A warning to mankind by George Orwell
Early life and family background
The man who would become known to the world as George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, then part of British-ruled India. His father, Richard Walmsley Blair, born in 1857, entered the Indian civil service at eighteen and served as an opium agent, administering and overseeing the production of a commodity exported primarily to China, a grimly profitable cog in the machinery of empire. Orwell’s mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, came from mixed French and English parentage, born in Surrey but raised in Moulmein, Burma, where her family were well-established merchants. She was working as a governess when she married Richard, who was thirty-nine—nearly twice her age. They went on to have three children: Marjorie (born 1898), Eric (1903), and Avril (1908).
Though the Blairs could claim distant aristocratic links, the family’s finances had dwindled by the time of Eric’s birth. They belonged to the upper-middle class without the security of affluence. This positioned the young Eric in the uneasy space of genteel poverty, a vantage point that fostered both an alertness to privilege and a sensitivity to deprivation—threads that would later run through his life and writing.
Illness shadowed him from infancy. He suffered frequent bouts of poor health, particularly affecting his lungs, a lifelong vulnerability that would flare and recede, yet never quite relent. In 1904, shortly after his birth, Eric followed his mother and sister to England while his father remained in India. By late 1905, the family settled in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. He would later remember his childhood fondly and considered himself his mother’s favourite, though his relationship with his father—distant in those early years and complicated even when proximity resumed—was never particularly warm.
Richard returned briefly to England in 1907, long enough for Ida to give birth to Avril in 1908, before going back to India. The England of Eric’s childhood struck him as peaceful and open, a place where children roamed freely and optimism seemed the air’s natural texture—an atmosphere embodied, in his memory, by the pleasure-seeking Edward VII. Yet beneath this apparent calm ran the currents of imperial power and global commerce. Men like Richard Blair, stationed across continents, helped channel colonial wealth towards London through maritime trade. Tragedies intruded into this idyll. Orwell would later recall the horror he felt at hearing about the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912. Far greater horror arrived in 1914, when the First World War shattered the comfort of his world. He was eleven.
Education and early literary ambitions
Eric’s mother, keenly ambitious for her son, pushed for a good education. In 1911, he began at St Cyprian’s School near Eastbourne, a preparatory school geared towards entry to public schools. He excelled at Latin, Greek, English, History and Mathematics, and showed athletic talent, especially at cricket. During his five years there he frequently topped his classes, earning prizes in English (1915) and Classics (1916).
Around this time, the family moved to Shiplake, near Henley, where Eric formed a close friendship with the Buddicom children—Jacintha, Prosper and Guinever. With Jacintha in particular, Eric shared literary enthusiasms. Already at eleven, he proclaimed his ambition to become a famous writer, composing and reading aloud plays inspired by Shakespeare. The outbreak of war intensified his early engagement with public affairs. He wrote a patriotic poem urging young Englishmen to enlist; it was printed in a local paper and read at St Cyprian’s assembly.
In retrospect, Orwell would look back on his time at St Cyprian’s with a mixture of bitterness and scepticism. In an essay published posthumously in 1968, he described harsh discipline, meagre living conditions, poor food and class-based favouritism. Some contemporaries challenged the severity of these claims, suggesting exaggeration. Still, the sense of injustice, of institutions rationing dignity according to wealth, left its mark.
In 1916, Eric won a Classics scholarship to Wellington College. He soon sat for the Eton examination, placing thirteenth for twelve scholarships. A place opened, and in May 1917 he went up to Eton, the nation’s premier public school, founded in 1440 by Henry VI. As a King’s Scholar, he owed no fees and belonged to an intellectual elite that lived within the college precincts. Yet he felt socially out of place, acutely aware that his presence owed to scholarship rather than family resources. Unlike at St Cyprian’s, his academic performance slipped. He fell to the bottom in Latin and transferred to the less demanding Classical General track. The prospect of a university scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge receded.
During these years, war hung in the background. By 1917, the romantic patriotism of 1914 had worn thin; trench stalemate and attrition dulled the glamour. Even epochal events—the Russian Revolution among them—made small impression on schoolboys insulated by routine. Yet the war touched his family: Richard, now sixty, went to France as a second lieutenant; Ida worked in the Ministry of Pensions. The house in Henley was let, and Eric and Avril often spent holidays with the Buddicoms. Eric’s affection for Jacintha, expressed through poems, took on a romantic tone, while his reading—Chesterton, Wells, Lawrence—widened both imagination and critique.
