19 Facts Worth Knowing About George Orwell
And we’re off! As we start this summer’s book club, I want to explore the life of George Orwell and the context in which he wrote 1984. To begin, I’ll share a three-part series covering some of the facts and myths about Orwell and 1984.
As a reminder, in the first couple of weeks, we won’t explore the text of 1984 just yet in order to give everyone a chance to read the book and avoid any spoilers. Please feel free to comment on the posts to get the discussion going (but please avoid giving anything away about the plot for now.)
In part one, I’ve curated some of the details about George Orwell’s life that I found to be foundational, especially interesting, or influential on his work. I learned many of these details from two terrific books: Orwell’s Ghosts by historian Laura Beers and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by writer Dorian Lynskey. The Orwell Foundation has a nice database of information about the author and links to many of his most influential essays. The Orwell Archive houses an incredible number of documents and photographs.
Without further ado, here are 19 facts worth knowing about George Orwell:
1: George Orwell isn’t George Orwell’s real name. That would be Eric Arthur Blair. He took on the pen name in 1933, when he published his first full-length book, Down and Out in Paris and London, “a fictionalized retelling of his experience ‘slumming it’ with the poor of Europe’s two great imperial capitals.” He adopted the pen name so that his reasonably well-to-do family could avoid any possible embarrassment from the book’s content and so he could save face if the book ended up a dud.
2: He created his pen name by combining “George,” England’s patron saint, with “Orwell,” from England’s River Orwell. Other contenders included: Kenneth Miles, P. S. Burton, and H. Lewis Allways. Though many of his contemporaries knew him as George Orwell, he never officially changed his name. (From here on out I’ll refer to him as George Orwell, since that’s who we know him as too.)
3: Orwell authored 9 books, as well as a number of articles, essays, reviews, and poems. His complete works, which includes both his published and personal writing, fills 20 volumes and contains nearly 9,000 pages and 2 million words.
4: According to a 2003 article in The New York Times, “Orwellian” is “the most widely used adjective derived from the name of a modern writer.” (Take that Dickensian and Kafkaesque.) Though, as the author points out, this doesn’t mean the term is always wielded wisely.
5: Orwell was born on June 5, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, where his father was a mid-level official in the Opium Department of Britain’s Imperial Civil Service. His father was “tasked with overseeing the production of opium in India for export to China, whose ports had been open to the highly-addictive substance in the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century.” When Orwell was around one, his mother moved with him and his older sister to England.
6: Orwell described his family as “lower-upper-middle class,” which writer Dorian Lynskey nicely defines as, “a troubled stratum of the English class system that had the pretensions and manners of the wealthy, but not the capital, and therefore spent most of the money it did have on ‘keeping up appearances.’”
7: When Orwell was eight, his parents sent him to St. Cyprian’s boarding school, a place he recalled with disdain in his essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” In one memorable passage, he describes the particularly cruel punishment he received for wetting the bed and the lesson he took from it as an eight year-old; a lesson which calls to mind the concept of “thoughtcrime” in 1984:
8: From 1917 to 1921, Orwell attended Eton College, perhaps England’s most prestigious boarding school on a scholarship. Other graduates of the all-boys school include Princes William and Harry, former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson, fellow writers Percy Bysshe Shelley and Ian Fleming, economist John Maynard Keynes, and many others. Orwell was a mediocre student and socially the experience seems to have been mixed at best.
Bonus fact: Science fiction writer Aldous Huxley—the author of Brave New World, “the other great 20th century dystopian novel”—was Orwell’s French teacher at Eton.
9: After leaving Eton, while many of his peers continued their studies at Oxford or Cambridge, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police. He spent five years stationed in Burma. He drew on his experience there for two of his most famous essays, “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” as well as his novel, Burmese Days. When he resigned his position at the age of 24, he did so with a newfound disdain for British imperialism:
10: In addition to being a police officer and writer, Orwell held a number of different jobs over the course of his life, including: bookstore clerk, dishwasher, editor, and war correspondent.
11: He was also a soldier. In 1936, Orwell left for Spain to write about and fight in the Spanish Civil War. He enlisted with the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a socialist revolutionary group fighting against Franco’s fascist-backed movement. He wasn’t alone, explains Lynskey. “The great left-wing movement of the day attracted all sorts: adventurers and dreamers, poets and plumbers, doctrinaire Marxists and frustrated misfits. . . . Over a thousand journalists and authors went, too, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and poet Stephen Spender.”
