George Orwell

George Orwell in 1943.

George Orwell, (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was an English journalist and author of numerous essays, non-fiction books, and six novels—including Animal Farm and 1984. He was known as man of strong opinions, who addressed some of the major political movements experienced during his life, such as imperialism, fascism, and communism. His work is generally characterized by a lucid prose, and based on much of his journalism and essays, Orwell wrote a lot on himself and his life. While Eric Blair never totally abandoned his birth name, his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but his relatives and oldest friends knew him by his real name.

Orwell's birthplace in Motihari, Bihar, India.

Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, India where his father, Richard Blair (1857-1938), a British civil servant, was stationed; he worked as a sub-deputy opium agent for the Indian Civil Service under the British Raj. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair nee Limouzin (1875-1943), was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar) of French extraction. In 1904, around a year after Eric Blair's birth, his mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England where they settled in Henley-on-Thames. Eric Blair's favorite sister, Avril, was born later in 1908.

His father remained in India and rarely visited, with Eric Blair barely knowing his father until his father retired from service in 1912, but even then the pair never formed a close relationship. Eric Blair would later comment that his father and he never formed a strong bond, often with the younger man finding his father to be dull and conservative. He would later say the attitudes of his parents were those of "landless gentry," or what he would later call lower-middle-class people whose pretension to social status had little relation to their income. And, thus, he was brought up in an air of impoverished snobbery. This attitude came, in large part, from Eric's grandfather who had been a wealthy plantation and slave owner. But by the time Eric was born, the family fortunes had dwindled.

Eric Blair was often a sick child, with notable battles against bronchitis and the flu. And, in part due to his alienation from his father, and from his experiences from school from an early age, Eric Blair was a lonely child, later saying he had the habit of lonely children of making up stories and holding imaginary conversations. He would say that he knew, from the age of five or six, that he wanted to grow up to be a writer, and his first "poem" came around the the age of four or five, with his mother taking dictation. He would later say he remembered nothing of the poem, and between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four he tried to abandon the idea of being a writer, which never stuck.

Blair family home at Shiplake, Oxford.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, the family moved to Shiplake, Oxford, where Eric met nearby family friends and dreamed of becoming a famous writer, suggesting he would write a book in the style of H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia, while he also enjoyed shooting, fishing, and birdwatching in the area.

Starting at age five, Eric was sent to a convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which his older sister, Marjorie, also attended. His family wanted Eric to have a public school education, but could not afford the fees, and the Roman Catholic convent run by French Ursuline nuns was what they could send him too. In 1911, Eric Blair was sent to study at St. Cyprian's School in Eastbourne, East Sussex. St. Cyprian's was a boarding school, where Eric Blair would later report that he received his first real taste of the British class system. He attended on a partial scholarship, and although Eric was not initially informed that he was on a scholarship, he noticed soon he was a poorer student, with the school treating the richer students better than the poorer ones.

St. Cyprian's playing fields.

Blair hated the school, with his feelings later immortalized in his essay "Such, Such Were the Joys" which was published posthumously and was based on his time at St. Cyprian. He was unpopular with his peers, and returned to books to take up his time, although he later was distinguished by some of his intellectual brilliance. Otherwise, he grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, as explored in the above essay. While at St. Cyprian's, Blair met Cyril Connoly, who became a writer and, as editor of Horizon, published several of Orwell's essays. During his time at St. Cyprian, Blair published his first two poems. One of these poems is well remembered, "Awake Young Men of England," which was published in the Henley Standard.

Blair spent five years at St. Cyprian where he, in his essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," catalogued his miseries. However, some of that misery is considered to be exaggerated, but the essay itself was deemed too libelous to print, with the essay finally being published posthumously in 1968. Blair, during this time, was also expelled from his "crammer" school, which, as the name suggests, was an institution designed to help students study for specific exams. His expulsion came after he sent a birthday message attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor, according to Sir Bernard Crick's biography of Blair.

Following his studies at St. Cyprian, Blair had earned two scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College, with the Eton scholarship not guaranteeing a place at the college and with none made available to Blair at the time. Orwell waited at St. Cyprian's until December 1916 for a place to become available. When none did, he took the place at Wellington College, where he spent the Spring or Lent term. In May 1917, a place became available at Eton College as a King's Scholar. He attended Eton College until 1921. His principal tutor was A. S. F. Gow, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who would give him advice later in his career as well. And, while there, Blair briefly learned French from Aldous Huxley.

