George Orwell: the indomitable life of the writer who confronted totalitarianism

But while his surname has become one of the most Googled adjectives in history, what of the real man behind it?

Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell rightly ranks highly among the most important writers to have ever lived. His two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the distillation of a life that experienced, first hand, the bleak totalitarianism of the interwar period and who determined to confront it using his strongest weapons: his words.

“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 proclaimed. “It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

What was George Orwell’s real name?

A fitting place to start is the fact that his world-famous name, George Orwell, was not his name at all, but a pseudonym. He was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, then a part of British India.

He seized upon the pen name in 1932 while writing his first major work, Down and Out in Paris and London. The ‘George’ was taken from the patron saint of England, whereas ‘Orwell’ was inspired by one of his favourite places, the River Orwell in Suffolk. The overall effect was a tribute to his fondness for England.

The historian Laura Beers – author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century, who spoke to us on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast – explains that part of his motivation behind adopting a pseudonym may have been out of consideration for his family.

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“At that point he’s still living with his parents and his younger sister, and he doesn’t want to embarrass them with a book that is about a man slumming it amongst disgraceful comrades,” she says.

George Orwell’s early life and family

George Orwell’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was a civil servant, and his half-French mother, Ida Mabel, had been raised in Burma. He was their second child, and he had an older and younger sister.

When he was just one year old, Ida relocated to Henley-on-Thames in England with him and his older sister. Despite their relatively modest circumstances, she was determined to give her son a public school education and succeeded in obtaining him a scholarship at St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne.

During his five years boarding there, his experiences were not all pleasant. In fact, they became the subject of an excoriating essay, Such, Such Were the Joys, that he wrote in later life.

Yet his academic prowess saw Orwell secure a place at the prestigious Eton College on a scholarship. He completed his studies in 1921, but not before being taught French by another future author of a dystopian classic, Aldous Huxley of Brave New World fame.

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While Orwell would maintain a subdued recollection of this period of his life, his childhood friend, Jacintha Buddicom, insisted that he was a happy youth. He befriended her during his summer holidays in Shiplake, Oxfordshire, where his family had relocated to shortly before the First World War.

“[Jacintha] said he never came back and complained about school and he never seemed unhappy,” says Beers. “He liked games, the great outdoors, books and all the things that well-adjusted young men like.”

Perhaps Orwell’s later bitterness stemmed from an acute awareness of Britain’s class system, according to Beers. “One of his greatest sources of grievance seems to have been that he was less well off financially than many of the other people at his prep school and certainly at Eton,” she explains.

Indeed, in 1941, Orwell wrote: “England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.”

How did Orwell’s experience of British imperialism shape him as a writer?

Rather than progress to university, which his family could not afford, Orwell enrolled in the Indian Imperial Police and opted for deployment to Burma. Beers believes his decision to enter colonial administration was inspired by his background: “He grew up in an Anglo-Indian household, surrounded by memories of the empire and family who talked regularly about their time in the empire as if it were more real to them than their current existence.”

His experiences in Burma would leave an indelible mark on Orwell, sparking a political awakening and giving shape to the desire he had since childhood of being a writer. An outsider from the Burmese, he soon became disillusioned with – and repulsed by – the near total and arbitrary power he had over the indigenous population.

Moreover, Orwell was disturbed by the corrupting influence that this system rendered on those dispensing authority. Some scholars have suggested that it was his experiences of colonial oppression that seeded in Orwell a visceral rejection of totalitarianism in all its forms, whether it be Stalinist, Nazi or European imperialism.

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Orwell was inspired to write his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and the essays, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant in response to his time in colonial service.

The first of the essays details the public execution of a member of the community in which Orwell both humanises the condemned man while emphasising his ‘foreignness’. “But one of the things that we never learn in /A Hanging/ is what crime the man has meant to have committed, which is seen as largely irrelevant,” says Beers.

“I think that speaks to Orwell’s belief that most of the supposed criminality of the peoples of South Asia, in the eyes of the British, was largely [informed by] prejudice, racism and systems of systematic oppression rather than actual crimes committed.”

The second essay details how an imperial officer feels pressured by the local population to dispense his duty as an enforcer by killing a violent elephant that has caused mayhem in the area: “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East,” wrote Orwell.

Did George Orwell fight in the Spanish Civil War?

On 17 July 1936, a military coup attempted to overthrow the democratic Second Spanish Republic. Led by reactionary and ultra-nationalistic officers – among them the future dictator General Francisco Franco – the insurgency failed in its objective, plunging Spain into a civil war.

