ORWELL, George

ORWELL, George [1903–50]. Pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, English novelist, journalist, and political thinker. The adoption in 1933 of the pen name, taken from the River Orwell in East Anglia, marked his transformation from a member of the establishment of the British Empire into a social, political, and literary radical. He was born in Montihari, Bengal, India, the son of a British civil servant, and educated at Eton (where Aldous Huxley was one of his masters). From there he went in 1922 to serve in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, but resigned because he disliked imperialism ‘and every form of man's dominion over man’. In England in 1927, he became a reviewer and columnist, living for a time in the poverty described in the ‘documentary novel’ Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Six more works appeared before the Second World War: the novels Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Coming Up for Air (1939), and the non-fiction The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Homage to Catalonia (1938). They range from reflections on his life in Burma and on class differences and unemployment in England to his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was wounded in the throat while fighting for the Republicans against Fascism. Orwell at first saw himself as an anarchist, then a socialist, but later sought to avoid political labels. He was opposed to totalitarianism in any guise. He died of tuberculosis, a disease from which he had suffered for many years. He is best known for his two post-war anti-totalitarian satirical novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the latter introducing the concept of NEWSPEAK. From the same period comes the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (first published in Horizon, 1946), still frequently included in anthologies and widely admired for its advice on prose style.

Attitude to English

Like others of his time, background, and social position, Orwell was a polyglot: LATIN and GREEK; FRENCH; Hindustani and Burmese; SPANISH. He did not, however, accept contemporary standards for English; he often derided the variety of BrE common among his fellow Etonians, along with the variety employed on the BBC, seeing them as dangerous establishment tools. In its place, he advocated an artificial amalgam of lower-class varieties, including the dropped aitch, to be taught in schools. Orwell was not averse to the official promulgation of an invented variety of English. The Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four is not, therefore, evil simply because it is artificial, but because its goals are untruth and mind control, and because its means to this end are the suppression of words for forbidden concepts (like honour, justice) and the ready conversion of parts of speech (like the verb speak as a noun, instead of speech). Orwell was in most ways a language conservative while he was a social individualist and a political adherent of ‘democratic socialism’, as he called it. His books sometimes champion those who speak non-standard English, but his essays severely oppose linguistic change and by implication condemn the diversity that change brings.

Rules for writing English

In ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell wrote that ‘one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases: (1) Never use a METAPHOR, SIMILE or other FIGURE OF SPEECH which you are used to seeing in print. (2) Never use a LONG WORD where a short one will do. (3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (4) Never use the PASSIVE when you can use the ACTIVE. (5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a JARGON word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.’ The double implication (that half a dozen rules would ‘cover most cases’, and that all writers worthy of the name would agree about what was ‘outright barbarous’) reveals Orwell's conservative stand on the complexities of language variety. See SATIRE, USAGE GUIDANCE AND CRITICISM.