George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bengal, the son of an Indian government official. He was educated at a Sussex prep school and then Eton. And his pre-ordained path in life was to follow his family’s traditional steps into the colonial civil service or the Church of England.
But Blair was to carve out quite a different career – founding a reputation as one of the century’s greatest writers, George Orwell, who gained inspiration for much of his writing by weeks spent in a Poplar dosshouse.
Blair left Eton in 1921 and, instead of taking up a place at Oxford or Cambridge, decided to return to the sub-continent, joining the Imperial Indian Police. But after seven years stationed in Burma, he was growing restless. He found the climate unbearable, the health problems that were to dog the rest of his life had begun, and – most of all – he was starting to have severe misgivings about British rule in India.
His stirring political sense combined with his urge to write. And in 1928 he resigned his post, returning to Europe with the idea of writing about the urban poor.
Down and out
The next three years of his life were spent among the down-and-outs, first of Paris, and then with a return to London. Landing at Tilbury, the almost penniless Blair pawned his suit and made his way to a lodging house in Pennyfields, Poplar.
It was an eye-opener for the young writer: “Two or three of the lodgers were old age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never realised there are people in England who live on nothing but the old age pension of ten shillings [50p] a week.”
Blair spent much of his time among the down-and-outs compiling material for this journalism, talking to his fellow dossers, and killing time in the East End street.
He wrote: “All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams and the noisy, festering life of the back streets.”
The people of the East End looked different too. “The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling and more idling. Knots of men stood at the corners, slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two slices [of bread and marge] that the Londoner swallows every two hours.”
As an aspiring novelist should, Blair spent most of his time just watching. “The East End women are pretty (it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals – Chinamen, Chittagonian Lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs.”
And he saw the men of God making their appeals on every street corner, the Salvation Army in East India Dock Road, and the Mormons at Tower Hill. In Middlesex Street he watched in amazement as a parent berated her ungrateful child. “Enjoy yourself!” yelled the mother. “What yer think I brought yer out ‘ere for and bought y’a trumpet an’ all? You little bastard, you shall enjoy yerself!”
Poor health
By 1932, Blair had had enough of the streetlife. His health wasn’t good, and he took a job as a schoolteacher. A year later, his tramping diaries were published by Victor Gollancz as Down and Out in Paris and London. Fearing that their failure would damage his literary ambitions, the books came out under the pseudonym George Orwell.
But they were a huge success, and the pen name stuck. Over the next 18 years, Orwell’s reputation grew with novels like Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and a return to the horrors of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier. Signing up to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell collected the material for Homage to Catalonia.
He finally achieved huge success with the anti-totalitarian fable Animal Farm, in 1945, and retired to Jura in Scotland to pursue writing full time.
His most memorable work was to be his last though. In 1949, he explored further the horrors of totalitarian government with the novel 1984. But his health was failing. His weak lungs, damaged by his years of rough living in Paris and the East End, failed on 21 January 1950, and Orwell died of complications arising from chronic tuberculosis. He was buried in the village churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.