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https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four

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Nineteen Eighty-four, also published as 1984, novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism. The chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and his ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. The book's title and many of its concepts, such as Big Brother and the Thought Police, are instantly recognized and understood, often as bywords for modern social and political abuses.

Summary

The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian states (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia). Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thought and promote the Party's doctrines. Its words include doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), which is reflected in the Party's slogans: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength." The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continual surveillance.

The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary living in a London that is still shattered by a nuclear war that took place not long after World War II. He belongs to the Outer Party, and his job is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, bringing it in line with current political thinking. However, Winston's longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. He embarks on a forbidden affair with Julia, a like-minded woman, and they rent a room in a neighbourhood populated by Proles (short for proletariats). Winston also becomes increasingly interested in the Brotherhood, a group of dissenters. Unbeknownst to Winston and Julia, however, they are being watched closely (ubiquitous posters throughout the city warn residents that "Big Brother is watching you.").

When Winston is approached by O'Brien-an official of the Inner Party who appears to be a secret member of the Brotherhood-the trap is set. O'Brien is actually a spy for the Party, on the lookout for "thought-criminals," and Winston and Julia are eventually caught and sent to the Ministry of Love for a violent reeducation. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Winston are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independence and destroy his dignity and humanity. In Room 101, where prisoners are forced into submission by exposure to their worst nightmares, Winston panics as a cage of rats is attached to his head. He yells out for his tormentors to "Do it to Julia!" and states that he does not care what happens to her. With this betrayal, Winston is released. He later encounters Julia, and neither is interested in the other. Instead Winston loves Big Brother.

Analysis

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. Its depiction of a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought is a sobering reminder of the evils of unaccountable governments. Winston is the symbol of the values of civilized life, and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all-powerful states.
Cathy Lowne The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Nineteen Eighty-four | Summary, Characters, Analysis, & Facts

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Nineteen Eighty-four, novel by George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism. His chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and his ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. Concepts such as Big Brother and the Thought Police are instantly recognized.

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At the behest of the Duchess of Atholl, George Orwell (1903-1950) spoke at the League for European Freedom, a neo-conservative forum with whom the celebrated author shared a distinct disdain for Communism. There, the similarities ended however. In a brutal reminder of his political pedigree Orwell decried the League for its implied duplicity in attempting to defend European democracy on one hand yet say nothing about British imperialism on the other.

The year was 1945: the end of the war was but a breath away, Churchill was about to be steamrolled and British India was still four years from partition.

Orwell concluded: "I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country" (Orwell 1945, quoted in Woodcock, 1967, p. v). The sentence's sentiment goes to the very intent of how the novel he'd been thinking seriously about writing came into being.

Leaving aside any literary evaluation, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four tells us more about Orwell's England than it does about Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany. Readers at the time read the novel and immediately (and erroneously) saw the Soviet regime writ large. The author was instead painting a much broader condemnation of totalitarianism, but one firmly wedged in the pre- and post-war England of his own experiences. Drabness, commodity shortages, personal deprivations, propaganda and an excessive bureaucracy were just some of the similarities Orwell's own England and the novel shared.

Of course, the same can be said to a certain degree of the Soviet Union and Germany, but Orwell's warning - which Nineteen Eighty-Four is often seen as - is more a diatribe highlighting the perversions to which a centralised ideology/economy is liable to adopt. In addition, the novel is an attempt to expose the increasing Communist-appeasing tendencies and associated 'poisonous influences' gestating within England's increasingly elitist and hierarchical Left during the 1940s.

To better appreciate the extent of Orwell's preferred polity and the increasing disenchantment he felt towards it ever being realised, one must go to Spain. Here, he endured the perils of centralised authoritarianism first hand while fighting alongside anarchist separatists in Spain's 1936-39 civil war. Appalled at the 'poisonous influence' inflicted on the Spanish insurrectionists by Moscow-led communists from afar, Orwell later detected similar ideological tendencies and influences taking hold within Britain's state socialism. Nineteen Eighty-Four was his documented warning as such; an extrapolation - to the point of satire - of the evils of totalitarianism: Stalinism (and Nazism to a lesser degree) were more timely, albeit contributing sources to the authors' mindset, than the novel's actual subject.

Orwell's civil war experiences in Spain - recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1938) - instilled an enormous hostility towards and disillusionment with orthodox Communism. Fighting for the Republican insurrectionists - themselves a motley and diverse collection of anti-Fascists and politicised trade unions - Orwell's semi-autobiographical account describes the internecine dissent between supposed Republican and Communists allies, including deplorable examples of Communist deceit in backing the war, as well as intellectual dishonesty in reporting the war. " Homage - written on his return to England in 1937 - is an attempt to set the record straight, to record the 'political truth' of the war as he saw it" (Coles, 1981, p. 66-67).

Describing himself as a soldier of a revolutionary army defending democracy against Fascism, Orwell got down to business in 'setting the record straight'. He was scathing of the "scandalous distortion of news from Spain in favour of the Stalinists by the liberal English press" (Woodcock, 1967, p. xii). Or as the author so succinctly put it himself: "the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time" (1970, p. 289). His conclusion was that intellectuals in general, and Britain's socialist movement in particular, were being seduced by totalitarian ideas and models.

Orwell later wrote an essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War, recounting with horror (and with hindsight) the depths to which the truth suffered in wartime reportage within the British press: "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed" (Orwell, 1970, p. 294).Any ensuing novel or writing on the subject naturally becomes immediate and personal and says as much, if not more, about the prevailing social climate, and in Orwell's mind, an extrapolation of ideological tendencies at the time. Such candour did not endear him at all to many of his democratic socialist colleagues. In fact, Stapleton states (1983, p. 658) that "Orwell was vilified by the fashionable and sentimental Left in England who knew nothing of the truth and had no desire to be told it". In this context, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its assault on truthful language and the rewriting of history, can arguably be seen as saying more about the author's home than it does about the Soviet Union or Germany.

In fact, language and its manipulation for political ends, is a dominating thread running through the totalitarian tapestry that is Nineteen Eight-Four. Again, England can be seen as the prime source in much of Orwell's critique, derived particularly from his 1941-43 wartime employment as a Talks Producer with the BBC. This broadcasting experience, combined with the intimate knowledge of the machinations of the Ministry of Information he had access to, left Orwell with enormous misgivings about the morality of propaganda, whatever the motives. While acknowledging that all governments exercise a degree of 'misinformation' especially in times of war, Orwell's reasonably close encounters of England's efforts in this regard, nonetheless fuelled much of his attack on the distortion of truth and the abuse of language. These include the linguistic horror of Newspeak, Winston's role within the Outer Party, and the suitably titled 'Rewrite Squad'. According to Brown (1990, p. 09), Orwell "felt that any connection with propaganda corrupted those who used it". And as Syme - Winston's comrade - rather sarcastically says (Orwell, 1949 (1989), p. 54): "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well."

This is not to say however, that echoes of Nazi Germany cannot be heard in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notorious book burning episodes and Nazism's fabricated denunciations of European Jewry serve as just two horrific reminders of totalitarian attempts to alter history. In fact, Orwell's contempt for Germanic nationalism and Hitler's tyrannical megalomania occasionally surfaced in some of his journalistic pursuits. Reviewing Mein Kampf in 1940 for the New English Weekly (Orwell, 1970, p. 28), he referred to Hitler's plans for a continuous Aryan state with plenty of"living room" as a "horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder". It is fair to say that similar notions of warfare in perpetuity - with Oceania and its two adversaries in a continuous state of conflict - permeate Nineteen Eighty-Four to a significant degree.

References to Hitler's Aryan supremacists - a driving tenet within the Reich - also appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four. At one stage Winston looks around the canteen imagining "the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal - tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree ..." (1949, (1989), p.63).

Likewise, parallels with the Soviet Union may well be identified too, but Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be said to specifically satirise Stalinism or Nazism, individually or as an amalgam, though many commentators - including Hammond (1984) and Wilding (1980) - seem to suggest as much. Orwell had already 'dumped on' revolutionary Russia with his 1945 beastly allegorical fable, Animal Farm. But elements of classic totalitarian Stalinism inhabit Nineteen Eighty-Four in that people simply disappeared in both the Soviet Union and Oceania. Consider the vanishing of Winston's father, mother and sister and the fact that the only person Julia "had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight". Such fear of state abduction was meant to breed absolute ideological obedience. And Stalin practiced this with widespread precision, as did Big Brother: "Syme had vanished," says Orwell's narrator. On investigation Winston noticed a list of:

members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before - nothing had been crossed out - but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme [as had countless Russians] had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

Given then the environment of a world war that saw bombs reign down on his homeland delivered by Fascists from afar, the disillusionment he felt for Britain's traditional Left and its degenerative role as an apologist for Russian foreign policy, combined with numerous written nuances, perhaps best summarised by his assertion (Orwell 1940, quoted in Woodcock, 1967, p. xii) "that the future must be catastrophic", Nineteen Eight-Four can arguably be seen, not so much as an attack on Stalinism per se, but rather, a polemic on "credulous or self-serving people who call themselves socialists, and on some of their illusions" (Pimlott, 1989, p. xv). Ingsoc - the Party's ideology - is thus presented as a perversion of English socialism. Hammond (1984, p. 173) rightly refers to one element of this perversion - and one of the novel's central theses - as "the insidious effects of concentrating power in the hands of an unscrupulous elite".

There is the additional argument - supporting the case that the novel is more about England and less about the Soviet Union and Germany - suggesting that Ingsoc might also be seen as a thinly disguised indictment of England's pre- and postwar governments in general, and the British Labour party in particular. Excerpts of Orwell's journalistic endeavours tend to support this view. Newsinger contends (1999, p. 124) that while "he continued to be an opponent of capitalism [Orwell nonetheless] remained dissatisfied with the Labour Government's restraint and moderation". Taking this one step further, Newsinger (like Pimlott above) says "Ingsoc can be better seen as deriving from a British National Socialism or British Nazism". Either way, England is again the source.

Orwell's most profound insight, according to Coles (1981, p. 159), "envisions an absolute totalitarianism which precludes individuality in society". While Nineteen Eighty-Four is imbued with a lifetime of ideas unleashed by its author, it is fair to say the novel was physically conceived in the bombed out ruins of war-torn England. Orwell: "The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately [immune from, or] better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere" (Orwell 1949, quoted in Hammond, 1984, p. 173).

The dystopia Orwell described would be instantly recognisable to inhabitants of 1940s London. And given the similarities between the author's homeland and Oceania - overzealous bureaucracy, personal depravity, drabness, commodity shortages and the insidiousness of propaganda, apart from the poisonous 'apologetic' influences infecting British socialism - Nineteen Eighty-Four can legitimately be claimed as telling us more about Orwell's England, than about Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany.

Does the novel also offer insights into Australian politics now? Very little. Fifty years after publication (and almost two decades later than the ominous year in question), Nineteen Eighty-Four is showing its age somewhat. At the time of writing (late 1940s), totalitarianism was a real stalking fear that consequently has not stood the test of time. While the second half of the 20 th century has had its share of authoritarian regimes, they have tended to operate in isolated pockets with minimal impact on the global scheme of things. The cessation of the Cold War 'duopoly' has only diminished (but not discredited) Orwell's prophetic plight. Today, transnational NGOs like the United Nations (via peace-keeping envoys and trade sanctions) and the World Bank (by withholding loans or credit) play a considerable part in restricting totalitarian-like tendencies. And the internationalisation of trade also inhibits such provincial and dictatorial insularity. Since the symbolic fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, there is no longer an ideological trade bloc that might facilitate a semblance of totalitarian rule. Romania's deposed dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, is a case in point.

The question begs: How long can a story about a future that is past continue to alarm, at least in an Australian context? Our own political Zeitgeist circa 2000 can draw little from Nineteen Eight-Four, at least in terms of heeding Orwell's dire warning, mainly because the totalitarian threat that framed the consciousness of Western governments in the late 1940s, has lessened considerably, if not completely, a half century later. But this is not to dismiss some of Orwell's concurrent themes altogether. Issues like the concentration of state power and governmental deceit, individual freedoms, the imposing of politically correct language, as well as occupational health and safety concerns are as relevant today as they were to Orwell's protagonists. As a novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four is first and foremost, a work of fiction. But as Pimlott asserts (1989, p. xvi), "it can also be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them". And that summation is as timely now as it was in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or even 1940s England.
Bibliography
Brown, G., 1990, Notes on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pan Books, London.

Coles Editorial Board, 1981, George Orwell's Works, Coles Publishing, Canada.

Hammond , J.R., 1984, A George Orwell Companion, Macmillan Press, New York.

Hunter, Lynette, 1984, George Orwell - The Search for a Voice, Open University Press, England.

Newsinger, John, 1999, Orwell's Politics, St Martin's Press, New York.

Orwell, George, 1949 (1989), Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, England.

Orwell, George, 1970, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 2, Penguin, England.

Pimlott, Ben, 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four - (Introduction), Penguin, England.

Stapleton, M., 1983, The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, CUP, Cambridge.

Wilding, Michael, 1980, Political Fictions, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Woodcock, George, 1967, The Crystal Spirit, Fourth Estate, London.

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Orwell and totalitarianism - Digital Done Write

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At the behest of the Duchess of Atholl, George Orwell (1903-1950) spoke at the League for European Freedom, a neo-conservative forum with whom the celebrated author shared a distinct disdain for Communism. There, the similarities ended however. In a brutal reminder of his political pedigree Orwell decried the League for its implied duplicity in attempting [...]

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Animal Farm: Character List | SparkNotes

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A list of all the characters in Animal Farm. Animal Farm characters include: Napoleon, Snowball, Boxer, Squealer, Old Major, Mr. Pilkington, Benjamin, Clover, Mollie, Moses, Mr. Frederick, Mr. Jones, The Dogs, The Hens, The Sheep.

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Animal Farm is George Orwell's satire on equality, where all barnyard animals live free from their human masters' tyranny. Inspired to rebel by Major, an old boar, animals on Mr. Jones' Manor Farm embrace Animalism and stage a revolution to achieve an idealistic state of justice and progress. A power-hungry pig, Napoleon, becomes a totalitarian dictator who leads the Animal Farm into " All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others" oppression.