12: While fighting, Orwell was shot in the neck. “Orwell was so much taller than the average Spaniard [he was around 6’ 3”] that his head protruded over the trench’s parapet,” Lynskey writes. “Every morning he liked to stand up to enjoy his first cigarette of the day. When an American militiaman, Harry Milton, asked him one day if he was worried about snipers, Orwell shrugged it off: ‘They couldn’t hit a bull in a passage.’
“At dawn on May 20, one marksman proved him wrong, with a well-aimed bullet that hit him in the throat beneath the larynx. Orwell assumed he was dying . . . [his] first thought was for Eileen [his wife], his second ‘a violent resentment at having to leave the world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well . . . The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaningless of it!’”
Bonus fact: Recent analysis of bacteria found on a letter Orwell sent shortly after he returned from the war suggests he may have caught tuberculosis, the disease that would ultimately kill him, while in a Spanish hospital recovering from the wound.
13: Orwell documented his experience in the war in his third book of non-fiction Homage to Catalonia. He had trouble publishing the book, because he was critical of the Stalin-backed revolutionaries who eventually turned on Orwell’s unit and other left-wing fighters. Publishers feared his account might inadvertently lend support for Franco’s authoritarian regime. Historian Laura Beers explains how the war changed him and shaped his writing:
“He had gone to Spain determined to fight fascism. He left determined to expose the threat to liberty posed by Stalinism. Homage to Catalonia included a frank description of what he had seen of the conflict between the POUM [Orwell’s unit] and the Stalin-backed government in Barcelona. . . . Had Spain not awakened Orwell to the dangers of Stalinism’s totalitarian approach to political dissent, he would have never gone on to write Animal Farm or Nineteen Eight-Four, the two books that have cemented his historical reputation as a champion of individual liberty against government tyranny.”
14: The struggle Orwell faced trying to publish Homage to Catalonia was indicative of his willingness to call out totalitarianism perpetuated by both the left and right, a quality that colored much of his politics and writing. It didn’t always win him friends. “Because he refused to outsource his judgment to an ideology or party line, even when he was wrong, which was quite often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way,” writes Lynskey. “He possessed what he praised Charles Dickens for having: a ‘free intelligence.’”
15: Orwell coined the term “cold war” in his essay, “You and the Atom Bomb.” At the end of the essay, Orwell writes:
“Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. 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—that 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.”
We can see this sentiment radiate throughout 1984 in the form of “forever wars.”
16: Orwell thought often about how language, used and misused, can influence political thought. In one of his most frequently cited essays on language, “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell breaks down the ways that language can obscure an author’s meaning and intent. To avoid authoring this kind of writing, he provides writers with some guidance:
He also offered up six rules for writing clearly. “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about,” he writes. “In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. . . . But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
17: Orwell married twice. He and his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, wed in June, 1936, six months before he left for the Spanish Civil War (she would join him there). An Oxford graduate, she was thoughtful and talented in her own right; however, as Lynskey writes, “she subordinated her own aspirations to Orwell’s . . . One friend said, ‘She caught George’s dreams from him like the measles.’” Unfortunately, she died prematurely in 1945, at the age of 39, from complications during surgery*. Orwell and Shaughnessy had one adopted son, Richard.
About three months before his death, Orwell married Sonia Mary Brownell, an editor at a literary magazine. She became the steward of his work after he died and helped start the George Orwell Archive at University College London.
18: Orwell battled illness for much of his life. He wrote and edited much of 1984 from bed, while suffering from the latter stages of tuberculosis.
19: He died on January 21, 1950, at the age of 46; a mere 227 days after publishing 1984.
*Correction: An earlier version of the article stated that Eileen O'Shaughnessy died from a "routine" operation. The operation from she suffered complications was a hysterectomy.
References
The following references correspond to each numbered fact. When a source is hyperlinked above, I’ve not included it here for brevity’s sake.
1: "a fictionalized...": Beers, L. Orwell's Ghosts (OG), p. 34. Embarrassment, save face: Lynskey, D. The Ministry of Truth (TMOT), p. 6. — 2: Pen name: OG, p. 34. TMOT, p. 6. — 3: Collected works stats, TMOT, p. xviii. — 5: Birthday, family details: OG, p. 23, 25. TMOT, p. 4. — 6: “lower-upper-middle class”: TMOT, p. 4. — 9: Time in Burma: OG, p. 30-34. — 11: Spanish Civil War: OG, p. 40. "The great left-wing...": TMOT, p.10-11. — 12: Around 6' 3": TMOT, p. 3. "Orwell was much...": TMOT, p. 16-17. — 13: Trouble publishing: OG, p. 44-45. "He had gone...": OG, p. 40-41. — 14: "Because he refused...": TMOT, p. xviii. — 17: Eileen O'Shaughnessy: OG, p. 39. TMOT, p. 13.
