Chapter 1 - Life and context

Summary

Background and schooldays

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Motihari in the eastern part of Bengal Province, India. (For consistency, we will refer to Eric Blair as George Orwell throughout despite the fact that he didn’t adopt that pen name until 1933.) Orwell would carefully categorize his family as “lower upper middle class,” typical of his fascination with all matters relating to class. His family background was rather better than that. One ancestor on his father’s side had married a daughter of the Earl of Westmoreland. Orwell’s father, Richard Walmsley Blair, was descended from an eighteenth-century family that had made its living in the expansion of the British Empire. Richard Blair was born in 1857 and joined the Indian Civil Service in 1875 as an agent in the Opium Department. He served in that capacity with moderate success until his retirement in 1912.

Although she also was born in England, Ida Limouzin, Orwell’s mother, was of French descent. The Limouzin family had settled in the Far East where they were engaged in the timber business in Burma. While on a trip to India, Ida Limouzin met and married Richard Blair who was eighteen years her senior. The marriage was a typical late Victorian arrangement. Two children were born in India: Marjorie in 1898 and Eric five years later. In 1904 Orwell’s mother took the two children to England where they settled in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Orwell would not see his father again until he was eight years old except for a brief visit in 1907 when his sister, Avril, was conceived. The lack of a male authority figure would have consequences later in Orwell’s life.