son of the first Horatio Blair), not surprisingly perhaps, was destined for the Navy, Richard for the far more humdrum life of colonial civil servant. Horatio became a Royal Navy captain, and would be buried with full naval honours at Portsmouth in 1908, when Eric was five and Britain was building up its formidable fleet of dreadnoughts. It was he who left behind the much-valued set of leather-bound volumes kept in a wooden travelling-case which Eric was to inherit. But there were also unusual, unpredictable and unstable relations who brought a dash of drama to the family. On 13 January 1911, Richard Charles Blair, another of his father's cousins, a captain in the 6th Gurkha Rifles, sailing home from India through the Red Sea, and suffering from depression, walked up on deck one night and quietly jumped overboard. The family kept the newspaper cutting of the story, another scrap of Blair history retained, and one is reminded of Eric's alter ego, John Flory in Burmese Days , who did away with himself in Burma in similarly melancholic circumstances.

The aristocratic connection had weakened by the time Richard Walmsley Blair was born. What took him to India is unclear, but he is said to have had an unhappy love affair, and this may be what led him, at the age of nineteen, to take on one of the most obscure and least heroic roles in the whole colonial system. In 1875 he entered the Opium Department of the Province of Bengal, an uncovenanted member of the Indian Civil Service. As Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, grade 5 on 500 rupees per month, he could hardly have found a more remote and less exalted position at the lowest level in the order of precedence in the complex hierarchy of the Empire. His job was to oversee the growing of opium, mainly for export to China. It was a lucrative trade monopolised by Britain, but one which the Chinese Government was actively seeking to have banned. By 1897, Richard, still stuck on his lowly grade 5 and his poor starting salary, was serving in Tehta, in the Gaya district in Upper Bengal. He was thirty-nine, unmarried, and employed in a job that seemed to have a distinctly limited future.

Eric's mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, grew up in Moulmein in Lower Burma.

Continues...

Excerpted from Inside George Orwell by Gordon Bowker Copyright &copy 2003 by Gordon Bowker . Excerpted by permission.

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First Chapter As a young man Eric Blair was fascinated by ghost stories and intrigued by black magic. Once, seemingly to deadly effect, he laid a curse on a schoolboy who had offended him. On another occasion he reported seeing a ghost.

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"In 1948, having caught sight of his naked reflection in a sanatorium mirror, he projected his own horrifying likeness on to Winston Smith, the persecuted protagonist of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four . Smith, too, is confronted by the ravaged spectre of a tortured man seemingly close to death:"

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"O'Brien, Winston's torturer, the sadistic alter ego of George Orwell, intent on rendering him less than human, and in Winston himself the masochistic alter ego, the mirror-image self of the same complex character."

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"Although Eric would turn atheist and spend his life attacking institutional religions, he always had a lingering affection for the Anglican Church, identifying with its dissenting martyrs and allowing it to confirm, marry and ultimately to bury him."