Image of George Orwell (circled) at Eton College.

While studying at Eton College, Orwell was known to have made up a song about his school's housemaster, John Crace, in which he made fun of Crace's appearance and penchant for Italian art. Unfortunately, while at Eton College, whether it was due to his social isolation or his further distaste for the class system in British schools, Blair was not the best student and it became apparent he would not win a scholarship to university and his parents could not afford to send him to a university.

Eric Blair in a passport photo in Burma and the last time he was known to wear a toothbrush moustache.

After failing to matriculate to an university, as his peers did, Blair instead joined the India Imperial Police Force in 1922, following, as some have suggested, the family tradition. There, he served as assistant district superintendent at a number of country stations in Burma (Myanmar), and early into his career, Blair seemed to be a model imperial servant. There, his reputation as an outsider and a loner followed him. As well, as Blair saw how much the Burmese were against the rule of the British. This led to him feeling increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. These feelings and his experiences would later be recounted in two autobiographical sketches - "Shooting an Elephant" and "A Hanging" - and in his novel Burmese Days.

While working as an officer in Burma, Blair got his knuckles tattooed. An acquaintance of Blair, Adrian Fierz, would later tell biographer Gordon Bowker that the tattoos were small blue spots the shape of small grapefruits, and that Blair had one on each knuckle. Some Burmese tribes believed tattoos would protect them from bullets, and some believe Blair may have tattooed his knuckles for similar superstitious reasons, or, as Bowker has suggested, it may have been a further attempt to set himself apart from the British establishment in Burma.

In 1927, amid his increasing distaste for his role in Burma, Blair caught dengue fever. This, along with the amount of time he had spent with the Imperial Police, entitled Blair to a leave in England. He returned to his family, where they spent a holiday in Cornwall—during which time, Blair began to appraise his life and decided that, despite his attempt to pursue a career other than writing, he realized the desire to be a writer remained strong and he could not continue as an Imperial Police Officer; he decided not to return, resigning from the police force.

After leaving the India Imperial Police Force, Blair had difficulty getting his writing career off the ground. In 1927, he moved into rooms in a house in Portobello Road in London, where a blue plaque commemorates his residence there. At this point, he began taking various jobs to make ends meet, and in 1928 he moved to Paris, where he struggled to work as a journalist for La Monde and continued to try writing short stories and freelance journalism, although he ended up destroying much of his writing from this period when much of it went unpublished. He continued to work menial jobs, such as working at pseudonymous "Hotel X" that barely provided Blair with enough money to eat as a plongeur (dishwasher). In February 1929, while in Paris, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin, a free hospital where medical students trained.

In 1931, Blair returned to live at his parent's home, where he continued to work to write reviews for a magazine and work as a private tutor. At this time, he was able to contribute essays to Adelphi—"The Spike" and "The Hanging" respectively—and under his own name. And from 1932 to 1933, Blair even received a teaching position at the Hawthorns, a small private school in Hayes, Middlesex.

At the same time, he began tramping around the slums of London, often donning ragged clothes, and living cheap in the East End of London and tramping the roads of England where he joined the annual exodus of the London slums to work in the Kentish hopfields. This built on his experiences in Paris, and have since been considered, by some, to be an attempt to expiate his guilt through an immersion in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe.

In 1931, Blair went further and intentionally got himself arrested for being "drunk and incapable." He wanted to experience prison and bring himself closer to tramps and the small-time villains with whom he mingled. Biographer Gordon Bowker recounts how he used the pseudonym Edward Burton and posed as a poor fish porter, and he engaged in drinking several pints of beer and nearly a whole bottle of whisky before making a scene and being arrested. Unfortunately, for Blair, the crime did not warrant the prison time he hoped for, and he was released after spending forty-eight hours in custody.

During this time, while trying to publish many of his essays written about his experiences, some of which would be published in the New Statesmen, whose editorial staff included Blair's friend Cyril Connolly, he was put into contact with Leonard Moore, who would become his literary agent in April 1932 and remain his lifelong literary agent.

First edition of Down and Out in Paris and London, published 1933.