By 1920, with one year left at Eton, his future came under discussion. Ida favoured university; Richard held that his son should join the imperial civil service. Given Eric’s lacklustre marks, the father’s practical view prevailed. After his final term at Eton in 1921, Eric joined his parents in Southwold, Suffolk. The following June, just past his nineteenth birthday, he passed the Indian Imperial Police exam. He asked to serve in Burma, a land linked to his mother’s childhood and to his grandmother, who still lived there. After a final summer with the Buddicoms, he sailed from Liverpool in late October 1922, arriving a month later in Rangoon and proceeding to the training college in Mandalay.
Burma: service, disillusionment and the seed of revolt
Burma had been annexed in 1885: British and Indian troops toppled King Thibaw, dismantled institutions, and folded the country into the Indian empire. The conquest was driven by commercial appetites: cheap rice, oil, timber. Military rule, direct and often indifferent, replaced traditional authority. By the time Eric arrived, the most violent upheavals had waned, but crime was on the rise; in 1924, there were some 800 murders, and prisons held around 16,000 people. The environment was unforgiving: searing temperatures, monsoons, and dangerous wildlife claimed lives each year.
Eric learned Burmese quickly and could converse with Buddhist priests within a few years. Yet he remained socially awkward and unsuited to the heavy-drinking culture prevalent among colonial police. His postings came fast: Myoungmya in the Irrawaddy delta (1924) as assistant to the District Superintendent; Twante as Sub-Division Officer to oversee a station and gather village intelligence; Syriam to safeguard the Burmah Oil refinery—a rare post that afforded Western comforts and relieved some social isolation; then Moulmein (April 1926), where he reconnected with family; and finally Katha on the Irrawaddy, where he contracted dengue. In July 1927, he was granted six months’ leave to recuperate in England.
He would never return to Burma. Those four and a half years left an indelible mark: the starkness of imperial power; the spectacle of dominance and deference; the undeniable brutality of rule; and, too, the discomfort and even distaste evoked by certain local practices as perceived through his upbringing and his time. The experience would power his fiction and his politics, sharpening his eye for injustice and his capacity for self-critique.
On a family holiday in Cornwall in September 1927, he announced that he was resigning from the Burma Police to become a writer. His parents reacted with shock and disapproval; relations with his father became strained for years. That autumn he sought guidance from an old Eton tutor, who encouraged him to go where writers and editors gathered. He moved to London, took lodgings on Portobello Road, and began what became a pattern: donning shabby clothes and venturing into the East End. He tramped, lodged in spikes, and immersed himself among the poor. His sympathy for the working class was genuine, yet these expeditions were also acts of research, of apprenticeship to the life of observation and exposure he craved.
Paris, poverty and apprenticeship to writing
In early 1928, lured by a favourable exchange rate and Paris’s reputation as a literary capital, he moved to the French capital, living in the Latin Quarter among writers and artists. He wrote short pieces; editors were unmoved. Journalism offered better prospects: essays on censorship in England, on working-class conditions drawn from his London wanderings, and reflections on Burma. He enjoyed the company of his Aunt Nellie Limouzin, who lived nearby.
In March 1929, influenza put him in hospital. Following his discharge, he lived in acute poverty, working as a plongeur—dishwasher—in a hotel and later in a restaurant, sharing a precarious existence with a Russian friend. He could have turned to Aunt Nellie for help; he chose not to, likely in pursuit of hard-earned knowledge and the texture of experience. The dirt, squalor and exhaustion of that life would later surface in his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).
In December 1929, he returned to Southwold. He had already written “The Spike,” an essay about tramping in London, and submitted it to the Adelphi, a progressive magazine then edited by Richard Rees and Max Plowman. It would not appear in print until 1931, but his connection with Adelphi proved formative; Rees, in particular, would become a close friend.
Over the next several years, he divided his time between Southwold and London, working from his bedroom in his parents’ house, reviewing books for the Adelphi, tutoring the children of family friends, and time and again setting out on tramping expeditions. He did odd work, once as a cleaner for a Limehouse family whose children were amused by his refined accent.
In 1931, he went to pick hops in Kent, an annual migration for East Enders seeking seasonal work. He kept a detailed diary of those weeks: the camaraderie and the thefts of food and supplies needed simply to carry on; the humiliation of writing home for ten shillings; the striking generosity of fellow pickers despite material scarcity. He tried speaking in a cockney accent but occasionally slipped into his natural voice, which paradoxically drew more empathy—people concluded he had “come down in the world.” After fifteen days of ten-hour shifts, he netted sixteen shillings.
The living conditions in London’s cheaper lodging houses were sometimes unbearable. After a spell near London Bridge that he found revolting, he asked his parents for money and moved somewhere cleaner. In early 1932, he secured Leonard Moore as his literary agent. He was then seeking a publisher for “A Scullion’s Diary,” based on Parisian experiences, which T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber found “interesting but too short.” Meanwhile, he took a teaching job at Hawthorns High School for Boys in Hayes—“one of the most godforsaken places I have struck,” he later wrote—and transferred in 1933 to Fray’s College in Uxbridge to teach French.
In June 1932, Moore brought positive news: Victor Gollancz would publish “A Scullion’s Diary” for an advance of £40, provided he made certain edits. Published in January 1933 as Down and Out in Paris and London, it appeared under a pseudonym: George Orwell. The choice united the patron saint of England, St George, with the River Orwell in Suffolk—a “good, round English name,” he said. After five years of uncertainty since Burma, Eric Arthur Blair had become George Orwell, a published writer.
The book received approving notices and appeared on bestseller lists. Yet his career remained precarious. Some found his voice dated; his prospects uncertain. Approaching thirty, dissatisfied and lonely, he even turned towards the Anglican Church in Hayes for solace—an impulse later understated or ironised in his writing. He lacked the income to live by his pen, and his romantic life faltered. He proposed to Brenda Salkeld, who declined but remained a friend. He began a relationship with Eleanor Jacques, who would marry Orwell’s friend Dennis Collings in 1934.
He sent the first hundred pages of Burmese Days to Moore in January 1933 and completed the manuscript by November. Pneumonia struck in December, forcing him back to Southwold to recover. Gollancz rejected Burmese Days, fearing libel actions from identifiable colonial figures. The book thus appeared first in the United States (1934) through Harper Brothers. Set in a fictionalised Katha, it follows John Flory, an alienated teak merchant, and interleaves romance, racial politics, corruption and despair. The novel closes with Flory’s suicide after his Burmese mistress is bribed to ruin him, his European fiancée having abandoned him.
Between 1934 and 1935, Orwell wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter in six months, presenting it to Moore in October 1934. The book tracks Dorothy Hare, a Suffolk rector’s daughter, through dislocation, breakdown, and a series of descents—hop-picking, a London boarding house for prostitutes, a night begging in Trafalgar Square, and work in a private school—before returning home. The novel offered social insight but lacked, in Orwell’s later judgement, unity of form; he disliked it and prevented reprints during his lifetime.
At Aunt Nellie’s prompting, he took a part-time job in late 1934 at Booklovers’ Corner, a Hampstead shop run by Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. They provided accommodation and access to London’s literary milieu. There he wrote most of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, about Gordon Comstock, a poet struggling against a literary and commercial world that undervalues him, satirising both the cult of money and the self-defeating puritanism of those who despise it. The book drew on Orwell’s own experiences while signalling that he was no longer entirely outside the literary world.
The Westropes’ left-wing commitments—longstanding members of the Independent Labour Party—exposed Orwell to socialist arguments that intersected with his anti-imperialism and his instinct for fairness. A Clergyman’s Daughter appeared in March 1935 to mixed reviews. With name changes to avoid libel, Gollancz published Burmese Days in Britain in June; it won favourable notices, including in the New Statesman by Cyril Connolly, a friend from schooldays, whom Orwell then reconnected with after thirteen years.
That spring, Orwell met Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a psychology student at University College London. He quickly wished to marry her; she was cautious, wanting first to complete her studies. Meanwhile, Orwell became a regular reviewer for the New English Weekly, and in January 1936 submitted the final manuscript of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Gollancz then proposed that he travel to the industrial North to document conditions, contributing to a growing body of Depression-era reportage.
Journey to the North and a socialist conscience
Orwell set out on 31 January 1936 for Manchester and, using contacts from Adelphi, stayed in Wigan, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and Barnsley over the next two months. He saw mines and docks, met workers and families, and recorded a granular, compassionate portrait of overcrowded lodgings, relentless labour and economic humiliation. In Barnsley he attended a rally led by Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Fascism—incubated in Italy under Mussolini and ascendant in Germany under Hitler—offered a seductive, dangerously simple channel for economic rage. Orwell was appalled both by the blackshirts’ violence and Mosley’s rhetorical power.
He returned to London in late March and in early April moved to a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, which would remain his retreat for a decade. There he transformed his northern journals into The Road to Wigan Pier. On 9 June 1936, he married Eileen at the village church; as his legal name remained Eric Blair, she became Eileen Blair. She left her degree and may have expected to collaborate on his work; in practice, she was often excluded from it, a source of tension and sadness.
By December, Orwell had completed The Road to Wigan Pier and sent it to Gollancz. The first half reports on slums, mines and families living at the edge of viability; the second is a political essay, arguing for democratic socialism and identifying obstacles—snobbery, fear, a distaste for austerity—as well as the failures of existing socialist movements to appeal broadly. Published in March 1937, it pushed Orwell further towards a socialism that was fiercely anti-totalitarian and grounded in the everyday decency of ordinary people.
Spain: a turning point
In July 1936, a military revolt led by General Francisco Franco rose against Spain’s Republican government. The conflict quickly became a civil war and a proxy struggle: Germany and Italy aided Franco’s Nationalists; the Soviet Union supported the Republicans, mobilising Communist networks and international brigades. By late 1936, Orwell resolved to go. He arrived in Barcelona at the end of December, intending to write for the British working class and, if possible, to fight. Through contacts in the Independent Labour Party, he joined the POUM militia (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), a revolutionary Marxist group opposed to Stalinist orthodoxy.
In January 1937, his unit went to the Aragón front near Zaragoza. Poorly supplied, they mostly patrolled. Observers noticed his quiet bravery at the lines and solitary reading and writing off them. In March, Eileen arrived in Spain to work in a support role. Later, transferred to the siege of Huesca, Orwell took part in an attack on an enemy redoubt, throwing a bomb to suppress fire and allowing his comrades to retreat—one of the most intense moments of his military life.
Returning to Barcelona in late April seeking a transfer to Madrid, he confronted the internecine conflict consuming the Republican side. The Civil Guard—on behalf of a Republican government increasingly aligned with Soviet demands—moved to dismantle the worker militias. For three days in early May, Orwell was barricaded in a rooftop post. On 6 May, government troops disbanded the militias. He returned to Aragón, and on 20 May was shot through the throat by a sniper. Miraculously, he survived. Declared unfit for service, he rejoined Eileen in Barcelona, where they were caught in the government’s suppression of the POUM and barely escaped Spain with their passports from the British consulate.
The six months in Spain transformed him. He saw courage and treachery at close quarters; he saw propaganda distort events in real time; he saw social revolution briefly realised and brutally crushed. An eyewitness piece critical of the Republican leadership was rejected by the New Statesman as effectively pro-Franco. He set to work on Homage to Catalonia, an unsparing chronicle of the conflict, camaraderie and betrayal he had witnessed. Fearing Gollancz would reject its anti-Stalinist stance, he sent it to Secker & Warburg. Published in April 1938, it sold fewer than 700 copies that year but would later stand among the most important accounts of the war, and the defining manuscript of his political maturation.
His health deteriorated severely in early 1938; lung trouble sent him to Preston Hall sanatorium for over five months. From there, he joined the Independent Labour Party, denouncing Communist subservience to Soviet policy and regarding the mainstream Labour Party as co-opted by the establishment. In September, he went to Morocco with Eileen to recuperate. He disliked his six months there—too much enforced idleness, too far from the life of England and the work he believed he needed to do—but he wrote Coming Up for Air, a novel of memory and loss in which George Bowling, tugged by nostalgia, returns to his Oxfordshire town to find it transformed beyond recognition by modernity and commerce. Delivered in March 1939 and published by Gollancz in June, it sold out its first edition quickly.
War, work and the making of allegory
As Europe slid into war, Orwell kept a diary of events. Eileen found work at the government’s Censorship Department in London; Orwell, initially opposed to war, came to feel a duty to contribute, limitations of health notwithstanding. He questioned whether literary work mattered in wartime but continued writing. Inside the Whale, a collection of essays, appeared in March 1940. He began writing for Horizon, a new literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly, and in May moved with Eileen to a flat near Regent’s Park. News from France was devastating: Dunkirk’s evacuation, and the surrender of France on 17 June. Worse came personally: Eileen’s brother Laurence, serving as a medic, was killed.
With the threat of invasion looming, the government formed the Local Defence Volunteers, soon renamed the Home Guard. Orwell joined a St John’s Wood company, rose to sergeant, and undertook guard duties at local strategic sites. He also joined a project led by Fred Warburg, the publisher of Homage to Catalonia, which aimed to bring writers to bear on wartime questions. Orwell’s contribution, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), argued that Dunkirk’s disaster was a failure of capitalism and that only a socialist transformation could save and remake Britain. It began with a probing meditation on English character and moved to a sharp, prescriptive politics of national renewal grounded in equality, decency and purposeful work.
In early 1941, he began writing “London Letters” for the Partisan Review in the United States, reporting on the Home Front, on the Home Guard he defended as an embryo citizen army, and on his hopes for post-war reconstruction. He observed Londoners’ stoicism shading into fatalism; after the RAF’s success in the Battle of Britain, invasion felt less likely, even as news from Greece, North Africa and the Middle East brought setbacks. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 did not inspire confidence in him; he doubted the Germans would have attacked without expecting quick victory.
