Nineteen Eighty-Four: The story behind the story

Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece has been called the most important novel of the 20th century. Finishing what he called ‘that wretched book’ all but killed its author and who knew that the now famous date was actually a last minute amendment?

Introduction: Published in 1948, Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most significant and influential novels of the 20th century.

Much has been written about it over the years: A dystopian world of institutional control and total surveillance, ‘thoughtcrime’, ‘doublethink’, political suppression and endless war, and a government that controls culture to the point it destroys its citizens’ ability to think independently.

These days, many of us are more familiar with Big Brother as being the reality TV show than the mustachioed face that watches over everyone in Orwell’s book.

As a talented author, Orwell’s words — and he produced almost two million of them over the course of a two decade career — have found a place within everyday vernacular and enriched the English language.

Much of his writing was preoccupied with the importance of speaking the truth and the risk to both individuals and societies when states attempt to censor and manipulate speech.

The book’s origins: Orwell first outlined his idea for a novel about the future, around the end of 1943, but it would be another five years before he typed the final words. In the intervening period, he road-tested many of the book’s most important ideas, images and phrases in hundreds of articles for magazines and newspapers.

All which would lead to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In it, Orwell describes how a hierarchical world tyranny is set up, how it stays in power, how it treats its people, and what life is like living under such a system. Nineteen Eighty-Four is in fact a coded blueprint for world tyranny, laying bare its structure and exposing its components.

As always, he drew on his own experiences, of working for the BBC during the war and living in Blitz-battered postwar London, to create a version of totalitarianism that was too close for comfort.

The story: Orwell’s novel is set in Airstrip One, a place once known as Great Britain, but now a province of the totalitarian superstate of Oceania and locked in perpetual conflict with two other blocs: Eurasia and Eastasia. Nineteen Eighty-Four is full of intriguing new machines, such as omnipresent screens which both addict and at the same time, watch over their citizens.

Orwell had minimal interest in science fiction, and an understanding of technology so limited that he didn’t even explain how his famous invention, the two-way telescreen, actually worked.

One of the citizens that they watched over is Winston Smith a low-ranking civil servant living in war-torn London. Grey, thin, and unable to climb the stairs without stopping to rest, and doubled up every morning by ‘a violent coughing fit’ that leaves him lying breathless on the floor, Winston is plainly Orwell who was dogged by health issues his entire life.

And as for the book’s Room 101, even that got its name from Room 101 in the BBC building where Orwell’s department used to hold its weekly meetings.

The story follows Winston’s life as he struggles to maintain his sanity and his grip on reality, while the regime’s overwhelming power and influence persecutes individualism and individual thinking on both a political and personal level.

Winston inhabits a world in which individuality has been made almost obsolete, history is rewritten daily and reality is fabricated according to the whims of the state.

Julia, the heroine of the novel, works in a government department known as Minitru, which systematically distorts access to information in highly subtle ways. To blind the citizens to their enslavement, she operates a machine that turns out porn novels, alongside films oozing with sex, and newspapers containing almost nothing but sport, crime and astrology.

Propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is what the Party says it is. However, the people don’t feel they’re enslaved.

To meet the ideological requirements of English Socialism (INGSOC) in Oceania, the ruling Party created Newspeak, a controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, free will — that threatens the ideology of the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalised such concepts into thought crime, as contradictions of INGSOC orthodoxy.

By weakening strength and independence of public minds, and compelling them to live in a continuous state of propaganda-induced terror, the Party force the people to accept anything, no matter if it were entirely illogical.

Apparently, Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, merely a warning. And it’s as a warning that Nineteen Eighty-Four keeps finding new relevance.

Its relevance today: Although Nineteen Eighty-Four wasn’t a prophecy, it’s full of prophetic statements: deforestation, the distribution of habit-forming drugs, the degeneration of language, even the forecast of a national lottery.

It contains some brilliant insights, in particular his concept of newspeak, the reshaping of language to make truth inexpressable.

Orwell’s unique clarity of thought and illuminating scepticism provide the perfect defence against our post-truth world of fake news and confusion.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother, the sinister party leader, inspires fear and a slavish love in his subjects by holding political rallies in which he stirs crowds into murderous frenzies directed at his enemies.

The “Party” in Orwell’s book rewrites history to its liking and convinces the general population that it was never any different. The people are brainwashed to accept contradictions as fact in a concept Orwell calls “doublethink.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four projects a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. As does the very term “Orwellian,” used increasingly to describe any number of troubling developments: from the habitual lying of world leaders to the toxic politicisation of the news media.

“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”

While Nineteen Eighty-Four is an indictment about specific governments, it’s also a warning about the importance of free thought and speech and society’s relationship with truth. One of the most prophetic of all Orwellian lexicons is:

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

Orwell’s narrative surges in relevance in today’s political climate. In an era filled with “alternative facts” and “fake news” his final novel was certainly prescient for what it says about exerting power by distorting reality.

The Trump administration: In 2017, when “alternative facts” rolled out of former Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s mouth, her words mirrored Orwell’s “doublespeak” and the discussions about it were enough to send his then 68-year-old novel to the top of Amazon’s chart— before completely selling out.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell writes that the final command of Big Brother was “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final most essential command.”

The same was often said during the Trump era. Believe the authorities, don’t believe your own senses, don’t believe the historical record.

This was best illustrated in July 2018 when, in an attack on the media during a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City, Trump said:

“Just remember what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what is happening.”

It was an oft-repeated message throughout his presidency. It continued unabated when he was not re-elected. For then of course came ‘the big lie.’

Like most of Trump’s rhetoric it was not an original thought, merely a plagiarised one. In this case, its source was from another dark time in world history.

Attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, “If you tell a lie big enough and then keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

For months, the former President spread lies about the 2020 election, calling it ‘the big lie’ claiming a massive conspiracy robbed him of a second term. As a result, many Republicans now question the election results and the lie has taken on a life of its own.

Putin: Fast forward to 2022, and if you’ve been paying attention to how Vladimir Putin talks about the war in Ukraine, you may have noticed a similar pattern. The Russian president often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they normally do.

He labels acts of war, for example, as “peacekeeping duties.”

He claims to be engaging in the “denazification” of Ukraine while seeking to overthrow or even kill that country’s Jewish president, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor no less.

He opines Ukraine is plotting to create nuclear weapons, while the greatest current threat of nuclear war is Putin himself.

This brazen manipulation of language is drawing attention. In a CNN interview, Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, said of Putin:

“When he says, ‘I want peace,’ this means, ‘I’m gathering my troops to kill you.’ If he says, ‘It’s not my troops,’ he means ‘It’s my troops and I’m gathering them.’ And if he says, ‘OK, I’m retreating,’ this means ‘I’m regrouping and gathering more troops to kill you.’”

Rudik’s comments about Putin remind me of another set of claims:

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Those were the words written on the side of the government agency building called the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell used this feature of the novel to draw attention to how totalitarian regimes — like the book’s fictional state of Oceania — perversely warp language to gain and retain political power. Orwell’s keen understanding of this phenomenon was the result of having witnessed it himself.

Orwell warned against the kind of abuses of language Trump and Putin commit, writing:

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell explored what mutual corruption of language and politics in a totalitarian regime looks like. Here the only crime is “thoughtcrime.” The ruling class seeks to eliminate its possibility by banishing the language needed to have the thoughts they had criminalised — which included any thought that would undermine the party’s totalitarian control. Limit language and you limit thought, or so the theory goes.

In March 2022, Russia ratcheted up its battle against truth and transparency when it passed a law banning the words “war” and “invasion” to describe its behaviour in Ukraine. The law sets prison sentences of up to 15 years for anyone who dares utter those words or spread other “fake news” about the conflict.

As BBC Newsnight reported:

“To utter the words ‘no to war’ in Russia today is an act of courage and defiance against an Orwellian regime that has outlawed the very use of the word war.”

Doublespeak is a political tool. As it is for many authoritarians and would-be authoritarians around the world, and just like it is with Trump, it’s also one of Putin’s weapons of choice. As Orwell warned:

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

Like many, I was first drawn to Nineteen Eighty-Four and in particular some of its famous quotes as they took on a renewed relevance in the age of Trump and the political doctrine he espouses. Two years after Trump lost the election or as he would have you think, had it stolen from him, Putin is doing the exact same thing.

And, not surprisingly, Trump still keeps trying to bend the truth. In a statement he put out on 6 May 2022 he said:

“Don’t believe anything you read, hear or see. It’s totally made up. It’s fake news folks.”

And his acolytes agree. Speaking on 17 June 2022 at the time of the January 6 Committee Hearings, former White House communications director, Alyssa Farah Griffin had this to say:

“The more that people pushed back against the Big Lie, many Trump supporters actually believe it more.”

Coincidentally, on the very same day, one of Putin’s closest advisors, the foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was telling the BBC of a parallel reality. He declared Russia “has not invaded Ukraine” and repeated the official line from the Kremlin that there is “no war” just what is called a special military operation.

Lavrov went onto say “It’s a great pity, but international diplomats including the UN high commissioner for human rights, the UN secretary general and other UN representatives, are being put under pressure from the West and very often they are being used to amplify fake news spread by the West.”

Now denying a war and just renaming it as a special military operation is pretty much the exact same thing that the Ministry of Truth would do in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And today, whilst that war is still being fought, another is also raging. And that’s the war on truth.