These experiences were then rearranged into his memoir-cum-novel Down and Out in Paris and London, which toured the underworld of society, and was credited with giving a human face to the statistics of poverty. At the time of its publication, Down and Out in Paris and London was considered and marketed as a novel, and it would not be until much later that it was recognized as largely a memoir, made up of Blair's experiences arranged into a loose narrative. Furthermore, this was the first time Blair used the pseudonym for which he is better known, George Orwell, to avoid embarrassing his parents. With the popularity of the work, the pseudonym became the name under which he would continue to write. The book drew comparisons to Emile Zola's 1873 novel The Fat and the Thin, which also explored the underbelly of Paris society of the time.

During and following the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell left teaching at The Hawthorns High School for boys to teach at Frays College, Uxbridge, which was a much larger establishment. Later this same year, 1933, he caught pneumonia and spent time at a cottage hospital in Uxbridge, where he was supposed to have believed his life was in danger. When he was discharged in January 1934, Orwell returned to his family home in Southwold to convalesce and never returned to teaching.

During his time in Southwold, Orwell finished his second novel, which he had been working on since 1932, Burmese Days, which would be published in the United States in October 1934. The publication of this novel proved difficult, as his publisher feared the publication of would provoke legal actions of libel and defamation from colonial administrators. It would eventually be published by Harper & Brothers, an American publisher. The book would not be published in Britain until June 24, 1935, with an author's note stressing that the book was entirely fictitious.

A plaque in Hampstead commemorating Orwell's time as a bookseller.

While Orwell was working to have Burmese Days published in Britain, he moved to Hampstead, where he worked as a part-time assistant in Booklover's Corner, a bookstore, in Hampstead. Orwell had begun working on his novel A Clergyman's Daughter, which drew on his time as a teacher and life in Southwold, which would be published in March 1935, a few months before Burmese Days would be published.

This novel, often one of the most unstudied and unknown of Orwell's novels, focused on Dorothy Hare, who, at twenty-eight, is worried about "spinsterhood." Through the novel, her concerns are exacerbated by her constant exposure to aged companions. Further, the novel offered many cliches about aging and many examples of the undesirable aspects of aging, while the senior characters of the book act as an inescapable chorus of the challenges of growing old.

In 1936, following the publication of his previous novels, Victor Gollancz suggested Orwell travel to the north of England, to Lancashire and Yorkshire, to investigate working class life and unemployment and to keep some of the spirit of his earlier work going. At the time, he struggled to pay rent in Hampstead and spent around January to March travelling through the north of England.

Eileen O'Shaughnessy with adopted son Richard Blair in 1944.

In the later part of 1935, George Orwell met Eileen O'Shaughnessy. She had at one time been a student of J.R.R. Tolkien and was considered highly educated and opinionated. In June 1936, the couple would be married and remained married until Eileen's death in 1945. Eileen supported Orwell, often financially, and more generally in their life and in his work, often typing manuscripts for him. Their relationship further featured, according to Eileen's biographer Sylvia Topp, affairs on both sides, with Orwell reportedly repeatedly cheating on Eileen, and Eileen further cheating on Orwell. This has to some suggesting their marriage was an open marriage, based on an understanding between the two, although this has also been contested.

Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier.

The couple moved to a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell was able to continue his writing on his next novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which would be published in June of the same year, and was a satirical portrait of literary life, with the protagonist Gordon Comstock giving up a successful job in advertising to become an unsuccessful poet, while descending into poverty.

This was not the book he had been working to study while in Northern England. Instead, the author had been writing The Road to Wigan Pier, which he had visited between January and March 1936. The book was in part social reporting and as well a socialist polemic, would be published in 1937, while the author was absent from England. The book was selected for the Left Book Club, which had been founded by Orwell's publisher Victor Gollancz.

In late 1936, following the submission of The Road to Wigan Pier to his publisher, Orwell and Eileen left for Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. Orwell joined fellow authors André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos, all who, similar to Orwell, fought for the partisans against Franco. There were several political parties on the Loyalist side in Spain, and each with their own militia. The militia Orwell would join, suggested by some by accident, was the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM), a small group of anti-Stalinist revolutionaries.

George Orwell during his time in Spain.

While he went to Spain out of an interest in the civil war, and to report on the civil war, he eventually ended up serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts, rising to the rank of second lieutenant in the POUM militia. At Teruel, Orwell was seriously wounded with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice, with his peers later saying it endowed his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. When he was medically discharged, Orwell was warned that the POUM had been suppressed and members jailed. He and Eileen immediately began to flee towards France. Following their departure, both Orwell and Eileen were indicted on treason charges. The author's return to England saw him plagued with health problems.