Written by: George Orwell

Type of Work: novel

Genres: political satire; allegory

First Published: August 17, 1945

Setting: Mr. Jones' Manor Farm

Major Thematic Topics: animalism; mob rule; virtue; religion as a drug; distortion of reality; death; false allegiance; political corruption

Motifs: rebellion; power; communism

Major Symbols: Cold War; the barn; the windmill

The three most important aspects of Animal Farm:

Animal Farm is an allegory, which is a story in which concrete and specific characters and situations stand for other characters and situations so as to make a point about them. The main action of Animal Farm stands for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the early years of the Soviet Union. Animalism is really communism. Manor Farm is allegorical of Russia, and the farmer Mr. Jones is the Russian Czar. Old Major stands for either Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, and the pig named Snowball represents the intellectual revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Napoleon stands for Stalin, while the dogs are his secret police. The horse Boxer stands in for the proletariat, or working class.

The setting of Animal Farm is a dystopia, which is an imagined world that is far worse than our own, as opposed to a utopia, which is an ideal place or state. Other dystopian novels include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Orwell's own .

The most famous line from the book is "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." This line is emblematic of the changes that George Orwell believed followed the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia. Rather than eliminating the capitalist class system it was intended to overthrow, the revolution merely replaced it with another hierarchy. The line is also typical of Orwell's belief that those in power usually manipulate language to their own benefit.

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Get free homework help on George Orwell's Animal Farm: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, essays, and character analysis courtesy of CliffsNotes. Animal Farm is George Orwell's satire on equality, where all barnyard animals live free from their human masters' tyranny.

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Not that Napoleon is into democratic elections, or anything. Nope. He operates through cruelty...

We meet Snowball when the pigs decide to spread Old Major's message through the farm. He's "a...

Squealer makes his debut appearance when he justifies the fact that the pigs have hoarded milk...

They're first unleashed on Animal Farm right after Snowball has wowed everyone with his flashy...

At first, things seem to be going well. He's a hard worker, making "I will work harder" into his...

Mollie is stupid, vain, and materialistic. (It's a good thing she's pretty.) From the very...

Despite his nasty temper, Benjamin knows what's up. After the rebellion, the other animals want...

But Old Major's "strange dream" (1.2) doesn't involve anyone dressed in a fur cape driving a...

When the pigs begin sleeping in beds, she thinks that she remembers a rule against animals...

Stories about an awesome place you go after you die, exemption from work, and contempt from the...

Animal Farm opens with a bang: "Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the...

The three dogs are mostly around to have the nine puppies that Napoleon turns into his private...

Napoleon may not be great with a crowd, but he's "especially successful with the sheep" (5.8). He...

Mr. Pilkington owns Foxwood, a neighboring farm. And-he doesn't sound so bad, really. The...

Mr. Frederick owns the neighboring farm of Pinchfield. He may be a human farmer, but he's no...

Whymper acts as "an intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world" (6.7). He's the first...

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The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Advertisement - Guide continues below Not that Napoleon is into democratic elections, or anything.

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A tame raven and Mr. Jones's special pet. The animals dislike him because he doesn't work, but many of them do believe his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain, a wonderful place where animals go when they die. Moses represents organized religion, and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church.

The solicitor whom Napoleon hires to represent Animal Farm to the outside world. He's shrewd and calculating, and by the end of the novel, has done well for himself. Mr. Whymper represents the capitalists who got rich doing business with the USSR.

A pig who writes propaganda poems and songs praising Napoleon and Animal Farm. Minimus represents the takeover of art by propaganda in a totalitarian state that aims to control what its citizens think.

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A tame raven and Mr. Jones's special pet. The animals dislike him because he doesn't work, but many of them do believe his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain, a wonderful place where animals go when they die. Moses represents organized religion, and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church.

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George Orwell, (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India-died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell's lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.

Early life

He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma ( Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the "landless gentry," as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).

Orwell won scholarships to two of England's leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, "Shooting an Elephant" and "A Hanging," classics of expository prose.

Against imperialism

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.

Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book's publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell's next novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller's assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.

Orwell's revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step-so common in the period-of declaring himself a communist.

From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II

Orwell's first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell's subsequent writing.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.

Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys' weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party.

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George Orwell | Biography, Books, Real Name, Political Views, & Facts

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George Orwell, English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the fictionalized but autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

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Animal Farm: Character List | SparkNotes

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A list of all the characters in Animal Farm. Animal Farm characters include: Napoleon, Snowball, Boxer, Squealer, Old Major, Mr. Pilkington, Benjamin, Clover, Mollie, Moses, Mr. Frederick, Mr. Jones, The Dogs, The Hens, The Sheep.

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website about figures of speech but a good one 

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website about figures of speech but a good one 

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Animal Farm: Metaphors and Similes | SparkNotes

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A list of the metaphors and similes in Animal Farm

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Totalitarianism in 1984 by George Orwell | Overview, Quotes & Examples - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Learn about totalitarianism in 1984 by George Orwell. Discover totalitarianism examples in 1984 that depict government control of citizens, and…

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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

British literary critic V. S. Pritchett could have been speaking for many in his review for the New Statesman:

"I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing;" wrote Pritchett after Nineteen Eighty-Four's publication; "and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down."

More than 70 years after its 1948 publication, Orwell's masterpiece routinely tops Amazon's list of overall best selling books. (In January 2017, Penguin Random House ordered 75,000 new copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four following a 9,500% spike in sales, according to The New York Times.)

Today it's not unusual to find influencers on both the right and the left invoke Orwell's book to decry the actions taken against them or to attack political opponents. In 2021, conservative US Senator Josh Hawely said Simon & Schuster's decision to cancel his book deal "could not be more Orwellian," while left-leaning media consistently claimed that former President Donald Trump was Big Brother personified.

Some parallels to Nineteen Eighty-Four we see today are downright chilling, while others seem silly. The question is, how does one separate breathless hyperbole from genuine threats?

To answer this, it's helpful to look at the inspirations for Orwell's book, a terrifying allegory detailing one man's attempt to stay sane in a totalitarian state that tortures the truth-and people-to control society.

Here are three real-life inspirations for Orwell's dystopian novel.

1. Communism

Many people know Orwell was a socialist for many years. Fewer know that Orwell became skeptical of collectivism, which he came to see as "not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of."

This is why there is general agreement that Orwell "modelled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany," two collectivist states hostile to private property and economic freedom.

While some may quibble over to which degree these states were communist/socialist/fascist, what's important to understand is that Orwell was modeling his dystopia on socialist states, particularly communist ones.

Orwell himself makes this perfectly clear in a letter he wrote to Sidney Sheldon, the man who purchased the stage rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"[ Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism," Orwell replied to Mr. Sheldon, "but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."

2. WE, a Novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Few people likely have heard of WE, a piece of dystopian fiction that never gained the traction of Nineteen-Eighty Four. But it's clear the book influenced Orwell who reviewed the work after the death of its author, Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Born in Lebedyan, Russia in 1884, Zamyatin was an enthusiastic socialist who became a member of the Bolshevik Party and participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Following the October Revolution, which he witnessed firsthand after returning from England, Zamyatin "threw himself headlong into party work, sitting on the boards of literary organizations and offering lectures on the craft of fiction," writes Russian literary scholar Jennifer Wilson in The New York Times.

In 1920-21, Zamyatin wrote WE, a dystopian novel set 1,000 years in the future, which explores the pressure to conform in an authoritarian society that has become fully bureaucratized.

WE struck a nerve in the Soviet Union, and not in a good way.

The book quickly fell under the eye of literary censors, who banned the novel prior to publication-despite Zamyatin's Party enthusiasm-making it "the first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union," according to Wilson. The book was not published until 1924, when the book house E. P. Dutton published an English translation, and Orwell would not review it until more than 20 years later.

The extent to which WE influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four is debatable, but The Guardian points out many of the similarities between the books.

The characters in We are numbered rather than named: its Winston Smith is D-503, and its Julia I-330. Its Big Brother is known as the Benefactor, a more human figure than Orwell's almost mythical dictator, who at one point phones D-503 ("D-503? Ah ... You're speaking to the Benefactor. Report to me immediately!"). Where Orwell's apartments come complete with an all-seeing "telescreen", Zamyatin's buildings are simply made of glass, allowing each of the residents - and the "Guardians" who police them - to see in whenever they want. We's Airstrip One, or Oceania, is called OneState. Instead of puzzling over 2+2=5, its lead character is disturbed by the square root of -1.

Readers can determine for themselves how much they think WE influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four. What's clear is that Orwell read the book, was influenced by it, and would see his own dystopian novel published just two years after he reviewed Zamyatin's work.

3. The Spanish Civil War's Propaganda

Perhaps the single greatest theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the idea of totalitarians attempting to control speech to shape reality.

Throughout his life and career, Orwell was motivated by a desire to remain attached to truth, and his experience in the Spanish Civil War shook him deeply. During that conflict-a war involving fascists against communists-Orwell witnessed war propaganda and its corrosive impact on the truth in English newspapers.

In his work George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943, Orwell described how much this frightened him.

"...I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened."

Orwell's brush with totalitarianism, war, and state propaganda left him terrified that "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

This would be a terrifying prospect any time, but it was particularly so during the period when Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the world stage seemed set for a perpetual (cold) war.

***

Few today are likely to dismiss Orwell's book as a mere figment of dystopian literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is, after all, largely a story about one man's attempt to maintain a grip on truth and reality in the face of state power and endless propaganda. In 2022, surely that's a story we can all relate to.
This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times.
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3 Real-Life Inspirations for George Orwell's 1984 | Jon Miltimore

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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. British literary critic V. S.

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Animal Farm | Political Satire, Allegory & Fable

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Animal Farm, anti-utopian satire by George Orwell, published in 1945. One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off

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Research Guides: Children’s Literature: Fairytales & Folktales

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A guide to researching children’s literature, including links to book awards, online children’s book collections, author biographies, and links to various genres of children’s books in the library collection

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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903. Over the course of his short life (he died in 1950, aged 46) he wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction. In this section, you can find out more about the books Orwell wrote.

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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903. Over the course of his short life (he died in 1950, aged 46) he wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction. In this section, you can find out more about the books Orwell wrote.

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Get free homework help on George Orwell's Animal Farm: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, essays, and character analysis courtesy of CliffsNotes. Animal Farm is George Orwell's satire on equality, where all barnyard animals live free from their human masters' tyranny.

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice.

Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally. Having spent much of his time with the working-class people of England, along with his experience of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell believed that socialism is the key to fight against capitalism. Thus, he writes "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" in his essay "Why I Write."

History behind Animal Farm

Orwell conceived the idea of 'Animal Farm' when he was thinking of a way to best communicate his opinions on socialism and Stalin. The concept of Socialism is examined in many nonfiction works of George Orwell. On contrary, in this allegorical novel, he satires the false notion or belief the Russian Revolution of 1917 created among the people. They believed that Russia was stepping towards socialism for millions of poor and oppressed Russians, but he felt that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards the opposite: the totalitarianism.

The novel presents subtly, how a group of Animals (citizens) of a farm (nation), eventually led into a terrible life ruled by a totalitarian regime, when they had the promise for freedom and equality. He has given a model for a "socialism gone wrong" for the animals in the novel reflect different kinds of humans and their struggles for freedom and power.

Initially, in 1917, it looked as if Karl Marx's dreams have become a reality. For, after a politically complicated civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, was forced to give up his throne and Vladimir Lenin, a Russian intellectual revolutionary, seized power in the name of the Communist Party (Snowball being on top after Mr Jones was overthrown). The new regime brought the land and industry controlled by the private under government supervision.

As a first step in restoring Russia to prosperity and to modernize the nation's primitive infrastructure, electricity was brought to the countryside (Snowball's idea of building the windmill). After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, gained power and banished Trotsky. He accumulated power by exercising brutality on his perceived political enemies and overseeing the purge of approximately twenty million Soviet citizens. Gradually, his desire for power turned him into a dictator than a communist leader, as depicted through the character Napoleon in the novel.

Publication - Earlier Rejection

In the beginning, Orwell faced a lot of issues getting the manuscript published. Mainly, it was because of the fear that the book might upset the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Since the book was written towards the end of the Second World War, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch that includes his regular publisher Gollancz.

Four publishers refused to publish ' Animal Farm' before it was published by Secker and Warburg in 1945. Finally, on August 17, 1945, ' Animal Farm ' was published in England, followed by a year later in the United States by the Harcourt Brace & Company.

Frederic Warburg also faced pressures against publication, even from people in his own office and from his wife Pamela, who felt that it was not the moment for ingratitude towards Stalin and the heroic Red Army, which had played a major part in defeating Adolf Hitler. When Orwell submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where T. S. Eliot was the director, he rejected stating that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint "which I take to be generally Trotskyite". Though Eliot praised the book to be of "good writing" he declared that he found the view "not convincing."

Preface to Animal Farm

In his "The Freedom of the Press," proposed preface to ' Animal Farm,' Orwell indicates that despite the number of published books in the U.K. was quite low due to the war, and people were yearning for more books, his book was still rejected by publishers. He describes how the British press was controlled by wealthy men and the government. "I can see now ....Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable." By expressing his concerns, he asserts that writers and novelists have the right to defend themselves and their Ideals, just as Russia has the right to defend its own belief in communism.

Illustrated Editions of Animal Farm

Following the first edition, in 1945, Orwell wrote to Frederic Warburg expressing his interest in pursuing the possibility of the political cartoonist David Low illustrating ' Animal Farm.' In spite of David Low declaring the book to be "an excellent bit of satire ... it would illustrate perfectly," nothing came out of this. Also, a trial issue produced by Secker & Warburg in 1956 illustrated by John Driver was abandoned. In 1984, the Folio Society published an edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. Following this, in 1995, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of ' Animal Farm ', an edition illustrated by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman was published by Secker & Warburg.

Lasting Legacy

George Orwell is often recognized as a leading exponent of twentieth-century English prose and one of the most influential satiric writers. Even after decades, wide ranges of his works are within the reach of the general reader, and they are read and analyzed by scholars and critics from different approaches. One of the reasons for the lasting appeal of his work lies in the qualities of its prose. Though he is recognized more as a political writer, his mastery of style cannot be denied, for they testify for his excellent quality.

Despite all the odds, George Orwell faced before publishing ' Animal Farm,' it still remains one of the best political tales of all time. Since its publication in 1945, the novel retains its freshness in the realm of time which can be read generation after generation. In 2005, Time magazine chose it as one of the 100 best English-language novels. Also, the book ranks at 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th Century Novels.

