The English writer and journalist George Orwell lived through a busy, traumatic period in twentieth century history, much of which he experienced at first hand :- the declining years of the British Empire, the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Western Europe in the 1930s, World War Two, and the early development of the Cold War. He is best known today for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) - two sustained, reasoned, anti-communist polemics that also make some scathing criticicms of Western society and values. Orwell's work, while its influence has perhaps now faded a little, has been a staple of the post Second World War era - in particular, the expression 'Big Brother is watching you' is, even today, something of a watchword in Western culture. Orwell himself, though, was very much an individualist, and the expression 'Thought Crime', coined by him, could indeed have been coined for him.

A Brief Life and Times

Orwell was born (real name Eric Blair) in 1903, into what he later described as the ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ of English society - what we might call the 'admin section' of Imperial Britain, at once servants of the real British 'elite' and yet almost completely insulated from the harsh realities of life as experienced by the majority of the population at this time¹. After spending his early years being groomed for a career in the civil service, he became disillusioned and walked away from this in the late 1920s, spending a few years living around the working class districts of London and Paris, and also in the North-West of England, writing about his experiences. These observations formed the basis for his early writings, such as Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Road to

Wigan Pier.

Like many Left-leaning writers and intellectuals of his time, he went to Spain in the mid-thirties to fight against Franco’s fascist army. He was wounded in this war, and it seems he never quite fully recovered - the injury seems to have been a principal factor in his death from tuberculosis in 1950, shortly after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, while he was still only in his mid forties. Orwell retained a life-long commitment to democratic politics, and was against authoritarianism of any variety. Unlike many of his contemporaries on the Left, he had no time for the communist experiment in the Soviet Union, in particular during its Stalinist period. He predicted (correctly of course) that such a system could never last under such conditions, and he set out in his two great novels to show how the two political extremes of the time - communism on the Left, fascism on the Right - were ultimately indistinguishable. Orwell's subject, then, was the dangers of totalitarianism in general, rather than specifically from any particular social formation.

Orwell and 'Englishness'

Orwell was also a sharp observer of English society and culture. He saw the English as a mild-mannered if slightly insular people, characterised by an aversion to extremism and a general faith in 'common sense'² over abstract philosophical ideas, which tend to be associated more with thinkers from across on the continental mainland. He was critical, however, of any romantic notion of England as a nation that was in some way ‘united’, as was often said of the British people, especially during periods of national crisis such as wartime. Orwell saw this 'unity' as an illusion. 'England is the most class-ridden country under the sun', he once wrote. 'It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly³'.

Orwell himself, however, was at times susceptible to many of the weaknesses he identified in the English mentality and, while he largely despised the decaying Imperial order into which he had been born, he seemed in some respects unable to overcome the confines of his own education. At times, Orwell revealed prejudices of his own, against anyone deviating from a rather narrow, personally defined ‘norm. This seems contradictory, bearing in mind his distaste for the 'insularity' he often saw in his fellow countryfolk, and also bearing in mind his fierce defending of the principle of individual liberty. He once wrote, for example, that, in his schooldays, there had been 'no notion that the working class were human beings' - while he could sympathise with the plight of the poor, from a safe distance, he still, ahem, 'despised them when I came anywhere near them⁴'.

Reading Orwell Today

Orwell, then, was an intruiging, rather paradoxical individual - an upper middle class 'man of the people' who tried, through the course of his life, to overcome the prejudices that his upbringing had educated him into. Although traces of Orwell’s ‘England’ can still be seen today, half a century later England would seem to be a more open, multicultural society, and it would be fair to say that the passing of the more old-fashioned notion of ‘Englishness’ is largely unmourned. He is perhaps best studied today from a historical perspective, as someone who was on the scene with his own idiosyncratic insights to offer on many of the key turning points in Twentieth Century history...