1984, and Animal Farm.

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He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. “

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)

                     In the 1st 50 years of the 20th Century, it came to pass that revolutionary upheavals in the name of social progress and the utopian ideal brought humanity to the gates of destruction.  Out of the flames of war arose several colossuses that bestrode the globe.  One of these, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was founded on the ideals of social equality and sharing.  Instead the people of the USSR had a nightmare unleashed on them unrivaled in the annals of human history.   Only once in the passing of human fictional literature has the acute horror of this regime been displayed once, much less twice.  Only one man has the insight and the genius to portray this regime for what it was, a failed experiment of fatally flawed ideology.  Only he understood that in the end, humans cannot defeat human nature, because it is inherit in themselves.  To truly understand the role that these two books, 1984, and Animal Farm played in our society, we must first understand the man that penned them.

Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in the Indian Village of Motihari, which lies near the border of Nepal in north-eastern India.  During this period the Indian sub-continent was part of the British Empire, and the country was run by the British middle class, which Eric’s family was a member of.  His father, Richard, was an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and his grandfather had served in the Indian Army. Eric grew up with a deep distrust of colonialism due to these facts, as his father played a small, but important role in the two defeats of china in the 19th century, that of keeping the opium dens very, very well supplied. His mother, 18 years his fathers junior, was the daughter of a French tradesman.  Eric also has a sister, Marjorie, who was five years older then himself.  In 1907 the family, minus Eric’s father who stayed in India until he retired in 1912, moved back to England.  Eric remembered his life in India as one of simple pleasures and freedoms that he lost once he was back in the cradle of Empire.  

The Blairs led a relatively privileged and fairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire.  Although the Blair family was not very wealthy – Orwell later described them ironically as “lower-upper-middle class.” They owned no property, had no extensive investments; they were like many middle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on the British Empire for their livelihood and prospects. (‘Orwell” 2)

        While his father was in his last year of service in India, Eric turned eight and his family, after some extreme difficulty both financially and politically, entered Eric in the St. Cyprian's preparatory school in Sussex.  During his time in St. Cyprian’s his mother, and his father once he returned from India, pressured Eric heavily to succeed, and to move up in the ranks of society.  When he was thirteen he was offered a scholarship to Wellington, and then Eton, both famous public schools.  He began to write more and more, and after entering these prestigious establishments, it was noted that, in 5 years, “Blair did not do a lick of work.” As noted in his work, “Why I Write,” Blair seemed to have known at an early age that he would be a writer, and felt that the pressure from this parents to succeed had only pushed him further in this direction. In the end he graduated 138 out of 167 students in his class, and did not receive a university scholarship, which it is doubtful he wanted to accept anyway. Now he decided to travel to India, and in 1922, he decided to follow in his families’ footsteps by joining the civil service in Burma. It seems that his influences in the manner were quite strange for the time, as stated here,

When he finished at Eton, Eric signed on with the Burmese police, partly because his father had influence at the Colonial Office, partly because he was seduced by Rudyard Kipling's poem Mandalay (which Orwell bizarrely considered to be the finest poem in the English language), with its promise of "a Burma girl a-settin' " by the old Moulmein pagoda. As it happened, Blair's first posting was to Moulmein, but he found Burma girls to be scarce on the ground. (“Orwell” 1)