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Animal Farm Historical Context | Book Analysis

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice. Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally.

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Embedded Style Sheet
"Animal Farm: An Overview." Gale Essential Overviews: Scholarly, Gale, 2015.
In his short novel Animal Farm (1945), English author George Orwell (1903-50) allegorizes the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist autocracy was pushed out and the Bolsheviks came into power, and the revolution's incremental betrayal of its supporters under dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). Drawing on fable conventions, Orwell tells a farmyard story, casting revolutionary leaders Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), and Stalin as pigs, which-along with other common farm animals such as horses and hens-rebel against the tyranny of tsar-like farmer Mr. Jones. Set on a small English farm, the novel follows a collective of working animals that, as the pigs exploit them anew, toil pathetically day after day in the belief that they are remaking the farm as a republic.

Orwell wrote Animal Farm toward the end of World War II (1939-45), when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was being hailed by the Allied forces (including the British) for its decisive victories over Nazi Germany at Stalingrad (1942-43) and Kursk (1943). As such, he had difficulty finding a publisher prepared to offend Russian sensibilities. Gollancz and Faber and Faber, among other publishing houses, rejected the book outright. London publisher Jonathan Cape came close to printing it but was persuaded to reject the work by a Ministry of Information official later presumed to have been a Soviet spy. In spite of this reluctance, when it was finally released in England by Secker and Warburg in 1945, the novel was a runaway success, as it was the following year in the United States-no doubt helped by the dissolution of wartime alliances and the first rumblings of the Cold War. Regarded by many as Orwell's finest work, and certainly his first truly popular one, Animal Farm has long been ranked as among the best books of the twentieth century.

Historical and literary context

Following the revolution, the Russian Communist Party recast the former empire as a federation of republics with governments informed by the socialist principles of German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-83). Initially under the leadership of Lenin, Soviet Russia then entered an era of reconstruction, during which it privatized all aspects of the economy and attempted to control any forms of dissent to its Marxist-Leninist goals. After Lenin's death, Stalin effected a coup from within the Communist Party, and, although making a dogma of Marxist-Leninism, he turned the party into a properly totalitarian apparatus. During what is referred to as the Great Purge, millions of enemies of the state were executed or sent to forced-labor camps. Meanwhile, hasty attempts to modernize the peasant agriculture brought on deathly famines. Animal Farm retells this history metaphorically-in the sly maneuverings of the boar, Napoleon, to oust his rivals and take control of the farm; in his forcing the animals to build an electricity-generating windmill, which leaves no time for food production; and in his purges of alleged traitors to the animals' revolution against Mr. Jones.

The novel begins with Lenin (some say Marx or a Lenin-Marx composite), Trotsky, and Stalin figured in the characters of Old Major, Snowball, and Napoleon, respectively-pigs on a farm where animals are bred to produce (like the hens), to labor (like the cart horses), and to be fattened for slaughter (like the pigs). Old Major rouses the animals to rebel against the "tyranny of man," and the Russian Revolution is satirized as a scrap between Mr. Jones and his animals. The animals, victorious, take over, and with a newfound sense of dignity set about everyday tasks such as harvesting hay. However, the pigs have only just posted the "seven commandments of Animalism," including the tenet that "all animals are equal," when they opt out of the hard labor and appropriate exclusively for themselves the comforts of the farmhouse. Here, what culminates in Napoleon's dictatorship tragically inflects the lives of the common animals, who continue to toil in the belief that they are forging Old Major's republic.

Bunt (1924) by Polish novelist Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (1867-1925) bears a remarkable resemblance to Animal Farm, although it is not clear whether Orwell knew of the work. The novel allegorizes the same revolution with a story of farmyard animals rebelling against their human masters in a struggle for equality that ends in terror and oppression. Orwell's next novel after Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), offers a comparably symbolic-if more realistic-vision of everyday life impoverished culturally and politically by a Stalinesque regime. The fearful preoccupation with Stalinism also informs Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), a nonfiction account of his experience in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) fighting for a leftist militia.

In addition to pleasing popular audiences, Animal Farm appealed to political conservatives who recognized its value as a propaganda tool for discouraging socialist affiliations. Thus the Central Intelligence Agency clandestinely funded the 1954 animated film adaptation by John Halas (1912-95) and Joy Batchelor (1914-91), which was also the first feature-length animated film in English cinema history. Critics in the early twenty-first century have been just as attentive to Orwell's politics, yet there has been a greater tendency to acknowledge the novel as a work of politically informed art rather than of mere propaganda.

Themes and style

The grand theme of Animal Farm has to do with the capacity for ordinary individuals to continue to believe in a revolution that has been utterly betrayed. Orwell attempts to reveal how those in power-Napoleon and his fellow pigs-pervert the democratic promise of the revolution. The emotional force of the novel comes from the author's depictions of those ordinary animals who unthinkingly give themselves in good faith to working for the very system by which they are ruthlessly exploited. A case in point is Boxer, one of two cart horses among the pigs' "most faithful disciples." The horses "had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers, they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals." Whether harvesting hay or fetching stones from the quarry, Boxer works harder than any other animal, yet still he adopts the motto "I will work harder." So selfless is he in his service, in fact, that he works himself close to death. At this point Napoleon, while purporting to send him to the hospital, sells him to the slaughterhouse, then spends the money from his corpse on whiskey for the pigs.

The novel develops according to a recognizable dramatic pattern that underscores the tragedy of what it means to never lose faith in a betrayed revolution. For example, when the animals participate in the so-called Battle of the Cowshed, they witness Snowball decorated as "Animal Hero, First Class" for distinguishing himself in battle against Jones. Napoleon later revises the history with contradictory details-announcing that Snowball actually fought alongside Jones against the animals. When the animals resist the new story, the pig Squealer (a master deceiver) convinces them that their memories are faulty. This pattern of firsthand experience superseded by revisionist propaganda underscores the tragedy, as Orwell sees it, of ordinary individuals who forego their better judgment in letting a totalitarian regime dictate a false reality.

Orwell chose a difficult genre-the fable, often equated with children's literature-to offer a complex critique of one of the most problematic regimes in modern history. He succeeds by capturing both realistically and amusingly the characteristics of many of the animals and by convincing the reader that these characteristics lend themselves, at least metaphorically, to understanding human life in the totalitarian context. Rather than simply mocking his subjects, Orwell suggests that there is indeed something beastly about them: that there is something sheep-like about those who learn dogma by rote (who bleat "two legs bad, four legs good!" or "four legs good, two legs better!" interchangeably), something dog-like about secret police trained to attack on command, and something horse-like about those who unthinkingly give themselves body and soul to the bankrupt cause.

Critical discussion

Animal Farm was released to critical acclaim. Writing for the New York Times, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. hailed it as "a simple story perhaps, but a story of deadly simplicity ... [a] superbly controlled and brilliantly sustained satire." Not everyone agreed with Schlesinger, however. Writer and critic W. J. Turner, for instance, thought the novel was marred by "pessimism" and accused Orwell of being "grossly unfair to Stalin in his account of him as 'Napoleon.'" Still, the fact that the novel has been a staple in classrooms for generations suggests that critics like Turner did not have the last say.

Writing in 1989, activist-scholar John Molyneux (1948-) summed up Animal Farm as "probably the most popular and influential piece of literary propaganda produced in English, perhaps in any language, this century." Molyneux claimed it was "likely that far more people have learned what they know of the fate of the Russian Revolution from here than from any other source." In his introduction to a 2003 edition of the novel (with Nineteen Eighty-Four), essayist and critic Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) confirmed Animal Farm's distinction as "the twentieth century's most successful satire." As Hitchens and Molyneux both make clear, although the novel has long appealed to younger readers with scant knowledge of Soviet history, the book's legacy rests on its political force.

Indeed, Orwell scholars continue to read the novel for its political insights. Discussing The Rule of the Pigs, Oleg Minich's 2005 cartoon adaptation of Animal Farm, Olena Nikolayenko insisted in her 2007 essay in PS: Political Science and Politics that the book speaks profoundly to contemporary crises in and for democracy-in Minich's case, in the former Soviet Republic of Belarus. Other twenty-first-century scholars similarly return to Animal Farm to think through enduring political issues. David Dwan, for instance, in an ELH ( English Literary History) article, considered Orwell's treatment of equality as a means of probing contemporary practices under Western democracy that do not always live up to prevailing ideals. Meanwhile, scholars such as Paul Kirschner have tried to reclaim the text as not only a political but also a literary work, reminding readers of Orwell's own declared intention "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."

Sources

Dwan, David. "Orwell's Paradox: Equality in 'Animal Farm.'" ELH: English Literary History 79.3 (2012): 655-83.

Kirschner, Paul. "The Dual Purpose of 'Animal Farm.'" Review of English Studies 55.222 (2004): 759-86.

Molyneux, John. "Animal Farm Revisited." International Socialism Journal 2.44 (1989): 99-112. Print.

Nikolayenko, Olena. "Web Cartoons in a Closed Society: Animal Farm as an Allegory of Post-Communist Belarus." PS: Political Science and Politics 40.2 (2007): 307-10.

Orwell, George. Animal Farm and 1984. Introduction by Christopher Hitchens. New York: Harcourt, 2003. Print.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. "Mr. Orwell and the Communists: His 'Animal Farm' Is a Compassionate and Illuminating Fable for Our Times." New York Times 25 Aug. 1946: 124+.

Turner, W. J. "How It Happened." Rev. of Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Spectator 17 Aug. 1945: 156-57.

Further Reading

Cohen, Karl. "The Cartoon That Came in from the Cold." Guardian. Guardian News and Media , 6 Mar. 2003. Web. 1 July 2014.

Fadaee, Elaheh. "Symbols, Metaphors, and Similes in Literature: A Case Study of Animal Farm." International Journal of English and Literature 2.2 (2011): 19-27.

Leab, Daniel J. Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007. Print.

Letemendia, V. C. "Revolution on Animal Farm: Orwell's Neglected Commentary." Journal of Modern Literature 18.1 (1992): 127-37.

Orwell, George. "The Freedom of the Press." Times Literary Supplement 15 Sept. 1972. Print.

---. "Why I Write." Essays. 1946.London: Penguin, 2007.Print.

Rodden, John. "Appreciating Animal Farm in the New Millennium." Modern Age 45.1 (2003): 67-76

Snyder, C. R. "Hope and the Other Strengths: Lessons from Animal Farm." Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 23.5 (2004): 624-27.

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Animal Farm Themes, Symbolism, Characters & Literary Devices

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Gale offers an introduction to themes, symbols & motifs in Animal Farm. Click to read our analysis of literary devices, allusions and more.

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Animal Farm | Political Satire, Allegory & Fable

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Animal Farm, anti-utopian satire by George Orwell, published in 1945. One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off

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George Orwell  Biography

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Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell produced literary criticism, 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 industrial 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, literature, language and culture.

Born in India, Blair was raised and educated in England from when he was one year old. After school he became an Imperial policeman in Burma, before returning to Suffolk, England, where he began his writing career as George Orwell-a name inspired by a favourite location, the River Orwell. He made a living from occasional pieces of journalism, and also worked as a teacher or bookseller while living in London. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s, his success as a writer grew and his first books were published. He was wounded fighting in the Spanish Civil War, leading to his first period of ill health on return to England. During the Second World War he worked as a journalist and, between 1941 and 1943, for the BBC. The 1945 publication of Animal Farm led to fame during his lifetime. During the final years of his life he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and moved between Jura in Scotland and London. It was published in June 1949, less than a year before his death.

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", " Room 101", " Newspeak", " memory hole", " doublethink", and " thoughtcrime". In 2008, ranked George Orwell second among "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal (now Bihar), British India into what he described as a " lower-upper-middle class" family. His great-great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy slaveowning country gentleman and absentee owner of two Jamaican plantations; hailing from Dorset, he married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the 8th Earl of Westmorland. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was an Anglican clergyman. Orwell's father was Richard Walmesley Blair, who worked as a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair ( née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures. 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. In 2014 restoration work began on Orwell's birthplace and ancestral house in Motihari.

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, he did not see his father until 1912. 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. 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. 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". Blair hated the school 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 , published several of Orwell's essays.

Before the First World War, the family moved 2 miles (3 km) south 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." 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.

While at St Cyprian's, Blair wrote two poems that were published in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. He came second to Connolly in the Harrow History Prize, had his work praised by the school's external examiner, and earned scholarships to Wellington and Eton. But inclusion on the Eton scholarship roll did not guarantee a place, and none was immediately available for Blair. He chose to stay at St Cyprian's until December 1916, in case a place at Eton became available.

WWI poem by 11-year-old Blair, "Awake! Young Men of England", published in 1914 in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard

In January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term. In May 1917 a place became available as a King's Scholar at Eton. At this time the family lived at Mall Chambers, Notting Hill Gate. Blair remained at Eton until December 1921, when he left midway between his 18th and 19th birthdays. Wellington was "beastly", Blair told Jacintha, but he said he was "interested and happy" at Eton. His principal tutor was A. S. F. Gow, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley. Steven Runciman, who was at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his contemporaries appreciated Huxley's linguistic flair. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate with each other.

Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his studies, but during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a college magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other publications- College Days and Bubble and Squeak-and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to a university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about the East, and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance examination. In December 1921 he left Eton and travelled to join his retired father, mother, and younger sister Avril, who that month had moved to 40 Stradbroke Road, Southwold, Suffolk, the first of their four homes in the town. Blair was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his Classics, English, and History. He passed the entrance exam, coming seventh out of the 26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark.

Blair's maternal grandmother lived at Moulmein, so he chose a posting in Burma, then still a province of British India. In October 1922 he sailed on board SS Herefordshire via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. A month later, he arrived at Rangoon and travelled to the police training school in Mandalay. He was appointed an Assistant District Superintendent (on probation) on 29 November 1922, with effect from 27 November and at the pay of Rs. 525 per month. After a short posting at Maymyo, Burma's principal hill station, he was posted to the frontier outpost of Myaungmya in the Irrawaddy Delta at the beginning of 1924.

