George_Orwell

George Orwell was born on June 25, 1903 under the name Eric Arthur Blair. His father worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service and his mother was the daughter of a tea merchant. He lived in Motihari, Bengal, India until he was one, when he moved to England with his mother and sister. When he was five, he began his education at a small Anglican parish school in Henley. He impressed his teachers so much, that was recommended to the headmaster of St. Cyprian’s School, one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time. He attended St. Cyprian’s School on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fee. He later recalled his time at the school with indignation in the essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys”. After graduating, he attended Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar from 1917 to 1921. He later wrote that he had been “relatively happy” at Eton, though he was disliked by many teachers, who perceived him as disrespecting their authority. Here, he also made many lifetime friendships with British intellectuals.

After finishing college, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. But as he grew to hate imperialism, he decided to resign and returned to England. His very first novel, //Burmese Days//, was published in 1934, and reflected on his many experiences in Burma. He adopted his pen name in 1933, wanting a pen name that stressed his love for the English tradition and countryside. He chose George after the patron saint of England and the monarch at the time, George V. Orwell was chosen after the River Orwell in Suffolk, which was one of his most beloved English sites.

He switched jobs frequently, living for several years in poverty and sometimes even homeless. He did itinerant work, and eventually found a job as a schoolteacher, until poor health forced him to work as a part-time assistant in a secondhand bookstore instead.

During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist Uprising. He sympathized for the Independent Labour Party, so he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM, in which he fought as an infantryman. In later works, he described his admiration for the absence of class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. Orwell was shot in the neck on May 20, 1937, and he and his wife, Eileen, left Spain shortly after. They barely escaped arrest as “Trotskyites” when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937. Until 1940, Orwell supported himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly.

During World War II, he was a member of the Home Guard, and soon began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly on programs to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain’s war efforts He knew very well that he was shaping propaganda, and reflected on the guilt later in his writing. He resigned in 1943, and began a job as literary editor of //Tribune//, contributing a regular column titled, “As I Please”. In 1945, his anti-Stalinist allegory, //Animal Farm//, was published with great critical and popular success. This provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. In 1949, his dystopian novel //Nineteen-Eighty-Four// was published. //Nineteen-Eighty-Four// became his best known work. Orwell died of tuberculosis at age 46. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life.

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Winston Smith is a lower-ranking citizen in the nation of Oceania, where everywhere he goes, even his own home, he is watched by the ruling Party through telescreens. He is haunted by giant posters of the Party’s leader, a figure known as Big Brother. The Party controls everything about citizens’ lives, and is currently enforcing the implement of an invented language, called Newspeak. The Party’s goal of this is to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking thoughts about rebellion is illegal, and is thought to be the worst of crimes. Winston is frustrated by the oppression and control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and other expression of individuality. He illegally purchases a diary, in which he can record his criminal thoughts. He has also become fixated on a man name O’Brien, whom he believes to be a secret member of the Brotherhood- the mysterious, legendary group that works to overthrow the Party. At work, he notices a beautiful dark-haired girl staring at him and worries that she is an informant who will turn him in for his thoughtcrime. One day, Winston receives a note from the dark-haired girl that reads “I love you.” She tells him her name, Julia, and they begin to have an affair, which is an illegal act in Oceania. The relationship lasts for some time, and Winston is sure that they will be caught and punished sooner or later. As the affair progresses, Winston’s hate for the Party grows. One day he receives a message saying that O’Brien wants to see him. Winston and Julia travel to O’Brien’s apartment and O’Brien confirms to them that he is, in fact a member of the Brotherhood. He introduces them to, and gives them a book about, the manifest of the Brotherhood. Winston is reading the book to Julia in a room above the store, when soldiers suddenly barge in and seize them. The owner of the store, Mr. Charrington, is revealed as having been a member of the Thought Police all along. Winston is torn away from Julia and taken to a place called the Ministry of Love. There, he finds that O’Brien too is a Party spy, who only pretended to be a member of the Brotherhood in order to trap Winston into committing an open act of rebellion against the Party. Winston is tortured and brainwashed by O’Brien for months, but Winston struggles to resist. So O’Brien sends Winston to Room 101, the final destination for anyone who opposes the party. Here Winston is forced to confront his worst fear- rats. O’Brien straps a cage full of rats onto Winston’s head and prepares to allow the rats to eat his face. Winston breaks down, and pleads O’Brien to do it to Julia, not to him. It turns out that giving up Julia was what O’Brien wanted from Winston all along. With a broken spirit, Winston is released to the outside world. He meets Julia, but no longer has any feelings for her. He has accepted the Party and has learned to love Big Brother.

** George Orwell wrote //1984// with the purpose of warning readers in the West about the dangers of totalitarian government. This was important to Orwell, because he had witnessed firsthand in Spain and Russia the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments would go to sustain and increase their power. //1984// was designed to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, when the book was published, the Cold War had not yet amplified, many American intellectuals supported the theory of communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was indistinct. Orwell, however, begged to differ. He was completely disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he had observed in communist countries. //1984// portrays the ideal and most extreme realization of a totalitarian society. It describes a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life, to the extent that even having a disloyal thought it against the law. Through Winston’s eyes, the reader comes to understand the number of techniques that the Party uses to control its citizens. These include psychological manipulation, physical control, control of information and history, technology, and language as mind control. The novel suggested to its readers in 1949 that, if totalitarianism were not opposed, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years.
 * 1984 and Totalitarianism

** One of the most important messages in //1984// is that language is of central importance to human thought. This is because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. Orwell proposes that if a political agency were to accumulate total control over a language, they could possibly alter the very structure of language, making it impossible to even conceive disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them. This idea is exemplified in //1984// through the language, Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining the language of Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing any ideas that might question the Party’s absolute power.
 * Language and Human Thought


 * Related Publications by George Orwell**
 * //Burmese Days//
 * //A Clergyman's Daughter//
 * //Keep the Aspidistra Flying//
 * //Coming Up For Air//
 * //Animal Farm//
 * //Nineteen Eighty-Four//
 * //Down and Out in Paris and London//
 * //The Road to Wigan Pier//
 * //Homage to Catalonia//