Following the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-A-Lago — the first time a former President’s home had ever been the subject of a search warrant — there was a huge escalation in the rhetoric about what was true and what wasn’t. Depending on where you got your news from — and who you believed to be telling the truth — you could just as easily blame the FBI and Department of Justice, as you could the former President. With so much disinformation around, it quickly reached the point where, for some, the facts just didn’t matter.

As Reed Galen from the Lincoln Project commented on 13 August 2022:

“These lies are not for us, they’re for the people watching Fox News, the people that are deeply imbedded in Trump’s authoritarian movement and believe in him. For them, the truth isn’t part of the deal anymore. And the more egregious the lie, the more these folks believe it to be the truth. What we’re seeing is the right wing moving to find any defence-able space they can for Donald Trump. And remember, the truth has nothing to do with it. It just doesn’t exist in their world. And once you hear Trump say “I declassifed them” you know he didn’t. Because whatever he says out loud, you can take the opposite of what the truth is in the real world.”

On 7 September 2022, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said much the same:

“Whatever Donald Trump says, the truth is always worse…and usually the opposite.”

And that was something Trump himself reiterated yet again at a Save America rally in Youngstown, Ohio on 18 September 2022 when he barefacedly accused the “radical, left wing” Democrats of doing precisely what he always does:

“They are the party of total disinformation.”

Five days later, he repeated the same anti-Democrat message at another Save America rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on 23 September 2022:

“You know, everything they do is disinformation. And they keep saying it and saying it and people start believing it.”

In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s 2022 best-selling book on Trump they write:

“After years of experience, Trump knew how to sell the big lie. He had done it many times before. As a real estate developer, he had claimed his buildings were taller than they were. As a reality TV star, he had made up conflicts between contestants to juice his ratings. As a political provocateur, he had claimed without a lick of proof that the nation’s first black president was secretly born in Africa. The trick with conspiracy theories, he had demonstrated, was repetition and conviction.”

Such blatant projection is of course a regular part of the Trump playbook. Especially when it comes to twisting the truth. Indeed, he’s elevated it to an effective political tactic.

There’s a popular quote about truth that’s often attributed to George Orwell and said to come from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Given the subject matter, it’s a beautiful irony that the quote itself doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the book. Neither is there any substantive evidence that Orwell either said or wrote those words. Indeed the earliest appearance researchers can find is in a 1982 book by Venturino Giorgio Venturini where the quote was attributed to Orwell.

Fittingly, the next time it appeared was in 1984 itself when Science Dimension, a Canadian magazine published a letter from a reader named David Hoffman who stated “I think George Orwell said in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Ironically, it proves what Goebbels once said about a lie: if you keep repeating it enough times, people will eventually come to believe it!

The genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four: As a boy, Orwell had loved the novels of H.G. Wells, especially The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds. Like Wells, Orwell seized upon trends in his own time and tried to imagine how they might develop over the long term.

As with all his books, Nineteen Eighty-Four is based on Orwell’s own experiences and its characters are drawn from his own circle. Some of his earliest experiences in Burma continued to shape his thinking for the rest of his life.

He first wrote about his time there in Burmese Days, which chronicles the country’s period under British colonialism. Not long after, Burma became independent from Britain. In 1948, a military dictator sealed off the country from the outside world, launched ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’, and turned Burma into one of the poorest countries in Asia.

Orwell tells much the same story in his penultimate novel Animal Farm, an allegorical tale about a socialist revolution gone wrong in which a group of pigs overthrow the human farmers and run the farm into ruin.

Finally, in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell’s description of a horrifying and soulless dystopia paints a chillingly accurate picture of Burma after the war, a country ruled by one of the world’s most brutal and tenacious dictatorships. He once said the novel wasn’t an attack on any particular government, but a satire of the totalitarian tendencies in Western society and intellectuals.

His experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War left a profound impression on him. The war’s violence didn’t shock Orwell, but its lies did. The demonisation of the POUM, and the mindless repetition of Stalinist falsehoods by English intellectuals, hardened his mind to what happens when there’s no consensus about reality.

Who was George Orwell? Although I have to confess to never having read Orwell’s book from cover to cover, I’ve been increasingly curious to find out how it came to be written and to discover more about its author. Much of course has been written about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, there can’t be many books that have piqued so much interest for such a long time. That being said, I had no idea how many rabbit holes it would take me down or quite how intriguing that story would prove to be.

So let’s begin at the beginning and go back to where it all started.

The book itself opens with the words:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

It’s a line that only makes you think on the very last word: clocks don’t strike thirteen, they stop at twelve. Immediately, Orwell has grabbed your attention.

But if that’s how the story starts, how did it come to be? Who was George Orwell? Why did he write it? And what was he thinking?

His own story is quite convoluted. Appropriately for a novelist, even his name was fictional.

Motihari, India: He was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, northeast India, the son of Richard Walmesley Blair. Known as Dick, his father was an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, responsible for monitoring the production and distribution of opium across India.

The opium trade was big business. Some 1.3 million peasant farmers in northern India grew poppies and it was run by the East India Company who had a monopoly over opium cultivation and business with Asia. They monitored poppy farmers, and enforced contracts and quality with police-like authority.

The Blair’s family tree was quite impressive, with noble and exotic lineage.

Eric’s great-grandfather, Charles Blair, was a wealthy country gentleman in who married Lady Mary Fane, the daughter of Mildmay Fane, the 2nd Earl of Westmorland. He lived at Spetisbury Manor in the Dorset village of Spetisbury and had income as an absentee landlord from plantations in Jamaica. His grandfather, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair, was a clergyman.

Although his mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin) was born in Penge, near London, she grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father was a teak merchant and boat-builder. He would go on to lose much of his money speculating in rice.

Richard met Ida in 1896 in Naini Tul, a hill station that was a popular retreat for government officials in the hot season. At 39 he was almost twice her age. She was just 21 and an assistant mistress at the local school. They married on 15 June 1897 and the following year, Ida gave birth to their first child, Marjorie.

Eric would follow in 1903, with his sister Avril arriving five years later.

Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire: In 1904, after an outbreak of the plague in Motihari, Ida Blair took Eric, who was one, and Marjorie to England, settling in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. After a few rented properties, in September 1904 they moved to 52 Vicarage Road, which Ida dubbed Ermadale, by combining the first two letters of Eric and Marjorie’s names.

His father however remained in India until Eric was eight, only returning for three-months’ leave in 1907 when Avril was conceived. He did not rejoin his family until his retirement some four years later, at the age of 55, after 37 years of service.

Socially awkward, and lacking a father-figure, Eric recalled:

“I was a lonely child, and made up stories and held conversations with imaginery persons.”

“I think from the very start, my literary ambitions were mixed up with a feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”

When he was five, Eric was sent as a day-boy to a Roman Catholic convent school in Henley-on-Thames, which Marjorie also attended. It was run by French Ursuline nuns, who had been exiled from France after Catholic education was banned in 1903 following the Dreyfus Affair.

Eastbourne, East Sussex: Although his mother wanted him to have a public school education, the family couldn’t afford the fees, and he needed to earn a scholarship. Ida Blair’s brother Charles Limouzin recommended St Cyprian’s School, a snobbish and expensive school in Eastbourne on England’s south coast. As a proficient golfer, Limouzin knew of the school and its headmaster through the Royal Eastbourne Golf Club, where he won several competitions in 1903 and 1904.

Eric arrived at St Cyprian’s in September 1911. He was eight-years-old. The school’s founder and headmaster, Lewis Vaughan Wilkes, had agreed to help Eric win a scholarship and made a private financial arrangement that allowed his parents to pay half the normal fees.

“I did not know I was being taken by reduced fees. It was only when I was eleven was I made to understand I wasn’t on the same footing as most of the other boys.”

Eric boarded at St Cyprian’s for the next five years, only returning home for school holidays. A fellow student, recalled him as a recluse, someone who kept himself to himself which led to him being bullied. Another described Eric as “one of those boys who seemed born old.”

Lewis Wilke’s wife Cicely, with whom he co-founded the school, was the one in control of its syllabus. She was a great believer in history teaching and taught English. It is said she stimulated generations of writers with her emphasis on clear, high quality writing. No doubt, she also had a big influence on a young Eric Blair who excelled in Latin and Greek, and won the coveted English prize.

Later he would write:

“I left St Cyprians with a sense of coming out of darkness into sunlight.”

Shiplake, Oxfordshire: Before the First World War, the Blair family moved again, this time to Shiplake, not far from Henley-on-Thames, and a house called Roselawn. It was here on the eve of war that 11-year-old Eric became friendly with the Buddicom family, especially their 13-year-old daughter Jacintha.

They met in the summer of 1914 when Eric was standing on his head in a meadow at the bottom of the Buddicoms’ garden. When asked why, he replied:

“You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up.”

Eric and Jacintha — known as Cini to her friends — quickly became inseparable. They developed a shared interest in poetry, he enjoyed shooting, fishing and bird-watching, while with Jacintha he read and wrote poetry and dreamt of future intellectual adventures. He once told her that at some point he might write a book in a style similar to that of H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia.

Based on their mutual love of books, a close companionship developed over the next eight-years, which blossomed into a strong physical attraction. However, the pair lost touch after he departed for Burma in 1922. She became unsympathetic at the letters he wrote complaining about his life, and stopped writing back. Later she disputed Blair’s writings about his own childhood, especially the picture of childhood misery he described in his essay Such, Such Were the Joys.