Working as an imperial police officer gave him considerable responsibility while most of his contemporaries were still at university in England. When he was posted farther east in the Delta to Twante as a sub-divisional officer, he was responsible for the security of some 200,000 people. At the end of 1924, he was posted to Syriam, closer to Rangoon. Syriam had the refinery of the Burmah Oil Company, "the surrounding land a barren waste, all vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night from the stacks of the refinery." But the town was near Rangoon, a cosmopolitan seaport, and Blair went into the city as often as he could, "to browse in a bookshop; to eat well-cooked food; to get away from the boring routine of police life". In September 1925 he went to Insein, the home of Insein Prison, the second largest prison in Burma. In Insein, he had "long talks on every conceivable subject" with Elisa Maria Langford-Rae (who later married Kazi Lhendup Dorjee). She noted his "sense of utter fairness in minutest details". By this time, Blair had completed his training and was receiving a monthly salary of Rs. 740, including allowances.

Blair recalled he faced hostility from the Burmese, "in the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves". He recalled that "I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible".

In Burma, Blair acquired a reputation as an outsider. He spent much of his time alone, reading or pursuing non- activities, such as attending the churches of the Karen ethnic group. A colleague, Roger Beadon, recalled (in a 1969 recording for the BBC) that Blair was fast to learn the language and that before he left Burma, "was able to speak fluently with Burmese priests in 'very high-flown Burmese'." Blair made changes to his appearance in Burma that remained for the rest of his life, including adopting a pencil moustache. Emma Larkin writes in the introduction to Burmese Days, "While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to those worn by officers of the British regiments stationed there. [He] also acquired some tattoos; on each knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like this-they are believed to protect against bullets and snake bites."

In April 1926 he moved to Moulmein, where his maternal grandmother lived. At the end of that year, he was assigned to Katha in Upper Burma, where he contracted dengue fever in 1927. Entitled to a leave in England that year, he was allowed to return in July due to his illness. While on leave in England and on holiday with his family in Cornwall in September 1927, he reappraised his life. Deciding against returning to Burma, he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer, with effect from 12 March 1928 after five-and-a-half years of service. He drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays " A Hanging" (1931) and " Shooting an Elephant" (1936).

In England, he settled back in the family home at Southwold, renewing acquaintance with local friends and attending an Old Etonian dinner. He visited his old tutor Gow at Cambridge for advice on becoming a writer. In 1927 he moved to London. Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, helped him find lodgings, and by the end of 1927 he had moved into rooms in Portobello Road; a blue plaque commemorates his residence there. Pitter's involvement in the move "would have lent it a reassuring respectability in Mrs. Blair's eyes." Pitter had a sympathetic interest in Blair's writing, pointed out weaknesses in his poetry, and advised him to write about what he knew. In fact he decided to write of "certain aspects of the present that he set out to know" and ventured into the East End of London -the first of the occasional sorties he would make to discover for himself the world of poverty and the down-and-outers who inhabit it. He had found a subject. These sorties, explorations, expeditions, tours or immersions were made intermittently over a period of five years.

In imitation of Jack London, whose writing he admired (particularly The People of the Abyss), Blair started to explore the poorer parts of London. On his first outing he set out to Limehouse Causeway, spending his first night in a common lodging house, possibly George Levy's "kip". For a while he "went native" in his own country, dressing like a tramp, adopting the name P.S. Burton and making no concessions to middle-class and expectations; he recorded his experiences of the low life for use in " The Spike", his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

In early 1928 he moved to Paris. He lived in the rue du Pot de Fer, a working class district in the 5th arrondissement. His aunt Ellen (Nellie) Kate Limouzin also lived in Paris (with the Esperantist Eugène Lanti) and gave him social and, when necessary, financial support. He began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days, but nothing else survives from that period. He was more successful as a journalist and published articles in , a political/literary journal edited by Henri Barbusse (his first article as a professional writer, "La Censure en Angleterre", appeared in that journal on 6 October 1928); , where his first article to appear in England, "A Farthing Newspaper", was printed on 29 December 1928; and Le Progrès Civique (founded by the left-wing coalition Le Cartel des Gauches). Three pieces appeared in successive weeks in Le Progrès Civique: discussing unemployment, a day in the life of a tramp, and the beggars of London, respectively. "In one or another of its destructive forms, poverty was to become his obsessive subject-at the heart of almost everything he wrote until Homage to Catalonia."

He fell seriously ill in February 1929 and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. His experiences there were the basis of his essay " How the Poor Die", published in 1946. He chose not to identify the hospital, and indeed was deliberately misleading about its location. Shortly afterwards, he had all his money stolen from his lodging house. Whether through necessity or to collect material, he undertook menial jobs such as dishwashing in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in Down and Out in Paris and London. In August 1929, he sent a copy of " The Spike" to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine in London. The magazine was edited by Max Plowman and Sir Richard Rees, and Plowman accepted the work for publication.

Southwold Pier in Southwold. Orwell wrote A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) in the town, basing the fictional town of Knype Hill partly on Southwold.

In December 1929 after nearly two years in Paris, Blair returned to England and went directly to his parents' house in Southwold, a coastal town in Suffolk, which remained his base for the next five years. The family was well established in the town, and his sister Avril was running a tea-house there. He became acquainted with many local people, including Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman's daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls' School in the town. Although Salkeld rejected his offer of marriage, she remained a friend and regular correspondent for many years. He also renewed friendships with older friends, such as Dennis Collings, whose girlfriend Eleanor Jacques was also to play a part in his life.

In early 1930 he stayed briefly in Bramley, Leeds, with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin, who was as unappreciative of Blair as when they knew each other as children. Blair was writing reviews for Adelphi and acting as a private tutor to a disabled child at Southwold. He then became tutor to three young brothers, one of whom, Richard Peters, later became a distinguished academic. "His history in these years is marked by dualities and contrasts. There is Blair leading a respectable, outwardly eventless life at his parents' house in Southwold, writing; then in contrast, there is Blair as Burton (the name he used in his down-and-out episodes) in search of experience in the kips and spikes, in the East End, on the road, and in the hop fields of Kent." He went painting and bathing on the beach, and there he met Mabel and Francis Fierz, who later influenced his career. Over the next year he visited them in London, often meeting their friend Max Plowman. He also often stayed at the homes of Ruth Pitter and Richard Rees, where he could "change" for his sporadic tramping expeditions. One of his jobs was domestic work at a lodgings for half a crown (two shillings and sixpence, or one-eighth of a pound) a day.

Blair now contributed regularly to Adelphi, with " A Hanging" appearing in August 1931. From August to September 1931 his explorations of poverty continued, and, like the protagonist of A Clergyman's Daughter, he followed the East End tradition of working in the Kent hop fields. He kept a diary about his experiences there. Afterwards, he lodged in the Tooley Street kip, but could not stand it for long, and with financial help from his parents moved to Windsor Street, where he stayed until Christmas. "Hop Picking", by Eric Blair, appeared in the October 1931 issue of New Statesman, whose editorial staff included his old friend Cyril Connolly. Mabel Fierz put him in contact with Leonard Moore, who became his literary agent in April 1932.

At this time Jonathan Cape rejected A Scullion's Diary, the first version of Down and Out. On the advice of Richard Rees, he offered it to Faber and Faber, but their editorial director, T. S. Eliot, also rejected it. Blair ended the year by deliberately getting himself arrested, so that he could experience Christmas in prison, but after he was picked up and taken to Bethnal Green police station in the East End of London the authorities did not regard his "drunk and disorderly" behaviour as imprisonable, and after two days in a cell he returned home to Southwold.

In April 1932 Blair became a teacher at The Hawthorns High School, a school for boys, in Hayes, West London. This was a small school offering private schooling for children of local tradesmen and shopkeepers, and had only 14 or 16 boys aged between ten and sixteen, and one other master. While at the school he became friendly with the curate of the local parish church and became involved with activities there. Mabel Fierz had pursued matters with Moore, and at the end of June 1932, Moore told Blair that Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish A Scullion's Diary for a £40 advance, through his recently founded publishing house, Victor Gollancz Ltd, which was an outlet for radical and socialist works.

At the end of the summer term in 1932, Blair returned to Southwold, where his parents had used a legacy to buy their own home. Blair and his sister Avril spent the holidays making the house habitable while he also worked on Burmese Days. He was also spending time with Eleanor Jacques, but her attachment to Dennis Collings remained an obstacle to his hopes of a more serious relationship.

"Clink", an essay describing his failed attempt to get sent to prison, appeared in the August 1932 number of Adelphi. He returned to teaching at Hayes and prepared for the publication of his book, now known as Down and Out in Paris and London. He wished to publish under a different name to avoid any embarrassment to his family over his time as a "tramp". In a letter to Moore (dated 15 November 1932), he left the choice of pseudonym to Moore and to Gollancz. Four days later, he wrote to Moore, suggesting the pseudonyms P. S. Burton (a name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. He finally adopted the pen name George Orwell because "It is a good round English name." The name George was inspired by the patron saint of England, and Orwell after the River Orwell in Suffolk which was one of Orwell's favourite locations.

Down and Out in Paris and London was published by Victor Gollancz in London on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews, with Cecil Day-Lewis complimenting Orwell's "clarity and good sense", and The Times Literary Supplement comparing Orwell's eccentric characters to the characters of Dickens. Down and Out was modestly successful and was next published by Harper & Brothers in New York.

In mid-1933 Blair left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge, west London. This was a much larger establishment with 200 pupils and a full complement of staff. He acquired a motorcycle and took trips through the surrounding countryside. On one of these expeditions he became soaked and caught a chill that developed into pneumonia. He was taken to a cottage hospital in Uxbridge, where for a time his life was believed to be in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and, supported by his parents, never returned to teaching.

He was disappointed when Gollancz turned down Burmese Days, mainly on the grounds of potential suits for libel, but Harper were prepared to publish it in the United States. Meanwhile, Blair started work on the novel A Clergyman's Daughter, drawing upon his life as a teacher and on life in Southwold. Eleanor Jacques was now married and had gone to Singapore and Brenda Salkeld had left for Ireland, so Blair was relatively isolated in Southwold-working on the allotments, walking alone and spending time with his father. Eventually in October, after sending A Clergyman's Daughter to Moore, he left for London to take a job that had been found for him by his aunt Nellie Limouzin.

This job was as a part-time assistant in Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope, who were friends of Nellie Limouzin in the Esperanto movement. The Westropes were friendly and provided him with comfortable accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was sharing the job with Jon Kimche, who also lived with the Westropes. Blair worked at the shop in the afternoons and had his mornings free to write and his evenings free to socialise. These experiences provided background for the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). As well as the various guests of the Westropes, he was able to enjoy the company of Richard Rees and the Adelphi writers and Mabel Fierz. The Westropes and Kimche were members of the Independent Labour Party, although at this time Blair was not seriously politically active. He was writing for the Adelphi and preparing A Clergyman's Daughter and Burmese Days for publication.

English Heritage blue plaque in Kentish Town, London where Orwell lived from August 1935 until January 1936

At the beginning of 1935 he had to move out of Warwick Mansions, and Mabel Fierz found him a flat in Parliament Hill. A Clergyman's Daughter was published on 11 March 1935. In early 1935 Blair met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, when his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, who was studying for a master's degree in psychology at University College London, invited some of her fellow students to a party. One of these students, Elizaveta Fen, a biographer and future translator of Chekhov, recalled Blair and his friend Richard Rees "draped" at the fireplace, looking, she thought, "moth-eaten and prematurely aged." Around this time, Blair had started to write reviews for The New English Weekly.

In June, Burmese Days was published and Cyril Connolly's positive review in the New Statesman prompted Blair to re-establish contact with his old friend. In August, he moved into a flat, at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner Heppenstall. The relationship was sometimes awkward and Blair and Heppenstall even came to blows, though they remained friends and later worked together on BBC broadcasts. Blair was now working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and also tried unsuccessfully to write a serial for the News Chronicle. By October 1935 his flatmates had moved out and he was struggling to pay the rent on his own. He remained until the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers' Corner. In 1980, English Heritage honoured Orwell with a blue plaque at his Kentish Town residence.

At this time, Victor Gollancz suggested Orwell spend a short time investigating social conditions in economically depressed Northern England. Two years earlier, J. B. Priestley had written about England north of the Trent, sparking an interest in reportage. The Depression had also introduced a number of working-class writers from the North of England to the reading public. It was one of these working-class authors, Jack Hilton, whom Orwell sought for advice. Orwell had written to Hilton seeking lodging and asking for recommendations on his route. Hilton was unable to provide him lodging, but suggested that he travel to Wigan rather than Rochdale, "for there are the colliers and they're good stuff."

On 31 January 1936, Orwell set out by public transport and on foot, reaching Manchester via Coventry, Stafford, the Potteries and Macclesfield. Arriving in Manchester after the banks had closed, he had to stay in a common lodging-house. The next day he picked up a list of contacts sent by Richard Rees. One of these, the trade union official Frank Meade, suggested Wigan, where Orwell spent February staying in dirty lodgings over a tripe shop. In Wigan, he visited many homes to see how people lived, took detailed notes of housing conditions and wages earned, went down Bryn Hall coal mine, and used the local public library to consult public health records and reports on working conditions in mines.

During this time, he was distracted by concerns about style and possible libel in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He made a quick visit to Liverpool and during March, stayed in south Yorkshire, spending time in Sheffield and Barnsley. As well as visiting mines, including Grimethorpe, and observing social conditions, he attended meetings of the Communist Party and of Oswald Mosley ("his speech the usual claptrap-The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews") where he saw the tactics of the Blackshirts ("...one is liable to get both a hammering and a fine for asking a question which Mosley finds it difficult to answer."). He also made visits to his sister at Headingley, during which he visited the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, where he was "chiefly impressed by a pair of Charlotte Brontë's cloth-topped boots, very small, with square toes and lacing up at the sides."

No 2 Kits Lane, Wallington, Hertfordshire, Orwell's residence c. 1936-1940

Orwell needed somewhere he could concentrate on writing his book, and once again help was provided by Aunt Nellie, who was living at Wallington, Hertfordshire in a very small 16th-century cottage called the "Stores". Wallington was a tiny village 35 miles (56 km) north of London, and the cottage had almost no modern facilities. Orwell took over the tenancy and moved in on 2 April 1936. He started work on The Road to Wigan Pier by the end of April, but also spent hours working on the garden, planting a rose garden which is still extant, and revealing four years later that "outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening". He also tested the possibility of reopening the Stores as a village shop. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published by Gollancz on 20 April 1936. On 4 August, Orwell gave a talk at the Adelphi Summer School held at Langham, entitled An Outsider Sees the Distressed Areas; others who spoke at the school included John Strachey, Max Plowman, Karl Polanyi and Reinhold Niebuhr.

