Book description
'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most
important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question
of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to
truth.'All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of
lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general
atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.'Language is a political issue,
and slovenly use of language and cliches make it easier for those in
power to deliberately use misleading language to hide unpleasant
political facts. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive
ideology, and it is no accident that 'Politics and the English Language'
was written after the close of World War II. 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 the Tribune
he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and
he also wrote for the Observer
and later for the 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.
