George Orwell :: essays research papers

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in India, which was at that time part of the British Empire. His family was not very wealthy and like most middle-class English families of that time, their livelihood depended on the Empire. In 1907, his family returned to England. His parents managed to send him to a private school in Sussex and when he was thirteen, he won a scholarship to Wellington. Soon after that, he won another scholarship to the well-known public school, Eaton. After being forced to work very hard at preparatory school, Blair lost interest in any further intellectual exertion that was not related to his personal ambition. In his book Why I Write he says that from a very young age he had known that he must be a writer. But, he also realized that in order to become a writer, he had to read literature. However, in Eaton, English literature was not a major subject and he spent his five years reading works by the masters of English prose includ ing Jonathon Swift, Laurence Sterne and Jack London on his own. He failed to win a university scholarship after the final examinations at Eaton and, in 1922, he joined the Indian Imperial Police. This decision was not the usual path that most Eaton students would have taken. Blair preferred a life of travel and action and he served in the force in Burma (now known as Myanmar) for five years. He resigned from the police force for two main reasons: firstly, being a police officer was a diversion from his real ambition of being a writer; and secondly, he felt that as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer believe. Even at this time, his political ideas and his ideas about writing were closely related. In his book The Road To Wigan Pier he wrote that he wished to "escape from†¦ every form of man's dominion over man", and he felt that the social structure of British Imperialism was that "dominion" over the English working class. After he returned to London at the age of twenty-four, he began to teach himself how to write. He spent most of his time writing in very poor living conditions because he felt that the poor in London and Paris represented the people of Burma under British rule.