BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU - HE WHO HIDE BEHIND THE Pseudonym 'GEORGE ORWELL'

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU –  HE WHO HIDE BEHIND THE Pseudonym  ‘GEORGE ORWELL’

George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.  One of his famous quote was ‘Big brother is watching you’.

Born in Motihari, Bengal, India, in 1903, George Orwell, novelist, essayist and critic, went on to become best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell created some of the sharpest satirical fiction of the 20th century with such works as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was a man of strong opinions who addressed some of the major political movements of his times, including imperialism, fascism and communism.  Blair was born in the Bengal region of Eastern India, which was a British territory. He was the son of Richard Walmesley Blair, a civil servant, and Ida Mabel Blair. Their only son was the middle child. He moved to England with his mother and sisters at the age of one. He displayed academic talent from a young age, so his mother took pains to ensure his attendance at a well-known boarding school called St. Cyprian’s. His family was neither poor nor wealthy, and Blair attended St. Cyprian’s on a scholarship.

Blair excelled academically there but faced many hardships in its puritanical, cutthroat environment. In the autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Blair/Orwell describes the social challenges he endured as a scholarship student among England’s wealthy elite. (These challenges would inform his satires of social stratification in his literary works, including (Animal Farm.) In the essay, he describes his child self with much sympathy and feeling for the child's perspective. Such experiments in empathy prepared him to create Animal Farm's brilliantly naive narrator.

Like many other boys in England, Orwell was sent to boarding school. In 1911 he went to St. Cyprian's in the coastal town of Eastbourne, where he got his first taste of England's class system. On a partial scholarship, Orwell noticed that the school treated the richer students better than the poorer ones. He wasn't popular with his peers, and in books he found comfort from his difficult situation. He read works by Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells, among others. What he lacked in personality, he made up for in smarts. Orwell won scholarships to Wellington College and Eton College to continue his studies.

Blair’s academic prowess continued in secondary school at Eton, a renowned secondary school (more recently famous for Prince William's attendance there). Blair graduated from Eton in 1921. Despite his intelligence, he could not afford to attend college. In 1922, he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He had spent the first year of his life in a British colony, and this time, he got a thorough experience of British colonial life and despised what he saw. His experiences made him a champion of the poor and downtrodden, a role in which he would continue for the rest of his life. Moreover, he could not stand the fact that his job put him directly in the position of privileged oppressor. He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police five years later while on leave in England.

Blair/Orwell thus became devoted to the problems of class and government power long before he wrote Animal Farm. As Louis Menand writes, "He turned his life into an experiment in classlessness, and the intensity of his commitment to that experiment was the main reason that his friends and colleagues found him a perverse and sometimes exasperating man." To complete his rejection of elitism, Blair lived after the fashion of the poorest Englanders. This included refusing to wear warm clothing in winter or to display table manners. It is questionable whether his destitute lifestyle contributed to his frequent illnesses, but such choices indubitably influenced his written works.

Blair tried his luck in Paris briefly but found he could not make a living there as a writer. He returned to England in 1929, where he published essays and continued his fascination with and incorporation into the dregs of society. He began to slip into poverty in earnest, so he took a job as a teacher at Frays College. He also secured himself a literary agent. Blair/Orwell published Down and Out in Paris in 1932. Before the book’s publication, Blair assumed the pen name by which he would become famous. Accounts of why the writer chose the pen name “George Orwell” vary. Some say the name is deeply symbolic while others state that it was merely one of a list of names from which he allowed his publishers to choose.

                     

 
George Orwell’s Home

From 1934 on, Orwell thrust himself fully into the writer’s arena. He quit his teaching job and moved to Hempstead, an epicenter for young writers at the time, where he worked in a used-book store. He published his first fictional work, Burmese Days, in 1934, and followed with A Clergyman’s Daughter in 1935. Orwell’s presence in Hempstead and his interest in the lower class did not go unnoticed. In 1936, the Left Book Club commissioned him to write an account of the destitute state of Northern England. Orwell threw himself into the project, conducting firsthand research in his quest for authenticity. In his travels, he met and married Eileen O’Shaughnessy. The controversial account was published in 1936 under the name The Road to Wigan Pier. He published Aspidistra Flying in the same year.