The result of his journeys through the north was The Road to Wigan Pier, published by Gollancz for the Left Book Club in 1937. The first half of the book documents his social investigations of Lancashire and Yorkshire, including an evocative description of working life in the coal mines. The second half is a long essay on his upbringing and the development of his political conscience, which includes an argument for socialism (although he goes to lengths to balance the concerns and goals of socialism with the barriers it faced from the movement's own advocates at the time, such as "priggish" and "dull" socialist intellectuals and "proletarian" socialists with little grasp of the actual ideology). Gollancz feared the second half would offend readers and added a disculpatory preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain.

Orwell's research for The Road to Wigan Pier led to him being placed under surveillance by the Special Branch from 1936, for 12 years, until one year before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy on 9 June 1936. Shortly afterwards, the political crisis began in Spain and Orwell followed developments there closely. At the end of the year, concerned by Francisco Franco's military uprising (supported by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and local groups such as Falange), Orwell decided to go to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. Under the erroneous impression that he needed papers from some left-wing organisation to cross the frontier, on John Strachey's recommendation he applied unsuccessfully to Harry Pollitt, leader of the British Communist Party. Pollitt was suspicious of Orwell's political reliability; he asked him whether he would undertake to join the International Brigade and advised him to get a safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Not wishing to commit himself until he had seen the situation in situ, Orwell instead used his Independent Labour Party contacts to get a letter of introduction to John McNair in Barcelona.

The square in Barcelona renamed in Orwell's honour

Orwell set out for Spain on about 23 December 1936, dining with Henry Miller in Paris on the way. Miller told Orwell that going to fight in the Civil War out of some sense of obligation or guilt was "sheer stupidity" and that the Englishman's ideas "about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney". A few days later in Barcelona, Orwell met John McNair of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) Office who quoted him: "I've come to fight against Fascism", but if someone had asked him what he was fighting for, "I should have answered: 'Common decency'". Orwell stepped into a complex political situation in Catalonia. The Republican government was supported by a number of factions with conflicting aims, including the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM - Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (a wing of the Spanish Communist Party, which was backed by Soviet arms and aid). Orwell was at first exasperated by this "kaleidoscope" of political parties and trade unions, "with their tiresome names". The ILP was linked to the POUM so Orwell joined the POUM.

After a time at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona he was sent to the relatively quiet Aragon Front under Georges Kopp. By January 1937 he was at Alcubierre 1,500 feet (460 m) above sea level, in the depth of winter. There was very little military action and Orwell was shocked by the lack of munitions, food and firewood as well as other extreme deprivations. With his Cadet Corps and police training, Orwell was quickly made a corporal. On the arrival of a British ILP Contingent about three weeks later, Orwell and the other English militiaman, Williams, were sent with them to Monte Oscuro. The newly arrived ILP contingent included Bob Smillie, Bob Edwards, Stafford Cottman and Jack Branthwaite. The unit was then sent on to Huesca.

Meanwhile, back in England, Eileen had been handling the issues relating to the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier before setting out for Spain herself, leaving Nellie Limouzin to look after The Stores. Eileen volunteered for a post in John McNair's office and with the help of Georges Kopp paid visits to her husband, bringing him English tea, chocolate and cigars. Orwell had to spend some days in hospital with a poisoned hand and had most of his possessions stolen by the staff. He returned to the front and saw some action in a night attack on the Nationalist trenches where he chased an enemy soldier with a bayonet and bombed an enemy rifle position.

In April, Orwell returned to Barcelona. Wanting to be sent to the Madrid front, which meant he "must join the International Column", he approached a Communist friend attached to the Spanish Medical Aid and explained his case. "Although he did not think much of the Communists, Orwell was still ready to treat them as friends and allies. That would soon change." This was the time of the Barcelona May Days and Orwell was caught up in the factional fighting. He spent much of the time on a roof, with a stack of novels, but encountered Jon Kimche from his Hampstead days during the stay. The subsequent campaign of lies and distortion carried out by the Communist press, in which the POUM was accused of collaborating with the fascists, had a dramatic effect on Orwell. Instead of joining the International Brigades as he had intended, he decided to return to the Aragon Front. Once the May fighting was over, he was approached by a Communist friend who asked if he still intended transferring to the International Brigades. Orwell expressed surprise that they should still want him, because according to the Communist press he was a fascist. "No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men."

After his return to the front, he was wounded in the throat by a sniper's bullet. At 6 ft 2 in (1.88 m), Orwell was considerably taller than the Spanish fighters and had been warned against standing against the trench parapet. Unable to speak, and with blood pouring from his mouth, Orwell was carried on a stretcher to Siétamo, loaded on an ambulance and after a bumpy journey via Barbastro arrived at the hospital in Lleida. He recovered sufficiently to get up and on 27 May 1937 was sent on to Tarragona and two days later to a POUM sanatorium in the suburbs of Barcelona. The bullet had missed his main artery by the barest margin and his voice was barely audible. It had been such a clean shot that the wound immediately went through the process of cauterisation. He received electrotherapy treatment and was declared medically unfit for service.

By the middle of June, the political situation in Barcelona had deteriorated and the POUM-painted by the pro-Soviet Communists as a Trotskyist organisation-was outlawed and under attack. The Communist line was that the POUM were "objectively" Fascist, hindering the Republican cause. "A particularly nasty poster appeared, showing a head with a POUM mask being ripped off to reveal a Swastika-covered face beneath." Members, including Kopp, were arrested and others were in hiding. Orwell and his wife were under threat and had to lie low, although they broke cover to try to help Kopp.

Finally with their passports in order, they escaped from Spain by train, diverting to Banyuls-sur-Mer for a short stay before returning to England. In the first week of July 1937 Orwell arrived back at Wallington; on 13 July 1937 a deposition was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason in Valencia, charging the Orwells with "rabid Trotskyism", and being agents of the POUM. The trial of the leaders of the POUM and of Orwell (in his absence) took place in Barcelona in October and November 1938. Observing events from French Morocco, Orwell wrote that they were "only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press." Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War gave rise to Homage to Catalonia (1938).

In his book, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett writes that according to Soviet files, Orwell and his wife Eileen were spied on in Barcelona in May 1937. "The papers are documentary evidence that not only Orwell, but also his wife Eileen, were being watched closely".

Laurence O'Shaughnessy's former home, the large house on the corner, 24 Crooms Hill, Greenwich, London[96]

Orwell returned to England in June 1937, and stayed at the O'Shaughnessy home at Greenwich. He found his views on the Spanish Civil War out of favour. Kingsley Martin rejected two of his works and Gollancz was equally cautious. At the same time, the communist Daily Worker was running an attack on The Road to Wigan Pier, taking out of context Orwell writing that "the working classes smell"; a letter to Gollancz from Orwell threatening libel action brought a stop to this. Orwell was also able to find a more sympathetic publisher for his views in Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg. Orwell returned to Wallington, which he found in disarray after his absence. He acquired goats, a cockerel (rooster) he called Henry Ford and a poodle puppy he called Marx; and settled down to animal husbandry and writing Homage to Catalonia.

There were thoughts of going to India to work on The Pioneer, a newspaper in Lucknow, but by March 1938 Orwell's health had deteriorated. He was admitted to Preston Hall Sanatorium at Aylesford, Kent, a British Legion hospital for ex-servicemen to which his brother-in-law Laurence O'Shaughnessy was attached. He was thought initially to be suffering from tuberculosis and stayed in the sanatorium until September. A stream of visitors came to see him, including Common, Heppenstall, Plowman and Cyril Connolly. Connolly brought with him Stephen Spender, a cause of some embarrassment as Orwell had referred to Spender as a "pansy friend" some time earlier. Homage to Catalonia was published in London by Secker & Warburg and was a commercial flop; it re-emerged in the 1950s, following on the success of Orwell's later books. In the latter part of his stay at the clinic, Orwell was able to go for walks in the countryside and study nature.

The novelist L. H. Myers secretly funded a trip to French Morocco for half a year for Orwell to avoid the English winter and recover his health. The Orwells set out in September 1938 via Gibraltar and Tangier to avoid Spanish Morocco and arrived at Marrakech. They rented a villa on the road to Casablanca and during that time Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air. They arrived back in England on 30 March 1939 and Coming Up for Air was published in June. Orwell spent time in Wallington and Southwold working on a Dickens essay and it was in June 1939 that Orwell's father, Richard Blair, died.

Second World War and Animal Farm

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Orwell's wife Eileen started working in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in central London, staying during the week with her family in Greenwich. Orwell also submitted his name to the Central Register for war work, but nothing transpired. "They won't have me in the army, at any rate at present, because of my lungs", Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer. He returned to Wallington, and in late 1939 he wrote material for his first collection of essays, Inside the Whale. For the next year he was occupied writing reviews for plays, films and books for The Listener, Time and Tide and New Adelphi. On 29 March 1940 his long association with began with a review of a sergeant's account of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. At the beginning of 1940, the first edition of Connolly's appeared, and this provided a new outlet for Orwell's work as well as new literary contacts. In May the Orwells took lease of a flat in London at Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, Marylebone. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, and the death in Flanders, France of Eileen's brother, Dr. Laurence O'Shaughnessy, caused her considerable grief and long-term depression. Throughout this period Orwell kept a wartime diary.

Orwell was declared "unfit for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June, but soon afterwards found an opportunity to become involved in war activities by joining the British Home Guard. He shared Tom Wintringham's socialist vision for the Home Guard as a revolutionary People's Militia. His lecture notes for instructing platoon members include advice on street fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars of various kinds. Sergeant Orwell managed to recruit Fredric Warburg to his unit. During the Battle of Britain he used to spend weekends with Warburg and his new Zionist friend, Tosco Fyvel, at Warburg's house at Twyford, Berkshire. At Wallington he worked on " England Your England" and in London wrote reviews for various periodicals. Visiting Eileen's family in Greenwich brought him face-to-face with the effects of the Blitz on East London. In mid-1940, Warburg, Fyvel and Orwell planned Searchlight Books. Eleven volumes eventually appeared, of which Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, published on 19 February 1941, was the first.

Early in 1941 he began to write for the American Partisan Review which linked Orwell with The New York Intellectuals who were also anti-Stalinist, and contributed to the Gollancz anthology The Betrayal of the Left, written in the light of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (although Orwell referred to it as the Russo-German Pact and the Hitler-Stalin Pact). He also applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Air Ministry. Meanwhile, he was still writing reviews of books and plays and at this time met the novelist Anthony Powell. He also took part in a few radio broadcasts for the Eastern Service of the BBC. In March the Orwells moved to a seventh-floor flat at Langford Court, St John's Wood, while at Wallington Orwell was " digging for victory" by planting potatoes.

"One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten."

-  George Orwell, in his war-time diary, 3 July 1941

In August 1941, Orwell finally obtained "war work" when he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service. When interviewed for the job he indicated that he "accept[ed] absolutely the need for propaganda to be directed by the government" and stressed his view that, in wartime, discipline in the execution of government policy was essential. He supervised cultural broadcasts to India to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany designed to undermine imperial links. This was Orwell's first experience of the rigid conformity of life in an office, and it gave him an opportunity to create cultural programmes with contributions from T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, E. M. Forster, Ahmed Ali, Mulk Raj Anand, and William Empson among others.

At the end of August he had a dinner with H. G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence at observations Orwell made about him in a Horizon article. In October Orwell had a bout of bronchitis and the illness recurred frequently. David Astor was looking for a provocative contributor for The Observer and invited Orwell to write for him-the first article appearing in March 1942. In early 1942 Eileen changed jobs to work at the Ministry of Food and in mid-1942 the Orwells moved to a larger flat, a ground floor and basement, 10a Mortimer Crescent in Maida Vale/ Kilburn-"the kind of lower-middle-class ambience that Orwell thought was London at its best." Around the same time Orwell's mother and sister Avril, who had found work in a sheet-metal factory behind King's Cross Station, moved into a flat close to George and Eileen.

Orwell spoke on many BBC and other broadcasts, but no recordings are known to survive.[112][113][114]

At the BBC, Orwell introduced Voice, a literary programme for his Indian broadcasts, and by now was leading an active social life with literary friends, particularly on the political left. Late in 1942, he started writing regularly for the left-wing weekly directed by Labour MPs Aneurin Bevan and George Strauss. In March 1943, Orwell's mother died, and around the same time he told Moore he was starting work on a new book, which turned out to be Animal Farm.

In September 1943, Orwell resigned from the BBC post that he had occupied for two years. His resignation followed a report confirming his fears that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, but he was also keen to concentrate on writing Animal Farm. On 24 November 1943, six days before his last day of service, his adaptation of the fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes was broadcast. It was a genre in which he was greatly interested and which appeared on Animal Farm's title page. At this time he also resigned from the Home Guard on medical grounds.

In November 1943, Orwell was appointed literary editor at Tribune, where his assistant was his old friend Jon Kimche. Orwell was on staff until early 1945, writing over 80 book reviews and on 3 December 1943 started his regular personal column, " As I Please", usually addressing three or four subjects in each. He was still writing reviews for other magazines, including Partisan Review, Horizon, and the New York and becoming a respected pundit among left-wing circles but also a close friend of people on the right such as Powell, Astor and Malcolm Muggeridge. By April 1944 Animal Farm was ready for publication. Gollancz refused to publish it, considering it an attack on the Soviet regime which was a crucial ally in the war. A similar fate was met from other publishers (including T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber) until Jonathan Cape agreed to take it.

In May the Orwells had the opportunity to adopt a child, thanks to the contacts of Eileen's sister-in-law Gwen O'Shaughnessy, then a doctor in Newcastle upon Tyne. In June a V-1 flying bomb struck Mortimer Crescent and the Orwells had to find somewhere else to live. Orwell had to scrabble around in the rubble for his collection of books, which he had finally managed to transfer from Wallington, carting them away in a wheelbarrow. Another blow was Cape's reversal of his plan to publish Animal Farm. The decision followed his personal visit to Peter Smollett, an official at the Ministry of Information. Smollett was later identified as a Soviet agent.