In August 1941, he was offered work as a radio producer in the BBC’s Indian Section. With deep affection for India and a desire to contribute, he accepted. He prepared daily English-language news commentaries broadcast to India and to Japanese-occupied Malaya and Indonesia. There were also summaries for translation into local languages and cultural programmes. He gathered writers of Indian background and promoted their work, while navigating interference from government departments such as the India Office, which sometimes objected to his programming and guests. In March 1942, resuming his diary after a break, he confessed to a fear that the work was “useless, or slightly worse than useless.” He doubted he had listeners; only later would he learn that people under occupation sometimes relied on these broadcasts as channels of truth.
He wrote an essay on Rudyard Kipling, published in Horizon in 1942, striking a characteristic balance: criticising the economic exploitation of India while acknowledging the energy and hardened competence of imperial “men of action.” He followed with keen interest Sir Stafford Cripps’s mission to India that spring, which sought to secure nationalist support for the war in exchange for post-war self-government. The mission failed; the proposals pleased neither the British government nor Indian nationalists. Orwell admired Cripps’s principle, and like many, saw in him a potential rival to Churchill as the leader of a radical wartime coalition. By late 1942, the war began to tilt in the Allies’ favour: Stalingrad became a turning point; in North Africa, British success grew. Increasingly cynical about his BBC role, Orwell resigned in September 1943 and left in November.
He became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing weekly associated with Labour MP Aneurin Bevan and financially backed by Cripps. Orwell’s trenchant anti-Soviet stance grated on some readers during the uneasy wartime alliance with Moscow, but Bevan supported him. He wrote a weekly column, “As I Please,” ranging widely—from war, to language, to roses in his Wallington garden. He continued to contribute to Partisan Review, Horizon, and the Observer.
Throughout 1943, he worked on a fable about revolution betrayed and power corrupted, an allegory of the Soviet Union set on a farm where animals overthrow their human master. By February 1944, the manuscript—Animal Farm—was complete. He had trouble placing it; Britain’s official line still leaned towards wartime goodwill, and many were reluctant to publish anything that might be construed as anti-Soviet. Jonathan Cape considered it, then withdrew after taking informal advice from the Ministry of Information. Orwell approached Secker & Warburg, who said they would publish if paper could be found. By September 1944, agreement was in place, but paper shortages delayed release until August 1945.
Private grief and public success
Meanwhile, he and Eileen adopted a boy from Newcastle, with the help of Eileen’s sister-in-law, Gwen O’Shaughnessy. Born on 14 May 1944, he was later named Richard Horatio Blair. That June, their flat was bombed; only in October did they move into a new place in Islington and bring Richard from Newcastle. Eileen left the Ministry of Food to care for the child.
In February 1945, Orwell departed as a war correspondent for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. Eileen and Richard stayed with her family at Greystone. While in London arranging adoption formalities, Eileen fell ill; doctors found multiple uterine tumours and scheduled an immediate hysterectomy. On 29 March, shortly after anaesthesia was administered, she died of cardiac failure at thirty-nine. Orwell, himself ill in Paris, rushed back for the funeral. Shattered, he nonetheless returned to his correspondent duties, reporting from devastated Germany as Allied forces swept east.
By June 1945, he had secured a nurse for Richard and brought the boy back to Islington. In August, Animal Farm appeared. In barely six weeks, it sold almost 5,000 copies. Its brilliance lay in its economy and bite: animals overthrow a negligent farmer; pigs—led by Snowball and Napoleon—assume leadership; power centralises; enemies multiply; history is rewritten; the commandments shift. Snowball is driven out; purges ensue; a propagandist pig, Squealer, moulds truth to convenience; in the end, the pigs become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced. The parallels were plain: Napoleon stood for Stalin, Snowball for Trotsky. Orwell’s target was not socialism but Soviet totalitarianism—the betrayal of egalitarian principles by a new elite justified by lies and force.
The book made him famous. Yet he worried that conservatives would seize it to denounce socialism as such. He reaffirmed his own democratic socialist convictions, while the politics of post-war Britain cooled his greater hopes. He welcomed Labour’s sweeping victory under Clement Attlee in July 1945 but yearned for deeper transformation.
Jura: illness, isolation and the making of a warning
He longed to leave London and write. Before her death, Eileen had told him he was overworked and pressed for a move to the countryside to focus on fiction. In September 1945, Orwell decided to rent a remote farmhouse—Barnhill—on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. He remained in London while renovations proceeded. Lonely and ailing, he proposed marriage to several younger women; all declined.