The two of them only came into contact again near the end of his life. Jacintha gave an account of the relationship in her memoir Eric & Us, published in 1974, which suggests that the then eighteen-year-old Blair attempted a botched seduction shortly before his departure to Burma, but she never took their romance seriously.

Berkshire: In January 1917, Eric took up a place at Wellington College in Berkshire. He only spent one term there as by May 1917 a place at Eton had become available as a King’s Scholar. By now the family had moved again, this time they were living at Mall Chambers, in London’s Notting Hill Gate. He remained at Eton until December 1921, leaving midway between his 18th and 19th birthday.

Wellington was “beastly”, Orwell told Jacintha, but he said he was “interested and happy” at Eton, although he didn’t think it was the school for him because there were so many regulations.

As at St Cyprian’s, fellow Etonians remember him as being rather mature and very well read, with an interest in words and English.

Southwold, Suffolk: Eric rejoined his now-retired father and mother who were now living on the east coast. However, without another scholarship they couldn’t afford to send him to Oxford, so it was decided he should go to India. Eric it seemed just wanted to get away and whilst his father wanted him to serve the Empire and join the Indian Civil Service, he had other ideas.

In 1922 he was sent to Craighurst, a private “crammer college” to prepare for the entrance examination. The following June he passed, just scraping through with enough marks to allow him to join the Indian Imperial Police where he was assigned to a force in Burma — his mother’s birthplace.

Burma (now Myanmar): On 27 October 1922 and just 19 years old, Eric sailed onboard the steamer SS Herefordshire from Liverpool via the Suez Canal and Ceylon to Burma. After a month at sea, and a journey of 8,000 miles, he disembarked at Rangoon and travelled to the police training school in Mandalay.

Eric spent five years from 1922 to 1927 in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma where he was one of 90 officers in charge of 13,000 native police who were responsible for law and order over a population of 13 million.

It’s fair to say he didn’t enjoy his first job. For one, he couldn’t stand the Buddhist monks. His essay Shooting an Elephant, deftly captures his discomfort, and ultimately disgust, at being part of the British colonial system in its slow death throes. Of life in Burma, he wrote:

“It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. A world in which every word, every thought is censored. You are not free to think for yourself.”

His experiences in Burma left him with a deep-seated hatred of authority and imperialism that can be traced via his work in the 1940s for the Observer to his final novel, 1984. But he liked the country itself. The beauty of the landscape fed a passion for the natural world that lasted until his death and inspired his first novel Burmese Days.

And the country left an impression on him other ways too. Whilst there, he made changes to his appearance that remained for the rest of his life. This included adopting a pencil moustache and having each of his knuckles tattooed with a small blue spot. This was a traditional Burmese charm against death from a bullet-wound or knife-thrust.

He had been assigned to Katha in Upper Burma where in 1927 he contracted the mosquito-borne tropical disease dengue fever. Not for the first time, illness would affect his future. Entitled to a leave in England that year, he was allowed to return in July due to his illness.

Polperro, Cornwall: Back in England, in September 1927 he went on holiday with his family to Polperro in Cornwall. Whilst there he reappraised his life, deciding not to return to Burma. “It was a most unsuitable profession for me” he wrote. He left the Indian Imperial Police to become a writer, a decision that shocked his family.

“I resigned in the hope of earning my living as a writer. I succeeded almost as well as most young people who take up a career of letters — that is to say, not at all. My first year of literary work paid me scarcely twenty pounds.”

Southwold, Suffolk: In England, Eric settled back in the family home at Southwold where his presence was a source of irritation between Eric and his father. Whilst there he renewed acquaintances with local friends and attended an Old Etonian dinner. He also visited Andrew Gow, his old classics tutor at Eton, at Trinity College, Cambridge seeking advice on becoming a professional writer.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, North London: Throughout his life, Eric had a particular interest in those on the margins and almost always wrote from his own personal experiences. Keen to witness the abject poverty of England for himself, he spent time ‘researching’ the subject by infiltrating the poor of London. To do this, he would dress as a tramp, using a friend’s house at 1B Oakwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb to change into what he referred to as his ‘tramping attire’. During the days he’d read Balzac in French and by night he’d be bedding down by Trafalgar Square, using the fountains to wash his face.

By the end of 1927, he’d moved into rooms at 22 Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Although he didn’t stay long, today a blue plaque commemorates his time living there.

Paris, France: In February 1928 Orwell decided to decamp to Paris. He spoke French fluently and had connections with Paris, as his aunt Nellie Limouzin lived in the city. He was also of French descent. His mother, Ida Limouzin, whilst born in England had a French father.

Whilst in Paris he lived in a hotel on the rue du Pot de Fer, a dingy, cobbled street in the Latin Quarter and fictionalised as the rue de Coq d’Or in his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell described the Hotel des Tres Moineaux as being “a dark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into forty rooms”. It was here he began to write novels, including an early version of Burmese Days.

At the end of February 1929 he fell seriously ill with “une grippe” and was taken to the Hôpital Cochin in the 14th arrondissement, a free hospital where medical students were trained. He remained there for the next three weeks. Later he recalled his hospital experience in an essay How the Poor Die, published in 1946 which describes it as a dark, filthy place.

Shortly afterwards, an Italian staying at the lodging house broke into his room and stole most of his money. To get by, Orwell pawned some of his clothes and set himself a budget of six francs a day. But, despite his frugality, his “money oozed away — to eight francs, to four francs, to one franc, to twenty-five centimes”. Apart from dry bread, for almost three days he had “nothing to eat whatever”.

Finally, a Russian friend and waiter helped him find a job in a hotel as a plonguer, a dishwasher. Orwell described the work as “thoroughly odious” and found it difficult to imagine that “people spend their whole decades at such occupations”. But his time as a dishwasher was short-lived.

Southwold, Suffolk: After nearly two years in Paris, in December 1929 Orwell returned to England and went directly to his parents’ home at 3 Queen Street in Southwold, which would remain his base for the next five years.

At this point in his life, his writing had earned him a mere twenty pounds.

In Southwold he became acquainted with many local people including Brenda Salkeld, the clergyman’s daughter who worked as a gym-teacher at St Felix Girls’ School in the town. Although she rejected his offer of marriage, she remained a friend and he continued to write to her until 1949 — just before his second wedding and only weeks before his death. The letters showed he used Salkeld as a sounding board for his ideas.

Leeds, Yorkshire: In early 1930 he went to Bramley, Leeds, for three months to stay with his sister Marjorie and her husband Humphrey Dakin. Whilst there he began to write about his experiences living on the breadline in Paris. Originally to be titled A Scullion’s Diary, his first book would eventually be published three years later under a new name Down and Out in Paris and London.

Hayes, Middlesex: Forced to earn a living, in April 1932 he started as a teacher at The Hawthorns, a private boys school in Hayes, West London. Today the old school building is now the Fountains House Hotel and bears a plaque to Orwell.

He wasn’t keen on the place, writing that the school was “a foul place” and that that Hayes itself was “one of the most godforsaken places I have ever struck.”

“After my money came to an end I had several years of fairly severe poverty during which I was, among other things, a dishwasher, a private tutor and a teacher in cheap private schools.”

These experiences informed his first book, 1933s Down and Out in Paris and London which was drafted at Oakwood Road and was the first to bear his pen name. He had decided to write under another name as his father didn’t think writing was a proper career.

In a November 1932 letter to his literary agent, Leonard Parker Moore, he suggested four possible pseudonyms: P. S. Burton (the name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. He finally adopted the nom de plume George Orwell because “It’s a good round English name.”

As his son Richard later recalled: “George was a very common Christian name and the name of the King, the river Orwell, which runs through Ipswich, wasn’t very far from Southwold, where his parents lived. So he just put the two together. But he never legally adopted it as his name. It was just his pen name.”

Uxbridge, Middlesex: In July 1933 Orwell left Hawthorns to become a teacher at Frays College, in Uxbridge.

By January 1934, following a severe attack of pneumonia, he had abandoned school teaching and planned to devote himself fully to writing.

Hampstead, North London: In 1934 his aunt Nellie Limouzin recommended he take a job at Booklover’s Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Pond Street, Hampstead, ran by her friends from the Esperanto movement, Frances and Myfanwy Westrope.

The job appealed to him as he only had to work afternoons, leaving the mornings free for writing and the evenings for social activity.

The Westropes initially gave him accommodation at their home above the shop. Orwell stayed in Hampstead for six-months, during which he began writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying tells the story of Gordon Comstock, who works in a bookshop and lived in digs where the landlady had the plant of the title in the entrance hall. It was a semi-autobiographical piece, based on Orwell’s own experiences in Hampstead.

“Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra. Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it, starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased existence.”

It was also in Hampstead, early in 1935 that he met the then 29-year-old Eileen Maud O’Shaughnessy.

He had moved to a flat at 77 Parliament Hill owned by Rosalind Obermeyer. His literary mentor, Mabel Fierz, knew the owner and asked if she’d rent Orwell a room, thinking the fresh air from nearby Hampstead Heath would be good for his lungs.

Eight years older than Orwell, the divorced South African was taking an advanced course in psychology at University College London. It was at a party she threw at her flat, that Orwell met the woman who he would marry.

