GEORGE ORWELL

You may recall we went to see the production “1984” The other night at or theatre. It was a chilling play for sure, leaving me cold to my bones and in absolute amazement just how Orwell’s predictions of the future, though perhaps he was about twenty years too early, was so accurate with todays life/living! I would say to appreciate the production and I’m sure the book too, you have to have an open mind and as was written, to be able to double think! To think outside the box but also realise what was originally written is now occurring on our news most days now with the middle east and how we all are being watched and every move  Whether it be via our mobile phones, computers/cookies, or what we buy for our weekly shopping and what we pay for on our cards. It’s all in the book/play. I was curious to learn some more about the man Orwell himself. Not his real name.

Eric Arthur Blair, was known as his pen name of George Orwell, was an English author and journalist His work was known to be intelligent and some would say with wit and profound awareness and social injustice also, intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and belief in democratic socialism.

 

He is considered the best 20^th century’s chronicler   of English culture. Orwell wrote fiction, political journalism, literary criticism and poetry. He is best known for the dystopian novel, and the play we saw, “1984”” Published in 1949and the satirical novella “Animal farm”” They have together, sold more than any other 20^th century author. His 1935 book “Homage to Catalonia”” an account of his experience was another book he wrote! Also he wrote “Down and out in Paris and London, and this title I don’t like, “Shooting an elephant and there were other books, but   the road to Wigan pierfor me is a book I would love to get. These are some of his words and you will see perhaps why his writing is gripping to the reader?

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”

You transport yourself to his world, through his eyes in that writing, don’t you think?

He was born in 1903, June in Motihari India, and his birth place I think I read earlier today, is still a protected monument of historical importance.

He left India with his Mother when he was one. He lived in Oxfordshire England with his two sisters and Mother, didn’t see his Father until he was about nine.

 

Orwell, Blair at the time had an interesting education, ending up at Eton, leaving there when he was eighteen. There is so much to write about Orwell, in my opinion his early life is of the most interest, and then telling of him joining the Indian Imperial Police.

He returned to England and decided to become a writer, he slept in slums and wrote about his life. He married quite late had a Son called Richard Blair who is still alive. Orwell died at the age of 46.

 

This is very brief, and just shows my initial analyses was wrong, after watching the play 1984 the other evening, I was sure he had first hand experience of being in an asylum. Wrong, but, reading about his life, wow, he for sure will have seen some serious action!