Creator / George Orwell

George Orwell reporting for the Ministry of Tru ... er, The BBC.

"If Saint Thomas More was the first Englishman, as one historian called him, then Orwell was perhaps the last."

— Paul Potts

Eric Arthur Blair (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was one of the most influential authors in the English language.

A democratic socialist most of his adult life, his views changed somewhat over time, as he became more cynical, but he never renounced his support of democratic socialism. His dislike of fascism and Stalinism (which he considered a totalitarian corruption of socialism) was very clear.

Orwell, a journalist, participated in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans, serving in the party militia of the P.O.U.M. or Party of Marxist Worker's Unification,^note Note that he didn't care for the POUM's ideology very much — he only ended up in its militia because he had come to Spain via the British Independent Labour Party, which was affiliated with the POUM. And because the POUM was against the Soviets, whom Orwell already mistrusted. and even got shot in the throat (an experience that he would later describe as "interesting"). His works tend to be considered cynical. The term "Orwellian" is named after his famous works of dystopian fiction, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four.^note Which is more than a tad ironic, given that this went against what Orwell himself believed.

Orwell struggled with occasional periods of ill-health throughout his life, and during once such period, in December 1947, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He never managed to fully recover from his sickness and his health steadily deteriorated over the next few years as he went in and out of medical institutions for treatments (some of which, in hindsight and with medical science being what it was at the time, might have done him more harm than good). And in the winter of 1949 it was obvious to family, friends, and Orwell himself that he was deadly ill and on his last legs. Finally, on the morning of January 20, 1950, an artery burst in Orwell's lungs, killing him at the age of 46.

He wrote nine books:

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) — account of his experiences of poverty in the titular cities.
• Burmese Days (1934)
• A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938) — an autobiographical account of his experiences in Spain.
• Coming Up for Air (1939)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Just some of the 556 articles that he wrote:

• "A Hanging" (1931)
• "The Spike" (1931)
• "Bookshop Memories" (1936)
• "Shooting an Elephant" (1936)
• "Spilling the Spanish Beans" (1937)
• "Boys' Weeklies" (1940)
• "Inside the Whale" (1940)
• "My Country Right or Left" (1940)
• "The Art of Donald McGill" (1940)
• "England Your England" (1941)
• "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941)
• "Poetry and the Microphone" (1943)
• "Raffles and Miss Blandish" (1944)
• "Good Bad Books" (1945)
• "Notes on Nationalism" (1945)
• "The Sporting Spirit" (1945)
• "Books v. Cigarettes" (1946)
• "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (1946)
• "Decline of the English Murder" (1946)
• "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" (1946)
• "How the Poor Die" (1946)
• "The Moon Under Water" (1946)
• "A Nice Cup of Tea" (1946)
• "Pleasure Spots" (1946)
• "Politics and the English Language" (1946) — A hugely influential non-fiction essay, frequently cited by advocates of plain writing.
• "The Politics of Starvation" (1946)
• "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946)
• "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
• "Riding Down from Bangor" (1946)
• "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946)
• "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad" (1946)
• "Why I Write" (1946)
• "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1947)
• "The English People" (1947)
• "Such, Such Were the Joys" (1952)

Orwell created the following tropes:

• Newspeak (he took inspiration from several real-life sources)
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future

Several additional tropes were inspired by Newspeak, including:

• Airstrip One
• Language Equals Thought
• People's Republic of Tyranny

George Orwell is the source of several trope names:

• 2 + Torture = 5
• All Issues Are Political Issues
• Big Brother Is Watching
• Cold War: It is debated whether he actually coined it, but he was certainly one of the first to use the phrase, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb".
• Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better
• Orwellian Retcon
• Room 101
• Thoughtcrime
• Unperson
• Written by the Winners

He is also the current mascot for the "Have a Nice Cup of Tea and Sit Down" page. He considered tea to be Serious Business. Brits Love Tea, indeed.

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Orwell's work provides examples of:

• Author Usurpation: Orwell's collected essays, journalism, and letters take up eleven volumes, and they plus his other non-fiction include important and interesting writings about the Spanish Civil War, popular culture, poverty in the UK, left-wing politics in The '30s and The '40s (from his very personal perspective) and loads of other topics that he liked to write about, but he's mostly associated with 1984, a book he write while very ill, and which he felt disappointed with when he'd finished it, and to a lesser extent Animal Farm.
• Badass Biker: Orwell acquired a four-cylinder motorcycle of American manufacture just after his arrival in Burma^note A highly expensive possession for a relatively poor police officer, as most four-cylinders in the 1920s were more expensive than a Model T Ford. and went through several funny adventures while riding it in the Burmese countryside. While in Britain he owned a 500cc Rudge-Whitworth motorcycle, which he rode in all weather on the worst roads and abandoned on the Isle of Jura shortly before death. The bike was rediscovered in 2006.
• Beige Prose:
  • He usually wrote like this himself and advised others to do the same in his essay "Politics and the English Language." Advice included "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." Later writers such as Julian Barnes and Will Self have criticized Orwell, or rather his supporters, for repeating the same advice. They point out that most of the greatest writers of English, such as Shakespeare, Dickens or Lewis Carroll, leave alone James Joyce (who Orwell liked), used all the resources of the English language.
  • Orwell's advice about prose writing was based on his self-deprecating conviction that most writers, including himself, weren't good enough at convincingly using all the resources of the English language, and he thought that if non-genius writers were going to write at all, then they should aim to write as clearly as possible, and avoid pretentious Latinate words such as "fallacious" when they already had the perfectly useful word "wrong". He didn't advocate purging all foreign and foreign-derived words from English; in the above-mentioned essay, he uses Latinate words such as "consequently", "incompetence", "formation" and "impartiality". What he disliked was the practice of not using a simple and clear but boring word, when you could use a vague and unclear but glamorously foreign neologism. Furthermore, the essay was not referring to the the literary fiction that the above counterexamples write in, but was primarily aimed at political writing, where writers often use such Latinate words to obfuscate a point (such as using euphemisms to obscure talking about a sensitive topic such as war crimes) rather than clarify it.
  • Critics have frequently quoted his rule of “Never use the passive voice when you could use the active” out of context, distorting it into a blanket prohibition on ever using the passive voice for any reason, but the second clause acknowledges that sometimes rendering a sentence in the active voice just isn’t possible, and his final rule is “Break any of the above rules sooner than write a barbarous sentence,” meaning that even if an active-voice construction is technically possible, that doesn’t mean one must use it if it sounds uglier and less natural than the passive.^note Linguists take such umbrage at denunciations of the passive voice because most of its haters can’t recognize a passive construction when they see it and wrongfully assume any ugly-sounding prose is in the passive even when actually in the active, or else fail to deplore a well-constructed sentence that uses the passive, while thinking it uses the active. Orwell did not demonstrate this vice.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: There are some genuinely good people in his stories. However, all his stories seem to go this direction between the protagonists and antagonists.
• Black Is Bigger in Bed: In "Notes on Nationalism", Orwell condemns the “large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes”, saying it’s linked to the self-hatred and dishonesty of English intellectuals.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Orwell claimed that he attended one, noting how the school structure clamped down on individuality. Later writers stated that Orwell's ideas of totalitarianism was inspired by his time in Eton. His biographer Bernard Crick, however, stated that Orwell's portrayal of his boarding school life was considerably exaggerated and indeed, Orwell himself often ratted out suspected and actual homosexuals to the prefects; he remained a lifelong homophobe.
• Capitalism Is Bad: He certainly believed this, and it's a subtext in most of his works.
• Crapsack World: Orwell paints a very depressing view of mankind, colonialism, dictatorships, bureaucratism, and corruption of revolutions.
• Dated History: Historian Paul Preston, a specialist on the Spanish Civil War, sees his Homage to Catalonia as this. He notes that Orwell's highly polemical and personal involvement with POUM gave people the idea that the Civil War was mainly about intra-left squabbles, and likewise greatly elevated and romanticized the POUM and the anarchists while not giving proper credit to the Communists. Preston notes that the anarchist collective Orwell celebrated was militarily and politically unworkable, and completely against the overall strategic goal of the Republicans (which the Communists under the Comintern and Stalin supported) to defeat Franco, and Orwell greatly exaggerated it for his own partisan grudges against rival leftists.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Orwell died after finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four. He would become more famous after death and especially as the year 1984 approached.
• Determined Defeatist: This man was convinced that Stalinism was infinitely seductive and infinitely mendacious and so the whole world would fall to totalitarianism within his lifetime or shortly after. He also simultaneously believed that mankind is not completely evil and that we should fight for human rights and social justice anyway.
• Dirty Communists: He believed Real Life communists like Stalin tended to be this and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are Take Thats by way of fiction.
• Downer Ending:
  • Pretty much all his stories have these. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a truly disheartening example.^note Then again, there is the appendix about Newspeak that talks about it and Ingsoc in the past tense through an academic lens, implying that despite what O'Brien said, the Party will fall after all.
  • Ironically enough, as editor of short stories sent to the Tribune, he openly complained about the tendency in (then) modern writing towards the Downer Ending and the belief that True Art Is Angsty.
  Orwell: Many readers have told me, in writing and by word of mouth, how tired they are of the kind of story that begins "Marjorie's husband was to be hanged on Tuesday, and the children were starving", or "For seven years no ray of sunlight had penetrated the dusty room where William Grocock, a retired insurance agent, lay dying of cancer"; but I don't fancy they are more tired of them than I am myself, who have to work my way through round about twenty such stories every week.
• Eponym: Orwellian has become a byword for dystopian futures and totalitarian societies, and use of propaganda.
• Escaped Animal Rampage: He wrote a short story, "Shooting an Elephant," about a time when an elephant escaped from a circus and rampaged through a town in Burma. They called him out to kill it. By the time he found it, its rampage was over and it was eating quietly in a field. However, the whole town was gathered round, so he shot it. It didn't die, so he shot it again. Still didn't die. Third shot did it. Well, it took another half-hour to die, but it collapsed.
  Orwell: I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
  • Orwell's biographer Bernard Crick, however, argues he made most of this up. According to a Burmese local, there was no escaped animal rampage and Orwell shot that elephant either for sport or by accident. There was an official government complaint since the elephant was regarded as valuable government property and Orwell was promptly transferred to Kanda with Colonel Welbourne calling him "a disgrace to Eton College." Crick noted that the essay first appeared in an anthology that encouraged writers to blend fact and fiction, though he noted that Orwell never tried to correct the record.^note Although Orwell never actually claimed that he was the protagonist of the story either.
  • Another Orwell authority, professor Peter Davison, quoted his friend George Stuart and widow Sonia Brownell in an edition of his Complete Works saying he did shoot the elephant. Stuart even said it precipitated the transfer to Kanda.
• The Generalissimo: Orwell wrote a lot about totalitarianism and the dangers of such regimes. It's a recurring theme in his entire work.
• Genius Cripple/Handicapped Badass: He suffered from chest infections all his life, but this never stopped him from writing or serving in the British Imperial Police, the Spanish Civil War (during which he survived a shot in the neck), and the English Home Guard. It led to his early death, however.
• Hitler Ate Sugar: This trope was pointed out as early as 1944, when George Orwell wrote in "What Is Fascism?" that "It will be seen that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, it is used even more wildly than in print." Orwell names a Long List of often opposing groups accused of fascism. It would seem that, according to Orwell, almost any group at the time had been accused of fascism by linking it to some policy in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. So, even at a time when honest-to-goodness fascism was still a going concern, it had devolved into being used as an all-purpose epithet.
• The Horseshoe Effect: A recurrent theme in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Given the increased criticism of the accuracy of his writing, and how Orwell himself took his partisan grudges against rival leftists to the extent of creating a list of possible subversives for the British government, an unsympathetic reader might see his own work as self-demonstrating this effect.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: Orwell was very concerned over the way language could be manipulated by people to justify their means. This was a constant theme in his entire work.
• Money, Dear Boy: Admitted that he only wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying as he was desperate for cash, and would have preferred never to have written it at all.
• Morton's Fork: He argues in "You and the Atomic Bomb" that either nuclear weapons are easy to build, in which case every petty tyrant will have a full arsenal of them and use them at the slightest provocation, thereby plunging the world into perpetual war, or nuclear weapons are difficult to build, in which case the handful of powers with access will hold the rest of the world hostage in order to increase their own power, also threatening perpetual war. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and this didn't happen, but it gave him the inspiration to write Nineteen Eighty-Four a few years later.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: His books are pretty bleak and frightening, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Not So Above It All: His main thesis was this trope, arguing that everybody, to some extent or other, used totalitarian tactics and "logic" when defending their viewpoints, meaning that invokedeven the UK or US could fall to dictatorship one day, and nobody would care.
• Only Sane Man: Liked to present himself as the only leftist in the world, or at any rate in Britain, to see Stalin for who he truly was. This is an exaggeration. In fact, Orwell was well aware of important anti-Stalinist left-wingers such as Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, and he praised the latter's history of the Communist International as a "very able book"; pity he didn't do more to make them better-known.
• The Power of Language:
  • Orwell was extremely interested in the power of language to control thought, and most of his works reflect this as a Central Theme.
  • This is the subject of his 1946 essay, ""Politics and the English Language".
• Real Life Writes the Plot: All of Orwell's books were inspired by the politics of his lifetime and his fears of how society would develop further.
  • Homage to Catalonia was about his firsthand experiences during the Spanish Civil War, Animal Farm was a satire on the Russian Revolution, and 1984 summarized all his fears about Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Of course, Orwell could exaggerate "real life", as in "Shooting an Elephant."
  • Much of 1984 was inspired by his time working as a propagandist for the BBC, and the particular focus on language directed to propaganda use was informed by his time working in the bureau.
  • Animal Farm was inspired by Russian communism and the rise of Stalin. It's also based on the vanity of the upper class and the real harsh treatment of the working class.
  • "Shooting an Elephant," as observed above, was not a faithful rendition of a rogue elephant shooting, but an allegory of the iron-fisted politics of the British Empire during the Indian independence movement. Key is the dominant theme, the colonial policeman killing the harmless great beast to save face. This was just the motivation given by Brigadier General Dyer after the Amritsar Massacre of 1919: "I considered it my duty to fire on them and to fire well. I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself. (...) They had come out to fight if they defied me, and I was going to give them a lesson." invokedThe narrator in Orwell's story uses almost the same phrases.
• Referenced by...: In Spider-Man: Far From Home, MJ quotes him:
  MJ: The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: He fled from Republican Spain after the Communists began to suppress opposition. Getting shot in the throat was a definite contributing factor. He wouldn't have been much use in the trenches after such an injury, having almost no voice.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Just about all of his works are heavily cynical.
• Sliding Scale of Libertarianism and Authoritarianism: Orwell himself was firmly down the libertarian end of the scale. At one point in life he apparently considered himself an anarchist, and he remained a committed libertarian socialist for the entirety of his life. His settings, on the other hand, are among the most nightmarish authoritarian dystopias ever imagined.
• The Theme Park Version: He presented one of these of the Soviet Union — and arguably, to dictatorships in general — in 1984.
• Unreliable Narrator/Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Some of Orwell's essays and writings have been regarded as this by later writers. Most notably, Orwell's criticism of his childhood at boarding school has been regarded as unfairly mean and disrespectful to the school headmaster. Julian Barnes has also pointed out that Orwell made several errors in the "Shooting an Elephant" essay, where he sweetened his own role in the stated incident. It is also a fact that the non-and-anti-Stalinist left existed independently of him, in contrast to what is said at Only Sane Man above.
• You Cannot Kill An Idea: Depends entirely on whether the idea is good or evil. Since at least some intellectuals make excuses for totalitarianism, and since totalitarianism gains popular support wholly on the claim that the dominant group is always right, it can never truly disappear from society, even in democracies (especially capitalist ones). On the other hand, if totalitarians ever come to power, they will by their nature corrupt humanity itself and remove every concept of goodness from the human condition, so that it cannot rise again even millennia later. In other words, you can kill the idea of democracy, but not of fascism.

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