As Western democracies imposed an arms embargo and committed themselves to a policy of non-intervention, the fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini threw their support squarely behind the military rebels, the Nationalists. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union sent aid in the form of weapons, soldiers and a mobilised multinational army of amateur fighters – the International Brigades – to assist the Republicans.

In December 1936, Orwell – who had returned from Burma and settled in Hertfordshire, where he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy – ventured to Spain to join the struggle against fascism, via his contacts in the Independent Labour Party. Once there, he enlisted in a Trotskyist group known as the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), better known as the POUM.

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Arriving in Barcelona that winter, Orwell’s first impressions are vividly captured in the opening paragraphs of his memoir, Homage to Catalonia. Enthused by the enactment of radical socioeconomic reforms, he wrote: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle... every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle... every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised.”

He saw military action on the relatively quiet Aragon Front and was keen to join the fighting around Madrid. But standing at 6ft 2in, Orwell literally stood above many of his comrades, and this made him an easy target. During spring 1937, he took a bullet to his throat and was invalided out of action. The damage would affect his voice for the rest of his life.

It was during his time in Spain that Orwell came face-to-face with the reality of Stalinism, too. The most notable event occurred between 3 and 8 May 1937, when Barcelona descended into street fighting between various Republican factions, with Orwell witnessing the fracas from a hotel rooftop.

Weeks later, the POUM was denounced as a Trotskyite front for the fascists and actively suppressed by the Moscow-aligned Spanish Communist Party under the guidance of Soviet apparatchiks. Orwell and Eileen, who had joined him in Spain, had to go on the run.

The May Days, as the clashes became known, left a profound impression on Orwell, according to Beers. “The Stalinist-influenced government went after Orwell’s colleagues and distorted the truth to defame them as enemies of the Republic… [something that] is very much present in the way that Orwell writes about the rewriting of history and the malleability of truth and its use by those who want to hold on to power at any price in Nineteen Eighty-Four and in Animal Farm.”

What books did George Orwell write?

Orwell’s reputation as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished writers was undoubtedly built on his two most famous novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

But he had penned four others by then, as well as three nonfiction works, was a prolific essayist and wrote hundreds of book reviews, columns and poems.

His literary career began in earnest following his time in Burma, with his first major work being the memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. Published in 1933, it details Orwell’s personal experiences of squalor and homelessness, exposing the poverty rife in the French and British capitals.

During the 1930s, as the decade became increasingly polarised by the rise of totalitarianism and threat of fascism, Orwell used his writing to advocate for democratic socialism.

The second half of his book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) – an investigation into the harsh living conditions among the working class of Britain’s industrial north – allowed him to profess his leftist beliefs, as well as explain why those who would most benefit from socialism were likely to be opposed to it.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote what Beers describes as his most “optimistic” piece of writing: the essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. Here, “he lays out what he sees as the necessary prerequisites of social change in order for England to win the war against fascism,” she says.

In another notable essay, Why I Write, Orwell explained what drove the decision to take up his vocation: “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”

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This power to confront unpleasant facts enabled Orwell to assess his life, and the increasingly fraught times he navigated, in as clear-eyed a way as possible. For instance, while he was critical of those on the left who held a completely negative impression of England, he offered a view of the country as if it was an eccentric family “in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”.

He went on: “Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

In one of his most influential pamphlets, Politics and the English Language (1946), he criticised vague, unclear and jargon-filled language, which he believed was used by politicians, journalists and academics to obscure truth and manipulate public opinion.

The essay contains one of Orwell’s most quoted observations: “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

George Orwell and Animal Farm

One of Orwell’s most famous works, the novella Animal Farm is a children’s fable of the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of Joseph Stalin.

The plot reimagines the history of early Soviet Russia through talking farmyard animals, who unite and rise up against their human master and seize control of their destiny. They rename the land ‘Animal Farm’ and adopt seven commandments, including “All animals are equal”.

Orwell attributed the story’s inspiration to an incident he witnessed following his return from Spain: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

After the barnyard revolution, the smarter and manipulative leaders, the pigs – led by Napoleon, representing Stalin – gradually erode its egalitarian principles and create a new form of tyranny. This subversion is reflected in a change to Animal Farm’s commandment, “All animals are equal”, with the caveat: “but some animals are more equal than others”.

The novella ends with the pigs forging an alliance with the human farmers as the other animals look back and forth between the two, no longer able to tell them apart. Orwell’s fable is a poetic critique of Stalinism’s betrayal of the socialist ideals of the October Revolution and the emergence of one of the 20th century’s most tyrannical regimes.