Around the time The Road to Wigan Pier was published, Orwell took his offensive against elitism and tyranny a step further, volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans. He joined POUM, a Trotskyist socialist party that emphasized the need for a working-class uprising and opposed the Spanish Communist Party’s belief in collaborating with the middle class (Orwell was a revolutionary socialist). Orwell’s experiences in the war, including being shot almost fatally, cemented his hatred of totalitarianism in its many guises. This included Stalinism, against which he held a lifetime grudge. Ironically, Orwell’s neck injury very nearly—and literally—robbed the outspoken writer of his voice. However, he did recover, and while doing so Orwell completed a novel, Coming Up for Air. Orwell described his social observations of Spain in Homage to Catalonia.

In 1940, Orwell and his wife moved to central London, where he worked as a reviewer. When World War II began, he rose to fight for the cause of freedom again, this time for England. He joined the Home Guard and worked for the BBC to compose and disseminate wartime propaganda. Orwell knew of what he spoke when he skewered propaganda in Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell based his satires not just on hearsay and research but also on personal experience; writing propaganda is said to have made him feel corrupt.

The son of a British civil servant, George Orwell spent his first days in India, where his father was stationed. His mother brought him and his older sister, Marjorie, to England about a year after his birth and settled in Henley-on-Thames. His father stayed behind in India and rarely visited. (His younger sister, Avril, was born in 1908.) Orwell didn't really know his father until he retired from the service in 1912. And even after that, the pair never formed a strong bond. He found his father to be dull and conservative.

According to one biography, Orwell's first word was "beastly." He was a sick child, often battling bronchitis and the flu. Orwell was bit by the writing bug at an early age, reportedly composing his first poem around the age of four. 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." One of his first literary successes came at the age of 11 when he had a poem published in the local newspaper.

He was also a war correspondent. During wartime, Orwell and his wife adopted a son, but his wife died shortly afterwards. Also during this time, Orwell completed Animal Farm, which was published in England in 1945. It was at this point, just when Orwell’s personal life was in shambles, that his legend took flight. The book met with immediate and far-reaching public success, especially since it was so topical.

Orwell continued to write for periodicals while completing his second renowned novel, 1984. He remarried in 1949, to Sonia Brownell.

Orwell, who was prone to illness, had his career and his life cut short when he died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950. Orwell’s friend, David Astor, saw to it that he was buried in a small county churchyard. Orwell is buried under his birth name. He left a strong literary and political legacy, being one of those artists who influenced not only the literary universe, but also the real world in which he lived. As he wrote in "Politics and the English Language": "In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." This statement also illustrates the pessimism for which Orwell was known. Like some other disillusioned people of his generation, Orwell believed that totalitarian governments would inevitably take over the West.

After leaving the India Imperial Force, Orwell struggled to get his writing career off the ground. His first major work, Down and Out in Paris and London, (1933) explored his time eking out a living in these two cities. Orwell took all sorts of jobs to make ends meet, including being a dishwasher. The book provided a brutal look at the lives of the working poor and of those living a transient existence. Not wishing to embarrass his family, the author published the book under the pseudonym George Orwell.

Sometimes called the conscience of a generation, Orwell next explored his overseas experiences in Burmese Days, published in 1934. The novel offered a dark look at British colonialism in Burma, then part of the country's Indian empire. Orwell's interest in political matters grew rapidly after this novel was published. Also around this time, he met Eileen O'Shaughnessy. The pair married in June 1936, and Eileen supported and assisted Orwell in his career.

