Review of George Orwell: Life and Legacy by Walter S. Judd & Graham A. Judd

There have been many books written about George Orwell since his death in 1950, and I doubt this one covers much new ground. The author, Robert Colls, was professor of English History at the University of Leicester, and the style of this account is as you might expect: I’m astonished there weren’t footnotes (though the bibliography and index are extensive).

As for the book itself it, at times, feels like an extended Wikipedia entry: we learn, for instance, that his first significant long form published work, Down and Out in Paris and London, had “a print run of 1,500 copies, a reprint of 500 and a third impression of 1,000 copies…” and that The Road to Wigan Pier… sold 43,690 copies at 2s 6d each (12 new pence – actually 12½p but Britain ditched the half-penny decades ago), earning… about Ł600…” We learn where he went to school, where he lived, what jobs he held, what he thought of people and what he thought of the world. But along the way we get an insight into his writings, his influences and his legacy.

George Orwell was a pen name. He was born (and remained) Eric Arthur Blair, in 1903 in India and was brought up in the dying days of the Raj. He barely saw his father, a British employee of the Indian Civil Service, since his French-born mother French resettled in Henley with her children when Orwell was one. Convent school and Eton followed, leading to a return to India to join Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He stayed until he was 24 when dengue fever forced his return to England for convalescence and the beginning of his time as a writer.

His most famous works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four came much later. Before that, he was mainly regarded for his non-fiction, and in particular his essays (of which Colls considers Shooting an Elephant (1936) the best). Burmese Days(1934), for instance, accounts for his time in India. His nascent political positions start to become clear in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) which he researched by spending time amongst working people in Wigan, Sheffield and elsewhere, and where he developed a sympathy for their dislike of the bourgeoisie (despite his background). These books weren’t massively successful at the time and his first novel The Clergyman’s Daughter had none of the fire (or sales) of his later work, so he needed a day job: variously teaching (which he hated), journalism and broadcasting. He hung out (and fell out) with socialists and communists, flirted with the Labour Party and went to Spain in the 1930s to see for himself what revolution was all about. He fought, got shot, got caught up in factional in-fighting and escaped – all of which helped shape his understanding of the world and its injustices and inequalities. Homage to Catalonia (1938) covers his time there, but there was barely time to draw breath before World War Two sucked him in. Too ill to fight in the regular army, he spent most of the war working for the BBC and the left-wing Tribune magazine, writing Animal Farmand developing Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Animal Farm tells of rebellious animals who kick the farmer off Manor Farm and create a socialist utopia where all animals are equal, until they aren’t. Satirising Stalin’s Soviet Union, where communism is subverted by individual greed and authoritarian control, the pig controllers become indistinguishable from humans leaving the lesser animals no better off. Nineteen Eighty-Four has similar themes of totalitarian control, even extending to “thought crime”. It’s a bleak prediction of an impoverished, surveillance state where “big brother” is always watching and again, Orwell has totalitarian governments in his sight and like Dickens (who he admired) has downtrodden working people in his thoughts.

Colls’ account touches on all this, drawing heavily from public records and papers, but also gives insights into his private life: married twice (his first wife died of cancer) and with a string of extra-marital relationships. Unfortunately (and perhaps inevitably given the relatively short length) this account skims Orwell’s private life, but it does enough to intrigue. Unfortunately, too, Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 46, having packed an awful lot into a brief life and having authored two of the best-known political novels ever written. He will have recognised Animal Farm as fantasy (he referred to it as “A Fairy Tale”) but whether he saw Nineteen Eighty-Four as science fiction is less clear. But it is, in all its glory.

Colls’ book is a good aperitif for wider Orwell study, though too thin to entirely satisfy. A better starting point would be the novels themselves, both chilling and prescient.

Non-Fiction Reviews

George Orwell: Life and Legacy