George Orwell - his craft and his challenge

 My father had a huge set of Encyclopedia Britannica which travelled the world with us.  I remember as a child fondling the huge black volumes of which there seemed to be dozens and later mastering the two books of indexes which helped you to find the information you sought.  I was awestruck that there was so much to learn from these massive bound books.  This was the world before the internet and I felt especially blessed that our home housed such a treasure-trove.  It did not matter what homework was given by teachers, this set of encyclopedias provided the gold standard information on any topic.  

Later, as a teacher, when a student of mine quoted Wikipedia or some Facebook posting in their assignments I would sigh in vain that now the information highway was so full of nonsense it seemed miseducation was the goal, not truth.  Then, years later helping students with their masters and Ph.D. thesis I realised this highest form of education was just endless repetition of the knowledge of others changed slightly to avoid the cry of plagiarism.  Okay, the sources used were peer-reviewed journals and much sounder than a web posting but this puerile packaging and sharing of the knowledge of others seemed to have become the new gold standard.  That feels wrong for so many reasons and I like this quote which gives a different definition and highlights some of the flaws of this particular knowledge system.

“Knowledge is a light which God casteth into the heart of whomsoever He willeth.” It is this kind of knowledge which is and hath ever been praiseworthy, and not the limited knowledge that hath sprung forth from veiled and obscured minds. This limited knowledge they even stealthily borrow one from the other, and vainly pride themselves therein!"

Bahá’u’lláh

When visiting my new baby granddaughter in England I wandered into an old graveyard in a beautiful hamlet outside Oxford and discovered the grave of George Orwell, one of my Dad's favourite authors.  Weeks later I wanted to read more about this writer and turned to the once so reliable online Encyclopedia Britannica as my source.  Expecting a balanced account of this brilliant writer I found myself disturbed by the tone of this particular entry.  Let me quote a few of the offending sections,

"He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar)."

Exactly who cares if his father was a minor official and why does the business success or failings of George Orwell's maternal grandfather reflect on the writer?  Does this not say more about the reviewer and their perspective of what is considered valuable?  If he had come from a long line of wealthy slave transportation businessmen with vast inherited estates would this reflect better on George Orwell?

 "Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” ... lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income."

Oh dear, does anyone else feel that this statement is strangely disturbing? 

 "Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery."

Here one wants to ask the person constructing this piece, is this meant to be the snobbery George Orwell experienced as a result of being poor?  In which case perhaps a different phraseology would be appropriate?

 "After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance." 

I have no problems with the young George Orwell being distinguished by the brilliance of his mind. However, I resent the implications that his being poor made him distinguished in some fashion.  Perhaps it would have been better to say that all the other students around him in the school were exceedingly rich.

"He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953)."

Here is an extract, from George himself, in that very essay, which tells the first few weeks of being sent to a private boarding school for the first time.

“Soon after I arrived ... I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating.”

And beatings were given regularly and harshly in this establishment at first by means of a riding crop, but when this broke during a harsh thrashing, a more sturdy implement took its place.  It was also clear to George at this very young age that those whose families were rich did not receive the same level of brutality.  Even the treatment meted out by older boys was cruel and as George himself sadly pointed out, "Against no matter what degree of bullying you had no redress." Little wonder then in this environment George became sad, uncommunicative, and was regarded as unconventional by others.

George won two scholarships to elite public schools, Wellington and Eton, not due to his birthright or family wealth but as a result of his abilities.  Despite his brilliance, he chose not to go on to university but instead led a full life enriched with experiences he would later use in his writing. My favourite books of George Orwell are Animal Farm, 1984 and Down and Out in Paris and London.  He is an insightful and brilliant writer whose perspectives need to be more widely embraced.  Poverty is never viewed the same way after reading the last of these books and 1984’s is a powerful prophetic piece.  Animal Farm is one of the most hard-hitting political storytelling pieces and my admiration of the character Boxer lingered from childhood to adulthood.  

It took me a long while to find Geroge Orwell’s grave because he did not use his pen name but his own given name Eric Arthur Blair on the gravestone.  Orwell’s friend, a member of the Astor family, had helped provide George Orwell the privacy he needed to finish his last book 1984 on the remote Scottish island of Jura. This editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency" and insisted that on his own death he would be buried under an equally simple gravestone in a plot just beside his friend.   Somehow as a writer, George Orwell was able to convey a humanity and sensitivity that embeded within it the knowledge he had won from his own life experiences.  These were not stolen from someone else but crafted by a brilliant mind from all that he had observed and magically challenges those that read it.