Invited by Rosalind, Eileen O’Shaughnessy was a slender woman with broad shoulders and dark brown hair. She was a graduate student at University College working on a Master’s degree in educational psychology. Orwell was attracted to her the instant she walked into the room and when the party finished he walked her to the bus stop. When he came back to the flat, he told Rosalind she was “the sort of girl I’d like to marry”.

It’s easy to understand why Orwell was attracted to her. They had similar experiences and similar interests. Having read widely in English literature, Eileen was one of the most intelligent women he’d ever met and could hold her own with him in discussions about poetry or fiction.

Like her suitor, Eileen had a varied career behind her. Born in South Shields, where her father worked for the Customs & Excise, she was unusual among women of her generation in possessing an Oxford English degree. Subsequently she taught in a girl’s boarding school, took odd clerical and administrative jobs and then ran her own typing agency, Murrells Typewriting Bureau, in Victoria Street. This was a business specialising in “translation, typing and secretarial services” created by Grace Murrell and taken over by Eileen before she gave it up to pursue a psychology degree at UCL.

Orwell had already been involved in several low-key romantic entanglements, but the seriousness of his intentions towards Eileen produced a whirlwind courtship. They went horse-riding at Blackheath, near the O’Shaughnessy family home in south London, and within three weeks he had as good as proposed.

During the summer of 1935 they spent many weekends together, staying in Greenwich or making excursions into the countryside. He repeated his proposal, but she put him off, saying she didn’t want to marry until she’d completed all the work for her degree.

So serious was he about marriage that he wanted them to become engaged. But as always with Orwell there was problem. “At present, alas! I can’t afford a ring, except perhaps a Woolworth’s one.” he would write.

As fate would have it, Eileen’s elder brother Laurence, was a thoracic surgeon and an eminent one at that. A Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons, he was also at the forefront of research on heart disease and tuberculosis. In fact, he was one of Britain’s leading experts on tuberculosis. In 1936, he founded a clinic at Lambeth Hospital for the treatment of cardiovascular disease, as well as becoming the consultant surgeon to the Preston Hall tuberculosis sanatorium, where Orwell would later be a patient.

Orwell’s first novel under his new name was several years in the writing. He began drafting Burmese Days in Paris from 1928 to 1929 and revised it in 1932 at Southwold while doing up the family home during the summer holidays. By December 1933 he’d typed the final version, and in 1934 delivered it to his agent, Leonard Moore, who submitted it to Victor Gollancz, the publisher of Orwell’s previous book. Gollancz, already fearing prosecution from having published another author’s work, turned it down as he was worried about charges of libel.

In the end, Burmese Days was published in New York in 1934. Set in Burma during the waning days of the British Empire, when the country was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, it’s a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.

Two years later, 1936 saw the first essay to appear under the Orwell name. Bookshop Memories, based on his time in Hampstead.

In January 1936 a £500 publisher’s advance sent him to northern England. Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write a personal report about the economic and social conditions in the depressed industrial areas of northern England.

The first book club in the UK, the Left Book Club was founded in 1936 to oppose war, inequality and fascism.

With his new commission, Orwell gave up his bookshop job in a Hampstead and spent the next three months gathering material for what was to become his next book, The Road to Wigan Pier.

Orwell’s account of his journey round the unemployment black-spots of the north of England, was published in March 1937, by which time he was nearing the end of his third month as a volunteer for the Republican army in Spain.

According to some of his friends, George Orwell was paranoid. In the mid-30s he thought Catholics were spying on him; during the Spanish Civil War he thought communists were shadowing him. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, relentlessly scrutinised by Big Brother, embodies that sense of persecution.

But it seems Orwell’s paranoia was justified. The Soviet secret police were watching him in Barcelona in 1937, and recently released documents reveal he was also under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5 as early as 1929, while living “down and out” in Paris.

Wallington: Lack of money was a constant hindrance throughout his writing career. The £500 advance meant he could at last become a full-time writer, escape the noise and poor air of London and get married.

By April 1936, Orwell had relocated once more. This time he moved to Wallington, a small Hertfordshire village three miles east of Baldock. Here he had found a 300-year-old thatched cottage. As the property was abandoned and in a neglected state, it was cheap, costing him just 7s 6d a week. He had impulsively rented it sight unseen.

Even by the standards of the 30s it was uncomfortably primitive, high on damp and low on modern amenities. There was no electricity, no hot water and only an outside toilet.

It was here the Orwells began their married life. He was 33, she was 30. They married in St. Mary’s church, Wallington on Tuesday 9 June. Orwell was happily telling a friend, “I’m getting married this very morning. In fact, I’m writing with one eye on the clock and the other on the Prayer Book,” a reference to his distrust of conventional pieties. There was no honeymoon. As Eileen wrote: “On the afternoon of June 9, he was married. On the morning of June 10 he was back at the typewriter as usual.”

The first few months of married life were probably Orwell’s happiest. He loved walking, the countryside and animals. The couple kept hens and goats, grew fruit and vegetables, and reopened the village shop in the cottage, then known as The Stores.

Today, the cottage at 2 Kits Lane, bears the name Monks Fitchett and a plaque records ‘Author George Orwell lived here between 1936 and 1940.’

His rural idyll was short-lived. Having sent his completed manuscript of The Road to Wigan Pier, his account of his northern trip, to Leonard Moore on 15 December, a few days before Christmas, Orwell travelled to Spain.

Barcelona, Spain: Five months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell went to Barcelona with the intention of writing newspaper articles.

Almost immediately, on 30 December, he enlisted in the rather obscure and ill-equipped Trotskyist militia of POUM (Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification) at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona “because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.”

Aragon, Spain: After a week of so-called training, he became a volunteer soldier in the revolutionary army against Franco and went to fight with the Independent Labour Party contingent on the Aragon front in northeast Spain.

In February, Eileen arrived in Barcelona.

On 10 May 1937, Orwell was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper, the 7mm bore, copper-plated Spanish Mauser bullet, shot from a distance of some 175 yards, missing his carotid artery by just a few millimetres. Under the impact, he fell on his back. Here’s how he described the experience:

“It was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock — no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing.”

His wound was dressed at a first aid post some half a mile from the actual line, and he was transferred first to Barbastro and then to the hospital at Lerida,

After receiving external treatment of his wound, Orwell remained at the hospital, under care of Dr Farre, until 27 May 1937 when he was transferred to Tarragona.

“Dr Farre told me, by some sort of unexplainable luck, no essential organ had been touched; he said the pain in my arm might be produced by abrasions of one of the main nerves and that the pain in my left side was probably due to hitting the ground when falling. He told me there was nothing to fear about the basic wound.”

On 29 May 1937, a month after being shot, Orwell was back in Barcelona and in the city’s Maurín Sanatorium. Walking wounded and with discharge papers in his pocket, he was suffering from semi-complete aphasia and a slight fever.

Although the pain in the left side had disappeared, the one in the arm subsisted unchanged. The doctor at the hospital in Tarragona had told him that his larynx was “broken” and that he would never recover a normal voice. At the time, it was said Orwell was only able to utter any sound so feebly that his speech was inaudible beyond a range of two yards.

When he began to recover from his wound the following month, he volunteered to return to battle. But in mid-June POUM was suddenly declared illegal. Following the orders of their Soviet backers, the communists demanded absolute allegiance. It was subversive even to think ill of the Party. Orwell was getting his first taste of totalitarianism.

From 20 to 22 June, he was on the run, investigated and hunted by the Communist police. Both he and Eileeen managed to escape across the French border on 23 June 1937.

Orwell returned from Spain nursing both real and metaphorical scars, but armed with material for his next book. A wounded fighter, his legend began to take hold. He’d made a name for himself and now had a well-defined role in English intellectual life.

He wrote about his time in Spain in Homage to Catalonia, but again Gollancz refused to publish it. Fortunately for Orwell, Secker & Warburg said they would take any book he wrote about his experiences and in April 1938, while the war was still raging, Homage to Catalonia was published. It sold only a few hundred copies during his lifetime.

A year after returning from Spain, as a precursor to the subject matter he would go on to cover in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell wrote “we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so”. Although widely attributed to Orwell, the reality is ‘Deux et deux font cinq” (Two plus Two make Five) was the title of a collection of short stories by French author Alphonse Allais and published in 1895!

Aylesford, Kent: 1938 also saw his health take another turn for the worse. One of his lungs haemorrhaged and on 17 March after being seen by Laurence O’Shaughnessy, he was rushed by ambulance to Preston Hall Colony in Aylesford, Kent. During World War I the hall had been used as a hospital and convalescent home for wounded servicemen. After the war, it built a reputation as a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis.

He was put in a private room paid for by his brother-in-law, who was treating him. During the five and a half month-long convalescence he advised the still frail Orwell that his health would benefit from a winter in warmer climes. The South of France was considered, until Laurence O’Shaughnessy suggested Morocco due to its dry climate.

Marrakesh, Morocco: In September 1938, financed by a £300 loan from an anonymous benefactor (in fact his friend, the wealthy novelist Leo Myers) Orwell and Eileen set out by sea for Morocco. They left Tilbury on 3 September sailing on the SS Stratheden to Gibraltar. They arrived in Marrakech on 14 September and checked into the Hotel Majestic.