He planned to settle in Jura in spring 1946, but a haemorrhage related to tuberculosis at the end of February, and then the death of his sister Marjorie, delayed him until late May. At Barnhill, he was joined by his surviving sister Avril, his son Richard and his nurse, Susan Watson. Barnhill was beautiful but remote: seven miles from the nearest village, Ardlussa. He bought a motorbike for supplies. The isolation offered focus and silence, but made friendship difficult; reaching the island required a mesh of trains, buses, boats and, finally, a rugged taxi ride—weather permitting.
He promised Leonard Moore that he would complete a new novel by autumn. Life on Jura—hard travel, hands-on subsistence, and persistent illness—slowed him. Through the 1930s and 1940s, he had watched and written about totalitarian regimes and British wartime censorship. He believed the ground of tyranny lay in language—its distortion, euphemism and deceit—and in the misuse of power to make people accept what they knew to be false. He conceived a novel as a warning—clear, cold, uncompromising. By September 1946, he had written about fifty pages and returned briefly to London to see friends and arrange professional matters.
A BBC radio adaptation of Animal Farm aired in January 1947. He persuaded Victor Gollancz to release him from his contract and made Secker & Warburg his principal publisher. He returned to Jura in April 1947, determined to finish the new book by early 1948; his health sabotaged the plan. Susan Watson fell out with Avril and left; Richard Rees, the friend and former Adelphi editor, came to Barnhill and looked after Orwell for much of the year. By late 1948, the first draft was nearly complete. A planned trip to London in November was abandoned; he was plainly too ill.
A doctor reached him at Ardlussa and diagnosed tuberculosis. Shortly before Christmas, he entered a hospital near Glasgow. He improved in spring and returned to Jura, resuming work on a second draft, against medical advice to rest for six hours a day. By October, the manuscript was ready to type. Too ill to travel and unable to hire a typist willing to undertake the journey, he did the typing himself. The title chosen with Warburg was Nineteen Eighty-Four—a near future in which the novel’s imagined conditions might plausibly unfold.
Early in 1949, he left Jura for the last time and went to a Cotswolds sanatorium. Warburg, on reading the manuscript, was appalled: he feared the novel would be read merely as an anti-Soviet tract and used as propaganda in the early Cold War climate. Orwell insisted that though the Soviet Union provided one source of inspiration, the setting was a heightened version of wartime England—its shortages, its bureaucracy, its Ministry of Information. In the book, England is “Airstrip One,” part of Oceania, locked in endless war with Eurasia and Eastasia. Big Brother’s face stares from posters and screens; telescreens watch and speak; the Thought Police root out deviation. Winston Smith, a functionary in the Ministry of Truth, rewrites newspapers to fit the party line. The Ministry’s architecture evokes the Senate House of the University of London—wartime home of the Ministry of Information—while the Ministry’s internal feel reflects Orwell’s time at the BBC.
Julia, a young woman who shares Winston’s hatred of Big Brother, becomes his lover and partner in fragile rebellion. They are discovered, separated, tortured at the Ministry of Love, and broken in Room 101 by their worst fears. At the end, Winston betrays Julia and loves Big Brother. It was a dark mirror held up to the human capacity for surrender under pressure, and a study of the means by which power seizes the mind through controlling language, memory and desire.
Published in June 1949 to booming sales and admiring reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, the book lifted Orwell’s spirits but could not repair his body. In September, he moved to University College Hospital in London, close to Senate House—the real-life echo of his imagined Ministry. He proposed to Sonia Brownell, fifteen years his junior and an editor at Horizon. She had refused him before; this time, she accepted. They married on 13 October at his hospital bedside. A brief improvement followed; then a decline.
Plans were made to take him to Switzerland, less with hopes of a cure than to ease the end. Four days before his scheduled departure, on 21 January 1950, George Orwell died, aged forty-six.
The making of a conscience: themes, politics and the question of legacy
Orwell’s life, judged by its beginnings, might have resembled that of many colonial administrators: dutiful service, posting to exotic distances, a quiet pension, and a respectable burial. Instead, a series of refusals and reckonings re-routed him. He resigned from the police. He cast off the expectations of class. He stubbornly placed himself among the poor, sometimes to discomforting effect, always with the aim of seeing clearly. He apprenticed himself to experience, then to prose. Through failed romances, precarious jobs, precarious health, and slowly accumulating books and essays, he made himself a writer whose voice is recognised even in paraphrase: exact, spare, with an ethical pressure that insists on clarity.