In December 1936, Orwell traveled to Spain, where he joined one of the groups fighting against General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was badly injured during his time with a militia, getting shot in the throat and arm. For several weeks, he was unable to speak. Orwell and his wife, Eileen, were indicted on treason charges in Spain. Fortunately, the charges were brought after the couple had left the country.

Other health problems plagued the talented writer not long after his return to England. For years, Orwell had periods of sickness, and he was officially diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1938. He spent several months at the Preston Hall Sanatorium trying to recover, but he would continue to battle with tuberculosis for the rest of his life. At the time he was initially diagnosed, there was no effective treatment for the disease.

 To support himself, Orwell took on all sorts of writing work. He wrote numerous essays and reviews over the years, developing a reputation for producing well-crafted literary criticism. In 1941, Orwell landed a job with the BBC as a producer. He developed news commentary and shows for audiences in the eastern part of the British Empire. Orwell enticed such literary greats as T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster to appear on his programs. With World War II raging on, Orwell found himself acting as a propagandist to advance the country's side. He loathed this part of his job and resigned in 1943. Around this time, Orwell became the literary editor for a socialist newspaper.

Orwell is best known for two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which were published toward the end of his life. Animal Farm (1945) was an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. These pigs were said to represent Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky. The novel brought Orwell great acclaim and financial rewards.

In 1949, Orwell published another masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four (or 1984 in later editions). This bleak vision of the world divided into three oppressive nations stirred up controversy among reviewers, who found this fictional future too despairing. In the novel, Orwell gave readers a glimpse into what would happen if the government controlled every detail of a person's life, down to their own private thoughts.

Nineteen Eighty-Four proved to be another huge success for the author, but he had little time to enjoy it. By this time, Orwell was in the late stages of his battle with tuberculosis. He died on January 21, 1950, in a London hospital. He may have passed away all too soon, but his ideas and opinions have lived on through his work. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have been turned into films and have enjoyed tremendous popularity over the years.

Near the end of his life, Orwell proposed to editor Sonia Brownell. He married her in October 1949, only a short time before his death. Brownell inherited Orwell's estate and made a career out of managing his legacy.

His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language, and a belief in democratic socialism.

 His famous works are -

Novels	Burmese Days (1934) A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) Coming Up for Air (1939) Animal Farm (1945) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Nonfiction	Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Essays	"A Hanging" (1931) "The Spike" (1931) "Bookshop Memories" (1936) "Shooting an Elephant" (1936) "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (1937) "Boys' Weeklies" (1940) "Inside the Whale" (1940) "My Country Right or Left" (1940) "England Your England" (1941) "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941) "The Art of Donald McGill" (1940) "Poetry and the Microphone" (1943) "Raffles and Miss Blandish" (1944) "Good Bad Books" (1945) "Notes on Nationalism" (1945) "Books v. Cigarettes" (1946) "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (1946) "Decline of the English Murder" (1946) "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" (1946) "How the Poor Die" (1946) "The Moon Under Water" (1946) "A Nice Cup of Tea" (1946) "Pleasure Spots" (1946) "Politics and the English Language" (1946) "The Politics of Starvation" (1946) "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946) "The Prevention of Literature" (1946) "Riding Down from Bangor" (1946) "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946) "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" (1946) "Why I Write" (1946) "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1947) "The English People" (1947) "Such, Such Were the Joys" (1952)

In 1945, Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and 'doublethink' - entering popular use. By now Orwell's health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

                            

George Orwell in his 47years of stay in this world tried to change the world through his works and fought the incurable disease which devastated him during his life span.

George Orwell’s grave in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.

In an autobiographical piece that Orwell sent to the editors of Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote: "The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

Other writers admired by Orwell included: Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Gissing, Graham Greene, Herman Melville, Henry Miller, Tobias Smollett, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad and Yevgeny Zamyatin.    He was both an admirer and a critic of Rudyard Kipling.

Orwell's work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including cold war, Big Brother, thought police, Room 101, memory hole, newspeak, doublethink, and thought-crime.

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