George Orwell was a British novelist best known for his dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984. This document provides biographical details about Orwell's life and career. It summarizes excerpts from his works that discuss his experiences in Burma which informed his anti-imperialist views, as well as passages that demonstrate his growing distrust of totalitarianism. The document also reviews Orwell's use of language and his goal of creating political art to expose lies and draw attention to injustice.

1. George Orwell (1903 – 1950)
1984
“The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately
better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”

2. Life of Eric Arthur Blair and his Work
– his father Richard worked for the Opium Department
of the Indian Civil Service
– at the age of 8 went to St. Cyprian’s, later to Eton,
where he realized that a sane middle-class worker would
make a better statesman than a half-witted upper-class
Eton graduate
– after Eton he joined the Imperial Police in Burma
(1922 -- 1927)
– as an aspiring writer he did several odd-jobs in Paris and London
– Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), so “part of my guilt would drop from
me”, (see Greenblatt, p. 2378)
– after his experience in Spain (shot right through his neck) and Northern England,
he became an uncommitted and independent leftist, believing capitalism could
be lethal, but the Soviet type of communism was also a perversion
– from then on he published anti-totalitarianism works

3. from Such, Such Were The Joys
(1947, Partisan Review)
“Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's […] I began wetting my
bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a
habit which I must have grown out of at least four years
earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such
circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in
children who have been removed from their homes to a
strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a
disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and
for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not
need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with
a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please
God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let
me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference.”
(Orwell, 2014, p. 416)

4. From Such, Such Were The Joys
regarding his attitude to Sambo and Flip (Wilkeses) at St. Cyprian’s
“As I came out of the shop I saw on the opposite pavement a
small sharp-faced man who seemed to be staring very hard at
my school cap. Instantly a horrible fear went through me.
There could be no doubt as to who the man was. He was a spy
placed there by Sambo! I turned away unconcernedly, and
then, as though my legs were doing it of their own accord,
broke into a clumsy run.” (p. 427)
“If it ever happened that both of them were away, Brown
acted as deputy headmaster, and on those occasions instead
of reading the appointed lesson for the day at morning
chapel, he would read us stories from the Apocrypha.“ (p.
430)

5. Such, Such Were The Joys, main topics
– beating
– omnipresent dirt, smell, hunger and cold
– money (or lack of it)
– countryside snobbery
– spying (chocolate, toys)
– degradation (Blair from a poorer family)
– currying favour with the teachers (scholarships,
waiting at tables)
– sexual scandal (acts against purity)

6. His opinions on the Empire, from
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
“All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that
time I had already made up my mind that
imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I
chucked up my job and got out of it the better.
Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for
the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the
British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more
bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like
that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters.” (Orwell, 2014, p. 19)

7. Shooting an Elephant (1936) //
a moment of hate as in 1984?
“The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and
could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right
thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad
dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the
Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I
was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame
to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an
elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee
coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie
had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave
me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I
often wondered whether any of the others grasped that
I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” (Ibid., pp. 24
– 25)

8. from Inside the Whale (1940)
“What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of
laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture. Until
recently the full implications of this were not foreseen, because it was
generally imagined that Socialism could preserve and even enlarge the
amosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized how false
this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of
totalitarian dictatorships – an age in which freedom of thought will be
at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The
autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But
this means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer
at least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an
end and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is
barely imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg;
he is marely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as
surely doomed as the hippopotamus.” (Orwell, 2014, p. 131)

9. From Why I Write (1946)
Orwell recognizes 4 motives for writing:
“1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered
after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc.
etc.” (p. 2014, p. 3)
“2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the
other hand, in words and their right arrangement.” (Ibid.)
“3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and
store them up for the use of posterity.” (Ibid.)
“4. Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire
to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of
society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from
political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a
political attitude” (Ibid., p. 4)

10. Why I Write (1946)
“What I have most wanted to do throughout the
past ten years is to make political writing into an
art. My starting point is always a feeling of
partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down
to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going
to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is
some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I
want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to
get a hearing.” (Ibid., p. 5)

11. from Politics and the English Language (1947)
“Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is
no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the
English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and
sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin
or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words
like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine,
subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their
Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena,
hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad
dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Rus-
sian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is
to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where nec-
essary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this
kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and
so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s mean-
ing. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.”
(Orwell, 2014, p. 352)

12. Julian Barnes on George Orwell,
from George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant
(Through the Window, 2012)
“And George Orwell? It would surprise, and
doubtless, irritate, him to discover that since his
death in 1950 he has moved implacably towards NT
status. He is interpretable, malleable, ambassadorial
and patriotic. He denounced the Empire, which
pleases the left; he denounced communism, which
pleases the right. He warned us against the
corrupting effect on politics and public life of the
misuse of language, which pleases almost
everyone.” (Barnes, 2012, p. 31)

13. Julian Barnes on George Orwell,
from George Orwell and the Fucking Elephant
(Through the Window, 2012)
“Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a
system-and-structures man, not least because he
thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere
self-help. ‘The central problem – how to prevent
power from being abused – remains unresolved.’
And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will
remain a living writer.” (Ibid., p. 40)

14. Works
Burmese Days (1934)
A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Coming Up for Air (1939)
Animal Farm (1945)
– inspired by an image of a boy whipping his
cart-horse harshly
– his wife Eileen Maud Blair (née O'Shaughnessy) died after being anaesthetized before an
operation
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949, int. The Last Man in Europe, 1980)
– in poor health, written on the island of Jura
(left for the place only with his adopted son Richard
and a maid, travelling from London to Glasgow, then
taking boat, bus, boat again Jura, than a car to
a secluded cottage
– married for the 2nd time (Sonia Mary Brownell)
on his death-bed

15. Britain during WWII
“For six years Britain was to all intents and purposes a
totalitarian state, albeit preserving the veneer of
democracy. The Emergency Powers Act of May 1940 had
given the government unlimited authority over both
people and property.” (Strong, 1998, p. 501)
– children evacuated
– ID distributed
– labour directed (essential and non-essential)
– food and clothes rationed
– able men conscripted
– others joined Home Guard or Air Raid Precautions
– class distinctions “vanished“
– taxes raised!!! (see Strong, ibid.)

16. On March 5, 1946, W. Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speech
at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an
‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states
of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,
Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all
these famous cities and the populations around them
lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are
subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet
influence but to a very high and in some cases
increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
To watch:
Simon Schama’s A History of Britain
Episode 15, The Two Winstons: 49.25 (track 6)

17. The Seminar Questions (see also Gateway B2+, p. 63)
1. Comment on: a) Winston’s job; b) his workplace and its functions.
2. What seems to be the ultimate aim of Newspeak as opposed to Oldspeak?
3. Why does Syme like the words ungood, plusgood and doubleplusgood?
4. What criticism does Syme make of Oldspeak?
5. Why will nobody in 2050 be able to understand the conversation between
Syme and Winston Smith?
6. How will past works of literature change when they are expressed in Newspeak
and why?
7. What will happen to the slogan “Freedom is slavery” and why?
8. Why does Winston think people in the Party won’t like Syme?
9. Do you think there are more words, fewer words or the same number of words
in your language today compared with a hundred years ago? What would
explain this?
10. Will the number of words grow or shrink in the future?
11. Do you think a new, invented language could ever catch on and become
popular? Why? /Why not?
12. Do you think works of literature can be a threat to people in power? Why?/Why
not?
13. Comment on the types of Newspeak vocabulary (from p. 27 on…).

18. 2
14. “Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences,
even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own
day.” (File 5, p. 27)
Comment on the quotation. Can you find any similarities in between today’s English and the Newspeak features
mentioned in the text (e. g. on pp. 28 – 29)?
15. Comment on: a) Winston’s marital status; b) marriages in Oceania; c) sexual morals in Oceania; d) culture and
media in Oceania.
16. Can you think of a theme found in the novel which you as a reader consider elaborated spot-on with regard
to our world?
17. Can you think of a theme found in the novel which you as a reader consider unrealistic, or too far-fetched,
etc.?
18. Can you think of a theme found in the novel which you as a reader consider irrelevant because you think the
author is wrong here?
19. Comment on the problem of the Newspeak euphony (see p. 31).
20. Comment on the term “glorious Revolution” as found in Winston’s diary on p. 21. (in the file).
21. Comment on the quotation on. p. 26: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If
that is granted, all else follows.”
21. Can you think of any doublethink experience from your everyday life (or from any [even fictional] situation)?

19. Poetry Conversion – rewrite the lines from Wordsworth’s Oldspeak to Newspeak
(try and follow the part-of-speech and vocabulary analysis as foud in the Principles of
Newspeak by George Orwell)
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
in such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
what wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

20. Warning against 1984?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
10430597/University-slaps-trigger-warning-
George-Orwells-Nineteen-Eighty-Four.html

21. Bibliography and other references:
Barnes, J. 2012. Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and one short story). London:
Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-099-57858-1.
Greenblatt, S., 2006. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, New York,
London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2877 pp. ISBN 0-393-92715-6.
Orwell, G. 2014. Essays. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-141-39546-3.
Orwell, G. The Complete Novels. 2001. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN-13: 978-
0141185156.
Spencer, D. Gateway B2+. 2011. London: Macmillan Publishing. ISBN 9780230723627.
Strong, R. 1998. The Story of Britain: A People’s History, London: Pimlico, ISBN 0-7126-
6564-3.
Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech
https://www.wcmo.edu/about/history/iron-curtain-speech.html
Documentaries:
George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6txpumkY5I
George Orwell: The Last Man in Europe – 1984
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK5gsHEjJuY
The Two Winstons (A History of Britain)
By Simon Schama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr5A0hhRV_A