George Orwell - Essays of George Orwell

PENGUIN BOOKS
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
Martin Secker & Warburg

PENGUIN BOOKS

Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933. In 1936 he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded. Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air. During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for me Manchester Evening News. His unique political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.

George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: You have made an indelible mark on English literature you are among the few memorable writers of your generation.

Bernard Crick is Emeritus Professor of Birkbeck, the University of Londons college for mature part-time students. He took early retirement in 1984 to live in Edinburgh and interest himself in British Isles questions. Born in 1929, he was educated at University College London, the London School of Economics and Harvard. He lived for four years in North America before teaching at the LSE and then Sheffield University. His books include The American Science of Politics; the widely translated In Defence of Politics (Penguin 1964; revised edition, 1993); George Orwell: A Life, which was the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year for 1980; and Political Thoughts and Polemics. Joint editor of the Political Quarterly from 1965 until 1980, literary editor from 19912000, he has written for the Observer, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent, and was chairman in 1998 of the government advisory committee whose report led to making Citizenship a new subject in the English national curriculum.

The footnotes in this edition are taken from the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.