Upon his return, Orwell also found difficulties in England. Here he had two of his works rejected by Kingsley Amis, and his publisher Victor Gollancz was equally cautions, while communist organizations were running attacks on The Road to Wigan Pier. Threats of libel ended these attacks, but Orwell's relationship with his publisher was damaged, and his book on his experience during the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, would be published by Secker & Warburg. The book, once published, was a commercial flop. However, since its publication, Homage to Catalonia has been suggested to be one of his best books.

During this period, Orwell also considered work in other areas, but his health problems kept him from going anywhere, until, in September 1938, Orwell travelled to French Morocco where he began work on his next novel. In 1939, the Orwell's returned to England, where they spent time in Wallington and Southwold. In June, Orwell's next novel, Coming Up for Air, was published. This book showed a conservative strain in Orwell's thinking, following the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express fears about a future threatened by war and fascism.

Orwell at the BBC.

As the world was plunged into war, Orwell attempted to enter into military service, but was denied entrance due to his poor health. He, instead, joined the Home Service, and he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a producer, where he produced propaganda for the East Asian and Indian part of the British Empire, in order to garner support from them. There he developed news commentary and shows for these audiences, and was able to get literary greats such as T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster to appear on his program. However, he found the work, especially the propagandist work, to wear on his, describing the atmosphere at the BBC as somewhere between a girl's school and a lunatic asylum. He would go on to suggest the work he was doing was at best useless, or worse than useless.

Orwell left the BBC in 1943. When he left, he became the literary editor for the left wing The Tribune, where he wrote a periodical column "As I Please" until 1945. In the same year, he joined The Observer, where he worked as a war correspondent. During this time, although Orwell was never able to get near the front as the Allies raced towards Berlin, never at the front, but often he would be a day behind the front line, sometimes entering captured towns within a day of its capture, with bodies still in the streets. He visited liberated Paris, Stuttgart, Cologne, and would end up in Austria.

During one of his assignments, when Orwell was out of England, Eileen Blair died, on March 29, 1945, while undergoing surgery in Newcastle upon Tyne. In the year prior to her death, the Orwells had adopted a one-month old child, who they named Richard Horatio Blair.

During this period, Orwell was working on his allegorical novel Animal Farm. Because of the success, in part, of this novel, and his succeeding novel, he has sometimes been called the conscience of his generation. The novel was seen, at the time of its publication, August 1945, as an anti-Soviet satire, with the two protagonist pigs intended to represent Stalin and Leon Trotsky.

First Edition cover of Animal Farm with the since abandoned subtitle.

Previous to the publication of Animal Farm, the manuscript was allegedly almost destroyed when Orwell's home at 10 Mortimer Crescent in London was struck by a German V-1 flying bomb. At the time, Orwell, Eileen, and Richard were away, but the home was demolished. During his lunch break at The Tribune, Orwell returned to the home foundation, where he searched the rubble for his books and papers, which he piled into a wheelbarrow to bring back to his office. The publication has since been credited with making Orwell's fame and making him, for the first time, prosperous.

Due to Stalin being, at the time, an ally of the British, and the British Intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, it caused difficulty for the publication, with the manuscript being rejected by various British and American publishers. The manuscript was rejected by his publisher Victor Gollancz and by Faber and Faber, where T.S. Eliot was the editor rejecting it. It was not until it was picked up by Secker & Warburg that the novel was finally published. Since then, the book as been considered an allegory for any totalitarian regime or at any time when freedom is attacked, regardless of the banner under which it is performed.

The initial title of the novel was Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, but the subtitle was dropped after the initial publication, as it was considered to make the novel seem like it was a book for children. The novel also, initially, contained a preface in which Orwell criticized British self-censorship, especially where it concerned the USSR. This preface, titled "The Freedom of the Press" went unpublished on all editions of Animal Farm, even though even the first edition had space provided for a preface. Instead, it was rediscovered in 1972 by Ian Angus, who went to write his own introduction to the essay.

Adaptation of Animal Farm into a video game.

Since the publication of Animal Farm, although it is still considered a piece of anti-Stalinist work in many cases, rather than being seen as an anti-totalitarian fable, the book has since served as many students first introduction to the concept of totalitarianism. This book, as it remains a novel which refuses to explain itself, but exists as it is, has also been used by various people to justify their beliefs or their aims.