George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell’s dystopian modern classic of a totalitarian Britain under the all-seeing gaze of Big Brother is arguably the most famous of all his writings. Conceived during the Second World War, he began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in June 1944.

At this time, his health was failing rapidly and so progress was slow. In May 1946, with the war over, Orwell decamped to the Inner Hebridean island of Jura to recuperate. Staying in a farmhouse called Barnhill, he drafted and rewrote the nightmarish world set in a then-near future, where privacy is non-existent and a totalitarian regime has absolute control over every aspect of life, ‘truth’ and history itself.

“The dystopia that he presents and particularly the emphasis on the surveillance state is something that remains relevant in so many contexts in the 21st century,” says Beers. “Obviously, if you’re living within Xi’s China or Putin’s Russia that relevance, particularly from a status perspective, is much more glaring.”

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Yet Beers argues that Nineteen Eighty-Four has remained a bestseller beyond its Cold War context because the totalitarianism it portrays is universally recognisable: “Even within a Western context, when we think of all the different ways in which we’re surveilled both by our own governments, but also large corporations using our data and effectively watching and packaging us. That sense of an omnipotent surveillance apparatus is one that continues to echo with people.”

Since its publication in 1949, many have interpreted the novel as a warning inspired by the author’s opposition to Stalinism, and thus against left-wing politics in general.

However, Orwell himself was quick to dismiss any notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a prophecy and he remained a committed democratic socialist who never disavowed his leftist politics.

He regarded Stalinism as a monstrous perversion of socialist principles. Beers suggests that it is more appropriate to read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a rendering of totalitarianism in general.

This can be seen in the infamous chapter when the protagonist, Winston Smith, is tortured inside the Ministry of Love, and the henchman O’Brien conjures a scene of the regime’s ultimate objective: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

“That’s really a fascist image. We associate the jackboot still to this day with Nazi Germany,” says Beers.

What did George Orwell do in the Second World War?

When war broke out in September 1939, the Medical Board declared Orwell “unfit for any kind of military service”. Instead, he joined the Home Guard and continued to write. Meanwhile, his wife Eileen gained employment at the Censorship Department within the Ministry of Information, housed inside Senate House in Bloomsbury, London. This would inspire the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“He worked briefly for the BBC, producing programmes for the Indian section of the Eastern Service and he brought on a lot of young, new writers and poets,” says Beers. “But he ultimately left as it wasn’t something he found overly fulfilling.”

Surprisingly, in spite of the numerous radio broadcasts he was part of during this time, no surviving recording of Orwell’s voice has ever come to light.

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Throughout the war years, he wrote regularly for the left-wing weekly magazine, Tribune, which was under the editorship of the Labour MP – and future ‘father of the NHS’ – Aneurin Bevan. Eventually, Orwell became the magazine’s literary editor.

In 1944, he and Eileen adopted a young boy whom they named Richard Horatio and, after their home was destroyed in a Nazi V-1 attack, they settled in Islington.

In the final months of the war, Orwell accepted a posting at the Observer as a war correspondent and ventured to recently liberated Paris. His deployment overseas, however, was interrupted by the unexpected death of Eileen from complications during a hysterectomy.

By the time the war ended in September 1945, Animal Farm had been published.

How did George Orwell die?

A lifelong heavy smoker, Orwell’s respiratory problems worsened after the war. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in late 1947, leading to Bevan, his editor at Tribune, to make a request for specialist medication from the United States.

While recuperating at a sanitorium in the Cotswolds, one of Orwell’s friends, Celia Kirwan, visited. She had just been recruited as Robert Conquest’s assistant at a secret wing of the British Foreign Office known as the Information Research Department.

Orwell provided Kirwan with a list of names of various notables spanning academia, the arts and politics who he deemed sympathetic to Stalinism and therefore unreliable for producing anti-Soviet propaganda. Among the dozens of names he came up with were Hollywood actors Charlie Chaplin and Katharine Hepburn, the director Orson Welles, and renowned historian EH Carr.

By 1949, an increasingly ailing Orwell had struck up a new relationship with Sonia Brownell, to whom he became engaged while undergoing treatment. They married that October and Sonia cared for his affairs for the remainder of his life, leaving him to concentrate on writing from his cottage on Jura.

On 21 January 1950, just seven months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell died at University College Hospital, London, after an artery burst in his lungs. He was 46. And as all the graveyards near the hospital had no space, the acclaimed author ended up being buried in the graveyard of All Saints’ Church in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.

To this day, his grave remains something of a site of pilgrimage for his legions of fans: those who have held his words as an attack on totalitarianism, and who praise the name of Orwell while condemning the political nightmare that shares that name.