George Orwell Classism

George Orwell

Politics and Classism.

Index

Introduction.

The History of George Orwell.

Road to Wigan pier

Animal Farm

Nineteen eighty-four

Conclusion.

Introduction

In this dissertation my main aim to describe George Orwell and find out what made him tick. Orwell was and is one of the most quoted men who ever lived and in his lifetime wrote such masterpieces as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Animal farm (1945) and Road to Wigan Pier (1937). As well as being a novelist, Orwell also wrote essays and columns for newspapers. The reason why I chose to discuss the three books above are these are the three books that I will concentrate on during this dissertation. The three books have two very similar themes class and politics. Whether it be
He neglected to win a university scholarship, and in 1922 Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police. In doing so he was already breaking away from the path most of his school fellows would take, for Eton often led to either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he was drawn to a life of travel and action. He trained in Burma, and served there in the police force for five years. In 1927, while home on leave, he resigned. There had been at least two reasons for this: firstly, his life as a policeman was a distraction from the life he really wanted, which was to be a writer; and secondly, he had come to feel that, as a policeman in Burma, he was supporting a political system in which he could no longer believe in. Even as early as this, his ideas about writing and his political ideas were closely linked. It was not simply that he wished to break away from British Imperialism in India he wished to "escape from ... every form of man 's dominion over man", as he said in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and the social structure from which he came, depended, as he saw it, on just that "dominion over others" - not just over the Burmese, but over the English working class. These strong political views and ambition to become a writer drove him to success. But it was not one or the other that gave him his success it was his ability to combine the two interests of politics and writing and put it in such a way that
There, at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach himself how to write. His neighbours were impressed by his determination. Week after week he remained in his unheated bedroom, thawing his hands over a candle when they became too numb to write. (Why I Write, 1947) In spring of 1928, he turned his back on his own inherited values by taking a drastic step. For more than one year he lived among the poor, first in London, then in Paris. For him the poor were victims of injustice, playing the same part as the Burmese played in their country. One reason for going to live among the poor was to overcome a repulsion which he considered typical of his own class or classism. In Paris he lived and worked in a working-class quarter. At that time around 1929, he tells us, Paris was full of artists and would-be artists. There Orwell led a life that was far from bohemian; when he eventually got a job, he worked as a dishwasher. Once again his journey was downward into the life to which he felt he should expose himself, the life of poverty-stricken, or of those who barely scraped a living. Though this journey through class was Orwell 's goal, what was the point of doing it? I believe that Orwell was trying to remove himself from his own class of the bourgeoisie and trying to gain a classless status. But to do that he would have to remove all the ideals that he was brought up with to gain what he wanted would take generations of