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George Orwell: Books
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A year before George Orwell died in 1950, his typewriter was confiscated. Orwell lay tucked under an electric blanket in a small wooden chalet in the green and pleasant heart of the Cotswolds, dying of pulmonary tuberculosis. Piled around his sickbed were a variety of books: tomes on Stalin and on German atrocities in the Second World War, a study of English labourers in the nineteenth century, a few Thomas Hardy novels, some early Evelyn Waugh. Under the bed was a secret stash of rum.
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Although George Orwell had written 1984 as an indictment of the excesses of communism, the Soviet Union reinterpreted it as an indictment of capitalism. Hoxha Polytechnic taught Orwell's book as part of its literature curriculum.
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Orwell was a hard-working, thoughtful, and prolific writer. Between 1931 and 1941 he published some 230 essays, reviews (of books, plays, films), sketches, and poems. All the writing he did honed his skills. As Malcolm Muggeridge later remarked, Orwell's writing overall was "sharp, original, and clear as a church bell ringing on a still evening." His work appeared in venues such as Time & Tide, Tribune, The Adelphi, New English Weekly, New Statesman..., and Horizon. Orwell needed whatever he could earn, but the financial rewards were meager. Peter Davison estimates that in 1940 his journalism earned Orwell less than £160, yet that year he published some very significant essays.
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In the spring of 1936 Orwell moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. His reputation up to this time, as writer and journalist, was based mainly on his accounts of poverty and hard times. His next book was a commission in this direction. The Left Book Club authorized him to write an inquiry into the life of the poor and unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was divided into two parts. The first was typical reporting, but the second part was an essay on class and socialism.
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After the ordeals of Spain and writing the book about it, most of Orwell's formative experiences were over. His finest writing, his best essays and his great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed up his house in Wallington and he and Eileen moved into 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, NW1. He supported himself by writing freelance reviews, mainly for the New English Weekly but ... for Time and Tide and the New Statesman. He joined the British Home Guard soon after the war began (and was later awarded the "British Campaign Medals/Defence medal").
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Orwell's Down and Out was issued in 1933. During the next three years he supported himself by teaching, reviewing, and clerking in a bookshop and began spending longer periods away from his parents' Suffolk home. In 1934 he published Burmese Days. The plot of this novel concerns personal intrigue among an isolated group of Europeans in an Eastern station. Two more novels followed: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
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