Burmese Days, By GEORGE ORWELL

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George Orwell's remarkable international reputation is primarily due to his last two novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which have spoken to the Cold War consciousness with such force and intimacy that conceptions such as Big Brother, "doublethink," and the apocalyptic date 1984 have become virtually mythic elements in our culture. Although Orwell became England's most prominent political writer during the 1940s, he was equally honored for his pragmatic, commonsensical habit of mind and for his uncompromising commitment to intellectual integrity. In fact, his career is a testimony to the enduring power of a moralist who tenaciously clings to the values of common decency, social justice, and respect for the individual. When Orwell died in January 1950, V. S. Pritchett eulogized him as a "saint" and as the "conscience of his generation."
Orwell was a complex, paradoxical figure who once described himself as a "Tory anarchist," a phrase which expressed his complex unification of radical and conservative impulses.


Although he became a militant socialist after 1936, he was a fervent anti-Communist and persistently attacked the "smelly little orthodoxies" which he felt had corrupted intellectual liberty. While he was committed to the power of the writer to influence and affect the direction of his society and its political order, he was convinced that ideological commitment would destroy the power of a writer: "To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox." He hated expediency (whether political or literary), sympathized with the poor and the underdog, opposed imperialism and aristocratic privilege, and became England's most vigorous spokesman for popular culture during the 1940s. He repeatedly defended the normative values of ordinary, bourgeois life, felt a persistent nostalgia for the order and stability of the pre-1914 world, and believed in the embryonic power within common, ordinary Englishmen. He became, in the words of one writer, a "revolutionary patriot." Orwell's career—as novelist, essayist, and political pamphleteer —finally serves as a kind of barometer to an understanding of the conflicts and mood of the 1930s and 1940s and of the situation of the liberal writer working in a time of cultural and political crisis.


George Orwell) was born on 25 June 1903 at Motihari in Bengal, India, where his father was an undistinguished administrator in the Opium Department of the Government of India. He was the second child of Richard Walmsley and Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair. His mother returned to England with her children by 1905, although his father did not return permanently until 1911, when he retired. These early years in England, living at Henley-on-Thames, a very Edwardian town, would come to represent a period of happiness and security that affected Orwell's consciousness for the rest of his life. And yet he was also aware of conflicts. Years later he described himself as a member of the "lower-uppermiddle class," a phrase which was meant to contrast the family's social rank (as servants of king and country) with their middle-class economic status. Although the family was by no means impoverished, Orwell was later to insist that in this kind of "shabby-genteel family . . . there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any workingclass family above the level of the dole." His awareness of having an ambivalent social position and of money's extraordinary importance would become prominent themes in Orwell's first four books and helped to shape his attitudes to what he came to see as the privileged intelligentsia.

In september 1911 he was sent to St. Cyprians, a snobbish and expensive school, where he was to be prepared for entrance into one of the good public schools of England. The rigorous commitment to education and to the building of character at St. Cyprians was to make Orwell a promising candidate for public school, but the four years that he spent there also had a profound emotional impact on him, which he recorded in his posthumously published England Your England and Other Essays (1953). This world was one in which money, position, and privilege seemed to be the determinate values, and Orwell came to feel like an alien in a foreign land. He remembers that the rich boys were openly favored and that he was reminded of his own tenuous economic status by being denied things because, he was told, his parents could not afford them. While a critic such as Anthony West finds the paradigm of the world of 1984 expressed in Orwell's recollections of favoritism, arbitrary rules, and the omnipotence of the system, it is perhaps more important to understand that during these years Orwell began to develop his antipathy toward authoritarian or institutionalized rule and began to develop an embryonic theory about victims and victimizers.
This awareness of a fundamental conflict between the individual and a larger social structure would become an important social subject in his writing of the 1930s and a political subject in his work of the 1940s.
In the spring of 1916, Orwell sat for scholarship examinations for entrance into a public school. He narrowly missed a place at Eton but was accepted into Wellington, where he spent the first nine weeks of 1917; however, because of the war, a place opened up in the scholarship class at Eton, and in May 1917 he enrolled there. The atmosphere at Eton was much more open than at St. Cyprians: it was a freer intellectual environment, one in which individuality and intellectual freedom were encouraged. Orwell was later to say that the great virtue of the school was its "tolerant and civilized atmosphere which gives each boy a fair chance of developing his individuality." Immediately after the war Eton gained the reputation of being "Bolshie"; there was a popular recoil against convention and authority, and Orwell's outspoken, cynical stance thrived in this atmosphere.....

Source: Encyclopedia of World Biography on George Orwell