Politically, Spain changed him most. He saw, with a shock that never left him, the speed with which a revolutionary hope could be inverted by authoritarian methods, he saw lies circulated as truth, and he saw honest comrades erased by ideology. He remained a socialist—committed to equality, to decency, to the dignity of labour and the rights of ordinary people—but he became an unrelenting critic of totalitarianism, whether in Nazi or Soviet guise. He came to believe that the first duty of a writer is to tell the truth, to resist euphemism and cant, to refuse propaganda even when it flatters one’s own side.
His essay on politics and language—culminating in the famous “Politics and the English Language”—and his later fiction elaborate a single essential thesis: if language is debased, freedom is endangered. When we are made to say “peace” to mean war, “freedom” to mean servitude, “democracy” to mean a one-party state, we become complicit in our own unfreedom. When the state controls memory—by falsifying records and smearing dissenters—it begins to control the future. The moral of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is not that human beings are irredeemably corrupt, but that power, unrestrained, tends to corrupt and to sanctify its corruption through words.
His socialism never softened into piety. He disliked the fetishisation of poverty and distrusted intellectuals who romanticised the working class from a safe distance. He valued practical kindness, the small virtues cultivated by people who keep their word, help their neighbours, and resist cruelty even when it is fashionable. He defended the Home Guard when leaders dismissed it; he celebrated English “decency” while mocking English snobbery and nostalgia. He believed in freedom of thought not as a right reserved for the clever, but as a common condition of dignity.
The contradictions in his life—an Etonian who hated privilege; a colonial policeman who denounced empire; a socialist who attacked Soviet tyranny; a literary man who distrusted literary cliques—give his work tensile strength. He knew what it meant to belong and to stand apart, to speak as an insider and to see as an outsider. He was often ill, often lonely, sometimes abrasive, sometimes wrong. Yet he kept returning to the same injunction: look, and tell the truth about what you see. If the truth offends your faction, tell it anyway.
Love, loss and the cost of clarity
The personal cost of Orwell’s commitments was high. He had difficulty sustaining romantic relationships; the strain of poverty, illness and stubborn life choices weighed on those around him. Eileen, whose intelligence and humour enriched his life and whose practical labour made his work possible, died suddenly at thirty-nine. Her absence haunted him. After adopting Richard, he struggled to be the father he wished to be while finishing work whose urgency he felt so keenly that he typed through haemorrhages.
Barnhill, for all its loveliness, was also a place of suffering: icy winters, long rides over rough roads, lungs aflame, friends far away, and a manuscript that he could not allow himself to abandon. That he chose to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four—typing it himself—when he knew what it would cost his health, speaks to a stern sense of duty. He intended the book as a warning. He believed that warnings lose their force if delayed.
Those who knew him testify to his kindness and his stubbornness. He could be generous to a fault and merciless in argument; he could be patient with a child and scathing towards a lie. The roughness of his manners sometimes hid a scrupulous sensitivity; he disliked pretension and hypocrisy, and bluntness, he believed, was a service when the stakes were high.
Reception, misreading and the continuing argument
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him famous—and vulnerable to being appropriated. Conservatives used them to attack socialism as such; Communists denounced him as a class traitor; liberals embraced him as a champion of civil liberties; radicals saw in him a burning critique of power in all its disguises. He anticipated and resisted misuse; his essays strain to specify targets with care. He defended socialist principles even as he exposed socialist betrayals. He insisted that the British working class deserved not charity but justice and power, and that true democracy could not be built atop lies.
Over time, “Orwellian” entered the language—a double-edged honour. It has come to mean, for many, the nightmarish techniques of surveillance and linguistic manipulation he described. Orwell, who hated vagueness, might bridle at seeing his name become a catch-all term. Yet he would recognise in the transformations of public discourse—advertising that sells submission as liberation, governments that euphemise violence, corporations that harvest attention and personal data—proof that his warning remains pertinent.
His diagnosis travels because it is not bound to a single moment. Totalitarian techniques mutate. The medium changes—from posters and wired microphones to screens, networks and algorithmic curation—but the temptations are familiar: to make inconvenient truths disappear; to humiliate dissidents; to flatter the obedient; to collapse complexity into slogans; to inundate citizens with distractions until they forget what they once demanded. Orwell’s argument is not that we are doomed, but that vigilance is the price of freedom, and precision in language is the first defence against the corrosion of thought.
Craft, clarity and the ethics of prose
As a stylist, Orwell was a craftsman of unusual conscience. He believed that good prose is like a windowpane: one looks through it to the world, rather than at it as ornament. He advised writers to avoid stale metaphors, to prefer short words to long, and to cut any word that could be cut. Yet he also allowed for exceptions, knowing that rigid rules can produce a dead language. The point was not aesthetic purity but truthfulness: writing should reveal reality rather than conceal it.
