A Biography of Eric Blair
By: Ashton Lawrence
The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by Eric Blair under the pseudonym George Orwell. Blair was born in a part of India known as the Bengal Province, located in northeastern British India, on June 25th, 1903. He had two siblings, Marjorie, who was born five years after him, in 1898, and Avril, who was born in 1908. Blair was the favorite child of his mother Ida Limouzin, who supported the women’s suffrage movement. On the contrary, Blair’s father, Richard Blair, did not exhibit this type of activist thinking and worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Because of the plague raging at the time in India, the family moved to the village of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England without Richard. This action by his father would later prove through his work to have had a psychological effect of Blair. As a child, Blair attended private, boarding school in Sussex and then received a scholarship to continue his education at Eton. This was also influential to his writing and gave him empathy towards the victims in his writing. Afterwards, Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. He grew to despise the English government do to the harsh punishments he was required to enforce which eventually led to him quit this job.
Determined to become a writer, Blair lived in poverty in two very bustling European cities, which inspired his first work Down and Out in Paris and London, which was the first time Blair used the pseudonym George Orwell. After this success, he began his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was shot twice. Though his physical wounds eventually healed, his memories of the ongoing atrocities occurring in Europe did not. This led directly to his next great work, Animal Farm, which conveyed his dissatisfaction with the political regimes of his time.
Continuing on his anti-totalitarianism campaign, he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this dystopian novel, he depicts a startlingly bleak future as an example of why government’s power should be limited. His book explored the exploitation of authoritative government, which was particularly persuasive to people at that time due to World War II.
Though his political opinions live on through his novels, Eric Blair himself died of Tuberculosis January 21st, 1950 in London after straining himself to finish the writing and editing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
References:
"George Orwell." 2014. The Biography Channel website. Apr 02 2014, 07:26 <http://www.biography.com/people/george-orwell-9429833>.
Quinn, Edward. Critical Companion to George Orwell: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2009. Print.
Williams, Raymond. George Orwell; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Print.
The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by Eric Blair under the pseudonym George Orwell. Blair was born in a part of India known as the Bengal Province, located in northeastern British India, on June 25th, 1903. He had two siblings, Marjorie, who was born five years after him, in 1898, and Avril, who was born in 1908. Blair was the favorite child of his mother Ida Limouzin, who supported the women’s suffrage movement. On the contrary, Blair’s father, Richard Blair, did not exhibit this type of activist thinking and worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Because of the plague raging at the time in India, the family moved to the village of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England without Richard. This action by his father would later prove through his work to have had a psychological effect of Blair. As a child, Blair attended private, boarding school in Sussex and then received a scholarship to continue his education at Eton. This was also influential to his writing and gave him empathy towards the victims in his writing. Afterwards, Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. He grew to despise the English government do to the harsh punishments he was required to enforce which eventually led to him quit this job.
Determined to become a writer, Blair lived in poverty in two very bustling European cities, which inspired his first work Down and Out in Paris and London, which was the first time Blair used the pseudonym George Orwell. After this success, he began his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was shot twice. Though his physical wounds eventually healed, his memories of the ongoing atrocities occurring in Europe did not. This led directly to his next great work, Animal Farm, which conveyed his dissatisfaction with the political regimes of his time.
Continuing on his anti-totalitarianism campaign, he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. In this dystopian novel, he depicts a startlingly bleak future as an example of why government’s power should be limited. His book explored the exploitation of authoritative government, which was particularly persuasive to people at that time due to World War II.
Though his political opinions live on through his novels, Eric Blair himself died of Tuberculosis January 21st, 1950 in London after straining himself to finish the writing and editing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
References:
"George Orwell." 2014. The Biography Channel website. Apr 02 2014, 07:26 <http://www.biography.com/people/george-orwell-9429833>.
Quinn, Edward. Critical Companion to George Orwell: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2009. Print.
Williams, Raymond. George Orwell; a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Print.