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George Orwell and Animal FarmThe British author George Orwell, pen name for Eric Blair,achieved prominence in the late 1940’s as the author of twobrilliant satires. He wrote documentaries, essays, andcriticism during the 1930’s and later established himself asone of the most important and influential voices of thecentury. Eric Arthur Blair (later George Orwell) was born in1903 in the Indian Village Motihari, which lies near to the border ofNepal. At that time India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair’sfather Richard, held a post as an agent in the Opium Department of theIndian Civil Service. Blair’s paternal grandfather, too, had been partof the British Raj, and had served in the Indian Army. Eric’s mother,Ida Mabel Blair, the daughter of a French tradesman, was about eighteenyears younger than her husband Richard Blair was. Eric had an eldersister called Marjorie. The Blairs led a relatively privileged andfairly pleasant existence, in helping to administer the Empire.Although the Blair family was not very wealthy, Orwell later describedthem ironically as “lower-upper-middle class (Gross, p.109).” Theyowned no property and had no extensive investments; they were like manymiddle-class English families of the time, totally dependent on theBritish Empire for their livelihoo! d and prospects. Even though the
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father continued to work in India until he retired in 1912, in 1907,the family returned to England and lived at Henley. With somedifficulty, Blair’s parents sent their son to a private preparatoryschool in Sussex at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen, he won ascholarship to Wellington, and soon after another to Eaton, the famouspublic school (Gross, p.112). His parents had forced him to work at adreary preparatory school, and now after winning the scholarship, hewas not any more interested in further mental exertion unrelated to hisprivate ambition. ^At the beginning of Why/Write, he explains that fromthe age of five or six he knew he would be, ^must be,^ a writer (Gross,p.115).^ But to become a writer one had to read literature. ButEnglish literature was not a major subject at Eaton, where most boyscame from backgrounds either irremediably unliterary or so literarythat to teach them English Literature would be absurd. One of Eric’stutors later declared that his famous pupil had done absolutely no workfor five years. This was, of course, untrue: Eric has apprenticedhimself to the masters of English prose who most appealed to him,including Swift, Sterne and Jack London (Gross, p.