However, some point out that especially as its allegory reaches any attempt to establish a totalitarian regime, and as it explores the themes of truth and free speech and tribalism, historical erasure, factual manipulation, and war as an engine of national pride, the book is considered as relevant now as it was at the time of its publication. Since its publication, many have considered it one of the best English-language novels, appearing on several lists attesting as much.

Despite the enduring popularity of Animal Farm, the novel's contemporary popularity made Orwell a sought after literary figure, and that popularity would be, for many, cemented in his next book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which has since been stylized as 1984. The novel would end up being considered one of the definitive novels of the 20th century, being translated into more than sixty-five languages, selling millions of copies worldwide, and securing Orwell's place in literature.

Various covers of 1984 since it's publication in 1949.

Following the end of the Second World War, Orwell began pursuing an idea for a book, which he had titled The Last Man in Europe, when he began working on it between 1943-1944. Orwell claimed he was partly inspired by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944, with an Observer colleague later reporting that Orwell left the conference convinced that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were plotting to divide the world.

The 1936 show trial of minor Bolshevik official named ES Holtzman, the first major trial of a period known as the Great Purge, where Holtzman claimed to have met Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov, at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1932, a hotel later revealed to have been demolished in 1917, has been considered to have been another moment that would later make its way into the novel, with Orwell following the accounts of Russia's descent into tyranny. Many of the features of this fall Orwell would take and use to explain the world of the novel.

This was in the atmosphere of the dawn of the nuclear age where televisions were becoming increasingly popular, and a world falling into a Cold War, a term Orwell has been credited with creating in his 1945 essay "You and the Atom Bomb" in which he described a state that was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors, suggesting that the atomic bomb was likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a "peace that is no peace."

George Orwell photographed outside of Barnhill on Jura island.

Crucial to the story of how 1984 was written, David Astor, editor at The Observer, was a friend who gave Orwell a job for the paper, and would continue to be a patron of Orwell's throughout the 1940s. After Orwell's wife Eileen died, Astor offered Orwell his house, Barnhill, for a holiday. The house was seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote tip of the rocky finger of heather in the Inner Herbrides on Jura. Here, away from civilization to a degree, and away from his journalistic duties, Orwell felt liberated to think and write.

However, the move to Jura also proved difficult for Orwell's health, as he had been in poor health for a while, and the winter of 1946-1947 was one of the coldest of the century. Orwell complained to his agent during this period of the trouble with his book, but further expected to finish it by the end of 1946 if he was kept off of his journalistic work. At Barnhill, there was no electricity, where Orwell used Calor gas to cook and heat water, storm lanterns which burned paraffin, and in the evenings he burned peat. Further, he was known to chain-smoke black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes, creating a fog in the house that would have been cozy but unhealthy.

The Corryvreckan whirlpool.

As he continued to struggle with his work, Orwell was joined at Barnhill by his son, Richard, and his younger sister, Avril. Here, the three of them were able to enjoy some fishing, exploring the island, and pottering in boats. But these excursions led to a defining incident, where, in August 1946, Orwell, Avril, and Richard were nearly drowned in the Corryvreckan whirlpool. The incident included freezing water, which brought Orwell constant coughing before he fell seriously ill in the next two months. He began to work at a feverish pace, while his health continued to decline, with visitors recalling the incessant sound of his typewriter. However, in November of that year, Orwell collapsed with inflammation of the lungs, and before Christmas 1946, Orwell was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In 1947, there was no cure for tuberculosis. Doctors of the time often prescribed fresh air and a regular diet. But, a new, experimental drug had entered the market, streptomycin, which David Astor arranged to have shipped to Orwell from the United States. Richard Blair would later say he believed his father was given excess doses of the drug, with side effects that included throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin, and the disintegration of his toes and fingernails. But, by March 1948, after a three-month course, the tuberculosis symptoms had disappeared.

During this period, when Orwell should have been convalescing, but he received a letter from his publisher that expressed anxiety over the state of his novel-in-progress. His publisher's wanted to take advantage of Orwell's popularity and get another book out as soon as possible. Orwell was soon near what he considered a finished manuscript, with a possible title, but it had also become a document only he could read. His agent and publisher both promised to help, but came at-cross purposes over possible typists, and Orwell reportedly felt beyond help and decided to go alone. By-mid November, Orwell was too weak to walk and he retired to his bed to finish typing the book. He was reportedly sustained by roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea, and a paraffin heater, until he was virtually done by November 30, 1948.

