Short History Of... - George Orwell

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Best known for his books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell earned a reputation as chronicler and prophet of modern society. Plagued by illness, he exposed poverty and injustice, satirised the powerful, and took up arms against fascism. Today, his name has become an adjective - ‘Orwellian’ - to express fears about totalitarian control. So, what turned this one-time servant of the British Empire into a critic of poverty and oppression? How did he almost lose his life before he’d written his most enduring works? And did this man of the left become a hero to those on the right? This is a Short History Of George Orwell.  A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Nathan Waddell, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham, and author of ‘A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell’.  Written by Edward White | Produced by Kate Simants | Assistant Producer: Nicole Edmunds | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay, Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check by Sean Coleman Get every episode of Short History Of... a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Overhead, a mechanism wears into life, sending the cage into the darkness beneath. But none of the party are coal miners. They're taking part in a guided tour which has been arranged for the benefit of one among them. His real name is Eric Arthur Blair, but his readers know him as George Orwell. In many ways he is an unusual character, an old Etonian and a former officer in the Indian Imperial Police Service. He's now on an expedition into England's industrial heartland to capture how the other half lives. 900 feet below ground, the cage comes to a stop. The door opens. One by one, the visitors exit onto a path,

where dim, electric lights struggle to cut through the gloom. Squinting in the darkness, Orwell makes out the tunnel ahead. It's less than five feet high, forcing Orwell at six foot three into an uncomfortable stoop. He crouches and shuffles forward as the tunnel gets narrower and the temperature increases, until after 300 yards, he smacks his head on the ceiling and falls to the ground. Thank goodness for the safety helmet he's wearing that absorbs the blow. To him, this subterranean place seems like hell, ferociously hot, frighteningly dark, and the infernal noise of distant machinery growing louder with every step.

Finally, he reaches the end of the tunnel, exhausted and wheezing. It takes him several minutes to take in the scene. In front of him is a team of half-naked men, kneeling. before a thick wall of rock, digging into the coal face with enormous drills. He's astonished by their strength. In the low light, these men don't look quite human to him, more like iron statues come to life. Other workers pass by, venturing deeper into the mine. Many move around on all fours, almost like dogs. After a little time observing the work, it's time for the visitors to leave.

60 minutes or so is more than enough for Orwell, though he knows the miners will be here for a full seven and a half hour shift. But turning to head back, he is hit by a dreadful realization. The return journey is uphill. As he climbs his lungs, weak since childhood, feel like they might burst at any moment. Eventually he arrives with the rest of the tour group at the lift. When he emerges, caked in black coal dust, he takes a gulp of freezing cold air.

He trudges slowly back to his lodging house and a hot bath. This morning has been a revelation. The miners embody all that he most admires, dignity, resilience and pride in honest labour. But he's also witnessed dirt, danger and exploitation. exploitation, the results of what happens when the rich and powerful bear down on ordinary people. It is, thinks Orwell, the awful way of the world. Best known for his books, Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell earned a reputation as a chronicle and profit of modern society. Plagued by debilitating illness, he exposed poverty and injustice, satirized the powerful, and even took up arms against fascism.

His name has become an adjective, Orwellian, a word to express our collective fears about totalitarian control and the fragility of freedom. So what turned this one-time servant of the British Empire into a critic of poverty and oppression? how did he almost lose his life before he'd written his most enduring works and how did this man of the left become a hero to those on the right? I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network. This is a short history of George Orwell. Though he will become known to most as one of the great English writers of the 20th century, The boy who would become George Orwell begins life not in England, but in India.

His mother, Ida, of French heritage, is working as a governess in India when she meets her future husband, Richard Walmsley-Blair. Soon the two marry and are joined by a daughter Marjorie, and then five years later in 1903, her son, Eric Arthur. According to the adult Orwell's memories, the family is lower, upper-middle class. His great-great-grandfather made his fortune from slave labour on his Jamaican plantation. But the family now exist on what Orwell will call the verge of shivering gentility. In 1904, Ida returns to England with young Eric and his older sister, though Richard

stays behind in India for a few years. He visits the family briefly in 1907, after which a third child is born, a girl named Avril. It's only in 1912 that Richard Blair permanently relocates to England. Ida settles with the children in Oxfordshire. Eric is a sickly child, forever suffering from bronchial complaints that will dog him for the rest of his life.

In 1911, the eight-year-old Eric enters St. Cyprians, a boarding school in East Sussex. His time here leaves an indelible mark. In an essay written more than 30 years later, he details sadistic teachers, feral classmates, and endemic snobbery, of which he, from a less exalted family than many of the other boys, was often a victim. Nathan Waddell is a professor of 20th century literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of A Bright Cold Day, The Wonder of George Orwell. The practical experience is, as he records it, very, very traumatic. Other people who were there with him at the same time and wrote memoirs about it sometimes

say that he's exaggerating. But in a sense, it doesn't matter whether he is or isn't exaggerating. It mattered to him later in life that he felt it to be traumatic. And it's no surprise then that his most famous work, 1984, is to do. with the experience of power from somebody who is weak and innovated and marginalised. Eric is inculcated with the values of the era. Love of King, Country and Empire are a given. At the age of 11, poem of his, awake young men of England, is printed in the local paper. It's three stanzas of tub-thumping patriotism, composed on the outbreak of the first

World War. Before that conflict has ground to its bloody end, Eric wins a scholarship to Eton College, the most prestigious private school in England. But he is never quite accepted into the highest echelons of the social elite, and fails to thrive, despite his obvious intellectual abilities. In 1921, he leaves Eaton and spends much of the summer with his friend Jacintha Buddickham, who lives with her family near the Blair's home in Oxfordshire. The pair are, it seems, thick as thieves.

But the relationship is ruptured one day when Eric, in the words of one biographer, attempts to force himself upon Jacintha. Distraught, she runs home crying. Though they will re-establish contact many years later, for now it appears to be the end of the relationship. Whether that horrible incident has any influence on Eric's next, rather unusual decision, is hard to discern. But the following year, he leaves England at the age of 19 to join the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.

Here, the reality of empire quickly sickenes him. He witnesses acts of cruelty and violence against the local people and is perhaps also required to perform such acts himself. Two of his essays have been cited as evidence that he did, Shooting an elephant concerns a police officer who has given the responsibility of killing a rampaging elephant. Another essay, a hanging, describes the scene of a public execution of a Burmese man by the imperial government. Both are graphic depictions of everyday colonial violence, what he calls the dirty work of empire at close quarters. They are also hailed as examples of Orwell's

talent for observation. Yet there is debate about how much of what he writes is the literal truth. Those essays are tricky. They're sort of unreliable as an insight into Orwell's actual experience, because we just don't know for sure quite how accurately they map onto what he did and saw. They have truths to them in that they are getting that real insight that Orwell had and wanted to communicate, which is the sort of strange lunacy and stupidity at the heart of the heart of empire he spends nearly five years in burma a period which proves transformative that experience

is the crucible in which his adult could is formed the vital source of his political insight as he comes to develop it is formed in burma because there he sees authority miswielded secretly he writes in shooting an elephant i was all for the burmese and all against their Presses the British. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep.

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Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. In 1927, Eric Blair, as he's still known, is through with policing. His gaze turns to Europe and a radical reassessment of his life. He finishes his time in Burma feeling like a guilty man. So he comes back and what he wants to do, as he puts it, is to go down among the oppressed, to sort of lower himself,

literally lower himself in the sense of a kind of class lowering and a privilege lowering, so that he can get some insight into what it feels like to be on the receiving end of authority. Over the next five years, this takes many forms. He undertakes an arduous stint of picking hops in Kent, consorts with the homeless in London, sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square. In Paris, he works as a... dishwasher his poverty is largely a self-imposed experiment to understand the working poor but he boosts his meagre income a little when he begins to get his writing published at

first there are articles and essays based on his experiences of life on the margins in Europe and of the imperial service in Asia then in 1933 he publishes his first book a a semi-autobiographical account entitled Down and Out in Paris and London. The book gives visceral first-hand descriptions of poverty in two of the world's great cities, a universe of those who have in some way fallen through the cracks of society. Though considered to be a largely truthful account of his recent life, as with his tales of Prep School and Burma, the line between fact and fiction preps is isn't always solidly drawn.

Orwell, he's as much as self-mythologizer as any other great writer. But the problem is, of course, that he's got this reputation for clarity, accuracy, and factualness. And we are inclined to take him at face value as a result and not to see the very subtle ways that he's manipulating us as a reader. And that happens more frequently than we might ordinarily think. This experience of destitution is a world away from the bourgeoisie. our lives of his parents, who now reside in the pleasant seaside town of Southwold in Suffolk. To save his respectable family from embarrassment at their son's tales of the underworld,

Eric Blair now assumes the pen name of George Orwell. Yet even the pseudonym gives some indication of his conventional English background. He chooses George of the nation's patron saint, and Orwell is the name of a river in Suffolk, reflecting his love of the English countryside. These apparent contradictions, Orwell, the conventional middle-class Englishman and Orwell, the unflinching critic of social inequity, run like a seam of coal through his next three books, all of them novels. Burmese days is, first, a story of imperial rule and colonialism.

After that, a clergyman's daughter, and keep the Aspidistra flying, critique class and capitalism in English life. Yet the books also express a certain affection for dear old blighty. To many critics, this communicates an essential uncertainty about England and the English that is a hallmark of Orwell's work and character. He had a kind of patriotic nostalgia in one sense for certain traditional English things, the countryside or cups of tea, provincial life in small English towns. At the same time, he was very sceptical about the way the country is organised.

So he is very much a critic of English life whilst having obvious fondness for it. There is far less ambivalence in his next book. The Road to Wigan Pier is a return to non-fiction. Orwell's account of his journey into Northern England in early 1936. His expedition leads him into the heart of working-class communities, where he spends two months staying in lodging houses, touring coal mines, and mixing with local people.

The book is memorable for Orwell's observations of the inequalities he discovers, but also for his visceral descriptive language. He finds, in his words, labyrinthine slums, with sickly, aging people, creeping round and round, them like black beetles. The image of a dirty thumbprint on a slice of bread and butter lodges in his head. Orwell, every inch the Middle Englander, cannot hide his revulsion.

There is a book waiting to be written about Orwell and disgust. There's so much of it in his work and life. And it seems to be, I think, the kind of primary emotion for him in some level, disgust at certain kinds of behaviour, certain kinds of smells. Raps are the most famous. thing in nature that he recalls from. But I think the key thing that he identifies and anatomizes in the Rotowig and Pier is the extent to which upbringing will dictate the terms of emotional response. So he talks, for example, about how his home life encouraged him to think of

working class people as dirty, smelly, lazy, all these sorts of cliches and inaccuracies and prejudices that his particular position in the class hierarchy. through home, through school, through the broader networks he belonged to, encouraged him to believe, and that he comes as he grows up to see as myths and damaging ones. And the Road to Wiggin Pier is his main indictment of the class system and how class enables injustice and sort of structurally guarantees it. To some, in the 1930s as well as now, the Road to Wigan Pier is an exercise in poverty tourism.

The son of one of the men who showed Orwell around Wigan says his father never forgave the writer for portraying the town in such a negative light. Many others find Orwell's account to be a devastating but humane exploration of economic and social injustice. Perhaps there is evidence enough to support both interpretations. There's doubleness always. This is the key thing about Orwell.

As with many a writer, there's a doubleness. Dualities and awkwardness are evident in many aspects of Orwell's identity. His characteristic forthrightness as a writer is hedged by genteel manners in person. He is emotionally reserved and consistently plight. On the page, he's spare, lean, seemingly in control of every word. Yet he has a capacity for slapstick clumsiness and never seems entirely at home in his own skin. He doesn't lack for friends, counting many writers among his closest circle. But his behaviour towards women can be strange,

and in the case of his teenage treatment of Jacintha Buddickham, plainly sinister. He proposes to two women who turn him down. However, his luck changes in his early 30s. Eileen O'Shaughnessy is a psychology postgraduate student, whom Orwell meets at a party in 1935. A year later, they are married, and the couple set up home together in London. To this day, Eileen intrigues scholars. She is a bit of a puzzle.

The accounts of her that we have often point out that she was a very difficult character to get under the skin of. So she's a bit of an enigma. A good match then for her contradictory husband. It seems to me to be quite a playful character. He could be sober and serious. has a justified reputation for a kind of moral earnestness. But he was also very humorous, and there's some lovely letters where he and Eileen are talking about their dog, which they very wonderfully call Marx, and the sort of the silly things that

it's doing. So you get a clear sense there of a very gentle, mutually respectful, supportive, domestic environment. He doesn't see marriage as an impediment to adventure, however. When Spain descends into civil war in 1936, the struggle of the Republicans battling the fascist forces led by General Franco attract sympathy throughout Europe and America. Many left-leaning people, including a number of well-known writers, traveled to Spain to take up arms. In December, George Orwell packs some tea from Fortman Mason and heads out to join them. He arrives in Barcelona on Boxing Day, 1936.

A few days later, he's admitted into the militia of a far-left party known as Pum, one of several groups in the Republican struggle. It isn't long before he finds himself on active duty on the front line. In Aragon, the region west of Catalonia, there are two opposing sets of long, snaking trenches. hosts Republican forces, the other belongs to the fascists. Orwell is first dispatched to the trenches in January 1937. He spends around 100 days there and seems to take to life on the front line fairly well. He's grown accustomed to discomfort over recent years and has experience of firearms from his time in Burma. According to his own recollections,

he takes frequent pot shots at the enemy, though he claims claims not to know whether he ever hits anyone. He also participates in one audacious raid, during which he tosses a hand grenade at the enemy and chases a soldier with the bayonet of his rifle. All the while, he's growing increasingly sympathetic to the left-wing politics pursued by many of those on the Republican side. Their critique of class and power rings resonantly true to him.

In April, he's given a short spell of leave in Barcelona, where he's reunited with Eileen, who's recently arrived and is helping to coordinate Republican volunteers. But they are both appalled by the forces taking hold of the struggle. Orwell's group, the Pum, is not aligned with the great leftist superpower that is the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin. But Stalinist factions, backed by Moscow, are in the ascendancy, and they have no time for alternative viewpoints. Censorship, imprisonment and violence are often the fate of those who stray from Stalinist orthodoxy. This is Orwell's first bitter taste of totalitarianism. It comes as a great relief when, in the late spring, he is ordered West once again, back to the

front line. It's the 20th of May, 1937. At 5 a.m., the sun is climbing above the horizon in Aragon, northeastern Spain. George Orwell makes his way along a narrow ravine dug into the dry, rocky landscape, ready for another shift on sentry duty in the Republican trenches. As the spring sunlight begins to illuminate their surroundings, he approaches his comrade, an American volunteer named Harry Milton, to release. Milton to relieve him of his watch. Only a few hundred yards in front of them, their adversaries

the fascists are ensconced in a similar trench. Orwell, in his languid fashion, lights a cigarette. The rising sun at his back, he steps onto a sandbag to look out over the parapet. Risky for anyone, especially so for Orwell, his height making him an obvious target for the enemy. The still of the morning is suddenly ruptured, a loud crack, a flash of light. He jolts backwards, a wave of weakness swallows him, and in the next breath, when his knees buckle and he falls to the ground, he realizes what has happened. He has just been shot by a fascist sniper. Harry Milton is now looming over him, his face filling Orwell's blurry vision. Milton shouts out for something to cut open his comrade's shirt, but though Orwell has a knife in his pocket, when he tries to reach for it, his arm won't move.

He lies still on the ground, numb, frozen, gasping for breath. The sniper's bullet has hit him in the throat. Blood pours from his mouth. A stretcher-bearer runs to the scene. He produces a tiny bottle of alcohol and splashes it onto the womb. A further moment of realization comes to Orwell now. He is, in this very moment, dying. Four comrades haul him up onto a stretcher and carry him away. Suddenly, a surge of feeling returns to Orwell's body. Their path is punishing, for Orwell and the men carrying him.

The ground underfoot is undulating and treacherous. Lying prone on the stretcher in excruciating pain, he rocks and sways with each step, and it's more than a mile to the ambulance. Along the way, though pain consumes him and his life is racing to its end, he notes the way the leaves of the silver poplar trees brush against his face. Eventually they reached the ambulance, and as the engine starts up and is driven away from Dane, to the hospital in Barcelona.

Orwell feels the sting of a needle as the doctor administers a shot of morphine. He slumps back. Agony finally giving way to a sweet pulse or relief. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant. You're building something big.

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This fall get double points on every qualified stay. Life's the trip. the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. After a couple of weeks in hospital, he's well enough to be discharged. But all the while, the Stalinists' campaign to quash descent is ramping up. The Pum leaders are imprisoned. Orwell and Eileen worry for their safety. After a nerve-wrecking few days of lying low, they eventually managed to catch a train into France. In July, they return to England. Orwell's abhorrence of the Stalinist's power grab is a key theme of homage to Catalonia,

the account he writes of his six months in Spain. It's a time that many see as utterly crucial to understanding George Orwell as we know him today, a man of the left, but one who cherishes individual freedoms. It's the defining event in his life. And whenever I teach Orwell to students, I always say, If you read just one thing, just read homage to Catalonia, because that is the key book for understanding Orwell at his core. Back in England, Orwell suffers further serious medical problems. In the spring of 1938, he starts coughing up blood, and a few days later, it's clear that he is suffering serious internal hemorrhaging.

His doctors conclude that it's a flare-up of his long-standing bronchial illnesses. Orwell insists he's perfectly fine, but he is not. He spends months in hospital before Eileen takes him to Morocco to recuperate away from the damp and cold of an English winter. There he begins work on another novel, coming up for air. In many ways, the book follows the themes of his earlier fiction, the tale of a disappointed, middle-aged man who yearns for a return to some lost, bucolic England. But the story is edged by the loomers

looming threat of global catastrophe. Coming up for air is published in June 1939. Less than three months later, Britain is at war with Nazi Germany. Now in his late 30s and with a history of serious ill health, he won't see military action. His war work consists of writing and broadcasting. In 1940, he authors a pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius, which perfectly distills his connection to his homeland. In it, Orwell appears as both traditionalist and radical. His description of England and the English is ironically affectionate. He writes of a land of solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads,

populated by people with mild, knobby faces, bad teeth and gentle manners. Yet he also says it is the most class-ridden country under the sun, a land of snobbery and privilege ruled largely by the old and silly. Britain, he believes, is in desperate need of a leftist revolution. Only with a planned, nationalised economy, and socially liberated from entrenched wealth and class division, can the nation defeat the Third Reich? It's the culmination of a lengthy political journey for Orwell,

from imperial police officer to socialist revolutionary. Yet his radicalism is underpinned by a genuine love of country. He sees revolution as a means of conserving all that is best about his homeland. He discovers, in a sense, to his own surprise, that he is in fact a patriot. Because he sees what's at stake more clearly then, as many other people do. That doesn't mean that he is uncritical and that he doesn't have negative things to say about England's.

All the same sitting behind that is a sense that, okay, whatever those failings, England means something, and it matters, and that he wants to sort of align himself with that. Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell broadcasts talks on the BBC's Overseas Eastern Service by leading British authors, including T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster, as well as himself, designed to counteract Nazi propaganda. His time at the BBC is rather productive, though he does describe the place as something halfway between a girl's school and a lunatic asylum. The experience of being a tiny cog within a giant bureaucracy leaves its mark, as does dedicating himself to the production of propaganda.

These are to be features of his next two novels. ones that will solidify his status as a giant of English literature. But for now, there are personal issues that absorb Orwell's attentions. In 1943, his mother passes away. It is naturally a deeply sad time for him, as was the death of his father, who died a few years earlier. And it's his father's name, Richard, that he now passes to his son, a baby boy he and Eileen adopt in 1944. Richard comes into their lives just as Orwell is finishing his latest work, the story of a revolution gone wrong in a quaint corner of southeast England.

On one level, animal farm is a peculiar departure for the writer. It's a beast fable, a story about a group of animals rising up against the farmer who owns them. But the simple, almost childlike tale is simultaneously a tart allegory for the rise of Stalin in the Soviet Union. His distaste for Stalinism has been evident since the days of the Spanish Civil War. Throughout the fight against Germany, the Soviets have been a key ally to the British. But as the war creeps to its end, Orwell wants the world, especially his fellow leftists, to wake up to the horrifying reality of Stalin's rule.

Totalitarianism in all its forms must be rejected. power, corruption, the use and abuse of language, even the setting of a farm in the idyllic English countryside. This is all classic Orwell. But it presented in a more accessible fashion than any of his previous works. Animal Farm is a wonderfully economical treatment of these things. And it's precisely because it's economical that it seems to be available to everybody as their version of the truth.

So as much a critique of right-wing power, or as left-wing power and everything in between. It is available because it's concerned with a structural issue, which is the perversion of good intentions into power-seeking and power hoarding. And that's not limitable to any one political tradition, even though he is writing it with an eye on communism. The non-partisan quality of animal farm isn't immediately obvious to everyone, however. Orwell finishes the manuscript in 1944,

but when he sends it to publishers, the reaction is underwhelming at best. Al Farm is difficult to publish because he writes it at the wrong moment. He writes it when the Soviets are on our side in World War II. But he has no time at all for people who say, well, because we are in league with Stalin, we should off our cap and be respectful.

And he just says, well, this has to be called out and in a way that it's going to grab the widest possible audience. But before a publisher can be found, Eileen dies during a hysterectomy in March 1945, while Orwell is away covering the liberation of Paris from the Nazis. She's just 39 years old. Orwell's response to this shocking and utterly unexpected development strikes some as odd, if not downright callous. Though funeral arrangements have already been made by the time he returns from France, he doesn't attend the ceremony. of flack for how he writes about Eileen's death. He often uses phrases like, it was an awful shame,

and it's very sort of understated and very emotionally reserved and very English. But then again, Alwell's not necessarily the best writer about the emotions. There is ample evidence of this reticence in the Orwell canon. For instance, in his published account of nearly dying while fighting in Spain, he includes the sentence, the whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting. In truth, Eileen's death is a seismic blow to Orwell. Not only has she cared for him through illness and injury, but she's played an important part in his creative life, too. Her influence is felt in Animal Farm. Friends who read the book note numerous examples of Eileen's sharp humor and flair for psychological insight

throughout. When it's eventually published in August 1945, Anonymous The normal farm is an instant hit with the public, both in Britain and abroad. The success is bittersweet for Orwell. The years of hardship and ill health are now being rewarded. Yet he is unable to share the fruits of his labour with Eileen. Orwell tries his best to carry on as normal in his London home. In May, 1946, there is further sadness when his elder sister Marjorie dies. Later that year, Orwell decides to relocate to the remote Scottish island of Jura.

Having holiday there in recent years, it seems the perfect spot for a new start, away from the noise and pollution of London. With his toddler and the help of his younger sister Avril, he sets up home on the island in spring, 1947. But in the autumn, he falls ill with chest problems once again. He struggles with his breathing and loses an alarming amount of weight. In December, a specialist arrives. The diagnosis is devastating.

It's tuberculosis. It's not terminal, the doctor thinks, but Orwell must leave Richard and Avril behind to receive treatment on the Scottish mainland. Oh, hi, buddy. Who's the best you are? I wish I could spend all day with you instead. Uh, Dave, you're off mute. Hey, happens to the best of us.

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At Hermey's Hospital, a nurse is on her rounds. Coming from the other end of the corridor, she hears a familiar sound. It's a typewriter belonging to a patient, on the respiratory ward, the writer George Orwell. As she enters the room and approaches the patient's bed, his face is a study in concentration. He's a tall man and thin with a narrow moustache. Oblivious to his visitor, he clacks away on his typewriter, lost in the letter he's working on. It's not to anyone he knows, but to a kind reader of his who once sent him a pot of jam.

He's writing to apologize for not thanking her sooner. The nurse raises her eyebrows and taps her fob watch. The patient looks up. He knows the signal. It's time for his daily walk. With no little effort, he places the typewriter on the bedside table and eases himself out from beneath the bed sheets. Sliding a pair of slippers onto his feet, he then stands,

pulls a dressing gown around his pajamas, and walks uneasily to the door. Outside, a gentle breeze rustles the leaves of a long row of trees. From above, birds sing and swoop down in search of earthworms on the lawn. Orwell paces his way slowly around the grounds. He's been here almost five months now.

During that time, the treatment has been punishing. For a while, he has been. he was given a brand new drug, but it triggered an allergic reaction. He lost further weight, his hair fell out, and his skin began to flake. But tests now show he's making real improvement. Frequent walks are all part of the recovery process, but even this light exercise takes its toll. He can't have walked more than a hundred yards when he stops.

Placing his hands on the back of a bench, he stoops to catch his breath. Back in the ward, the nurse watches Orwell through an open window. She remembers seeing his x-rays the day he was admitted. They showed that chronic TB had smothered his left lung and made a start on the right. She knows how desperately ill he was, and despite his insistence to the contrary, how very fragile he remains. Now she sees him falter. He looks as though he might claps. The nurse grabs a nearby wheelchair and rushes outside.

But by the time she's halfway down the path, Orwell has turned on his heel. He looks up and smiles and waves a hand at her, a signal that there's no need for fuss, something Orwell cannot abide even when fuss is precisely what's required. Slowly, steadily, he walks back to the ward. he has a thank you letter to write and after that a masterpiece to complete Orwell is delighted

when a few weeks later he is deemed well enough to go home at last he can be with Richard now a sunny energetic four-year-old and he can get back to revising a book that his treacherous lungs had forced him to set aside As with Animal Farm, this latest work pulls together many of his abiding concerns, but does so in a different way.

This time, reminiscent of one of his great heroes, H.G. Wells. The story is set in a future version of Great Britain, or Airstrip One, as it's now called in this fictional world. In this dystopia, words, actions and thoughts are monitored and controlled by a one-party government led by a dictator known as Big Brother. The story's protagonist is Winston Smith, an ordinary citizen who secretly detests the totalitarian regime. He discovers an underground resistance movement and begins an affair with a like-minded young woman named Julia.

But it turns out they are under more surveillance than they realize. Both are apprehended by the government, tortured, and brainwashed into obedience. In anatomizing this hellish regime, Orwell introduces a powerful set of concepts with an evocative vocabulary, newspeak, double-think, thought crime. Winston is tortured in Room 101, a venue where each individual is confronted with their darkest fears, and citizens are reminded to behave with the government slogan, Big Brother is watching you. Now, out of hospital, Orwell heads back to Jura to finish the manuscript. However, as the book is nearing its completion, he suffers a serious relapse. The final weeks of 1948 are spent in bed with his typewriter once again, while Avril is on hand to look after him and Richard. The prospect of death looms large as 1949 begins.

But perhaps it is the death of others that most shapes the novel that Orwell has finally decided to call 1984. Insufficient consideration in my view has been paid to the impact Ireland's death has upon his mindset in writing a book about death. You know, it is a book about death

and the sort of the evacuation of hope from people. Orwell's work hails the strength of ordinary common decency. 1984 questions whether those simple values can withstand the pressures of the modern world. He wants to hold onto the thought that no matter what the dictators do and the fascists attempt and the communists try, they cannot stop the earth orbiting the sun. There is a hard limit to their power, in other words. But 1984 seems to suggest that, okay, that may be true.

But if you don't know that the world is orbiting the sun, if you cannot ascertain that, that, then it makes no difference. Its core message, I think, is don't trust authority to have your back. No sooner has Orwell finished the book, then he makes the long journey south for specialist treatment in the Cotswolds. Richard remains on Jura with Avril. At the sanatorium, a string of visitors note how dreadfully ill he looks. Thin, gaunt, exhausted.

One of those visitors is Celia Kirwan, sister-in-law to Orwell's friend, the writer Arthur Kirstler. Kerwin works for the Foreign Office in the Information Research Department. Her job is to counter Soviet propaganda, a huge political issue of the day, and one that Orwell is very interested in. During Kerwin's visit, she and Orwell discuss writers who might be useful to her work. A week later, Orwell sends her a list of British writers he describes as Crypto-Communists, those who secretly sympathize with the Soviet Union and therefore cannot be trusted by the government for counter-propaganda purposes.

In subsequent years, some will cite this as proof of Orwell's break with leftist politics. Others suggest it's an ironic betrayal of the principles at the heart of 1984, that he is effectively doing the work of Big Brother, denouncing fellow writers for their political views, accusing them in other words of thought crimes. But his defenders insist this is unfair, that Orwell still believes in intellectual freedom, but recognizes the danger of having pro-Stalinists involved in government work. The list is composed two months. before 1984 is released into the world.

The novel is an instant success, even more so than Animal Farm four years earlier. Some see it as a condemnation of Stalin's Russia. Certain critics even recognize it a dark satire of the labor government in post-war Britain. Others think it a warning about the perils of mass media technology. These different readings set the pattern of things to come. Every generation will reinvent 1984 as something scorchingly relevant to their own times. 1984 is a bit of a raw shark test.

You can kind of see in it what you want. So for a time, it's seen as a satire on surveillance. Another time, it's seen as a satire on totalitarianism, specifically. At other points, it's about truth and post-truth, and, you know, that's very much the all-well we have at the moment. By early autumn, 1949, the book is a publishing juggernaut in Britain. Britain and America. But Orwell continues to be plagued by tuberculosis.

In September he is transferred to a private wing at University College Hospital in central London. The rationale seems to be no more than a change is as good as a rest. However, the move also brings him closer to Sonia Brownell, a young woman he got to know through her work for the magazine Horizon, which belongs to an old school friend of his. In recent months, she's visited Orwell several times, and now, to the astonishment of just about everyone, she becomes his fiancée. Brownell is actually one of several women to whom Orwell has proposed since Eileen's death in 1945.

In his poor health, he perhaps seeks someone to look after him, and to take care of his son should the worst happen. Brownell is the first woman to say yes. Quite why is unclear. it's simply an act of kindness for a desperately ill man, though some biographers have painted her as an opportunist with an eye on his literary estate. The wedding takes place in Orwell's hospital room on the 13th of October, 1949. It possibly provides Orwell with some solace, but his condition deteriorates. Three months later, at the age of 46, he dies on the 21st of January,

1950. Though Sonia becomes heavily involved in Orwell's literary legacy, Richard is now raised by Avril and her husband Bill, whom she marries in 1951. In the decades since his death, Orwell become synonymous with many things. Englishness, moral clarity, precision of expression, speaking truth to power, to name but a few. A foundation is set up in his name to promote political writing and which awards annual prizes for books and journalism. But it's his final two works, Animal Farm and 1984, that have come to define him in the public imagination. 1984 in particular is embedded in the culture of the English-speaking

world. It is a constant reference point in politics, literature and pop culture. In the 1970s, David Bowie attempts to turn the novel into a stage musical, but is denied. by Orwell's widow. Two famous film adaptations are made, and the book also inspires hit TV shows, Big Brother, and Room 101. Indeed, Orwell's very name has become an adjective. The word Orwellian is shorthand for the over-surveillance

that comes with authoritarian power. This curious, contradictory man has become indispensable to our understanding of the modern world. Simultaneously, a visionary ahead of his time, ahead of his time, and dogged by a nostalgia of a lost England, at times Orwell seems as inescapable as Big Brother himself. But his opinion of the hyper-connected digital world that has emerged in the decade since his death, in which almost every human action seems to generate data, to be stored, analyzed, and sometimes even weaponized, is something we can only imagine.

This is a question that is always asked. What would he make of certain things that are happening at? we sort of need Orwell to be around, perhaps because we might feel slightly adrift culturally, were he not there in our language, because he's always been there. You know, if we didn't have the word or the phrase room 101, we would have to invent it. So he feels alive in that sense. He is present everywhere. of Bletchley Park. We won the war, partly thanks to our ability to read our enemy's hand. We are reading Enigma codes, encrypted codes from 1940.

But that sort of pinch point where it helps us win the war is really from 1942 onwards. War is not just bullets and beaches and dead men and nowadays dead women. It's actually something that's often invisible. And I think that's probably the takeaway of Bletchley Park. That's next time. If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noyser Plus. Head to www.org.com forward slash subscriptions for more information.

Next time on Short History of We'll bring you a short history of George Orwell. That's next time. Wait, I didn't get charged for my donut. It was free with this Tim's rewards points. I think I just stole it. I'm a donut stealer. Ooh. Earn points so fast, it'll seem too good to be true.

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