His essays remain models of argumentative clarity. In “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” set in Burma, he anatomises how imperialism deforms both ruler and ruled, making cowards of the powerful and instruments of the powerless. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” he revisits the anxieties and cruelties of childhood schooling, probing the origins of fear and the traditions that legitimise it. In “Notes on Nationalism,” he dissects patterns of thought that submerge individuality into group identity, warning against a politics that subordinates truth to loyalty.
This ethic of clarity made him unpopular in certain quarters. Sentimental revolutionaries censured him for disloyalty; partisans mocked his insistence on facts as naive. He understood that a writer is a watcher and a teller; his only capital is credibility. When he erred, he corrected; when he doubted, he said so. He prized the sentence that says exactly what it means. He demanded of himself what he demanded of the powerful: say what is, not what is convenient.
The final warning: why Nineteen Eighty-Four still matters
Nineteen Eighty-Four is sometimes misread as a prophecy—an absolute forecast of a specific future. It is better read as a map of dangers. Its plausibility does not depend on any single state reproducing all its features; rather, it identifies techniques by which freedom can be throttled: perpetual war to justify emergency powers; surveillance to enforce conformity; the manufacture of enemies to focus fear; the systematic rewriting of records to erase awkward truths; the degradation of language into slogans; the reduction of love to loyalty to the leader; torture not merely to inflict pain, but to make the victim affirm what he knows to be false.
In Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth, one hears the whirr of a modern newsroom bent to political pressure, the tap of a keyboard rewriting headlines in real time, and the click of a delete key that makes inconvenient stories vanish. In Newspeak, one hears linguistic fashions that impoverish nuance, a vocabulary compressed until indignation is blunt and praise vacuous. In the Two Minutes Hate, one senses the choreographies of social media outrage that harness real emotion to trivial ends. In Room 101, one feels the dread that makes people speak against loved ones to save themselves, and in doing so, lose themselves.
Orwell chose, deliberately, to end in darkness. Winston does not triumph; he betrays. But even in defeat there is an implicit charge: do not let it come to this. The novel’s power comes from its credibility. The world it imagines is not a science fiction of gadgets but a psychology of power. It insists that the battle for freedom is fought daily, in habits of thought and speech, in refusals to join a chorus when the song is false.
A life’s arc and an open question
Eric Blair remade himself as George Orwell, and George Orwell remade English political prose. The journey ran through Burma, boarding houses, bookshops, and battlefields; through poverty and modest success; through a brief, happy marriage and a sudden bereavement; through illness and remote labour; and finally, to two books whose brevity and force have outlived many longer reputations.
Was he a great novelist of society, or a middling artist whose political parables overwhelmed his craft? The question has been asked for decades, and reasonable people answer it in different ways. He lacked, it is true, the lush invention of some contemporaries, the voluptuous language of stylists who made sentences sing for their own sake. But to consider only aesthetic flourish is to misunderstand his project. He sought, primarily, to unite ethics and style: to write so that the truth could breathe. His prose is not plain so much as purified; it strips away what conceals. In a century where ideologies taught millions to praise what crushed them, this was not merely a choice of voice but a stance of resistance.
He criticised socialism when it adopted authoritarian means; he criticised capitalism when it failed to deliver justice; he criticised empire because it corrupted rulers and maimed the ruled; he criticised intellectuals when they excused cruelty with cleverness. He could be harsh; he could be wrong; he was rarely indifferent. He believed that civilisation rests on telling the truth and keeping promises, on the decencies of everyday life, and on the refusal to worship power.
The warning he offered—to guard language, to resist lies, to defend the autonomy of mind, to suspect the seductions of certainty—was addressed not only to his time but to ours and to those that will follow. What remains is not a dogma but a discipline: look clearly; name things correctly; do not yield your judgement to the crowd; defend the right of others to speak; be wary of those who would save you by taking away your freedom to disagree.
In the end, George Orwell’s greatest bequest may be this: the conviction that integrity in language is inseparable from integrity in politics, and that both depend on courage. He did not live long enough to see the full reach of his influence, or the many ways in which his warnings would be invoked—sometimes faithfully, sometimes lazily. But he lived long enough to complete the work he considered essential, and to send it into the world as a mirror and a challenge.
If we accept his warning, we accept a duty: to tend our words, to interrogate our beliefs, and to build a society where truth does not need permission to be spoken. That task is never finished. It falls to each generation anew.