In mid-December, they rented a villa just outside Marrakesh. Whilst there, he began writing Coming Up for Air, an elegy to a lost England gathered up beneath the shadow of the approaching war-planes and Marrakech, an essay exploring troubling themes such as racism, exclusivism, colonialism, de-humanisation and anti-Semitism, which would be published in 1939.

After finishing the first draft of Coming Up For Air, the Orwell’s took a week’s holiday at a hotel in Taddert in the Atlas mountains. On their return to Marrakesh on 27 January, Orwell fell ill for three weeks.

On 26 March 1939, after their six-month stay, they left Morocco, sailing from Casablanca and arriving in London on 30 March with the completed manuscript of Coming Up For Air. After a brief visit to Southwold, the Orwell’s arrived back in Wallington on 11 April 1939.

His last visit to Southwold was in the summer of 1939 to attend his father’s deathbed.

In the summer of 1940, as invasion threatened, he was appointed drama and film critic of the weekly magazine Time and Tide and the couple relocated to London and a mansion flat in Chagford Street NW1.

Wallington, Hertfordshire: War was looming and the future uncertain. Rejected for military service because of his ravaged lungs, Orwell moped in Wallington, before taking a job as a ‘talks producer’ in the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike, while Eileen began working for the censorship department in Whitehall, a job that would later prove informative for Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell would reluctantly relinquish the cottage as his main home in 1940, but retained the lease for a further seven years, snatching brief breaks there when time permitted.

London: After his spell at the BBC, Orwell became literary editor for the socialist magazine Tribune, a publication which mirrored Orwell’s philosophy of democratic socialism, adopted on his return from Spain. He liked the job as it left him time to write, and he especially relished his As I Please column in which he often wrote about his beloved countryside.

In London between the autumn of 1943 and April 1944 Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his exposure ‘of the Soviet myth’. Orwell said the idea for the book came to him in Wallington, when he saw a carthorse being controlled by a small boy. He realised men exploit animals ‘in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat’, and wondered what might happen if animals became aware of their strength.

Orwell credits Eileen for help in planning the satirical fable, which through the extensive use of allegory, recounts the tale of a group of farm animals who overthrow their farmer to build a new regime of justice and equality, run by and for the animals themselves.

Orwell used Wallington’s Manor Farm as his model, including its farm buildings and big barn which still stand today. All he did was change Wallington to Wallingdon and the people into animals, keeping many of their names and traits recognisable by the locals.

His final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, his warning that a totalitarian state could take hold, even in Britain, was also partly inspired by an event in Wallington. The police called on him in the village to warn him about importing banned books. He realised then he’d been under Special Branch surveillance and his post was being opened.

It’s also thought that Eileen’s futuristic poem, End of the Century 1984, published in 1934 a year before she met Orwell, influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four.

By now they were eager to become parents, however gynaecological problems prevented Eileen from conceiving. In May 1944, while doodle-bugs were dropping over London, her sister-in-law, Gwen O’Shaughnessy, told them of a Tyneside mother who’d given birth to a son she couldn’t keep due to a wartime affair.

Four weeks later, in June 1944, they were able to adopt the month-old boy who they named Richard Horatio Blair; the first name coming from Eric’s father and ‘Horatio’ after an uncle.

The effect of Richard’s arrival on Eileen is attested to by her friends: although worried that she might not love him enough, Eileen “wanted to live” again.

Shortly before the adoption, a bomb had caved in the ceiling of their flat at 10a Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn, so they had to relocate once more, moving to a top floor flat — “the most dangerous place to live when the bombs are falling” — at 27b Canonbury Square, Islington, North London. They would not be there long before tragedy struck.

In February 1945, just as the war was ending, Orwell left Tribune to become European correspondent for The Observer, travelling first to Paris. From there he went to Cologne where a re-occurrence of his health problems forced him into hospital. At the same time, Eileen was also in hospital.

She had gone into Fernwood House Hospital, Newcastle, for a hysterectomy, a rather common procedure for possible ovarian cancer, but on 29 March 1945 her heart stopped on the operating table due to an allergic reaction to the anaesthesia. She was just 39.

The last word in the unfinished letter she’d been writing him before she died was “clock” which is found in the first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In her previous letter she’s spoke of her hatred of London and her wish that he’d stop wasting his energy on journalism and move to the country where they could raise their child and he could write what she believed would be a masterpiece.

Orwell was still in Cologne when he received a telegram informing him of his loss. In a state of shock, he returned to England and travelled up for the funeral on 3 April 1945 at St Andrew’s Cemetery, Jesmond, Newcastle.

Orwell’s friends expected he’d put the child back up for adoption, but he refused to consider it. For the first few months after Eileen’s death, Richard lived with family friends so Orwell could get her affairs in order and find a nanny/housekeeper to help him with his young son while he worked. He would end up hiring Susan Watson.

Beset by problems, Animal Farm wasn’t published until August 1945. First the manuscript was nearly destroyed and had to be rescued from the rubble when the bomb hit their flat, then Orwell struggled to find a publisher. He even considered publishing it himself with the help of a loan from David Astor. War-time paper shortages led to its printing being delayed for several months, but when it did come out it was an instant success, so much so that by 1946, for the first time in his life, Orwell was in calm financial waters. But although he’d finally found the fame he’d always wanted and was now in demand as a writer, he was also mourning the loss of his wife.

On 19 October 1945, George Orwell was the first to coin the term cold war in his essay You and the Atom Bomb, speculating on the repercussions of the atomic age which had begun two months before when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In this article, Orwell considered the social and political implications of “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.”

During November 1946, Vernon Richards (born Vero Recchioni), a journalist and photographer friend of his, was commissioned to take photos of Orwell and his son in their Canonbury flat. Taken over two days, the photos captured Orwell doing every day things — having tea, playing with Richard, rolling shag cigarettes, working on carpentry and writing. In them, you can see his china tea cups, his books, his Burmese sword and Richard’s toys. Also featured was an old Victorian wicker chair he always sat in and next to it, his scrap screen, something he was quite proud of. So much so that he talked about it in his essay Just Junk — But Who Could Resist It?

Canonbury Square would be the last place Orwell and his son would live in London. A blue plaque now designates this an historic house.

Recently widowed, Orwell pined for female companionship.

He first met Sonia Brownell in the early years of the war when she was Cyril Connolly’s assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Orwell knew Connolly from his schooldays at St Cyprian’s. The two had remained friends and Connolly would go on to become his literary editor. More recently, Sonia had babysat his son, and gone to bed with him in a dutiful, perfunctory way.

A noted beauty, she liked mixing with writers and artists, among them William Coldstream and Francis Bacon. Like Orwell, she was also an ardent Francophile, counting among her friends French writers Michel Leiris and George Bataille.

As a young woman, Sonia Brownell was responsible for transcribing and editing the manuscript for the first edition of the Winchester Le Morte d’Arthur, as assistant to the eminent medievalist at Manchester University, Eugène Vinaver.

Drifting into the bohemian demimonde of London’s Fitzrovia, she fell in with a group of Bloomsbury-influenced artists, who clamoured to paint her.

Fifteen years his junior, Orwell found her vivacity irresistible. Aware he might die, he needed someone who could look after his literary affairs, and Sonia’s editorial experience, not to say her tenacity, impressed him. However, he was in Jura, hundreds of miles away from her in London. It meant their affair had to be put on hold.

She never claimed to be in love with him, and his approach to their marriage was equally unromantic (“learn how to make dumplings” seemed to be the gist of his proposal).

Her marriage to Orwell coincided with the sudden loss of her job when Horizon ceased publication. Her boss, Cyril Connolly, one of Orwell’s oldest friends, described the marriage as a “grotesque farce”.

Amid the postwar malaise, Orwell’s friends thought he looked even more gaunt and run-down than usual and desperately needed a change. After Eileen’s death, he couldn’t face living alone in Wallington. For years, he had dreamed of squirrelling himself away on a Hebridean island, so David Astor suggested he spend a few weeks on Jura where his family owned the 20,000-acre Tarbert estate.

Jura, Scotland: Located in the Inner Hebrides, the isle of Jura had fewer than 300 inhabitants who were outnumbered by 6,000 deer. Robin Fletcher, the laird of Jura, and his wife, Margaret, owned a farmhouse that needed a tenant to save it from ruin. To Orwell, it sounded ideal, so in May 1946, he and his younger sister Avril (who was always known as Av) left London for Jura.

Orwell described the secluded isle as “an extremely un-get-able place.” Getting there from meant a 48 hour journey: first by train to Glasgow, then another train to Gurock. From there it was a boat ride to Tarbuck, a bus to West Tarbuck, another boat to Craighouse, before finishing with a 17-mile taxi ride.

Situated at the north end of the island, Barnhill was about as remote and off the beaten track as you could get. The house needed Calor gas for heating water and cooking, and coal and peat to heat the house in the evenings.

With no phone or postal service — the mailboat, known as ‘the steamer’ called three times a week — his sole means of communication with the outside world was a battery radio. Even the nearest village, Ardlussa, was eight miles away along a rough track and the closest hospital was on the mainland in Glasgow.

Despite the isolation, Orwell loved living on Jura, especially after his housekeeper, Susan Watson, arrived with his son, Richard. The island offered the life Eileen had prescribed in her final letters to her husband: fresh air, family and fiction. Captivated by the sea and air and emptiness, he spent much of the year there. For the first few months he chose not to write but to work on Barnhill’s garden and spend time hunting for rabbits, fishing and catching lobsters.

