George Orwell
George Orwell
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Eric Arthur Blair (25
June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English
novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic
who wrote under the pen
name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by
lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both authoritarian communism and fascism), and support of democratic socialism.
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. 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.
Orwell's work influential in popular culture, 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, The
Times named Orwell the
second-greatest British writer since 1945.
Early years:
Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25
June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India, into what he described as a
"lower-upper-middle class" family. 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 1904, Ida 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, Eric was
sent as a day student to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames. It was a
Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns. His mother
wanted him to have a public school education,
but his family could not afford it. Through the social connections of Ida's
brother Charles Limouzin, Blair gained a scholarship to St Cyprian's School in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Arriving
in September 1911, he boarded for the next five years, returning home only for
holidays. 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 Horizon,
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." Growing
up together, Buddicom and Blair became idealistic adolescent sweethearts,
reading and writing poetry together, and dreaming of becoming famous
writers. Blair also enjoyed shooting, fishing and birdwatching with
Jacintha's brother and sister.
Literary career and legacy:
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 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. 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."
Literary influences:
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,
Orwell's investigation of poverty
in The Road to Wigan Pier strongly resembles that of Jack
London's The People of the Abyss. 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 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, "about as good a novelist as one can be (i.e. as
novelists go today) while holding untenable opinions".
Literary critic:
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, he feels this very strongly
with Swift,
with Defoe,
with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert,
though in several cases. 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. His 1945 essay In
Defence of P.G. Wodehouse 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.
Famous writings:
1. Burmese Days
2.
A Clergyman's Daughter
3. Keep the Aspidistra Flying
4. Coming Up for Air
5. 1984
6. Down and Out in Paris and London
7. The Road to Wigan Pier
8. Homage to Catalonia
9. Inside the Whale and Other Essays
10. A collection of essays
11. The English people.
- Literary devices
: He used
a variety of literary devices in his writing,
including metaphors, foreshadowing,
irony, and similes.
- Writing style: is typically short and to the point. Particularly in his later works such as Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell intentionally avoids using figurative language, unnecessary words, and intricate language.
- The style of Animal Farm: is simple and clear. The novella's language is concrete, factual and delivered in short sentences. The simplicity of style culminates at the novella's end, in one-sentence paragraphs: “It was a pig walking on his hind legs.
Animal Farm
criticized: for
its historical inaccuracy, political bias, and failure to capture the
nuances of totalitarianism.
1. Historical
inaccuracy:
- Some critics, especially
on the political left, have criticized the book for its historical
inaccuracy.
- Others have accused Orwell of being
"grossly unfair to Stalin" in his portrayal of Napoleon.
2. Political bias:
- Conservatives have used
the book to warn against the dangers of communism and socialism.
- Some critics have accused Orwell of
expressing aristocratic contempt towards the working class.
3. Failure to capture totalitarianism:
- Philosopher Hannah Arendt
has argued that the book fails to capture the nuances of totalitarianism.
- Arendt says that Orwell's portrayal of the
pigs as the sole villains ignores the fact that totalitarian systems are
often the result of many individuals.
4. Other criticisms:
- Some critics have accused
the book of pessimism.
- Some critics have criticized the book for its disillusion and failure of political imagination.
Despite these criticisms, Animal
Farm has been a staple in classrooms for generations and is considered one of
the most successful satires of the 20th century.
The main themes in
Animal Farm: are class, equality and inequality, and
power and control.
Animal
Farm is a satirical fable that
explores themes of power, greed, and the corrupting nature of power. Some
important points of the story include:
·
The
rebellion
The animals
rebel against their human master, Mr. Jones, and take control of the
farm.
·
The
pigs take power
The pigs, who
are smarter than the other animals, take more and more for themselves and
become the new oppressors.
·
The
pigs betray their ideals
The pigs
betray their ideals of equality and solidarity and turn the farm into a
dystopian regime.
·
The
animals' initial freedom
The animals
initially establish a utopian society based on equality and solidarity.
·
The
animals' conditions deteriorate
The conditions
for the non-pig animals start to deteriorate after Napoleon takes
control.
·
The
pigs become indistinguishable from humans
The pigs
become the new oppressors and cannot be distinguished from the humans.
·
The
story is an allegory
The story is
an allegory that represents the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of
Stalinism.
·
The
story critiques totalitarianism
The story is a critique of totalitarianism and the corrupting nature of power. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." Meaning and significance: The last line of the book highlights the tragic and ironic transformation that has taken place on Animal Farm.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
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