First edition of George Orwell's 1984.

The typescript of the story reached Orwell's publishers in London in mid December. His publishers and his colleagues recognized the manuscript's qualities almost at once, with one in-house memo noting that the publishers thought if they could not sell 15 to 20 thousand copies they ought to be shot. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on June 8, 1949 and was almost universally recognized as a masterpiece. Even Winston Churchill, who told his doctor he had read it twice.

Writing in The New Yorker on June 10, 1949, Lionel Trilling went on to say the novel confirmed Orwell's place in intellectual life and as an intellectual author. Trilling went on to call the novel a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book, that while being a fantasy of a political future, also served as a magnifying device for an examination of the present. The novel brought him lasting fame with its grim vision of the future and in many ways cemented his literary fame.

The enduring popularity of 1984, especially when compared to other contenders from the era which produced similar novels, such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, or Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, has been explained, in part, as the book was not meant to be about life under Communism, or any specific regime, but rather was intended as a warning about tendencies within liberal democracies. While the postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe produced societies out of Orwell's pages, American readers saw 1984 as a book about loyalty oaths and McCarthyism. Since then, it has been used to comment on President Nixon and Watergate and the strongman persona of President Trump.

Since its publication, the novel has spawned various adjectival phrases, such as using the author's name to describe something, where calling something "Orwellian" is used to describe a totalitarian or surveillance state. As well, the vocabulary of the Party has entered the English language as signs of a nightmare future, including words like "doublethink," "memory hole," "unperson," "thoughtcrime," "Newspeak," "Thought Police," and, the most popular and enduring, "Big Brother." This miasma of cultural reference points and half-understanding has brought a general understanding of the book that, once reading, has brought new, and even returning readers, to an even clearer understanding of the novel's power. Especially as, many readers have commented over time, the book can act as a moral mirror to what is happening in the contemporary political culture.

There remains questions over why Orwell eventually titled the novel Nineteen Eight-Four, although by far superior to the working title The Last Man in Europe, although the naming of the book remains largely a mystery. The enduring theory was that the title was a simple switch of the digits of the end of the year, 1948, in which he submitted his manuscript, which seems to be the most popular explanation for scholars. Although, this would seem to be contradicted by a letter he sent his publishers while he was finalizing his manuscript in which he said he was considering both The Last Man in Europe or Nineteen Eighty-Four as a possible title, with the publisher suggesting the latter title was more commercial.

Other suggestions have included that Orwell wanted to honor his late wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, and name the book after her poem "End of the Century, 1984," which was inspired after she read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. While others suggested it was an allusion to the centenary of the Fabian Society, which was founded in 1884.

Another theory holds that Orwell was making a nod to one of his literary influences. The first being Jack London, who, in 1908, published The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel that chronicled the rise of oligarchic tyranny in the United States, with part of the book taking part in 1984. Orwell was supposed to have described the book as a prophecy of the rise of Fascism when he read it.

One suggestion is that Orwell borrowed the title from one of the stories by GK Chesterton, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" which was set in 1984. While others have suggested that the book referred to the year Orwell's son Richard Blair would reach forty, the same age as Winston Smith. While Peter Davison, in his George Orwell: A Life In Letters, suggested that, in Orwell setting the novel successively in 1980, 1982, and 1984, Orwell was projecting his own age, 36, when World War II started from when he was planning to write the novel. Therefore, 1944 plus 36 equals 1980, 1946 plus 36 equals 1982, and 1948 plus 36 equals 1984.

The Cotswold Sanitorium.

Following his bout of tuberculosis, and the completion of his manuscript for 1984, Orwell was admitted to the Cotswolds Sanitorium in Gloucestershire to continue convalescing and undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. His health continued to decline, and in 1949, in his room, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness with Orwell holding on until the new year, 1950, as his health continued to decline. On the 21st of January, George Orwell suffered a massive hemorrhage in hospital and died.

A series of Orwell's longer essays were published in the forms of pamphlets during his life. These include:

Although not well known for his poetry, and with some of it lost, especially that poetry which was never published, George Orwell did publish a series of poems, which were compiled and published in George Orwell: The Complete Poetry in October 2015 for The Orwell Society.

The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell.

