Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, George
Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools
in England. Because of his background—he famously described his
family as “lower-upper-middle class”—he never quite fit in, and
felt oppressed and outraged by the dictatorial control that the
schools he attended exercised over their students’ lives. After
graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to forego college in order
to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma. He hated his duties
in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a
political regime he despised. His failing health, which troubled
him throughout his life, caused him to return to England on convalescent
leave. Once back in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated
himself to becoming a writer.
Inspired by Jack London’s 1903 book The
People of the Abyss, which detailed London’s experience
in the slums of London, Orwell bought ragged clothes from a second-hand
store and went to live among the very poor in London. After reemerging,
he published a book about this experience, entitled Down
and Out in Paris and London. He later lived among destitute
coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to
give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism. In 1936, he
traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed
firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political
regimes. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in
Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell’s
mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority. Orwell
devoted his energy to writing novels that were politically charged,
first with Animal Farm in 1945, then
with 1984 in 1949.
1984 is one of Orwell’s best-crafted novels, and it remains one of the most
powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian
society. In Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Orwell had witnessed
the danger of absolute political authority in an age of advanced
technology. He illustrated that peril harshly in 1984. Like
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), 1984 is
one of the most famous novels of the negative utopian, or dystopian, genre.
Unlike a utopian novel, in which the writer aims to portray the
perfect human society, a novel of negative utopia does the exact opposite:
it shows the worst human society imaginable, in an effort to convince
readers to avoid any path that might lead toward such societal degradation.
In 1949, at the dawn of the nuclear age and before
the television had become a fixture in the family home, Orwell’s
vision of a post-atomic dictatorship in which every individual would
be monitored ceaselessly by means of the telescreen seemed terrifyingly
possible. That Orwell postulated such a society a mere thirty-five
years into the future compounded this fear.
Of course, the world that Orwell envisioned in 1984 did
not materialize. Rather than being overwhelmed by totalitarianism, democracy
ultimately won out in the Cold War, as seen in the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Yet 1984 remains
an important novel, in part for the alarm it sounds against the
abusive nature of authoritarian governments, but even more so for
its penetrating analysis of the psychology of power and the ways
that manipulations of language and history can be used as mechanisms
of control.
