George Orwell, or Eric Arthur Blair, (1903-1950) was one of the UK’s most prolific and influential political writers, perhaps best known for his dystopian novel 1984 (1949), which topped the best-seller list again on the election of President Donald Trump. However, Orwell’s activism wasn’t limited to the pen and typewriter. This armchair warrior fought in the Spanish Civil War, witnessed first-hand the injustices of imperialism while serving as a police officer in Burma and lived amongst the unemployed to gain the insights which made him an outspoken critic of industrial capitalism.
Starting out: becoming George Orwell
Born Eric Blair in India, where his father was a minor official in the country’s Opium Department, the family (minus Dad) moved back to England in 1904 and established home in Henley-on Thames. After an unhappy few years at a prep school in Eastbourne, Eric won a scholarship to Eton before returning to the Far East as an officer in the Burmese police force. Here he gained a life-long dislike of the injustices of the empire – a dislike that fed into his well-known 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant.
In this essay, he described how he was put under enormous pressure to kill an elephant that had gone wild due – something he eventually did and soon after regretted. The key issue presented – the difficulty of resisting power, whatever its source, in this case the pressure of the crowd, and the importance of protecting the freedom of the individual – was one that was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life.
On his return from Burma in 1927 Eric decided, at the age of 24, to move to London and attempt to make a living as an author, using the pseudonym George Orwell. With the help of an old neighbour, he found lodgings in London’s Portobello Road and began writing almost everything and anything to earn some money – money he had to supplement with a salary from a teaching job in the London suburb of Hayes.
It was Orwell’s decision to share the lives of the homeless and the poor, so he could write about them authentically, that began to earn him his reputation. Down and Out in Paris and London may have been well received but it was his account of his time in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), that really made his name as a champion of working people.
Wigan Pier made its mark by providing its mainly middle-class readers with an accessibly-written, vivid and thought-provoking insight into the lives of their working-class counterparts during the Depression of the 1930s, when levels of unemployment and poverty were high. Keeping notes of his stay in northern England, Orwell lodged in their houses, travelled around the Wigan area and went down a mine to experience first-hand what conditions were like. He noticed, for example, the way people had become accustomed to passively waiting for things to happen:
This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon.[1]
and:
A working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a middle-class person does… The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.[2]
More controversially, he expressed in the book, a new and more pragmatic political response to the social conditions he observed around him. As a starting point, he emphasised that intellectuals and artists like himself were only able to enjoy a relatively comfortable life-style because of the labour of ordinary people.
Instead of the abstract theorising of many intellectuals, he wanted those with power and influence to acknowledge the reality of the conditions – both the positive and negative – in which the English working-class lived. Only then, he believed, would it be possible to improve things.
He was now an important voice in the debate about the future political direction of the country – a voice whose contribution was especially respected because he had seen for himself how the other-half lived.
Fighting Fascism and Soviet Communism Abroad
George Orwell ventured further out of his comfort zone to gather material for his next book – Homage to Catalonia (1938), for which he went to Spain, both to report on the civil war there and to join the forces trying to defeat Franco’s fascist armed rebellion against the democratically-elected government of the country. It was here that Orwell sustained a wound in the throat that nearly killed him, on the barricades in Barcelona during the last part of his stay in Spain.
Barcelona also gave Orwell an insight into what socialism in practice might feel like:
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Senor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; … Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform.[3]
Refusing the join the Soviet-backed International Brigade, Orwell chose to work with groups that were prioritising bringing about revolutionary changes to Spanish society, rather than solely focussing on defeating Fascism.
By the time he was planning to leave Spain in the summer of 1937, Orwell had become a political fugitive because of his refusal to toe the official Communist Party line. With his wife, Eileen, used as a decoy to lure him into the open; his hotel room searched and friends arrested; and forced to go into hiding, the last few weeks of his Spanish experience meant that he witnessed at first hand the reality of political terror.
Despite this, when Orwell returned to England in July 1937 he did so with a considerably deeper understanding of the political realities of his time than when he had left.
‘I have seen wonderful things,’ he wrote to his friend Cyril Connolly, ‘and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’[4]
and:
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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.[5]
Fighting for Social Democracy in England
Soon after returning to England, Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party, so that he could make his contribution to the cause of democratic socialism – a cause he felt that the mainstream Labour Party had become disconnected from.
Although fully committed to the struggle against dictatorship of whatever kind, it took several months before he became convinced that war with Germany was necessary to defeat Fascism in Europe. As late as January 1939, he was making quite detailed suggestions about how the anti-war campaigners should organise themselves and arguing that they should be prepared to engage in illegal activities. Appeasement may today have a bad name but in the late 1930s the argument for it attracted radical, even revolutionary socialists, such as Orwell, as well as Nazi-sympathisers.
Whether it was the pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of August 1939 or a dream the night before the Pact’s announcement, as he later claimed, that caused him to switch to becoming a supporter of the war is not clear. However, what is certain is that from that moment, despite having to abandon previous allies and friends, Orwell became fully active in Britain’s struggle to defeat Nazi Germany.
Orwell joined the BBC’s Eastern service, edited a series of influential political books under the Searchlight imprint and was active in his local St John’s Wood branch of the Home Guard. In 1941 he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn, one of his most influential works.
In this short book, he expressed the view that despite the awful destructiveness of the conflict, it also presented an opportunity – an opportunity realised through revolution – to build a democratic socialist society. This society would be founded on traditional characteristics of English culture, such as a respect for the law and for freedom of speech:
An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over it the unmistakable marks of our own civilisation…[6]
Such a government will do the essential thing:
It will have nationalised industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless educational system. Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it.[7]
Continuing his political activities during the latter part of the 1940s, he controversially helped the Government’s Information Research Department gather the names of Soviet-communist sympathisers and was a prominent agitator for the value of individual liberty and social equality.
Most significantly, it was during this period that he wrote two of his greatest books. Whilst both Animal Farm and 1984 are works of fiction, they are also major contributions to the struggle against totalitarianism. Both teach us how to recognise the many signs and guises of totalitarian power and offer inspiring forms of resistance. Ordinary Winston Smith, for example, at the start of Orwell’s last novel, begins a secret diary – something forbidden by the regime – addressed to the previous or next generation and re-affirms that the struggle for freedom cannot be extinguished.
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings![8]
By Mike Peters, a U3A Shared Learning Project researcher for the Citizens Project
[1] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001), 44.
[2] Ibid, 81.
[3] George Owell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 2000), 3.
[4] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 269.
[5] George Orwell, Why I Write (London: Penguin, 2004), 8.
[6] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 2: My Country Right or Left, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 102.
[7] Ibid, 103.
[8] George Orwell, 1984 (London: Penguin, 2000), 30.
