George Orwell's Grave

TOPIC: GEORGE ORWELL

TEACHER: MISS CATALINA GARCÍA

SUBJECT: SCIENCE

GRADE: 4TH

GROUP: # “1”

NAME OF THE MEMBERS:

• GABRIELA DESIRÉ ORELLANA DÍAZ

• CINDY HASSEL PERDOMO MARTÍNEZ

• WALMAN EDUARDO MENDOZA MEMBREÑO

• WILMER ENRIQUE JIMÉNEZ BORJAS

• KALEB ANTONIO CÁCERES CARDONA

PLACE AND DATE: SAN PEDRO SULA 8/29/2013

INTRODUCTION

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (Motihari, British Raj, June 25, 1903, London, UK, January 21, 1950) was a British writer and journalist whose work bears the mark of personal experiences by the author of three stages of his life: his stand against British imperialism that led to the undertaking as a representative of colonial enforcement in Burma during his youth for social justice, having been observed and the conditions life of social classes of workers in London and Paris against the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism after his participation in the Spanish Civil War.

Orwell is one of the essayists in English twentieth century's greatest and best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism: Animal Farm and 1984 (which he wrote and published in his last years of life).

Witness of his time, Orwell is, in the thirties and forties, writer, literary critic and novelist. From his varied production, the two works that had a more lasting success were two texts published after the Second World War and Animal Farm, especially 1984 novel that created the concept of 'Big Brother' has since passed into the common language of the critique of the modern techniques of surveillance.

The adjective "Orwellian" is often used in reference to totalitarian dystopian universe imagined by British writer.

George Orwell: "In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act"

CONTENT

George Orwell

Early years

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, Bihar, in India. His great-grandfather Charles Blair was a wealthy country gentleman in Dorset who married Lady Mary Fane, daughter of Thomas Fane, 8th Earl of Westmorland, and had income as an absentee landlord of plantations in Jamaica.His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman. Although the gentility passed down the generations, the prosperity did not; Eric Blair described his family as "lower-upper-middle class". His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was involved in speculative ventures.Eric had two sisters: Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. When Eric was one year old, his mother took him and his older sister to England.

In January, Blair took up the place at Wellington, where he spent the Spring term. In May 1917 a place became available as a King's Scholar at Eton. He studied at Eton until December 1921, when he left at age 18½. Wellington was "beastly", Orwell told his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but he said he was "interested and happy" at Eton. His principal tutor was A. S. F. Gow, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who also gave him advice later in his career. Blair was briefly taught French by Aldous Huxley. Stephen Runciman, who was at Eton with Blair, noted that he and his contemporaries appreciated Huxley's linguistic flair. Cyril Connolly followed Blair to Eton, but because they were in separate years, they did not associate with each other.

Blair's academic performance reports suggest that he neglected his academic studies,but during his time at Eton he worked with Roger Mynors to produce a College magazine, The Election Times, joined in the production of other publications—College Days and Bubble and Squeak—and participated in the Eton Wall Game. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship, and they concluded from his poor results that he would not be able to win one. Runciman noted that he had a romantic idea about the East and the family decided that Blair should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. For this he had to pass an entrance examination. His father had retired to Southwold, Suffolk by this time; Blair was enrolled at a crammer there called Craighurst, and brushed up on his classics, English and History. Blair passed the exam, coming seventh out of the 26 candidates who exceeded the pass mark.

Personal life

Childhood

Jacintha Buddicom's account Eric & Us provides an insight into Blair's childhood. She quoted his sister Avril that "he was essentially an aloof, undemonstrative person" and said herself of his friendship with the Buddicoms "I do not think he needed any other friends beyond the schoolfriend he occasionally and appreciatively referred to as 'CC'". She could not recall his having schoolfriends to stay and exchange visits as her brother Prosper often did in holidays.Cyril Connolly provides an account of Blair as a child in Enemies of Promise. Years later, Blair mordantly recalled his prep school in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys", claiming among other things that he "was made to study like a dog" to earn a scholarship, which he alleged was solely to enhance the school's prestige with parents. Jacintha Buddicom repudiated Orwell's schoolboy misery described in the essay, stating that "he was a specially happy child". She noted that he did not like his name, because it reminded him of a book he greatly disliked - Eric, or, Little by Little, a Victorian boys' school story.

Connolly remarked of him as a schoolboy, "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself".At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes, his former headmaster's son recalled, "...he was extremely argumentative—about anything—and criticising the masters and criticising the other boys.... We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments—or think he had anyhow." Roger Mynors concurs: "Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself...."

Blair liked to carry out practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging from the luggage rack in a railway carriage like an orangutan to frighten a woman passenger out of the compartment. At Eton he played tricks on John Crace, his Master in College, among which was to enter a spoof advertisement in a College magazine implying pederasty. Gow, his tutor, said he "made himself as big a nuisance as he could" and "was a very unattractive boy".Later Blair was expelled from the crammer at Southwold for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor.In one of his As I Please essays he refers to a protracted joke when he answered an advertisement for a woman who claimed a cure for obesity.

Blair had an enduring interest in natural history which stemmed from his childhood. In letters from school he wrote about caterpillars and butterflies, and Buddicom recalls his keen interest in ornithology.

Religious views

Orwell was a communicant member of the Church of England, he attended holy communion regularly, and allusions to Anglican life are made in his book A Clergyman's Daughter. Mulk Raj Anand has said that, at the BBC, Orwell could, and would, quote lengthy passages from the Book of Common Prayer. At the same time he found the church to be a "selfish...church of the landed gentry" with its establishment "out of touch" with the majority of its communicants and altogether a pernicious influence on public life. Moreover, Orwell expressed some scepticism about religion: "It seems rather mean to go to HC [Holy Communion] when one doesn't believe, but I have passed myself off for pious & there is nothing for it but to keep up with the deception." Yet, he was married according to the rites of the Church of England in both his first marriage at the church at Wallington, and in his second marriage on his deathbed in University College Hospital, and he left instructions that he was to receive an Anglican funeral.In their 1972 study, The Unknown Orwell, the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams noted that at Eton Blair displayed a "sceptical attitude" to Christian belief. Crick observed that Orwell displayed "a pronounced anti-Catholicism".Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1946, acknowledged Orwell's high moral sense and respect for justice but believed "he seems never to have been touched at any point by a conception of religious thought and life."

The ambiguity in his belief in religion mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell "vaunted" his atheism while Eric Blair the individual retained "a deeply ingrained religiosity". Ingle later noted that Orwell did not accept the existence of an afterlife, believing in the finality of death while living and advocating a moral code based on Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Lifestyle

Orwell was a heavy smoker, rolling his own cigarettes from strong shag tobacco, in spite of his bronchial condition. His penchant for the rugged life often took him to cold and damp situations, both in the long term as in Catalonia and Jura, and short term, for example, motorcycling in the rain and suffering a shipwreck. His love of strong tea was legendary—he had Fortnum & Mason's tea brought to him in Catalonia and in 1946 published "A Nice Cup of Tea" on how to make it. He appreciated English beer, taken regularly and moderately, despised drinkers of lager and wrote about an imagined, ideal pub in his 1946 newspaper article "The Moon Under Water". Not as particular about food, he enjoyed the wartime "Victory Pie" extolled canteen food at the BBC, and once ate the cat's dinner by mistake.He preferred traditional English dishes, such as roast beef and kippers.Reports of his Islington days refer to the cosy afternoon tea table.

His dress sense was unpredictable and usually casual. In Southwold he had the best cloth from the local tailor, but was equally happy in his tramping outfit. His attire in the Spanish Civil War, along with his size 12 boots, was a source of amusement. David Astor described him as looking like a prep school master, while according to the Special Branch dossier, Orwell's tendency to dress "in Bohemian fashion" revealed that the author was "a Communist".

Orwell's confusing approach to matters of social decorum—on the one hand expecting a working-class guest to dress for dinner, and on the other, slurping tea out of a saucer at the BBC canteen —helped stoke his reputation as an English eccentric.

Biographies of Orwell

Orwell's will requested that no biography of him be written, and his widow Sonia Brownell repelled every attempt by those who tried to persuade her to let them write about him. Various recollections and interpretations were published in the 1950s and 1960s, but Sonia saw the 1968 Collected Works as the record of his life. She did appoint Malcolm Muggeridge as official biographer, but later biographers have seen this as deliberate spoiling as Muggeridge eventually gave up the work. In 1973, American authors Stansky and Williams produced an unauthorised account of his early years which lacked any contribution from Sonia Brownell.

She commissioned Bernard Crick, a left-wing professor of politics at the University of London, to complete a biography and asked Orwell's friends to co-operate.Crick collated a considerable amount of material in his work, which was published in 1980,but his questioning of the factual accuracy of Orwell's first-person writings led to conflict with Brownell, and she tried to suppress the book. Crick concentrated on the facts of Orwell's life rather than his character, and presented primarily a political perspective on Orwell's life and work.

After Sonia Brownell's death, other works on Orwell were published in the 1980s, with 1984 being a particularly fruitful year for Orwelliana. These included collections of reminiscences by Coppard and Crick and Stephen Wadhams.

In 1991, Michael Shelden, an American professor of literature, published a biography.More concerned with the literary nature of Orwell’s work, he sought explanations for Orwell's character and treated his first-person writings as autobiographical. Shelden introduced new information that sought to build on Crick's work.Shelden speculated that Orwell possessed an obsessive belief in his failure and inadequacy.

In 2003, the centenary of Orwell's birth resulted in biographies by Gordon Bowker and D. J. Taylor, both academics and writers in the United Kingdom. Taylor notes the stage management which surrounds much of Orwell's behaviour, and Bowker highlights the essential sense of decency which he considers to have been Orwell's main motivation

CONCLUSIONS

1. George Orwell argued for social justice and against totalitarianism that prevailed at the time.

2. Orwell is one of the essayists in English twentieth century's greatest and best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism: Animal Farm and 1984.

3. Throughout his career he was primarily known for his work as a journalist, especially in his writings as a reporter, but also was an excellent writer.

REFERENCES

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell

ANNEXES

Blair family home at Shiplake University College Hospital where Orwell died

George Orwell's grave

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