Orwell was born in India, son of an official in the opium trade
Eric Arthur Blair (1903 to 1950), writing as George Orwell, used clear prose against injustice and every kind of totalitarianism. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him famous, and words like Big Brother, doublethink and Orwellian itself are now everyday English.
Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, then in the Bengal Presidency of British India, into a family he called lower-upper-middle class. His father, Richard, was a sub-deputy agent in the Indian Civil Service's Opium Department, overseeing opium grown for sale to China. His mother, Ida Limouzin, had grown up in Moulmein in Burma, where her French father dabbled in speculative business. Further back the family included Charles Blair, a Dorset gentleman who owned two Jamaican plantations worked by enslaved people, and an Anglican clergyman grandfather. Restoration of the Motihari house began in 2014.
When Eric was one, his mother took him and his older sister Marjorie to England, settling at Henley-on-Thames in 1904; a second sister, Avril, followed. Apart from a short visit in 1907 he did not see his father again until 1912. At five he attended a convent school run by French Ursuline nuns. Family connections won him a reduced-fee place at St Cyprian's in Eastbourne, where he boarded from 1911, sensed he came from a poorer home than his classmates and was miserable, later recording the experience in the posthumous essay Such, Such Were the Joys. There he met Cyril Connolly, who as editor of Horizon would publish several of his essays. He later won a scholarship to Eton.
At Shiplake, where the family moved before the First World War, he befriended the Buddicom family. Jacintha Buddicom first saw him standing on his head in a field, explaining that people notice you more upside down. The two became idealistic teenage sweethearts, sharing poems and dreams of literary fame.
His adult books ranged widely. The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 recorded working-class life in northern industrial England, and Homage to Catalonia in 1938 described fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; both are rated as highly as his essays on politics, language and culture. He opposed both fascism and authoritarian communism and backed democratic socialism. In 2008 The Times ranked him the second-greatest British writer since 1945, and his coinages, from Thought Police and Room 101 to Newspeak and the memory hole, remain in constant use.
Source: George Orwell
