Eric Arthur Blair was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, in what was then Bengal, where his father worked for the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother brought him to England before he was two and he barely knew his father until he was eight.
He went to Eton on a scholarship. That meant being poor among the wealthy for five formative years. He described his family as lower-upper-middle class, a phrase that took him a paragraph to explain and which explains most of his politics. I’d tape Orwell’s rules above every writing desk in the country, and people who never read past the title throw his name around too often. What I care about is the man who spent his life trying to write sentences that couldn’t hide anything.
Instead of university he joined the Imperial Police in Burma, spent five years enforcing an empire he came to despise, resigned, and deliberately went to live among the destitute in Paris and London.
He took the pen name so his family wouldn’t have to read about that period under the family name. It came from a river in East Anglia. He died of tuberculosis in London in January 1950, aged forty-six, seven months after publishing his last novel.
The pen name is more than a footnote. Eric Blair was an Etonian and a colonial policeman. George Orwell was a tramp, a dishwasher, a militiaman and a critic of the class he came from. He constructed the second person deliberately and then became him, and the invention signs the writing everybody knows.
The output is also smaller than the reputation suggests. Six novels, three books of reportage, and several hundred essays and columns, produced in about seventeen working years while he was ill for most of them. Two of those novels have eclipsed everything else so completely that the rest of the shelf is effectively invisible. He was also broke for most of it. The books that made him permanent sold modestly in his lifetime, and the money only arrived at the very end, when he was too ill to use it.
The health was the constant. Tuberculosis shaped where he could live and how long he could work, and the last novel was written on a remote Scottish island while he was seriously ill.
The Eton scholarship is the fault line in the biography. He was there on merit and without money, surrounded by boys who had both, and he wrote later about the humiliations of that position with a precision that only comes from having lived it. He didn’t go on to university. That was unusual for an Eton scholar and which he seems to have chosen. The Imperial Police in Burma was a respectable colonial career and a decisive step away from the literary establishment his contemporaries were entering. By his mid-twenties he’d resigned, come home, and begun deliberately living among the poor in Paris and London. His family found this incomprehensible. He was a former colonial officer sleeping in casual wards. Throughout, he was also a working reviewer and columnist producing enormous quantities of short journalism to pay rent. The essays everybody quotes were mostly written to deadline for small fees.
That combination, an expensive education, a colonial career, deliberate poverty and a life of freelance deadlines, is unusual enough that it explains most of what is distinctive about him.
What are Orwell’s six rules for writing?
His essay on political language ends with a short list of rules for writing, and it’s the most practically useful thing he produced.
The rules cover the same ground repeatedly: avoid the stale metaphor everybody uses, prefer the short word, cut anything that can be cut, prefer the active, avoid jargon and foreign phrases where a plain equivalent exists. The last rule instructs you to break any of the others before writing something barbarous.
That final rule is the one people skip and it’s the point. The list is a set of defaults, offered by somebody who expected you to override them when your ear said otherwise. What makes the essay matter is the argument underneath. That isn’t about elegance. His claim is that vague language and clear thinking can’t coexist, that political writing is largely the defense of the indefensible, and that the way you defend the indefensible is by never saying plainly what you mean. The examples he gives of atrocity described in bureaucratic abstraction haven’t dated at all. Anyone who reads a modern press release can run the exercise themselves.
I’d make this essay required reading for anybody who writes press releases, and I’d make them read it twice. Whenever a company describes firing people as a restructuring opportunity, I can hear Orwell sighing.
Why do Orwell’s essays outlast his novels?
The two famous books have been absorbed into shorthand, and the shorthand has largely replaced them. Nineteen Eighty-Four is now a set of words people deploy about whatever they dislike, usually without much relation to the book. Animal Farm is taught to fourteen-year-olds as an allegory with a key attached. That turns a novel into a puzzle with an answer.
The essays haven’t been absorbed that way and are consequently still alive.
Down and Out in Paris and London is reportage from inside dishwashing and vagrancy. The Road to Wigan Pier is about the industrial north and includes a long section attacking the middle-class socialists he was writing for. Homage to Catalonia is an account of a war he fought in that got him shot through the throat and then hunted by his own side.
That last one explains him. He went to Spain to fight fascism, found the Republican side purging its own factions, and wrote the truth about it knowing it would cost him allies. Publishers refused it. It sold almost nothing in his lifetime. Homage to Catalonia is the book of his I respect most. Anybody can tell the truth about their enemies. He told it about his own side, knowing it would cost him friends and sales, and that takes a kind of nerve I rarely see in writers of any era.
A writer’s actual politics are visible in what they’re willing to publish about their own side.
How did Burma shape Orwell’s politics?