In October 1946 he left for London, returning in April 1947, and again in July 1948 before deciding to permanently move to Jura.

Av would end up taking Susan Watson’s place and Barnhill was never short of family and friends visiting. It was on Jura that Orwell wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the idea for which had first come to him several years earlier, in 1943.

Av was also devoted to her brother and without her practical, no-nonsense way of looking after the house and his needs he wouldn’t have been able to cope. Her presence allowed him to concentrate on writing. In the months after the war, life was hard. Rationing was still in force and buying groceries, or anything for that matter, was a struggle. There was one small shop at Craighouse: some 23 miles south of Barnhill.

In the last four years of his life, from the time he moved permanently to Jura, his one and only goal was to finish writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. He pushed himself to the point where he was so weak he sometimes got dizzy spells and high temperatures just from the act of walking.

By the end of 1946, halfway through the writing, he become so ill he had to go to the Hairmyres Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium at East Kilbride, on the outskirts of Glasgow. He was admitted on Christmas Eve. He was told he had advanced tuberculosis of the left lung.

In those days, tuberculosis sanatoria concentrated on therapy involving a nutritious diet, exposure to fresh air and sunshine and graduated physical exercise. The antibiotic, streptomycin was discovered in the U.S.A. in 1942. It enabled previously ill patients to be made fit for surgery.

Orwell was the first patient in Scotland to receive the newly developed streptomycin. The doctors confiscated his typewriter, insisting that complete physical and mental rest was essential for effective treatment. Undaunted, for five months he sat in bed, propped up on pillows, and wrote in longhand with ball-point pen until finally he was well enough to get up and walk around the grounds.

Although his health improved a little, attempts to rest his badly affected lung by simple surgical procedures were not successful. Tragically, he proved to be allergic to streptomycin, his skin flaked, his mouth became painfully ulcerated, his hair and nails fell out. The side effects were so severe that the treatment which might otherwise have saved his life had to be stopped after fifty days.

Orwell spent the remainder of his seven month stay writing, walking in the grounds and playing croquet. In July 1947, he returned to Jura to finish writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, but his health continued to deteriorate.

In August 1947, Orwell led a boating expedition with his son and his nephews across the notorious Gulf of Corryvreckan. The small dinghy they were in overturned and they all nearly drowned in the whirlpool, the third largest in the world. This only worsened his health.

Just before Christmas 1947, a chest specialist visited Orwell on the island and diagnosed tuberculosis. Although told to rest, Orwell pushed himself to work on the book every day. He was so weak that he did most of his writing and typing lying in bed, chain-smoking. His sister Av used to complain that his Black Shag tobacco stunk the house to high heaven. It was the tobacco blend of the famous (and fictional) Sherlock Holmes.

As well as the cigarettes, working in the cold and damp, with a defective paraffin heater would prove to be the worst possible climate for his tuberculosis.

“I began to relapse about the end of September,” he wrote to a friend. “I could have done something about it then, but I had to finish that wretched book, which, thanks to illness, I had been messing about with for 18 months and which the publishers were harrying me for.”

Finally, near the end of October, he came downstairs to announce that the book was finished. Orwell had produced a manuscript, but one that was illegible to anyone save its author. A toast was made with the last drams of whisky and then he went back upstairs and started typing the final manuscript himself because in spite of his requests to his publisher to send a secretary to type it, no one had arrived and there didn’t seem to be anyone coming.

It was to be the final Herculean effort of his life, For the next six weeks he typed a dozen to twenty pages a day (around 4,000 words), seven days a week, sitting on the side of his bed with the typewriter on a chair in front of him.

From the beginning, Orwell was referring to the book as The Last Man in Europe. In fact, that was its title almost up until publication. A week before he finished typing he was still unsure what to put on the title page. On 22 October 1948 he had written to his publisher, Fredric Warburg:

“I am hesitating between The Last Man In Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

One can understand why naming it The Last Man In Europe appealed to him: he had lost most members of his family except for one sister and his adopted son. Indeed, in less than ten years, his wife, his father, and mother, as well as his sister and brother-in-law had all died. He’d also come very close to losing his own life while fighting in Spain.

It was Warburg who suggested choosing Nineteen Eighty-Four, deeming it a more commercial choice.

When it was finally finished, he packaged up the original and the carbon-copy and on 4 December 1948, sent one to his literary agent, Leonard Moore and the other to Warburg.

Immediately after mailing the final manuscript, Orwell physically collapsed and wasn’t capable of picking up a pen, let alone a typewriter. From the time he finished writing Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell never had a day when he wasn’t lying in bed, wasting away until he was “the thinnest a person can be and still live”. He had literally given everything he had to its creation.

Nineteen Eighty-Four would be published six months later on 8 June 1949.

Cranham, Gloucestershire: As soon as he was well enough to travel — just after Christmas 1948 — he left Jura for the last time to be admitted into the Cotswold Sanatorium for Consumption in Cranham, where it was hoped he’d recover.

Here in a small wooden chalet, just 15 feet by 12, Orwell lay tucked under an electric blanket. Piled around his sickbed were a variety of books: tomes on Stalin and on German atrocities in the Second World War, a study of English labourers in the nineteenth century, a few Thomas Hardy novels, some early Evelyn Waugh. Under the bed was a secret stash of rum.

Not for the first time, his typewriter had been confiscated. The doctors at the sanatorium had advised him to stop writing. Any kind of writing, they said, would tire him out. What he needed was total rest. Both his lungs were clogged with lesions, and he was coughing up blood.

Ever defiant, Orwell continued to write. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and corrected proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. At the same time, he was developing an idea for another book: a novella entitled A Smoking Room Story, which would revisit Burma, a place he’d not been back to since leaving the police force. He sketched it out across four pages of a notebook, but the story would never be written.

Propped up in bed, Orwell lamented “I’ve made all this money, and now I’m going to die.”

London: After some nine months at Cranham, in September 1949, Orwell was transferred by ambulance to University College Hospital in London where his specialist thought he’d receive better care. While in the private patients wing, and believing he’d recover and be discharged, he asked Sonia to marry him. She agreed.

The wedding was hastily arranged for mid-October, but by then Orwell couldn’t leave his hospital bed. Indeed, he was so ill that David Astor had to procure a special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury so he could be married in his room. Only three people attended, including Astor who was technically best man.

Orwell wore a red velvet smoking jacket, bought specially for the occasion by his friend and fellow author Anthony Powell. However he was suffering so badly from tuberculosis, he wasn’t even able to get out of bed to kiss his bride. Astor described him as looking like Gandhi, just “skin and bone”.

The wedding party, less Orwell, went off to the Ritz for breakfast. There, Sonia proudly displayed not only the gold band on her finger, but also a large engagement ring adorned with rubies, diamonds and an emerald. She’d chosen the expensive bauble herself, paying for it with one of Orwell’s blank cheques.

By Christmas 1949, it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to survive. On his mind at this time was his 5-year-old son Richard who’d been living with him on Jura, but had not been able to see him since he’d gone to the sanatorium.

Sonia had been visiting him during his last week, a time where he’d been getting his affairs in order and holding meetings with accountants and lawyers.

It was in the small hours of 21 January 1950 that Orwell’s life ended when he succumbed to a haemorrhage. Sonia was at a nightclub with Lucien Freud and their friend Anne Dunn. At some point after midnight, a phone call reached the club with the news that the novelist had died.

Orwell was just 46. He’d been married for barely three months and his most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been published a mere seven months earlier.

His appearance: Orwell once wrote “By the time you leave this earth, you have the face you deserve.”

Standing 6' 3", Orwell was a tall, gaunt man, who always looked older than his years. He had gentle sunken eyes and deep lines that hinted at suffering on his face. When he was 25, a friend described him as being “remarkably moth-eaten for one his age.”

Although he had a full-head of hair, he looked much older than he was. His face was deeply lined and he sported a pencil-thin moustache. This was popular among actors of the day. Errol Flynn, David Niven, Clark Gable, Don Ameche, and Leslie Phillips all wore one.

Before his pencil moustache, in the 1920s, Orwell, who was (like Charlie Chaplin) later a prominent anti-Nazi, sported a similar moustache made famous by Hitler. The ‘toothbrush’ had become popular as a response by working-class men to the more flamboyant, flowing Kaiser-style moustaches of the upper classes.

Though not evident from published photographs, Orwell had tattoos on the backs of his hands. Adrian Fierz, the son of the friend who helped Orwell find his first publisher, spotted the tattoos and asked about them. “They were,” he recalled, “blue spots the shape of small grapefruits — one on each knuckle.”

Although he kept up with old Etonians and his upper-class friends, as if to maintain his connection with the miners and workers, he developed a working-class persona. As he got older, he became an increasingly eccentric ‘character’ whose personality was identified with a political position, and cultivated this image in a dour, ironically self-aware way. An East End woman who met him during his tramping days, even said he reminded her of Stan Laurel.

He spent much of time away from people and was indifferent to his own personal appearance. To many, he was remembered as a rather dishevelled unshaven figure, habitually wearing the same outfit: a battered tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbow, dark shirt, hairy tie and baggy flannel trousers. He wore a long scarf, but no hat — which in the 1930s was considered under-dressed. He had his suits made by a Southwold tailor (Denny of Southwold, founded in 1851 by William Denny and still operating in the same family) until the day he died.

