George Orwell: Research Essay

George Orwell: Research Essay

Considering the long and chequered history of humanity, it’s unbelievably difficult to compare the events of the past hundred years to any that preceded them. The last century saw the liberation and equalization of all races, effectively knocking the old colonial and imperial ideals from their throne; it also saw the bloodiest conflict in history. Those who experienced these upheavals and lived to tell the tale have been nicknamed “the Greatest Generation,” with good reason. Any change is liable to cause an uproar, which is why the twentieth century was punctuated by war, protest, and the ubiquitous presence of criticism—of society, of politics, of the world. No one epitomized the “conscience of a generation,” or was a better “chronicler of modern English culture” than George Orwell.

Orwell was born in Motihari, India, on June 25th, 1903, under the name Eric Arthur Blair. His family’s history was perennially intertwined with colonialism, beginning with his great-grandfather, Charles Blair, who had owned substantial plantations in Jamaica during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At the time of his birth, his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the opium department of the Indian Civil Service. Despite the fact that his mother, Ida Mabel Blair, took him to live in England shortly after his birth, he maintained ”a romantic idea about the East.” At the age of twenty, Orwell used his family connections to land a job with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

Due to a shortage of staff and his family’s status, Orwell was quickly given responsibilities previously unknown to a man of such a young age: within two years of his arrival in Burma, he was assigned to the frontier outpost of Myaungmya, and to the care and keeping of some twenty thousand people. His almost surreal experiences as the European man in charge of so many colonial natives—that were treated as second-class citizens in their own country— laid the foundation for the revolutionary and critical writing of his later career. In his memoir-essay “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell simultaneously laments and jokes that he was “hated by large numbers of people—the only time in [his] life that [he had] been important enough for this to happen.”

As a sub-divisional police officer of the small town of Moulmein, he noted an overt sense of dissatisfaction amongst the Burmese natives. This resentment was never enough to spark violence or riots, but the interactions between the Burmese and the British were very strained, with both parties guilty of harassment and “beastly behaviour.” Contrary to his supposed revolutionary ideals, Orwell was torn between the establishment and the will of the people: “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny;” he boldly proclaimed, “and with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.”

During a routine day at his work, a report comes in that an elephant has broken away from its mahout and is wandering uncomfortably near to human settlement. Egged on by the “sneering yellow faces” of the already angry Burmese, Orwell dutifully grabs his rifle and goes out to see if he can deal with the situation. He has no desire to shoot the beast, as it had always seemed somehow “worse to kill a large animal,” but his fear of seeming weak in the eyes of the local spurred him to action. Despite his own unwillingness, he had become, in a sense “only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.” The elephant is shot and killed, and the story ends on a pearl of wisdom: “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.” This message is repeated time and again throughout the works of Orwell.

“A Hanging,” another recollection of his work as a police officer in Burma, creates an uncomfortable air of tension when he mixes the mundane with the morbid. In the scene, he has been invited to view the hanging of a convicted criminal, a “puny wisp of a man.” Whilst being frog-marched from his cell to the gallows, the shoeless prisoner stepped slightly to the side “to avoid a puddle on the path.”

This simple act of unconscious thought—the inherent desire to keep your feet dry, even as you walk towards your death—prompted an epiphany in the young Orwell, who writes: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. [...] This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive.” Despite his feeling of despair, he is obviously unable to act, and watches solemnly as the prisoner makes his last appeal to his god, and to the world: a persistent chant of “Ram! Ram! Ram!” Then, with little more than the executioner’s cry of “Chalo!” and “a clanking noise,” he was dead.

There is silence over the prison yard, for a moment, until a small dog begins to bark and conversation resumes. All at once, everyone began “chatting gaily,” making small talk about breakfast and laughing— “at what, nobody seemed certain.” Seeking to break the awkwardness that had permeated the group, the Burmese Magistrate began telling funny stories, which lightened the mood significantly. In the spirit of co-operation, they ”all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably.” A feeling of camaraderie had come to exist between the Europeans and the Burmese that had not yet been seen on the prison grounds. The sick irony of their new friendship hangs limply from the closing sentence: “The dead man was a hundred yards away.”