The Orwells spent some time in the North East, near Carlton, County Durham, dealing with matters in the adoption of a boy whom they named Richard Horatio Blair. By September 1944 they had set up home in Islington, at 27b Canonbury Square. Baby Richard joined them there, and Eileen gave up her work at the Ministry of Food to look after her family. Secker & Warburg had agreed to publish Animal Farm, planned for the following March, although it did not appear in print until August 1945. By February 1945 David Astor had invited Orwell to become a war correspondent for The Observer. Orwell had been looking for the opportunity throughout the war, but his failed medical reports prevented him from being allowed anywhere near action. He went first to liberated Paris and then to Germany and Austria, to such cities as Cologne and Stuttgart. He was never in the front line and was never under fire, but he followed the troops closely, "sometimes entering a captured town within a day of its fall while dead bodies lay in the streets." Some of his reports were published in the Manchester Evening News.

It was while he was there that Eileen went into hospital for a hysterectomy and died under anaesthetic on 29 March 1945. She had not given Orwell much notice about this operation because of worries about the cost and because she expected to make a speedy recovery. Orwell returned home for a while and then went back to Europe. He returned finally to London to cover the 1945 general election at the beginning of July. Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was published in Britain on 17 August 1945, and a year later in the US, on 26 August 1946.

Jura and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Animal Farm had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure. For the next four years, Orwell mixed journalistic work-mainly for Tribune, The Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines-with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. He was a leading figure in the so-called Shanghai Club (named after a restaurant in Soho) of left-leaning and émigré journalists, among them E. H. Carr, Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Barbara Ward and Jon Kimche.

Barnhill farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, Scotland. Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four while living here.

In the year following Eileen's death he published around 130 articles and a selection of his Critical Essays, while remaining active in various political lobbying campaigns. He employed a housekeeper, Susan Watson, to look after his adopted son at the Islington flat, which visitors now described as "bleak". In September he spent a fortnight on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and saw it as a place to escape from the hassle of London literary life. David Astor was instrumental in arranging a place for Orwell on Jura. Astor's family owned Scottish estates in the area and a fellow Old Etonian, Robin Fletcher, had a property on the island. In late 1945 and early 1946 Orwell made several hopeless and unwelcome marriage proposals to younger women, including Celia Kirwan (who later became Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law); Ann Popham, who happened to live in the same block of flats; and Sonia Brownell, one of Connolly's coterie at the Horizon office. Orwell suffered a tubercular haemorrhage in February 1946 but disguised his illness. In 1945 or early 1946, while still living at Canonbury Square, Orwell wrote an article on "British Cookery", complete with recipes, commissioned by the British Council. Given the post-war shortages, both parties agreed not to publish it. His sister Marjorie died of kidney disease in May, and soon afterwards, on 22 May 1946, Orwell set off to live on the Isle of Jura at a house known as Barnhill.

This was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near the northern end of the island, at the end of a five-mile (8 km) heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the owners lived. Conditions at the farmhouse were primitive but the natural history and the challenge of improving the place appealed to Orwell. His sister Avril accompanied him there and young novelist Paul Potts made up the party. In July Susan Watson arrived with Orwell's son Richard. Tensions developed and Potts departed after one of his manuscripts was used to light the fire. Orwell meanwhile set to work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Later Susan Watson's boyfriend David Holbrook arrived. A fan of Orwell since school days, he found the reality very different, with Orwell hostile and disagreeable probably because of Holbrook's membership of the Communist Party. Watson could no longer stand being with Avril and she and her boyfriend left.

Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again. Now a well-known writer, he was swamped with work. Apart from a visit to Jura in the new year he stayed in London for one of the coldest British winters on record and with such a national shortage of fuel that he burnt his furniture and his child's toys. The heavy smog in the days before the Clean Air Act 1956 did little to help his health, about which he was reticent, keeping clear of medical attention. Meanwhile, he had to cope with rival claims of publishers Gollancz and Warburg for publishing rights. About this time he co-edited a collection titled British Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds. As a result of the success of Animal Farm, Orwell was expecting a large bill from the Inland Revenue and he contacted a firm of accountants whose senior partner was Jack Harrison. The firm advised Orwell to establish a company to own his copyright and to receive his royalties and set up a "service agreement" so that he could draw a salary. Such a company, "George Orwell Productions Ltd" (GOP Ltd) was set up on 12 September 1947, although the service agreement was not then put into effect. Jack Harrison left the details at this stage to junior colleagues.

Orwell left London for Jura on 10 April 1947. In July he ended the lease on the Wallington cottage. Back on Jura he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four and made good progress. During that time his sister's family visited, and Orwell led a disastrous boating expedition, on 19 August, which nearly led to loss of life whilst trying to cross the notorious Gulf of Corryvreckan and gave him a soaking which was not good for his health. In December a chest specialist was summoned from Glasgow who pronounced Orwell seriously ill, and a week before Christmas 1947 he was in Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, then a small village in the countryside, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Tuberculosis was diagnosed and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health. David Astor helped with supply and payment and Orwell began his course of streptomycin on 19 or 20 February 1948. By the end of July 1948 Orwell was able to return to Jura and by December he had finished the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In January 1949, in a very weak condition, he set off for a sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire, escorted by Richard Rees. Unluckily for Orwell, streptomycin could not be continued, as he developed toxic epidermal necrolysis, a rare side effect of streptomycin.

One of the Animal Farm cartoon strips produced for the Cold War anti-communist department of the British Foreign Office, the IRD

The sanatorium at Cranham consisted of a series of small wooden chalets or huts in a remote part of the Cotswolds near Stroud. Visitors were shocked by Orwell's appearance and concerned by the shortcomings and ineffectiveness of the treatment. Friends were worried about his finances, but by now he was comparatively well off. He was writing to many of his friends, including Jacintha Buddicom, who had "rediscovered" him, and in March 1949, was visited by Celia Kirwan. Kirwan had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), set up by the Labour government to publish anti-communist propaganda, and Orwell gave her a list of people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. Orwell's list, not published until 2003, consisted mainly of writers but also included actors and Labour MPs. To further promote Animal Farm, the IRD commissioned cartoon strips, drawn by Norman Pett, to be placed in newspapers across the globe. Orwell received more streptomycin treatment and improved slightly. This repeat dose of streptomycin, especially after the side effect had been noticed, has been called "ill-advised". He then received penicillin, with doctors knowing fully well it was ineffective against tuberculosis. It is presumed it was given to treat his bronchiectasis. In June 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, to critical acclaim.

Orwell's health continued to decline after the diagnosis of tuberculosis in December 1947. In mid-1949, he courted Sonia Brownell, and they announced their engagement in September, shortly before he was removed to University College Hospital in London. Sonia took charge of Orwell's affairs and attended him diligently in the hospital. Sonia was a beauty, and her act of marrying a sick wealthy man, when his death was almost certain, has left many to doubt her intentions.

In September 1949, Orwell invited his accountant Harrison to visit him at the hospital, and Harrison claimed that Orwell then asked him to become director of GOP Ltd and to manage the company, but there was no independent witness. Orwell's wedding took place in the hospital room on 13 October 1949, with David Astor as best man. Orwell was in decline and was visited by an assortment of visitors including Muggeridge, Connolly, Lucian Freud, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Potts, Anthony Powell, and his Eton tutor Anthony Gow. Plans to go to the Swiss Alps were mooted. Further meetings were held with his accountant, at which Harrison and Mr and Mrs Blair were confirmed as directors of the company, and at which Harrison claimed that the "service agreement" was executed, giving copyright to the company. Orwell's health was in decline again by Christmas. On the evening of 20 January 1950, Potts visited Orwell and slipped away on finding him asleep. Jack Harrison visited later and claimed that Orwell gave him 25% of the company. Early on the morning of 21 January, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him at age 46.

Orwell had requested to be buried in accordance with the Anglican rite in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die. The graveyards in central London had no space, and so in an effort to ensure his last wishes could be fulfilled, his widow appealed to his friends to see whether any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire (present-day Oxfordshire), and arranged for Orwell to be interred in the churchyard of All Saints' there. Orwell's gravestone bears the epitaph: "Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950"; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen name.

The funeral was organised by Anthony Powell and Malcom Muggeridge. Powell chose the hymns: "All people that on earth do dwell," "Guide me, O thou great Redeemer" and "Ten thousand times ten thousand".

Orwell's adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair, was brought up by Orwell's sister, Avril Dunn (née Blair), his legal guardian, and her husband, Bill Dunn.

In 1979, Sonia Brownell brought a High Court action against Harrison when he declared an intention to subdivide his 25 per cent share of the company between his three children. For Sonia, the consequence of this manoeuvre would have made getting overall control of the company three times more difficult. She was considered to have a strong case, but was becoming increasingly ill and eventually was persuaded to settle out of court on 2 November 1980. She died on 11 December 1980, aged 62.

During most of his career, Orwell was best known for his journalism, in essays, reviews, columns in newspapers and magazines and in his books of reportage: Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), The Road to Wigan Pier (describing the living conditions of the poor in northern England, and class division generally) and Homage to Catalonia. According to Irving Howe, Orwell was "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson".

Modern readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is often thought to reflect degeneration in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism; the latter, life under totalitarian rule. Nineteen Eighty-Four is often compared to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; both are powerful dystopian novels warning of a future world where the state machine exerts complete control over social life. In 1984, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 were honoured with the Prometheus Award for their contributions to dystopian literature. In 2011 he received it again for Animal Farm. In 2003, Nineteen Eighty-Four was listed at number 8 and Animal Farm at number 46 on the BBC's The Big Read poll. In 2021, readers of the New York Times Book Review rated Nineteen Eighty-Four third in a list of "The best books of the past 125 years."

Coming Up for Air, his last novel before World War II, is the most "English" of his novels; alarms of war mingle with images of idyllic Thames-side Edwardian childhood of protagonist George Bowling. The novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of Old England, and there were great, new external threats. In homely terms, its protagonist George Bowling posits the totalitarian hypotheses of Franz Borkenau, Orwell, Ignazio Silone and Koestler: "Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it ... They're something quite new-something that's never been heard of before".

In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills." Elsewhere, Orwell strongly praised the works of Jack London, especially his book . Orwell's investigation of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier strongly resembles that of Jack London's The People of the Abyss, in which the American journalist disguises himself as an out-of-work sailor to investigate the lives of the poor in London. In his essay "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) Orwell wrote: "If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them." On H. G. Wells he wrote, "The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed."

Orwell was an admirer of Arthur Koestler and became a close friend during the three years that Koestler and his wife Mamain spent at the cottage of Bwlch Ocyn, a secluded farmhouse that belonged to Clough Williams-Ellis, in the Vale of Ffestiniog. Orwell reviewed Koestler's Darkness at Noon for the New Statesman in 1941, saying:

Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened-for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society-but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.

Other writers Orwell admired included: Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling, praising Kipling as a gifted writer and a "good bad poet" whose work is "spurious" and "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting," but undeniably seductive and able to speak to certain aspects of reality more effectively than more enlightened authors. He had a similarly ambivalent attitude to G. K. Chesterton, whom he regarded as a writer of considerable talent who had chosen to devote himself to "Roman Catholic propaganda", and to Evelyn Waugh, who was, he wrote, "ab[ou]t as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions".

Throughout his life Orwell continually supported himself as a book reviewer. His reviews are well known and have had an influence on literary criticism. He wrote in the conclusion to his 1940 essay on Charles Dickens,

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

George Woodcock suggested that the last two sentences also describe Orwell.

Orwell wrote a critique of George Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man. He considered this Shaw's best play and the most likely to remain socially relevant, because of its theme that war is not, generally speaking, a glorious romantic adventure. His 1945 essay In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse contains an amusing assessment of Wodehouse's writing and also argues that his broadcasts from Germany (during the war) did not really make him a traitor. He accused The Ministry of Information of exaggerating Wodehouse's actions for propaganda purposes.

In 1946, the British Council commissioned Orwell to write an essay on British food as part of a drive to promote British relations abroad. In his essay titled "British Cookery", Orwell described the British diet as "a simple, rather heavy, perhaps slightly barbarous diet" and where "hot drinks are acceptable at most hours of the day". He discusses the ritual of breakfast in the UK, "this is not a snack but a serious meal. The hour at which people have their breakfast is of course governed by the time at which they go to work." He wrote that high tea in the United Kingdom consisted of a variety of savoury and sweet dishes, but "no tea would be considered a good one if it did not include at least one kind of cake", before adding "as well as cakes, biscuits are much eaten at tea-time". Orwell included his own recipe for marmalade, a popular British spread on toast. However, the British Council declined to publish the essay on the grounds that it was too problematic to write about food at the time of strict rationing in the UK following the war. In 2019, the essay was discovered in the British Council's archives along with the rejection letter. The British Council issued an official apology to Orwell over the rejection of the commissioned essay, stating it was "delighted to make amends for its slight on perhaps the UK's greatest political writer of the 20th Century, by re-producing the original essay in full - along with the unfortunate rejection letter."

Reception and evaluations of Orwell's works

Production of the play 1984 at the Playhouse Theatre in the West End. Orwell's works have been adapted for stage, screen and television. They have also inspired commercials and songs, and he is often quoted. Historian John Rodden called him a "cultural icon".[167]

Arthur Koestler said that Orwell's "uncompromising intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times". Ben Wattenberg stated: "Orwell's writing pierced intellectual hypocrisy wherever he found it". According to historian Piers Brendon, "Orwell was the saint of common decency who would in earlier days, said his BBC boss Rushbrook Williams, 'have been either canonised-or burnt at the stake'". Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review describes Orwell as a "successful impersonation of a plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and tells the truth about it". Christopher Norris declared that Orwell's "homespun empiricist outlook-his assumption that the truth was just there to be told in a straightforward common-sense way-now seems not merely naïve but culpably self-deluding". The American scholar Scott Lucas has described Orwell as an enemy of the Left. John Newsinger has argued that Lucas could only do this by portraying "all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism [-] as if they were attacks on socialism, despite Orwell's continued insistence that they were not".

Orwell's work has taken a prominent place in the school literature curriculum in England, with Animal Farm a regular examination topic at the end of secondary education ( GCSE), and Nineteen Eighty-Four a topic for subsequent examinations below university level ( A Levels). A 2016 UK poll saw Animal Farm ranked the nation's favourite book from school.

Historian John Rodden stated: " John Podhoretz did claim that if Orwell were alive today, he'd be standing with the neo-conservatives and against the Left. And the question arises, to what extent can you even begin to predict the political positions of somebody who's been dead three decades and more by that time?"

