The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism
Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”
Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1903Born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India, son of an official of the colonial opium department
- 1917–1921King's Scholar at Eton College
- 1922–1927Served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and resigned, disillusioned with imperial rule
- 1928–1932Down and out in Paris and London: dishwasher, schoolteacher, bookshop assistant
- 1933Published Down and Out in Paris and London under the pen name George Orwell
- 1936Wrote The Road to Wigan Pier from the northern coalfields; married Eileen O'Shaughnessy
- 1936.12Reached Barcelona and enlisted in the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party
- 1937.01–05Served on the Aragon front at Alcubierre and Huesca; shot through the throat at Huesca in May
- 1937.05Caught in the Barcelona May Days while on leave, standing guard on a POUM building
- 1937.06Wanted after the POUM was outlawed; escaped with his wife into France
- 1938Published Homage to Catalonia, which sold 683 copies in six months
- 1941–1943Produced broadcasts to India in the BBC Eastern Service
- 1945Published Animal Farm
- 1949Published Nineteen Eighty-Four
- 1950.01.21Died of tuberculosis in a London hospital
Related historical events
The Second World War and 'revolutionary patriotism'
When the war came in September 1939 Orwell put his name down for war work but nothing came of it. Declared "unfit for any kind of military service" by the Medical Board in June 1940, he joined the Home Guard instead, sharing Tom Wintringham's socialist vision of it as a revolutionary People's Militia and writing lecture notes on street fighting, field fortifications and mortars. The same year he worked as a BBC producer on the Indian Section, and in mid-1940 he planned the Searchlight Books series with Fredric Warburg and Tosco Fyvel. The position he called "revolutionary patriotism", adopted after he left the ILP over its opposition to the war, produced The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius in February 1941, the first volume of that series. From August 1941 he was taken on full-time by the BBC's Eastern Service, supervising cultural broadcasts to India to counter Nazi propaganda. He resigned in September 1943 after a report confirmed that few Indians listened to the broadcasts, and because he wanted to concentrate on Animal Farm.