         He lived and worked in the civil service there from 1922 through 1927, as he began to work on his writing style. After leaving the Indian Civil Service he moved back to England and began to pull together his various journals and writings in order to prepare his first novels.  He rented a small, one room apartment on the Portobello Road in London and began in earnest to write.  After spending this time writing, he decided to live directly among the poor, first in London and later in Paris.  In many ways he did this in order to reveal to the members of his class that such injustices existed.  He felt that most of the middle class had pulled wool over their eyes and their denial of such worldly problems was a vice that he could take from them. While in Paris he lived in the artists quarter and worked as a dishwasher. The next year he returned to his family in London for Christmas and announced to them that he intended to write a book detailing his experiences in Paris. He finished a short draft, entitled, A Scullions Diary about 10 months later. This short novel was rejected twice, mainly on the grounds that it was only 35,000 words and used only a moderate part of all of the notes, journals and other things that he had collected and intended to use.  In despair he asked a friend, Mabel Firez to “destroy the script, but save the paper clips.”  She instead took it upon herself to get it published, and after much bullying it was read by one Leonard Monroe, a literary agent at the house Gollancz.  It was accepted as long as the swears were deleted and several names were changed to prevent lawsuits.  Now Eric plunged into finishing the book, and despite the fact that it took about 2 more years, it was exactly the book he had wanted to write initially.  Though he was sure that his writing would bring him the fame and recognition of the causes that he championed, he wrote the following to Victor Gollancz shortly before the book was revised for the last time

“I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously.  I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use this pseudonym again.” (“Orwell” 2)

The book was published as, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933 by the House of Gollancz.  Eric Blair was now officially known in the world as George Orwell.

Down and Out in Paris and London, is not a novel; it is a kind of documentary account of life unknown to most of its readers. And this was the point of it: he wanted to bring the English middle class, of which he was a member, to an understanding of what life they lead and enjoyed, was founded upon, the life under their very noses.  Here we see two typical aspects of Orwell as a writer: his idea of himself as the exposer of painful truth, which people for various reasons do not wish to look at; and his idea of himself as a representative of the English moral conscience. (“Orwell” 2)

 

 In his second book Burmese Days, he gave accounting to his experiences in the civil service, working in a system that he found to be impressive, yet flawed in its attempts at control. He admired the men and women that he worked with, and felt that they were underappreciated, and eventually became disillusioned with the imperial processes that dominated their lives.  His political views began to take true shape as he saw that the under classes of this time period were only represented through their strivings to improve the lot of their children.  

        The next phase of Eric’s life began when he visited and worked among the poor and downtrodden in England itself and his political views took full shape.  His first book that showed his true political feelings was The Road to Wigan Pier, in which he wrote about the struggles of coal miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan.  After seeing their struggles, he began to take an active political part, and when the Spanish Civil War he joined Ernet Hemingway and others in going to Spain to take part.  There he fought on the side of the Republican Loyalists and was twice wounded.  He had just recovered from his second wound when he received word that the soviet troops supporting the regime were moving against their former allies in the extreme left-wing, the anarchists and other fringe socialists, to which at this time Orwell was fighting with.  He was forced to flee the country, and thanks to the betrayal began to look deeply into the whispers of what was really going on in the USSR.  What he found shook his democratic socialist compulsions to the core, and embittered him to utopian societies, as he found they all grew into totalitarian states.  On his way home, he developed tuberculosis and had to stay in Morocco with the hope that it would pass. There he wrote the book, Homage to Catalonia, describing his experiences in the war and his reactions to the soviet betrayal. Shortly after the Second World War broke out, and Orwell signed up to fight but was judged unfit to serve, so he joined the BBC and worked in the Indian section as well as serving in the home guard.  In 1943 he began to write Animal Farm, and the next year Orwell and his wife adopted a son.  In 1945 his wife died during an operation, and he went off to Europe to be a reporter.  In 1946 he attempted to settle in the Scottish island of Jura, where he stated his last book, 1984.

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The islands climate was unsuitable for someone suffering from tuberculosis and Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the bleakness of human suffering, the indignity of pain. Indeed he said that the book wouldn’t have been so gloomy has be not been so ill. (“Orwell”2)  

Eric Blair died in January 1950 of a tuberculosis hemorrhage, having just finished 1984. He left the world with a picture of communism, socialism, and totalitarianism that cannot be matched for either accuracy nor influence.

        Of the two of his most famous books, Animal Farm, was written first, having been finished in 1945, and ...

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