Orwell was no self-publicist. Requests later on in his career for publicity photographs invariably were met in the negative.

Ironically, given the nature of subject matter of Nineteen Eighty-Four, no colour photographs, voice recordings or moving images exist of George Orwell. Those that do aren’t great portraits of him from a technical or visually pleasing perspective, but they do reveal a man ill at ease in front of the camera.

Never one to court publicity, in his will he even requested that no biography of him be produced.

His writing style: Orwell once wrote:

“From a very early age, perhaps as young as five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. However, from the age of between 17 and 24 I tried to abandon the idea.”

Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write — all the time. For him a day without writing was not a good one. There were, effectively, no pauses in the process: if not a novel, then a review, or an essay, a letter, a diary, a shopping list. For such a writer, as Eileen once said, not reprovingly, “his work comes before anybody— even his wife!” Indeed, Orwell’s relationship with writing was just like a marriage: in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, till death do them part.

He even compared the process to a sickness:

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

His advice to would-be authors:

“Never start writing novels, if you wish to preserve your happiness.”

But as difficult as it may have been, Orwell had a penchant for keeping things simple.

One of his six rules for writing (from his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language) advises “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you’re used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or jargon if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In Why I Write, another essay on writing, Orwell said:

“Good prose should be unobtrusive, like a window-pane.”

By the late 1930s, Orwell had developed a lively, lucid style of writing, which at its best feels as if he is talking just to the reader. He keeps his language clear, wanting to express thoughts and not to conceal or prevent them.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were, instictively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

When writing, he always used the same typewriter: a Remington Home Portable. It accompanied him everywhere, to the extent that some described it as an extension of his arm.

Throughout he career, Orwell deliberately sought out personal experiences to provide material for his writing, and everything he produced was related to the events of his life. Most of those decisions however were based on recommendations of others.

As well as writing countless essays and novels, Orwell was an avid reader and prolific reviewer. Thousands of books passed through his hands, but above all, he loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, many of which he claimed to know by heart. At his death he possessed a much-thumbed 1925 edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

The cover: The original iconic cover design was by Michael Kennar. One of the novel’s central themes is the idea that language is a controlling force and paramount to human thought. The cover design, depicting 1984 in numbers as well as words in the foreground, could be seen as an allusion to this key concept of the book.

The promotion: Although Orwell was too ill to promote Nineteen Eighty-Four, he did make an effort to dictate two press statements that he hoped would clarify his intentions. It was not a prediction, he insisted, nor an attack on the Labour government, which, as a democratic socialist, he supported. It was a call to arms:

“I do not believe that the kind of society which I described necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive.”

Indeed, what Orwell was describing post WW2 was the rising spectre of Soviet Communism.

The reaction: Within 12 months of its publication, the book had sold around 50,000 hardbacks in the UK; while U.S. sales reached more than one-third of a million. It quickly became a phenomenon.

To date, Nineteen Eighty-Four has sold more than 30 million copies.

Recently, an ‘as new’ first edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four was up for sale. The asking price for this copy in collector’s condition with its ‘rich in colour original dust-jacket’ was £9,000!

His money: For him to have died at 46, at the height of his powers, in relative poverty, just as he was about to become rich and famous, is an important part of the Orwellian legend. Great personal wealth and his notorious personal austerity would have sat ill together.

Money, or rather the lack of it, was a constant bane throughout his life. It led him to write material in order to earn a crust. In 1946 he wrote:

“There are two or three books which I’m ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of them. There is an even worse one called A Clergyman’s Daughter. This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half-starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.”

‘The tragedy of Orwell’s life,’ wrote his friend Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times in 1961, ‘is that when at last he achieved fame and success he was a dying man and knew it. He had fame, but was too ill to leave his room, he had money, but nothing to spend it on. He tasted the bitterness of dying.’

In 1946, six years before he died, Orwell had written that £1,000 a year was more than adequate for him; yet the American book club sales alone for Nineteen Eighty-Four brought him more than £40,000 in the last six months of his life.

That being said, at the time of his death, Orwell’s estate was valued at only £10,000. It would appear that four months of care in a private room of a London hospital where he was treated by the top lung specialist in Britain, after having already spent a good deal of money earlier in the year staying at a clinic in Gloucestershire, had taken as much of toll on his finances as it did on his body.

His health: In her 2022 novel Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit wrote this about Orwell’s health:

“Orwell spent his whole adult life essentially being a dying man. He had various respiratory illnesses, including tuberculosis that would hospitalize him repeatedly with lung hemorrhages and severe illness, and ultimately, he would drown in his own blood at the age of 46 in January of 1950.”

His final resting place: Following a funeral service in London at Christ Church, Albany Street attended by some fifty or sixty people, Orwell was buried in All Saints’ parish churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.

If you go there looking for it, his name isn’t on the tombstone. Orwell requested that he be buried under his own name. His family called him Eric until the day he died and, invariably, he signed his letters to them using his real name. He never abandoned it. The name he chose to abandon was his pen name. His tombstone reads: “Here lies Eric Arthur Blair” and makes no mention of his books or his pseudonym.

The reason for his final resting place is that his friend David Astor bought the plot when he learned Orwell — despite being an avowed athiest — had asked to be buried in an English country churchyard. Sutton Courtenay was where the Astor family had an estate. Astor himself is buried in an adjacent grave.

Postscript: Finding out what happened to those closest to George Orwell following his death is invariably much more difficult than researching Orwell himself. What follows represents my findings so far.

His second wife: Like Orwell, Sonia Brownell had Indian roots. Born in Calcutta, her father, Charles Brownell, was a freight broker who had died suddenly when she was just 4 months old, amid rumours of suicide, leaving her mother penniless.

Her stepfather took to the bottle, and when the family eventually returned to England, her mother made ends meet by managing boarding-houses. When she was six, she was sent to the Sacred Heart Convent in Roehampton. She loathed it so much, that in later life she spat if she passed a nun in the street. She left at 17 and, after learning French in Neuchatel, Switzerland where she spent a year in the mid-’30s, she took a secretarial course in London.

Whilst in Switzerland, she was the only survivor in an boating accident in which she had to choose between her own life and that of a friend. The boat capsized and the other members of the party drowned — the last of them attempting to drag her down with him.

She took refuge in books. Long before she ever met a writer or a painter, she decided they were the people who made life endurable.

She is believed to be the inspiration for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the “girl from the fiction department” who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith.

Sonia was the sole beneficiary of her husband’s will. In February 1950, a month after Orwell died, Sonia came to Barnhill. In the bedroom where he’d written and typed Nineteen Eighty-Four she found among his papers, his handwritten manuscript. It had lain undisturbed for thirteen months after he left.

Two weeks later, Sonia Orwell, as she insisted on calling herself, left the dreariness of post-war London for a holiday in St Tropez, where she tried to persuade the real love of her life — French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty — to abandon his wife and marry her. The plea was in vain and the dejected widow returned to London.

Together with David Astor and Richard Rees, George Orwell’s literary executor, Brownell established the George Orwell Archive at University College London, which opened in 1960.

A few years earlier, in 1957, she had remarried. Her new husband, Michael Pitt-Rivers, was a rich homosexual Wiltshire landowner who had gained notoriety in Britain in the 1950s when he was put on trial charged with buggery. This trial was instrumental in bringing public attention — and opposition — to the laws against homosexual acts as they then stood. During the marriage, Sonia had affairs with several British painters, including Lucian Freud and by Christmas 1961 she was back living in her old flat in Percy Street in London.

After seven years, the marriage ended in 1965. Once divorced, Sonia promptly went back to calling herself Sonia Orwell. Uninterested in money and hopelessly unbusinesslike, although she lived modestly, she drank a vast amount of red wine and fought an increasingly difficult battle with alcoholism. It wasn’t her only battle.

She guarded Orwell’s literary output and considered it her life’s duty to protect it. As well as feeling that she was being cheated by his literary agent, she was also taken for a ride by his financial advisor, Jack Harrison. She’d trusted him so blindly that for years she’d signed everything he put in front of her without question, only to discover in 1977 that she’d signed away control of Orwell’s copyrights to someone who intended (in her opinion) to misuse them.

What money she had she lavished on almost anyone who needed it, practically subsidising her novelist friend Jean Rhys for much of the 1970s.

Ultimately, the lawsuit she undertook to regain control of Orwell’s copyrights cost her everything, including her house, so she disappeared to a little bed-sit in Paris, leaving her friends mystified. There she spent her last years in profound unhappiness at her own folly.

Brownell died in London of a brain tumour in December 1980 almost 30 years after Orwell. She was 62. At least she knew that the suit had been settled two weeks earlier, so that she was able to bequeath the copyrights to Orwell’s adopted son.

She was penniless, having spent a fortune trying to protect Orwell’s name and having been swindled out of her remaining funds by an unscrupulous accountant. The painter Francis Bacon paid off her outstanding debts.

At her funeral, her godson, Tom Gross read the same passage from Ecclesiastes, about the breaking of the golden bowl, that she had asked Anthony Powell to read at Orwell’s funeral thirty years earlier.

Her biographer, Hilary Spurling, claimed she was nothing less than a helpless victim of Orwell’s fame, her inheritance of his estate being a noose hung around her neck “which would eventually destroy her.”

