Page 67 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes 4.1 Life and Works of George Orwell

Figure: 4.1 George Orwell

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/George_Orwell_press_photo.
jpg/220px-George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg
Born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal in India, George Orwell spent his initial days in India, where
his father was posted. George Orwell’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium
Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair, grew up in Burma where
her French father was involved in speculative ventures. Eric Arthur Blair had two sisters: Marjorie
who was five years older to him and Avril who was five years younger to him. When Eric was
one year old, his mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England and settled in
Henley-on-Thames. Eric’s father stayed in India and barely visited. Eric didn’t know his father
until he retired from the service in 1912. Even after that his father’s retirement, the pair didn’t
form a strong bond. Eric thought that his was very dull and conservative.

One biography states that Orwell’s first word was “beastly.” He was a sick child, often fighting
from flu and bronchitis. George Orwell reportedly composed his first poem when he was four
years old. He later wrote, “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding
conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions
were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.” His first literary successes
came at the age of 11 when his poem got published in the local newspaper. Like most boys in
England, George Orwell was also sent to a boarding school. In 1911 Orwell went to St. Cyprian’s
in the coastal town of Eastbourne, where he first tasted England’s class system. On a partial
scholarship, George Orwell realised that the school treated the richer students better than the
poorer ones. In this school Orwell was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty, and
in books he found comfort from his difficult situation. What he lacked in personality, he made
up for in smarts. He grew up a withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he later wrote about his miseries
of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the
Joys (1953).
George Orwell won scholarships to England’s two top schools, Eton and Winchester, and chose
the former. He stayed in Eton from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters. It was

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