Animal Farm and Related Readings

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Animal Farm. George Orwell.

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About the author

George Orwell ( June 25, 1903–
January 21, 1950) was the pen-name
of Eric Arthur Blair, a British au
thor and journalist best known for
his allegorical political novels, Ani
mal Farm and Nineteen Eighty
Four. The latter, which describes a
futuristic dystopian society, led to the
use of the adjective 'Orwellian' to de
scribe totalitarian mechanisms of

thought-control.

Eric Blair was born in Bengal, 1903 in the British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one; he did not see his father again until 1907 when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril.

At the age of 5, Eric was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley, which his sisters had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, however, he must have impressed the teachers very favorably, for two years later he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St. Cyprian’s School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Young Eric attended St. Cyprian’s on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St. Cyprian’s with biting resentment in the essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” but he did well enough to earn scholarships to both Wellington and Eton colleges.

After a semester a Wellington, Eric moved to Eton, where he was a King’s Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he wrote that he had been “relatively happy” at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary: some claim he was a poor student, others deny this. It is clear that he was disliked by

some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. In any event, during his time at the school Eric made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals.

Upon completing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family’s means being insufficient to pay for his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as evidenced by first novel Burmese Days , published in 1934, and by such notable essays as ‘A Hanging’, and ‘Shooting an Elephant’). He adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi . Perhaps surprisingly for a writer with progressive, socialist views, he chose a pen name that stressed his deep and life-long affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England, while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.

Blair lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London . He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead.

A member of the Independent Labour Party, Orwell felt impelled to fight as an infantryman in the anti-Stalinist POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) during the Spanish Civil War. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he believed was the betrayal of that workers’ revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, which was abetted by the Soviet Union. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay “Wounded by a Fascist Sniper”, as well as in Homage to Catalonia .

Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programs to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain’s war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like “an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot”. Despite the good pay, he quit this job in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune , a left-wing journal sponsored by a group of Labour

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Party MPs.
In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm , which
was published the following year with great critical and popular success.
The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable
income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the
Observer ’s war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the
Manchester Evening News . He was a close friend of the Observer’s editor/
owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor’s
editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen
Eighty-Four , was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the
island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.
Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O’Shaughnessy,
with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair. Tragically, she died in
1945 during an operation.