In Orwell's Victory, Christopher Hitchens argues: "In answer to the accusation of inconsistency Orwell as a writer was forever taking his own temperature. In other words, here was someone who never stopped testing and adjusting his intelligence".

John Rodden points out the "undeniable conservative features in the Orwell physiognomy" and remarks on how "to some extent Orwell facilitated the kinds of uses and abuses by the Right that his name has been put to. In other ways there has been the politics of selective quotation." Rodden refers to the essay " Why I Write", in which Orwell refers to the Spanish Civil War as being his "watershed political experience", saying: "The Spanish War and other events in 1936-37, turned the scale. Thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it." (emphasis in original) Rodden goes on to explain how, during the McCarthy era, the introduction to the Signet edition of Animal Farm, which sold more than 20 million copies, makes use of selective quotation:

"[ Introduction]: If the book itself, Animal Farm, had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in his essay Why I Write: 'Every line of serious work that I've written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism ....'
[ Rodden]: dot, dot, dot, dot, the politics of ellipsis. 'For Democratic Socialism' is vaporized, just like Winston Smith did it at the Ministry of Truth, and that's very much what happened at the beginning of the McCarthy era and just continued, Orwell being selectively quoted."

Fyvel wrote about Orwell: "His crucial experience [...] was his struggle to turn himself into a writer, one which led through long periods of poverty, failure and humiliation, and about which he has written almost nothing directly. The sweat and agony was less in the slum-life than in the effort to turn the experience into literature."

In his essay " Politics and the English Language" (1946), Orwell wrote about the importance of precise and clear language, arguing that vague writing can be used as a powerful tool of political manipulation because it shapes the way we think. In that essay, Orwell provides six rules for writers:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell worked as a journalist at The Observer for seven years, and its editor David Astor gave a copy of this celebrated essay to every new recruit. In 2003, literary editor at the newspaper Robert McCrum wrote, "Even now, it is quoted in our style book". Journalist Jonathan Heawood noted: "Orwell's criticism of slovenly language is still taken very seriously."

Andrew N. Rubin argues that "Orwell claimed that we should be attentive to how the use of language has limited our capacity for critical thought just as we should be equally concerned with the ways in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very language that we use."

The adjective " Orwellian" connotes an attitude and a policy of control by propaganda, surveillance, misinformation, denial of truth and manipulation of the past. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell described a totalitarian government that controlled thought by controlling language, making certain ideas literally unthinkable. Several words and phrases from Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered popular language. " Newspeak" is a simplified and obfuscatory language designed to make independent thought impossible. " Doublethink" means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The " Thought Police" are those who suppress all dissenting opinion. " Prolefeed" is homogenised, manufactured superficial literature, film and music used to control and indoctrinate the populace through docility. " Big Brother" is a supreme dictator who watches everyone. Other neologisms from the novel include, " Two Minutes Hate", " Room 101", " memory hole", " unperson", and " thoughtcrime", as well as providing direct inspiration for the neologism " groupthink".

Orwell may have been the first to use the term " cold war" to refer to the state of tension between powers in the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc that followed World War II in his essay, "You and the Atom Bomb", published in Tribune on 19 October 1945. He wrote:

"We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications-this is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbours."

The Orwell Society was formed in 2011 to promote understanding of the life and work of Orwell. A registered UK charity, it was founded and inaugurated by Dione Venables at Phyllis Court members club in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, a club that was often visited by Orwell in his youth.

Apart from theatre adaptations of his books, several stage plays were written with Orwell as one of the main characters.

In 2012, a musical play, One Georgie Orwell, by Peter Cordwell and Carl Picton was performed at the Greenwich Theatre, London. It explored Orwell's life, his concerns for the world that he lived in, and for the Britain that he loved.

In 2014, a play written by playwright Joe Sutton titled Orwell in America was first performed by the Northern Stage theatre company in White River Junction, Vermont. It is a fictitious account of Orwell doing a book tour in the United States (something he never did in his lifetime). It moved to off-Broadway in 2016.

In 2017, Mrs Orwell by British playwright Tony Cox opened at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London before transferring to the Southwark Playhouse. The play centres on Orwell's second wife Sonia Brownell (played by Cressida Bonas), her reasons for marrying Orwell and her relationship with Lucian Freud.

In 2019, Tasmanian theatre company Blue Cow presented the play 101 by Cameron Hindrum, in which Orwell is seen working on his novel 1984 "while keeping his severe illness at bay and balancing the demands of fatherhood, art, family and success."

Orwell is the main character in a 2017 novel, The Last Man in Europe, by Australian author Denis Glover.

Orwell's birthplace, a bungalow in Motihari, Bihar, India, was opened as a museum in May 2015, several years after local residents petitioned for conservation of the building. In January 2021, Orwell's bust near the museum was vandalised.

Statue of George Orwell outside Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC

A statue of George Orwell, sculpted by the British sculptor Martin Jennings, was unveiled on 7 November 2017 outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC. The wall behind the statue is inscribed with the following phrase: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear". These are words from his proposed preface to Animal Farm and a rallying cry for the idea of free speech in an open society.

Jacintha Buddicom's account, Eric & Us, provides an insight into Blair's childhood. She quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms: "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall him having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in holidays. Cyril Connolly provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise. Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the essay " Such, Such Were the Joys", claiming among other things that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship, which he alleged was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that "he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not like his name because it reminded him of a book he greatly disliked-Eric, or, Little by Little, a Victorian boys' school story.

Orwell's time at Eton College was formative in his attitude and his later career as a writer.

Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself". At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes, his former headmaster's son at St Cyprians, recalled that "he was extremely argumentative-about anything-and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys [...] We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments-or think he had anyhow." Roger Mynors concurs: "Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself."

Blair liked to carry out practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a railway carriage like an orangutan to frighten a woman passenger out of the compartment. At Eton, he played tricks on John Crace, his housemaster, among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a college magazine implying pederasty. Gow, his tutor, said he "made himself as big a nuisance as he could" and "was a very unattractive boy". Later Blair was expelled from the crammer at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor. In one of his As I Please essays he refers to a protracted joke when he answered an advertisement for a woman who claimed a cure for obesity.

Blair had an interest in natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he wrote about caterpillars and butterflies, and Buddicom recalls his keen interest in ornithology. He also enjoyed fishing and shooting rabbits, and conducting experiments as in cooking a hedgehog or shooting down a jackdaw from the Eton roof to dissect it. His zeal for scientific experiments extended to explosives-again Buddicom recalls a cook giving notice because of the noise. Later in Southwold, his sister Avril recalled him blowing up the garden. When teaching he enthused his students with his nature-rambles both at Southwold and at Hayes. His adult diaries are permeated with his observations on nature.

Buddicom and Blair lost touch shortly after he went to Burma and she became unsympathetic towards him. She wrote that it was because of the letters he wrote complaining about his life, but an addendum to by Venables reveals that he may have lost her sympathy through an incident which was, at best, a clumsy attempt at seduction.

Mabel Fierz, who later became Blair's confidante, said: "He used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he'd been attractive to women. He liked women and had many girlfriends I think in Burma. He had a girl in Southwold and another girl in London. He was rather a womaniser, yet he was afraid he wasn't attractive."

Brenda Salkield (Southwold) preferred friendship to any deeper relationship and maintained a correspondence with Blair for many years, particularly as a sounding board for his ideas. She wrote: "He was a great letter writer. Endless letters, and I mean when he wrote you a letter he wrote pages." His correspondence with Eleanor Jacques (London) was more prosaic, dwelling on a closer relationship and referring to past rendezvous or planning future ones in London and Burnham Beeches.

When Orwell was in the sanatorium in Kent, his wife's friend Lydia Jackson visited. He invited her for a walk and out of sight "an awkward situation arose." Jackson was to be the most critical of Orwell's marriage to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, but their later correspondence hints at a complicity. Eileen at the time was more concerned about Orwell's closeness to Brenda Salkield. Orwell had an affair with his secretary at Tribune which caused Eileen much distress, and others have been mooted. In a letter to Ann Popham he wrote: "I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc." Similarly he suggested to Celia Kirwan that they had both been unfaithful. There are several testaments that it was a well-matched and happy marriage.

In June 1944, Orwell and Eileen adopted a three-week-old boy they named Richard Horatio. According to Richard, Orwell was a wonderful father who gave him devoted, if rather rugged, attention and a great degree of freedom. After Orwell's death Richard went to live with Orwell's sister and her husband.

Blair was very lonely after Eileen's death in 1945, and desperate for a wife, both as companion for himself and as mother for Richard. He proposed marriage to four women, including Celia Kirwan, and eventually Sonia Brownell accepted. Orwell had met her when she was assistant to Cyril Connolly, at literary magazine. They were married on 13 October 1949, only three months before Orwell's death. Some maintain that Sonia was the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell was noted for very close and enduring friendships with a few friends, but these were generally people with a similar background or with a similar level of literary ability. Ungregarious, he was out of place in a crowd and his discomfort was exacerbated when he was outside his own class. Though representing himself as a spokesman for the common man, he often appeared out of place with real working people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin, a "Hail fellow, well met" type, who took him to a local pub in Leeds, said that he was told by the landlord: "Don't bring that bugger in here again." Adrian Fierz commented "He wasn't interested in racing or greyhounds or pub crawling or shove ha'penny. He just did not have much in common with people who did not share his intellectual interests." Awkwardness attended many of his encounters with working-class representatives, as with Pollitt and McNair, but his courtesy and good manners were often commented on. Jack Common observed on meeting him for the first time, "Right away manners, and more than manners-breeding-showed through."

In his tramping days, he did domestic work for a time. His extreme politeness was recalled by a member of the family he worked for; she declared that the family referred to him as " Laurel" after the film comedian. With his gangling figure and awkwardness, Orwell's friends often saw him as a figure of fun. Geoffrey Gorer commented "He was awfully likely to knock things off tables, trip over things. I mean, he was a gangling, physically badly co-ordinated young man. I think his feeling [was] that even the inanimate world was against him." When he shared a flat with Heppenstall and Sayer, he was treated in a patronising manner by the younger men. At the BBC in the 1940s, "everybody would pull his leg" and Spender described him as having real entertainment value "like, as I say, watching a Charlie Chaplin movie". A friend of Eileen's reminisced about her tolerance and humour, often at Orwell's expense.

One biography of Orwell accused him of having had an authoritarian streak. In Burma, he struck out at a Burmese boy who, while "fooling around" with his friends, had "accidentally bumped into him" at a station, resulting in Orwell falling "heavily" down some stairs. One of his former pupils recalled being beaten so hard he could not sit down for a week. When sharing a flat with Orwell, Heppenstall came home late one night in an advanced stage of loud inebriation. The upshot was that Heppenstall ended up with a bloody nose and was locked in a room. When he complained, Orwell hit him across the legs with a shooting stick and Heppenstall then had to defend himself with a chair. Years later, after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote a dramatic account of the incident called "The Shooting Stick" and Mabel Fierz confirmed that Heppenstall came to her in a sorry state the following day.

Orwell got on well with young people. The pupil he beat considered him the best of teachers and the young recruits in Barcelona tried to drink him under the table without success. His nephew recalled Uncle Eric laughing louder than anyone in the cinema at a Charlie Chaplin film.

In the wake of his most famous works, he attracted many uncritical hangers-on, but many others who sought him found him aloof and even dull. With his soft voice, he was sometimes shouted down or excluded from discussions. At this time, he was severely ill; it was wartime or the austerity period after it; during the war his wife suffered from depression; and after her death he was lonely and unhappy. In addition to that, he always lived frugally and seemed unable to care for himself properly. As a result of all this, people found his circumstances bleak. Some, like Michael Ayrton, called him "Gloomy George", but others developed the idea that he was an "English secular saint".

Although Orwell was frequently heard on the BBC for panel discussion and one-man broadcasts, no recorded copy of his voice is known to exist.

Orwell was a heavy smoker, who rolled his own cigarettes from strong shag tobacco, despite his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took him to cold and damp situations, both in the long term, as in Catalonia and Jura, and short term, for example, motorcycling in the rain and suffering a shipwreck. Described by The Economist as "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture", Orwell considered fish and chips, football, the pub, strong tea, cut-price chocolate, the movies, and radio among the chief comforts for the working class. He advocated a patriotic defence of a British way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state:

"We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official-the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the "nice cup of tea". The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above."

"By putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk, whereas one is likely to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round"

- One of Orwell's eleven rules for making tea from his essay "A Nice Cup of Tea" which appeared in the London Evening Standard, 12 January 1946

Orwell enjoyed strong tea-he had Fortnum & Mason's tea brought to him in Catalonia. His 1946 essay, " A Nice Cup of Tea", appeared in the London Evening Standard article on how to make tea, with Orwell writing, "tea is one of the mainstays of civilisation in this country and causes violent disputes over how it should be made", with the main issue being whether to put tea in the cup first and add the milk afterward, or the other way round, on which he states, "in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject". He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of lager, and wrote about an imagined, ideal British pub in his 1946 Evening Standard article, " The Moon Under Water". Not as particular about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie" and extolled canteen food at the BBC. He preferred traditional English dishes, such as roast beef, and kippers. His 1945 essay, "In Defence of English Cooking", included Yorkshire pudding, crumpets, muffins, innumerable biscuits, Christmas pudding, shortbread, various British cheeses and Oxford marmalade. Reports of his Islington days refer to the cosy afternoon tea table.

His dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual. In Southwold, he had the best cloth from the local tailor, but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size-12 boots, was a source of amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist".

Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum-on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen-helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric.

Orwell was an atheist who identified himself with the humanist outlook on life. Despite this, and despite his criticisms of both religious doctrine and religious organisations, he nevertheless regularly participated in the social and civic life of the church, including by attending Church of England Holy Communion. Acknowledging this contradiction, he once said: "It seems rather mean to go to HC [Holy Communion] when one doesn't believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up with the deception." He had two Anglican marriages and left instructions for an Anglican funeral. Orwell was also extremely well-read in Biblical literature and could quote lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer from memory.

His extensive knowledge of the Bible came coupled with unsparing criticism of its philosophy, and as an adult he could not bring himself to believe in its tenets. He said in part V of his essay, " Such, Such Were the Joys", that "Till about the age of fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did not love him." Orwell directly contrasted Christianity with secular humanism in his essay " Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool", finding the latter philosophy more palatable and less "self-interested". Literary critic James Wood wrote that in the struggle, as he saw it, between Christianity and humanism, "Orwell was on the humanist side, of course-basically an unmetaphysical, English version of Camus's philosophy of perpetual godless struggle."

