George Orwell ‘is in the peculiar position of having been a by-word for fifty years’. No, not Orwell of course, but Rudyard Kipling as described by Orwell. However, it is not far off the mark for Orwell himself. Orwell also wrote of Kipling, ‘before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works’. This may be a little further from the mark but many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
, if those. The millions who have heard of
Big Brother
and
Room 101
know nothing of their progenitor. Ignorance of Orwell is also to be found in academic circles and in what would regard itself as the higher reaches of journalism. When Professor Raymond B. Browne of Bowling Green University died he was credited by the
Daily Telegraph
with having launched ‘popular culture’ into the mainstream. Browne’s
Journal of Popular Culture
was published in 1967, but Orwell was writing most intelligently about popular culture over twenty-five years earlier. Indeed, when
Critical Essays
was published in the United States in 1946 as
Dickens, Dali and Others
it was given the subtitle
Studies in Popular Culture
.
At one extreme Orwell is canonised – hence the sub-title,
The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell
, of John Rodden’s excellent study analysing
The Politics of Literary Reputation
(1989). At the other he is subjected to the vigorous wielding of the hatchet, something Scott Lucas does ‘with remarkable efficiency’ in his
Orwell
(2003) according to Terry Eagleton in the
London Review of Books
, 19 June 2003. Where does poor old George stand? Professor Eagleton in his review of the three biographies of 2003, aptly titled, ‘Reach-Me-Down Romantic’, suggests that Orwell ‘combined cultural Englishness with political cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously cultivating a public image of himself’. Despite world-wide acclaim, Orwell saw himself as dogged by ‘Failure, failure, failure’. ‘Failure’, as Eagleton says, ‘was his forte.’

I am inclined to think that Orwell had within his deepest self an unresolved conflict that made him so contradictory a character. He was ever in arms against organised religion, especially the Roman Catholic Church. He thought there was no afterlife. Yet he was married in church, had his adopted son Richard baptised, and wished to be buried, not cremated, according to the rites of the Church of England. For so rational a man it was strange that he should ask Rayner Heppenstall to cast a horoscope for Richard (21 July 1944); that he should believe he saw a ghost in Walberswick churchyard (16 August 19
31); and discuss poltergeists with Sir Sachaverell Sitwell (6 July 1940), not to mention the quasi-religious conclusion to
A Clergyman’s Daughter
(but that, after all, is ‘only a novel’). Perhaps most telling is Sir Richard Rees recalling that Orwell had told him that it ‘gave him an unpleasant feeling to see his real name in print’: ‘how can you be sure your enemy won’t cut it out and work some kind of black magic on it?’ Was this mere whimsy, or was it deeply felt? Not ‘some enemy or other’ but ‘your enemy’. Who was that? The title of Rees’s study sums up his subject perfectly:
George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory
(1961). He fled from triumph and sought refuge in ‘Failure, failure, failure’.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, on 25 June 1903. His father, Richard Walmsley Blair was born in 1857 in Milborne St Andrew, Dorset, where his father was the Vicar. Orwell’s father served in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, was born in 1875 at Penge, Surrey but her family had a long association with Burma. Indeed, there seems to be a curious survival of the Limouzin family in Moulmein, Myanmar, to this day, as Emma Larkin discovered a year or two ago. She found not only that Orwell was well (if covertly) remembered, but she noticed a street called
Leimmaw-zin
, ‘the nearest Burmese pronunciation for “Limouzin”’. However, when she asked a passer-by to interpret the name, he confidently offered, ‘Orange-Shelf Street’ (
Secret Histories
, pp. 145–6).

Orwell’s parents married in the intriguingly-named church of St John in the Wilderness at Naini Tal on 15 June 1897. Orwell would surely have found that appropriate. Their first child, Marjorie, was born at Gaya, Bengal, on 21 April 1898. Ida Blair returned with her two children to live in England at Henley-on-Thames, in 1904. In
1907 Richard Blair took three months’ leave at Henley. On 6 April 1908, Orwell’s younger sister, Avril, was born. From 1908–11, Orwell attended a Roman Catholic day-school run by Ursuline nuns. He then boarded at St Cyprian’s, a private preparatory school in Eastbourne where he would meet Cyril Connolly, who was to feature significantly in his later life. Orwell’s essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is based (sometimes loosely) on his experiences at St Cyprian’s, but the school educated him well enough for him to enter Eton as a King’s Scholar in May 1917.

A letter that has only very recently come to light gives an account of his life thereafter from Orwell’s point of view. The letter has not previously been published and I am very grateful to its owner (who wishes to remain anonymous) for permission to include it here. Orwell had been asked by Richard Usborne, the editor of the
Strand
, a monthly literary periodical published from January 1891 to March
1950, to contribute to the journal and to give some account of his life. As Orwell’s last paragraph indicates, he felt far too busy to contribute – he was writing
Nineteen Eighty-Four
– but despite that went to some trouble to respond to Mr Usborne. It was typical of Orwell, as some of the letters in this selection show, that he would go to great trouble to respond to correspondents whom he hardly knew – if at all. The letter to Richard Usborne was written from Barnhill, Jura, on 26 August 1947:

Dear Mr Usborne,*

Many thanks for your letter of the 22nd. I will answer your queries as best I can. I was born in 1903 and educated at Eton where I had a scholarship. My father was an Indian civil servant, and my mother also came of an Anglo-Indian family, with connections especially in Burma. After leaving school I served five years in the Imperial Police in Burma, but the job was totally unsuited to me and I resigned when I came home on leave in 1927. I wanted to be a writer, and I lived most of the next two years in Paris, on my savings, writing novels which no one would publish and which I subsequently destroyed. When I had no more money I worked for a while as a dishwasher, then came back to England and did a series of ill-paid jobs usually as a teacher, with intervals of unemployment and dire poverty. (That was the period of the slump.) Nearly all the incidents described in
Down and Out
actually happened, but at different times, and I wove them together so as to make a continuous story. I did work in a bookshop for about a year in 1934–5, but I only put that into
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
to make a background. The book is not, I think, autobiographical, and I have never worked in an advertising office. In general my books have been less autobiographical than people have assumed. There are bits of truthful autobiography in
Wigan Pier
, and, of course,
Homage to Catalonia
, which is straight reporting. Incidentally
Keep the A.F.
is one of several books which I don’t care about and have suppressed.

As to politics, I was only intermittently interested in the subject until about 1935, though I think I can say I was always more or less ‘left.’ In
Wigan Pier
I first tried to thrash out my ideas. I felt, as I still do, that there are huge deficiencies in the whole conception of Socialism, and I was still wondering whether there was any other way out. After having a fairly good look at British industrialism at its worst, ie. in the mining areas, I came to the conclusion that it is a duty to work for Socialism even if one is not emotionally drawn to it, because the continuance of present conditions is simply not tolerable, and no solution except some kind of collectivism is viable, because that is what the mass of the people want. About the same time I became infected with a horror of totalitarianism, which indeed I already had in the form of hostility towards the Catholic Church. I fought for six months (1936–7) in Spain on the side of Government, and had the misfortune to be mixed up in the internal struggle on the Government side, which left me with the conviction that there is not much to choose between Communism and Fascism, though for various reasons I would choose Communism if there were no other choice open. I have been vaguely associated with Trotskyists and Anarchists, and more closely with the left wing of the Labour Party (the Bevan-Foot end of it). I was literary editor of
Tribune
, then Bevan’s paper, for about a year and a half (1943–5), and have written for it over a longer period than that. But I have never belonged to a political party, and I believe that even politically I am more valuable if I record what I believe to be true and refuse to toe a party line.

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