George Orwell and Englishness

The English author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born into a “lower-upper-middle class”2 family in the Indian village of Motihari, Bengal, on June 25, 1903, five years after his sister Marjorie Francis. The Blair family lived there as Orwell’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair, held a post as a sub-deputy agent for the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service from 1875 until he resigned in 1912.

In 1904 Orwell’s mother, Ida Mabel Blair, neé Limouzin, returned to England with Marjorie and Eric. They settled at Henley-on Thames, Oxfordshire, where Richard Blair visited them for three months in the summer of 1907. On April 6, 1908, the Blairs’ youngest child Avril Nora was born.

From 1908 onwards Orwell attended a day school at Henley until he was sent to St Cyprian’s, a private preparatory school at Eastbourne, Sussex, in September 1911. During the time there his first two poems “Awake! Young Men of England” (1914) and “Kitchener” (1916) were published by Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard. At the age of 13 Orwell won a scholarship to Wellington where he spent the spring term of 1917. Soon afterwards he won a King’s Scholarship and therefore went to Eton from April 1917 to September 1921. At Eton he contributed to school periodicals like The Election Times and College Days.

After he had finished his education Orwell did not go to University, but applied for a post at the Indian Imperial Police in April 1922. He was accepted and served in Burma from October 1922 to December 1927, when he resigned while on home-leave in England.

“When Orwell arrived in Burma he was imbued with the Spirit of Empire, of imperialism.”3 After his service for the Indian Imperial Police, however, he had changed his attitude towards the British Empire completely. In The Road to Wigan Pier he writes:

I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it. […] But it is not possible to be part of such a system without recognising it as an unjustifiable tyranny.4