Orwell's writing was often explicitly critical of religion, and Christianity in particular. He found the church to be a "selfish [...] church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. In their 1972 study, The Unknown Orwell, the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at Eton Blair displayed a "sceptical attitude" to Christian belief. Crick observed that Orwell displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism". Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life." His contradictory and sometimes ambiguous views about the social benefits of religious affiliation mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his unbelief while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained religiosity".

Orwell liked to provoke arguments by challenging the status quo, but he was also a traditionalist with a love of old English values. He criticised and satirised, from the inside, the various social milieux in which he found himself-provincial town life in A Clergyman's Daughter; middle-class pretension in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; preparatory schools in "Such, Such Were the Joys"; and some socialist groups in The Road to Wigan Pier. In his Adelphi days, he described himself as a " Tory- anarchist". Of colonialism in Burmese Days, he portrays the English colonists as a "dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

In 1928, Orwell began his career as a professional writer in Paris at a journal owned by the French Communist Henri Barbusse. His first article, "La Censure en Angleterre" ("Censorship in England"), was an attempt to account for the "extraordinary and illogical" moral censorship of plays and novels then practised in Britain. His own explanation was that the rise of the "puritan middle class", who had stricter morals than the aristocracy, tightened the rules of censorship in the 19th century. Orwell's first published article in his home country, "A Farthing Newspaper", was a critique of the new French daily the Ami du Peuple. This paper was sold much more cheaply than most others, and was intended for ordinary people to read. Orwell pointed out that its proprietor François Coty also owned the right-wing dailies and , which the Ami du Peuple was supposedly competing against. Orwell suggested that cheap newspapers were no more than a vehicle for advertising and anti-leftist propaganda, and predicted the world might soon see free newspapers which would drive legitimate dailies out of business.

Writing for Le Progrès Civique, Orwell described the British colonial government in Burma and India:

"The government of all the Indian provinces under the control of the British Empire is of necessity despotic, because only the threat of force can subdue a population of several million subjects. But this despotism is latent. It hides behind a mask of democracy... Care is taken to avoid technical and industrial training. This rule, observed throughout India, aims to stop India from becoming an industrial country capable of competing with England ... Foreign competition is prevented by an insuperable barrier of prohibitive customs tariffs. And so the English factory-owners, with nothing to fear, control the markets absolutely and reap exorbitant profits."

Spanish Civil War and socialism

Orwell joined the British Independent Labour Party during his time in the Spanish Civil War and became a defender of democratic socialism and a critic of totalitarianism for the rest of his life.

The Spanish Civil War played the most important part in defining Orwell's socialism. He wrote to Cyril Connolly from Barcelona on 8 June 1937: "I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before." Having witnessed anarcho-syndicalist communities, for example in Anarchist Catalonia, and the subsequent brutal suppression of the anarcho-syndicalists, anti-Stalin communist parties and revolutionaries by the Soviet Union-backed Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti- Stalinist and joined the British Independent Labour Party, his card being issued on 13 June 1938.

In Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier, published by the Left Book Club, Orwell stated that "a real Socialist is one who wishes-not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes-to see tyranny overthrown". Orwell stated in "Why I Write" (1946): "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." Orwell's conception of socialism was of a planned economy alongside democracy, which was the common notion of socialism in the early and middle 20th century. Orwell's emphasis on "democracy" primarily referred to a strong emphasis on civil liberties within a socialist economy as opposed to majoritarian rule, though he was not necessarily opposed to majority rule. Orwell was a proponent of a federal socialist Europe, a position outlined in his 1947 essay "Toward European Unity", which first appeared in Partisan Review. According to biographer John Newsinger:

"The other crucial dimension to Orwell's socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist. Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet Union and instead remained a socialist-indeed he became more committed to the socialist cause than ever."

In his 1938 essay "Why I joined the Independent Labour Party," published in the ILP-affiliated New Leader, Orwell wrote:

"For some years past I have managed to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against capitalism. But I do not delude myself that this state of affairs is going to last forever ... the only régime which, in the long run, will dare to permit freedom of speech is a Socialist régime. If Fascism triumphs I am finished as a writer-that is to say, finished in my only effective capacity. That of itself would be a sufficient reason for joining a Socialist party."

Towards the end of the essay, he wrote: "I do not mean I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election."

In 1939, Orwell wrote that "Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind." In 1945, he wrote that "The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates the impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference."

The Second World War

Orwell was opposed to rearmament against Nazi Germany and at the time of the Munich Agreement he signed a manifesto entitled "If War Comes We Shall Resist"-but he changed his view after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of the war. He left the ILP because of its opposition to the war and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". On 21 March 1940 he wrote a review of Adolf Hitler's for The New English Weekly, in which he analysed the dictator's psychology. According to Orwell "a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn't develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics". Asking "how was it that he was able to put [his] monstrous vision across?", Orwell tried to understand why Hitler was worshipped by the German people: "The situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches...The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon."

In December 1940 he wrote in Tribune (the Labour left's weekly): "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary." During the war, Orwell was highly critical of the popular idea that an Anglo-Soviet alliance would be the basis of a post-war world of peace and prosperity. In 1942, commenting on London Times editor E. H. Carr's pro-Soviet views, Orwell stated that "all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E.H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin."

In his reply (dated 15 November 1943) to an invitation from the Duchess of Atholl to speak for the British League for European Freedom, he stated that he did not agree with their objectives. He admitted that what they said was "more truthful than the lying propaganda found in most of the press", but added that he could not "associate himself with an essentially Conservative body" that claimed to "defend democracy in Europe" but had "nothing to say about British imperialism". His closing paragraph stated: "I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."

Jews, antisemitism and zionism

His relationship to Jews has been a recurring topic in various publications. Texts with an obvious antisemitic slant, as well as texts with a determined rejection of antisemitism, from different periods of Orwell's career, and his comments about the increasing conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine under the British Mandate are quoted.

Under the headline "Orwell's evolving views on Jews", Raymond S. Solomon draws an arc from Orwell's first book Down and Out in Paris and London up to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Anshel Pfeffer asks "Was Orwell an anti-Semite?" in the Israeli daily Haaretz. Paul Seeliger, editor of the compilation of Orwell's texts On Jews and Antisemitism, describes his relationship to antisemitism and Jewish issues as "ambivalent".

Writing in early 1945 a long essay titled "Antisemitism in Britain", for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that antisemitism was on the increase in Britain and that it was "irrational and will not yield to arguments". He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could "swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others". He wrote: "For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. ... Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness." In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein.

Tribune and post-war Britain

Orwell joined the staff of magazine as literary editor, and from then until his death, was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) Labour-supporting democratic socialist.

On 1 September 1944, writing about the Warsaw uprising, Orwell expressed in Tribune his hostility against the influence of the alliance with the USSR over the allies: "Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Do not imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the sovietic regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to honesty and reason. Once a whore, always a whore." According to Newsinger, although Orwell "was always critical of the 1945-51 Labour government's moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism." Between 1945 and 1947, with A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, he contributed a series of articles and essays to , a short-lived British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" edited by the ex-Communist Humphrey Slater.

Orwell publicly defended P. G. Wodehouse against charges of being a Nazi sympathiser-occasioned by his agreement to do some broadcasts over the German radio in 1941-a defence based on Wodehouse's lack of interest in and ignorance of politics.

Special Branch, the intelligence division of the Metropolitan Police, maintained a file on Orwell for more than 20 years of his life. The dossier, published by The National Archives, states that, according to one investigator, Orwell had "advanced Communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings". MI5, the intelligence department of the Home Office, noted: "It is evident from his recent writings-'The Lion and the Unicorn'-and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium The Betrayal of the Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him."

Sexual politics plays an important role in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, people's intimate relationships are strictly governed by the party's Junior Anti-Sex League, by opposing sexual relations and instead encouraging artificial insemination. Personally, Orwell disliked what he thought as misguided middle-class revolutionary emancipatory views, expressing disdain for "every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniacs".

Orwell was also openly against homosexuality, at a time when such prejudice was common. Speaking at the 2003 George Orwell Centenary Conference, Daphne Patai said: "Of course he was homophobic. That has nothing to do with his relations with his homosexual friends. Certainly, he had a negative attitude and a certain kind of anxiety, a denigrating attitude towards homosexuality. That is definitely the case. I think his writing reflects that quite fully."

Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", for example, in expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden. The protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock, conducts an internal critique of his customers when working in a bookshop, and there is an extended passage of several pages in which he concentrates on a homosexual male customer, and sneers at him for his "nancy" characteristics, including a lisp, which he identifies in detail, with some disgust. Stephen Spender "thought Orwell's occasional homophobic outbursts were part of his rebellion against the public school".

Orwell's will requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow, Sonia Brownell, repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him. Various recollections and interpretations were published in the 1950s and 1960s, but Sonia saw the 1968 Collected Works as the record of his life. She did appoint Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but later biographers have seen this as deliberate spoiling as Muggeridge eventually gave up the work. In 1972, two American authors, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, produced The Unknown Orwell, an unauthorised account of his early years that lacked any support or contribution from Sonia Brownell.

Sonia Brownell then commissioned Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at the University of London, to complete a biography and asked Orwell's friends to co-operate. Crick collated a considerable amount of material in his work, which was published in 1980, but his questioning of the factual accuracy of Orwell's first-person writings led to conflict with Brownell, and she tried to suppress the book. Crick concentrated on the facts of Orwell's life rather than his character, and presented primarily a political perspective on Orwell's life and work.

After Sonia Brownell's death, other works on Orwell were published in the 1980s, particularly in 1984. These included collections of reminiscences by Audrey Coppard and Crick and Stephen Wadhams.

In 1991, Michael Shelden, an American professor of literature, published a biography. More concerned with the literary nature of Orwell's work, he sought explanations for Orwell's character and treated his first-person writings as autobiographical. Shelden introduced new information that sought to build on Crick's work. Shelden speculated that Orwell possessed an obsessive belief in his failure and inadequacy.

Peter Davison's publication of the Complete Works of George Orwell, completed in 2000, made most of the Orwell Archive accessible to the public. Jeffrey Meyers, a prolific American biographer, was first to take advantage of this and published a book in 2001 that investigated the darker side of Orwell and questioned his saintly image. Why Orwell Matters (released in the United Kingdom as Orwell's Victory) was published by Christopher Hitchens in 2002.

In 2003, the centenary of Orwell's birth resulted in biographies by Gordon Bowker and D. J. Taylor, both academics and writers in the United Kingdom. Taylor notes the stage management which surrounds much of Orwell's behaviour and Bowker highlights the essential sense of decency which he considers to have been Orwell's main motivation. An updated edition of Taylor's biography has been published in 2023 entitled Orwell: The New Life, published by Constable.

In 2018, Ronald Binns published the first detailed study of Orwell's years in Suffolk, Orwell in Southwold. In 2020, Professor Richard Bradford wrote a new biography, entitled Orwell: A Man of Our Time while in 2021 Rebecca Solnit reflected on what gardening may have meant to Orwell and what it means to gardeners everywhere, in her book Orwell's Roses.

Two books about Orwell's relationship with his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and her role in his life and career, have been published: Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp (2020) and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life by Anna Funder (2023).

According to Blake Morrison, after DJ Taylor's 2023 Orwell: The New Life "No further biography will be needed for the foreseeable future, though it seems that one or even two of Orwell's journals are lying in a Moscow archive."

1. ^ Stansky and Abrahams suggested that Ida Blair moved to England in 1907, based on information given by her daughter Avril, talking about a time before she was born. This is contrasted by Ida Blair's 1905, as well as a photograph of Eric, aged three, in an English suburban garden. The earlier date coincides with a difficult posting for Blair senior, and the need to start their daughter Marjorie (then six years old) in an English education.

2. ^ The conventional view, based on Geoffrey Gorer's recollections, is of a specific commission with a £500 advance. Taylor argues that Orwell's subsequent life does not suggest he received such a large advance, Gollancz was not known to pay large sums to relatively unknown authors, and Gollancz took little proprietorial interest in progress.

3. ^ The author states that evidence discovered at the National Historical Archives in Madrid in 1989 of a security police report to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason described Eric Blair and his wife Eileen Blair, as "known Trotskyists" and as "linking agents of the ILP and the POUM". Newsinger goes on to state that given Orwell's precarious health, "there can be little doubt that if he had been arrested he would have died in prison."

4. The statue is owned by ^ The Orwell Society under the patronage of Richard Blair, Orwell's adopted son

Azurmendi, Joxe (1984): George Orwell. 1984: Reality exists in the human mind, , 32: 87-103.

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Leif, Ruth Ann. Homage to Oceania. The Prophetic Vision of George Orwell. Ohio State U.P. [1969]

Orwell, George, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1 - An Age Like This 1945-1950, Penguin.

Rodden, John (1989). George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (2002 revised ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0765808967.

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Wood, James. "A Fine Rage." The New Yorker. 2009. 85(9):54.

Karp, Masha (2023). George Orwell and Russia (1st ed.). United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 312. ISBN 978-1788317139.

Morgan, W. John, 'Pacifism or Bourgeois Pacifism? Huxley, Orwell, and Caudwell'. Chapter 5 in Morgan, W. John and Guilherme, Alexandre (Eds.), Peace and War-Historical, Philosophical, and Anthropological Perspectives, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp, 71-96. ISBN 978-3-030-48670-9.

Orwell, George. Diaries, edited by Peter Davison (W. W. Norton & Company; 2012) 597 pages; annotated edition of 11 diaries kept by Orwell, from August 1931 to September 1949.

Orwell, George. On Jews and Antisemitism, introduced, edited and annotated by Paul Seeliger (Berlin: Comino; 2022) 304 pages, ISBN 978-3-945831-32-8

Steele, David Ramsay (2008). "Orwell, George (1903-1950)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 366-368. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n224. ISBN 978-1412965804. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

Ostrom, Hans and Halton, William. Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in the Age of Pseudocracy (New York: Routledge, 2018) ISBN 978-1138499904

Wilson, S. M. and Huxtable, J. "Such, Such Were the Joys: graphic novel" (London: Pluto Press, Sept 2021) ISBN 978-0745345925

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Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism. Orwell produced literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism.