by George Orwell

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, at Motihari in Bengal to a father who served as a middle-ranking official in the Opium Department of the Government of India. In 1904 Blair’s mother took him and his older sister Marjorie “home” to England, their father joining them on his retirement in 1911. Blair had a comfortable middle-class upbringing and, upon finishing his schooling at Eton, joined the Imperial Indian Police, which posted him to Burma. After five years’ service, however, he resigned, partly, as he later put it, “because the climate had ruined my health”—a reference perhaps to the tuberculosis that was to kill him at the age of 46 in 1950; “partly,” he continued, “because I already had vague ideas of writing books, but mainly because I could not go on any...