George Orwell was born Eric Arthur
Blair in 1903 in India. His paternal grandfather served in the Indian Army
under the British Raj (= British rule in India before 1947) and his father
worked in the Indian Civil Service. Later Orwell described his family as
belonging to the "lower upper middle class" and indeed his parents
owed their privileged lifestyle to the British Empire.
Blair returned to England in 1907 with his mother and sister. He won a
scholarship to Eton, the famous English public school, where he developed a
strong dislike of the English class system.
Blair failed to win a university scholarship and he joined the Indian
Imperial Police in 1922. He served in the police force in Burma for five years
and, like many colleagues, had a native mistress. In 1927 he resigned, having
come to feel like the "hand of the oppressor" through his support of
imperialism, a political system he had grown to resent.
As a result of his experiences, Blair wrote Burmese Days (1934). Its
central character Flory, a timber merchant (= someone
who sells wood) in Burma, eventually commits suicide because he feels
alienated from both his fellow colonialists and the Burmese natives. He hates
the corruption among English and Burmese officials, and the white Europeans'
arrogance towards the natives.
In 1928, Blair decided to live among the poor of London and Paris for a
time. He regarded them - like the Burmese - as victims of injustice. He
described his experiences in his autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and
London (1933). Blair also changed his name to George Orwell: Eric Blair
suited an Etonian and colonial policeman, so he became George Orwell, classless
and anti-authoritarian (George is an ordinary English name, the Orwell is a
river in Fast Anglia).
In 1936, still under the influence of Burma, he wrote the essay,
"Shooting an Elephant". It later served as the title of a collection
of essays dealing with a wide range of topics.
At the end of 1936 Orwell fought on the Republican side in the Spanish
Civil War, because he was fascinated by the vision of a democratic society
without class distinctions. He returned from the war wounded and disillusioned,
having realized that - just as in Burma
- there would always be something inhuman nature that wants power over
others.
In 1938, Orwell fell ill with tuberculosis and never really recovered. In
1945, he wrote Animal Farm, a political satire about a society where all
animals are equal, but "some are more equal than others". Nineteen
Eighty-four, a utopian novel about an oppressive society that uses torture
to make its citizens love the government, another variation on the theme of
"man's dominion over man", was published in 1949.
George Orwell died in January 1950.