Born in India, Eric Arthur Blair (June 25th, 1903 – January 21st, 1950), George Orwell, was an English author, journalist and highly regarded political and cultural commentator. His hundreds of well respected reviews and columns made him one of the 20th century’s top essay writers. He also wrote three highly acclaimed novels: Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen eighty-four. The latter two, revealing his critical assessment of Totalitarianism, were published late in his short life.
George Orwell in BBC 1940
Below: 7 poems by George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
18 Facts about George Orwell
- 1. Just before his death in 1949, Blair finished writing the ever popular novel, “Nineteen eighty-four”, predicting our modern controlled societies with great clarity. As Orwell, Blair coined the terms thought-police, doublethink, and thoughtcrime in his depiction of a future ruled by State propaganda and enforcement controlling every aspect of society.
2. Relevant today, the term Orwellian is used to describe modern authoritarian social practices.
3. From an early age Blair wrote poetry. This WWI poem by an 11-year-old Blair, “Awake! Young Men of England”, was first published in 1914 in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard newspaper.
4. Six novels and three non-fiction works were penned by either Eric Blair or George Orwell.
5. A complex Leftist of his time, Blair wrote for the left-leaning Tribune as Literary Editor in 1940, “We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.” Adding, “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.”
6. Orwell’s Jan. 12th, 1946 essay, “A Nice Cup of Tea”, published in the London Evening Standard, featured eleven rules for making tea. He liked his strong.
7. Orwell enjoyed English beer, roast beef, and kippers, and smoking hand-rolled shag tobacco cigarettes.
8. Eileen and Eric Blair adopted a British son, Richard Blair (b. 1944), who is trustee and patron to the English author. After his parents passed, Richard Blair was raised by Orwell’s sister Avril and her husband, Bill Dunn.
9. Orwell’s phrase, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. …is inscribed on the wall behind a statue of the author unveiled in 2017 behind BBC Headquarters located in Central London. Meanwhile in today’s Orwellian News: “It’s Not OK Any More”: The United Kingdom Cracks Down on Free Speech
10. Registered UK charity, The Orwell Society was founded in 2011 to advance the ideas of George Orwell.
11. Orwell’s six rules for writers was included in his April, 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language.
- 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 where 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.
12. Both George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway lived in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1928. Questions remain about a meeting of the two writers abound.
13. During the Spanish Civil War, Blair was shot in the throat by a sniper’s bullet.
14. Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Scottish island, Jura, in a seaside farmhouse called Barnhill.
15. Months after a near death boating incident in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, Blair was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium. He died weeks later on January 21st, 1950, at the age of 46, after an artery in his lungs burst.
16. Although well versed on the Bible and an often participant to the Church of England Holy Communion, Orwell was a stern critic of the “good book” and considered himself an atheist and humanist. Eric Blair was buried in All Saints’ parish churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.
17. George Orwell once worked as an Indian Imperial Police Officer in Burma, India.
18. Long gone, Hampstead’s corner of Pond Street and South End Road was home to a little bookshop where Blair worked and lived from 1934-35.
7 poems by George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
A Little Poem
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
Ironic Poem about Prostitution
When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.
Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, “for twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me”.
She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice,
Stood out for twenty-five.
Our Minds Are Married, But We are Too Young
Our minds are married, but we are too young
For wedlock by the customs of this age
When parent homes pen each in separate cage
And only supper-earning songs are sung.
Times past, when medieval woods were green,
Babes were betrothed, and that betrothal brief.
Remember Romeo in love and grief—
Those star-crossed lovers—Juliet was fourteen.
Times past, the caveman by his new-found fire
Rested beside his mate in woodsmoke’s scent.
By our own fireside we shall rest content
Fifty years hence keep troth with hearts desire.
We shall remember, when our hair is white,
These clouded days revealed in radiant light.
Poem from Burma
Brush your teeth up and down, brother,
Oh, brush them up and down!
All the folks in London Town
Brush their teeth right up and down,
Oh! How they shine!
Aren’t they bloody fine?
Night and morning, my brother,
Oh brush them up and down!”
The Lesser Evil
Empty as death and slow as pain
The days went by on leaden feet;
And parson’s week had come again
As I walked down the little street.
Without, the weary doves were calling,
The sun burned on the banks of mud;
Within, old maids were caterwauling
A dismal tale of thorns and blood.
I thought of all the church bells ringing
In towns that Christian folks were in;
I heard the godly maidens singing;
I turned into the house of sin.
The house of sin was dark and mean,
With dying flowers round the door;
They spat their betel juice between
The rotten bamboos of the floor.
Why did I come, the woman cried,
so seldom to her beds of ease?
When I was not, her spirit died,
And would I give her ten rupees.
The weeks went by, and many a day
That black-haired woman did implore
Me as I hurried on my way
To come more often than before.
The days went by like dead leaves falling
And parson’s week came round again.
Once more devout old maids were bawling
Their ugly rhymes of death and pain.
The woman waited for me there
As down the little street I trod;
And musing upon her oily hair,
I turned into the house of God.
The Pagan
So here are you, and here am I,
Where we may thank our gods to be;
Above the earth, beneath the sky,
Naked souls alive and free.
The autumn wind goes rustling by
And stirs the stubble at our feet;
Out of the west it whispering blows,
Stops to caress and onward goes,
Bringing its earthy odours sweet.
See with what pride the the setting sun
Kinglike in gold and purple dies,
And like a robe of rainbow spun
Tinges the earth with shades divine.
That mystic light is in your eyes
And ever in your heart will shine.
Banner image by Bill Peloquin, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons