However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there.

Orwell’s five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939). Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. You can find more work about Orwell in our library. Taylor is a Trustee of The Orwell Foundation. His Biography of Orwell, Orwell: the Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. The following biography was written by D.J. George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

George orwell aspidistra