With Orwell's prolific essays and journalistic writing, his work has been collected variously since 1940. Two of the larger collections include Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus's edited four volume collection of Orwell's writings: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. With the four volumes:

• An Age Like This 1920-1940
• My Country Right or Left 1940-1943
• As I Please, 1943-1945
• In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950

This was followed by The Complete Works of George Orwell, a twenty-volume series, with the first nine being devoted to the non-fiction books and novels and the final eleven volumes entitled:

• A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936
• Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939
• A Patriot After All: 1940-1941
• All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941-1942
• Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942-1943
• Two Wasted Years: 1943
• I Have Tried to Tell the Truth: 1943-1944
• I Belong to the Left: 1945
• Smothered Under Journalism: 1946
• It Is What I Think: 1947-1948
• Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: 1949-1950

The twenty-volume series of The Complete Works of George Orwell.

George Orwell has been described, by Lionel Trilling, as an intellectual to his fingertips, removed from the Continental or American type of intellectual, but rather inhabiting a turn of mind considered "English," often described as an indifference to elaborate theory and extreme sensibilities, but entrenched in common sense and a commitment and faith in truth. Specifically that truth can be reached and an object can be seen for what it really is.

The maturation of Orwell's political thought often mirrors the movements throughout his life. The first of this came when Orwell grew up in a class-based and Imperial society. And Orwell, as a young man, attempted to participate in that Imperialist society, going so far as to be a part of the India Imperial Police as an assistant director superintendent. However, his experiences in Burma and with Imperial rule changed his views, moving him towards a personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle as a part of imperialism, and a political reorientation.

On his return from Burma, with the rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle, he began to consider himself an anarchist. But as he grew more politically interested, and worked among the poor in Paris and across England, he began through the 1930s to consider himself a socialist. During this period, many intellectuals moved through this stream of thinking to end at describing their politics as communist. However, due in part to Orwell's libertarian thinking, and due to his persecution at the hands of communists in Spain, he could never call himself as much.

The furthest left, or the closest to communist or Marxist thinking Orwell has been claimed to have came was to Trotsky-like thinking. However, Orwell's satires of these strains of thinking were powerful because he knew the excesses, and had seen the excesses of these thoughts. Further, it was discovered later, part of Orwell's anti-Stalin, and by extension, anti-communist thought came from his relationship with Stalin's Foreign Minister from 1930 to 1939, who had served as Russia's ambassador to the United States during World War Two.

Realistically, Orwell's thinking was anti-communist, anti-fascist, and anti-totalitarian, and has leaned towards democratic-socialist thought. And many of Orwell's texts, his essays, journalism, and novels often deal with the persistent elusiveness and complexity of language, writing, and form, and how that can be used politically. Orwell did not hide his politics or his thinking either, going so far in his essay "Why I Write" to state clearly:

Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.

A complicated part of Orwell's political life, especially one who seemed concerned about free speech and the encroachment of totalitarian, was Orwell's informed on other writers, actors, and academics in England suspected of being communists in what came to be known as "Orwell's List." This has been explained through the lens of Orwell's anti-communist thinking and sentiments but it has continued to be a complicating part of Orwell's legacy since it was revealed in 1996.

The file, which lay hidden until 1996, when Foreign Office file FO 111/189 was made public under the 30-year rule in the United Kingdom, showed that Orwell had, through his friend Celia Kirwan, given the semi-secret government propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD)—a list with the names of thirty-eight public figures he thought should be treated with suspicion.

Despite the consternation the list has caused since it has been revealed, the names on the list seemed to have only stopped those on it from writing pamphlets for the IRD, but these names seem to have never been passed on to MI5 or MI6. Further, one of the names on the list, Peter Smollett, would go on to get an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire). However, other names on the list, specifically Tom Driberg, a Labour MP of the time, was later named as a KGB agent by the Mitrokhin Archive of KGB documents. Peter Smollett was also in the archive, confirming he had been a Russian agent.

Alex Woloch, a Stanford English Professor, in writing on Orwell's politics, motions to the above quote as an important one, as it allows one to understand that Orwell's anti-totalitarianism can be better or best understood in relation to his democratic-socialist thought.

Woloch, in discussing Orwell, goes on to say that the dominant strand of theory in English literary criticism during the second decade of the 21st century is a deconstructive theory, and specifically a strain that looks for the subliminal political ramifications of literature, struggles with Orwell because his political commitments are clear to even naïve readers. Further, Woloch suggests, this is precisely what makes Orwell a trusted political writer, and a writer that readers continue to engage with in difficult times.