Authors: George Orwell
George Orwell was born in India in 1904. His father worked for the opium department of the British Overseas Civil Service. Orwell grew up in England and went to Eton. When he was 19, he enlisted in the Burmese Police Services as Burma was then a colony of Britain. Orwell spent five years as a Police Officer in Burma.
When left Burma, he spent a year in Paris and for part of that year, he worked as a dishwasher first at the Hotel Lotte, the Hotel X of Down and Out in Paris and London, and then he worked at a small restaurant called L'Auberge de Jehan Cottard.
When he returned to London, he lived for a few years as a tramp. However, his reputation as a writer was growing and he was not a tramp for long and was slowly and gradually grafted into a semi affluent middle class. He worked at a bookstore for a couple of years during which time he wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying, A Clergyman's Daughter and Coming Up for Air. After this, he was hired on to do a travelling article about the coal mines of Northern England called The Road To Wigan Pier.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is about a bookstore owner who is struggling to keep up amidst the usual tide of finances.
A Clergyman's Daughter is about the daughter of a rector, written in the second person observation point and centrally focused on the life of a young girl. This girl who starts the novel drawing up a bath later develops amnesia and becomes lost and geographically estranged, winding up amongst a group of hop pickers. Slowly her memory returns and when asked to help, her father in a characteristically dour way suggests to her to contact her cousin Tom the baronet. She stays with her father's cousin Tom for awhile and is eventually reunited with her father's household.
Coming Up For Air is the story of a man in his 40's during the 1920s recalling his childhood and youth which happened in the 1800s and also a few hints about the upcoming war then which would be the Second World War.
In the Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell hops on trains second class, and travels throughout the frosty wintry North of England and stays in the houses of miners. He writes descriptively about life as a coal miner tunnelling in the mines. He also comments about the lack of orthodontic concern. "The best thing that a miner considered that could happen to him was to be 'shut of' his teeth as early in life as possible. 'Teeth is just a misery', an old woman said. Orwell observed a family of four, and only the 15 year old boy had any teeth and this, he wrote was a condition that could not be expected to last long.
Orwell then wrote Animal Farm which is the greatest political satire with animals taking on certain political personalities and characteristics. Anthropomorphized.
1984 was Orwell writing about the state of Police surveillance capabilities in 1948, but his publisher asked him to turn the numbers around. Orwell should know about the inner workings of Police and Intelligence because he worked for five years as a Police Officer in Burma. But 1984 could also be a reference to the Philadelphia Experiment which was something that was whispered around the late night cocktail lounges of that time.
George Orwell is one of my favourite writers. He had a style. The writings have a kind of rhythm.
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