In 1927, Orwell contracted a viral illness called breakbone fever , a febrile disease similar to malaria. He resigned from the police and returned to Southold, England, where his family lived. Frustrated by the disconnect between the classes, inspired by Jack London’s experiences with intentional poverty, and experimenting with his own revolutionary ideals, Orwell decided to move to London and “go native,” dressing and living as the majority did. The social test continued when he moved to Paris six months later. His experiences as a “bona-fide member of the working class” formed foundation of his first novel, 1933’s Down and Out in Paris and London.

Predominantly autobiographical, the ’novel’ follows Orwell as he lives hand-to-mouth in the unsavoury areas of both cities. Despite his family’s relatively high status and money, he chooses to live among the “working poor” who slave throughout the week and to drink themselves sick on Saturday and Sunday: “the one thing that made life worth living.” While the bulk of the text is disconcertingly accurate and unflinching in its depiction of life for the “unwashed masses,” one chapter is particularly disturbing.

One night, as Orwell slept in his “wholly unfortunate” apartment block, a murder was committed on the street, just below his window. Having been awoken by the uproar, he rushed to the window, only to see “the murderers, three of them, flitting away at the end of the street.” Driven by curiosity rather than fear, he and several others descended down to the cobblestones to find a man lying there, “quite dead, his skull cracked with a piece of lead piping.”

Orwell goes on to describe the colour of the blood, the crowd that gathered “from miles around to see it,” and the regrettable fact that the body remained, untouched, in the street for days after, but none of these things causes distress particular stress to the author. In fact, the truly horrifying thing is how quickly things return to the status quo. “I was in bed and asleep within three minutes of the murder.” He claims, “We were working people, and where was the sense of wasting sleep over a murder?”

Human apathy was a significant and ever-present theme in Orwell’s writing, from his earliest works all the way to his final novel. As individuals, however, we are able to justify to ourselves the apathy and cruelty of systems—governments, armies, police organizations—by saying to ourselves: “I’d never behave like that. I would care. Individual people always care.” In Down and Out, Orwell came to understand that, when under less-than-favourable circumstances, people simply cease to care. It is this observation of a fundamental failing of the human condition that causes Down and Out in Paris in London to resonate so deeply with the reader.

Following his experiences in Paris, Orwell became a freelance reporter and set about covering the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He sent back regular correspondences for publication in England during his time there, and returned to find them “mangled beyond belief: callously edited to avoid discomforting the public.” His anger at governments and organizations that seek to obscure the truth lead to the writing of his most famous and critically acclaimed works: Animal Farm and 1984.

But, as Orwell wrote of dystopian futures and Soviet fables, he was dying. A life of sickliness had culminated in a devastating bout of tuberculosis, which plagued him for the last years of his life. Reflecting on a life of literary work that was coming to an end, he penned “Why I Write,” an essay about his experiences with the written word, and the journey he took to become who he was.

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea.” In addition to discussing his feelings about writing, he attempts to rationalize the practice, stating that there are four reasons why anyone should choose to write: “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.” By some grievous error, he left out “to get a decent grade in English class,” but this gross indiscretion has gone mostly unnoticed by critics.

George Orwell spent his final weeks in his flat in London, at XXXXXXXX Court, a stately brick building visible on the Beatles’ famous album cover “Abbey Road. ” A brass plaque hangs by the door of Flat 111, with a brief biography of his life, and his desire to inspire others to “speak up whenever possible, or more importantly, whenever impossible. ” An abnormally large number of security cameras—telescreens?—in the building have malfunctioned.

If it was George Orwell’s desire to inspire more writing, then he most assuredly succeeded. Perhaps the rumours are true, and his ghost still haunts the XXXXXXX Court block, encouraging young writers to take up the torch where he could not.

He certainly inspired this writer, down in Flat 86.