He spent five years as a colonial policeman before he wrote anything, and it’s the experience that made him. At nineteen he arrived, and at twenty-four he resigned. The job was enforcement: arrests, prisons, executions, the administrative machinery of an occupation carried out by a young man who had been taught it was benevolent and found it wasn’t.
Two of his best short pieces come directly from it. One describes an execution he attended and the moment a condemned man stepped around a puddle on the way to the gallows. That’s the detail the essay turns on. The other is about a crowd pushing him into shooting an animal he didn’t want to kill, and it’s really about the position of the occupier, who’s obliged to perform authority for an audience that despises him.
He assumed his readers might accept that empire is cruel to the colonized. The insight underneath is that it degrades the people administering it, forcing them into a role that requires them to stop thinking.
For a writer the transferable observation is that he did the job first. The authority in those essays comes from having stood in the room, and no amount of research produces the puddle detail. That puddle detail stuns me. No researcher would have invented it, and no amount of skill fakes it. I think it’s the best argument there is for going and doing the thing before you write about it.
Why did Orwell choose to live in poverty?
After Burma he chose poverty deliberately, which is different from having it happen to you, and he was honest about the difference.
He washed dishes in Paris hotel kitchens for long shifts and almost no money, and slept in London common lodging houses among men who had nothing.
He could have stopped at any point. He had family, an education and a way out, and he says so in the book instead of pretending otherwise. I respect that admission more than the hardship itself.
That admission makes the reportage trustworthy. A writer who claims full membership of a world he can leave is lying, and the reader detects it. A writer who states the escape hatch and describes what he saw anyway keeps his credibility.
The material also gave him something no other English writer of his class had: a working knowledge of what hunger, exhaustion and institutional contempt do to a person, observed at close range instead of sympathized with from a distance. Anyone writing about a world they’re visiting should copy the honesty instead of the immersion. Say what your exit looks like, then report.
How did Orwell build the plain style?
His prose reads as though anybody could write it. That’s the hardest effect in English and takes the most work.
Nothing draws attention to itself. The vocabulary is ordinary. The sentences are usually short and the paragraphs move in one direction. A reader gets to the end of a page having absorbed an argument without noticing any technique.
That transparency is engineered. He revised heavily, and the plainness is a decision made repeatedly against the more impressive option. Writers who assume plain means easy produce something flat instead, because plainness without precision is just absence.
The worst misunderstanding in writing advice is about plain language. People hear plain and think lazy. Orwell’s plainness came from revising until there was nothing left to hide behind, and it’s far harder work than dressing a sentence up.
The same principle runs through E.B. White and through Hemingway, and all three are misread the same way. The surface looks reproducible and the work underneath doesn’t show.
What is the contradiction in Orwell’s record?
Near the end of his life he gave a list of names to a British government propaganda department, identifying people he considered unreliable on Soviet questions. This is difficult to square with the man who wrote against surveillance and denunciation, and the defenses offered for it are mostly unconvincing. He was dying, he was at war with Stalinism, the list was informal, the department wasn’t the police. None of that fully answers it. A writer who spent his career warning about the machinery of the state participated in a small piece of it. That’s a fact about him, and it doesn’t need resolving. I find it disappointing in a way I can’t argue myself out of. It also makes the work more useful instead of less. Somebody who understood that temptation from the inside is a better guide to it than somebody who never felt it.
What can a writer take from Orwell?
Four things.
Treat clarity as an ethical position. His argument is that you can’t think clearly in vague language, and that people reach for abstraction exactly when they need to avoid saying what they mean. That applies to your own drafts before it applies to anyone’s politics.
Keep the rule that lets you break the rules. A list of defaults with an override clause is useful. A list of laws produces anxious, dead prose. Publish the thing that costs you. Homage to Catalonia is the most valuable book he wrote because it was inconvenient to the people on his own side.
Build the plain style deliberately. Transparency is an effect requiring more revision than ornament does, and it fails invisibly when the precision is missing.
How should you mark George Orwell Day?
Read the essay on political language. That takes twenty minutes and will change how you read everything for a week afterward. Or read Homage to Catalonia. It’s the book of his that fewest people have read and the one he’d probably have chosen.
If you only know Animal Farm from school, it reads very differently as an adult without a teacher supplying the key.
If you write, do the exercise. Take a paragraph of your own and mark every phrase you’ve seen elsewhere. Then replace each one with what you meant. The gap between the two is where the thinking wasn’t finished.
He’d have been appalled at how loosely people use his name, and I think he’d have been pleased by anybody who took that exercise seriously. Clear sentences were his whole fight, and I can’t think of a better way to mark his day than cutting a borrowed phrase and saying what you meant.
For other writers whose days are worth marking I’ve written about Toni Morrison, Mark Twain and Bloomsday.