For years, it was assumed that the income from George Orwell’s writings had mostly been frittered away by his widow, Sonia, whom he married a few weeks before his death. But the more one looks at the figures, the more the mystery of Orwell’s missing millions deepens. How could she possibly have got through it all?

In 1952, for example, Sonia donated the original manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four to a charity auction, at which it fetched a paltry £50. It was bought by a book dealer in the United States. Still in private hands, it is worth a small fortune.

In an article in the Times Literary Supplement, her biographer, Hilary Spurling, decisively acquits her of the charge of gold-digging: “The truth is Sonia lived modestly all her life because she never had much money, that she spent her last years in a rented room, and that she died in a public hospital ward, stripped of virtually everything she possessed.”

From George Orwell Productions — which, under the terms of his will, controlled the estate — she drew an initial widow’s pension of £40 a month (well below her husband’s poverty-line threshold, it might be noted), rising to £750 in the 1970s. The accountant who ran the company reported that her share of its assets in 1977 was worth about £75,000.

But apparently she never received even that, initiating a law suit against the accountant to recover the copyrights — a battle she finally won in an out-of-court settlement only a fortnight before her death. She then bequeathed the copyrights to Orwell’s adopted son, Richard, who, according to Orwell expert Michael Sheldon, “was living modestly on his salary as an employee of a company that manufactured agricultural equipment”.

His son: Richard Blair was only six when his father died in January 1950. Money from Orwell’s will was set aside for his education. Orwell had put his son down for Westminster, shelving his usual egalitarian principles because he felt the standard of literacy in state schools was so poor. However, Richard would eventually go to Loretto, a school near Edinburgh. After that he went to agricultural college and worked on various farms.

While Sonia was alive, he received very little money from her. His allowance, which she sent to Avril who brought him up, was only £150. Later, he would say he had to plead with Sonia for money to buy furniture when in 1964 he met and married Eleanor Moir. He supported himself and his wife by working in sales and marketing for Massey Ferguson from 1975 to 1986.

Perhaps because of this, he was never close to Sonia, and unlike her, was always content to use his father’s real surname, Blair.

Following Sonia’s death in 1980, Richard inherited the income from the Orwell estate and has lived in quiet dignity ever since, respecting his father’s work and protecting it from exploitation.

Today, aged 78, he dedicates his time to preserving the memory of his father as trustee of The Orwell Foundation and patron of the Orwell Youth Prize and through The Orwell Society.

Richard and Eleanor had two sons.

His older sister: Marjorie Blair married Humphrey Dakin a civil servant. She died in May 1946, she was 48-years-old.

His younger sister: Avril Blair married Bill Dunn. She died of a heart attack in January 1978. She was 69.

His publisher: Fredric John Warburg was born in 1898 into a Jewish family in Paddington, London. His parents were John Cimon Warburg and Violet Sichel. His family were distant relatives of the wealthy American Warburgs. His father was a professional photographer. He must have been successful as he was able to send his son to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in classics and philosophy. After serving as an officer in the First World War, in 1922 Warburg began an apprenticeship at the publishers Routledge & Sons, a career he would follow all his working life.

In 1935, together with Roger Senhouse, he purchased the publishing firm of Martin Secker, renaming it Secker & Warburg. The firm became famous for publishing the works of George Orwell after his previous publisher, Victor Gollancz, refused to publish his novel Homage to Catalonia in 1938.

Warburg went on to publish Orwell’s historically important and influential Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. He and Orwell became lifelong friends. Somewhat curiously, during the Second World War, Warburg served as a corporal in the Home Guard in St John’s Wood under Orwell, who was a sergeant.

He died in May 1981.

His literary agent: Leonard Parker Moore was Orwell’s literary agent from 1932 to his death in 1950. A partner of Christy & Moore and of the Lecture Agency Ltd, his other clients included Georgette Heyer and Catherine Cookson. The brother of the novelist Henry Moore, he worked as a journalist before becoming a literary agent. He died in January 1959.

His best friend: In 1946, David Astor, the editor of Britain’s oldest newspaper, The Observer, suggested to his friend George Orwell that he spend some time on a remote Scottish island where he could write his new book. Although he’d long been the heir-apparent to his father, Waldorf, Astor had only just begun working full time on his family’s newspaper. The Astor’s were one of the richest in England.

The family fortune had been made from property in Manhattan. John Jacob Astor was the first multi-millionaire in the United States. At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the country’s wealthiest person, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least $20 million, equivalent to approximately $650 million today.

The family’s New York City namesakes include the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Queens neighbourhood of Astoria.

David’s grandfather, William Waldorf Astor had moved to England in 1890. He took British citizenship in 1899, and bought the Observer from Northcliffe in 1911. In 1917, he was created a peer as Viscount Astor. Among his many acquisitions were Cliveden, the palatial country house overlooking the Thames in which David grew up.

His son Waldorf became a Tory MP, but resigned when he inherited his father’s peerage. As the 2nd Viscount Astor, his seat passed on to his wife, Nancy, who the first woman MP in Westminster.

Born Francis David Langhorne Astor on March 5 1912, David was the second of four sons. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Before the war, he worked for two years at Lazards, the merchant bank. Then in 1936 he moved to Leeds to join the Yorkshire Post, writing chiefly about hunting.

Astor was a brilliant talent spotter. He appointed Cyril Connolly as the paper’s arts and literary editor and it was through Connolly that he met Orwell who became a regular contributor.

David Astor was responsible for transforming a staid Establishment newspaper into the leading forum of English liberalism. Famed for the quality of its writers, The Observer combined support for the postwar welfare state with a belief in free enterprise and the mixed economy, anti-communism and Atlanticism with a fervent belief, inspired by Astor’s mentor, George Orwell, that, having given India its independence, Britain should shed its remaining colonies. Politically, Orwell showed Astor that the danger of totalitarianism may be as great from the Left as from the Right. Professionally, he made him aware of the importance of simple, clear prose.

In 1961, Astor was a co-founder of the human rights organisation, Amnesty International. Another of his interests was organic farming. Twice married, first, in 1945 to Melanie Hauser with whom he had a daughter and secondly, in 1952, to Bridget Wreford. They had two sons and three daughters.

He died in December 2001, aged 89 and is buried in All Saints’ parish churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. In an adjacent grave is his friend Eric Blair. Astor bought both burial plots when he learned Orwell had asked to be buried in an English country churchyard.

Barnhill: The huge effort Orwell invested in finishing Nineteen Eighty-Four while living on Jura killed him, but his death failed to turn the island or the house into a shrine.

The remote Hebridean island — which Orwell described as “an extremely un-getatable place” — has changed little since he arrived in May 1946, seeking peace and quiet. Today, there are fewer people and more cars, and television and mobile phones have diminished a sense of isolation, but the Isle of Jura remains among the most rugged fragments of coastal Britain and is considered one of Europe’s last wildernesses.

Jura is home to just two hundred and thirty people and 5,000 red deer that roam the open grassland and from which the island is said to take its name. In the Old Norse of the Viking invaders, Jura means ‘deer island’.

Barnhill, the remote farmhouse where Orwell wrote his masterpiece, is still there, a white speck of brick and glass on the grassy torso of Jura. It is little changed from the author’s summers there.

It’s possible to rent Barnhill, but the owners do not advertise the fact. Needless to say, there are no signs to it, nor any indication that he stayed there. Like his doomed hero, Winston Smith, Orwell has become an un-person in his Hebridean hideaway.

You will still need a boat or a 4x4 to get there and rely on a generator for electric light and charging phones.

Recently, the BBC-produced drama, Orwell on Jura was shot on location at Barnhill. Starring Ronald Pickup, it was written by Alan Plater.

The movies: Orwell’s novel has had two big-screen adaptations.

The 1956 version, starring Edmond O’Brien, Michael Redgrave and Jan Sterling, changed the storyline radically. Following the expiry of a distribution agreement, it was withdrawn from circulation by Orwell’s estate.

The best-known version is Michael Radford’s critically acclaimed 1984 retelling, starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, the restless party worker who dares to dream of independent thought and possible romance. The film was only possible following the death of Sonia Orwell in 1980.

Radford’s film version is important for several reasons: Playing the perfidious O’Brien, proved to be Richard Burton’s final role, and its cinematographer was Roger Deakins, who would go on to win acclaim for his work on Bond movies, Bladerunner and 1917.

The angel behind the 1984 enterprise was Richard Branson, who back then was just a guy in a baggy sweater who wanted to start a small film studio.

The movie had gone over budget, and there’d been a quarrel with Radford over the soundtrack. He didn’t want the music by Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of Eurythmics and had commissioned a classical score by composer Dominic Muldowney. But a compromise was reached, wounds were healed, and, in a blaze of publicity, 1984 was released…in one movie theatre.

In March 2012, it was reported that a new version was being put together by a consortium of Hollywood production companies (including Imagine Entertainment, which was partly owned by Oscar-winning film-maker Ron Howard) who had secured rights from Orwell’s estate. Shepard Fairey, the artist who produced the iconic Barack Obama “Hope” poster, was said to be instrumental in bringing the project to the attention of the producers.

Most recently, on 7 May 2020, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Paramount Pictures had picked up 2084, a movie based on the novel by George Orwell. It won’t be a direct copy of 1984 but will be more like a spiritual sister to the novel. The script was being written by Mattson Tomlin, who is also a co-writer of The Batman starring Robert Pattinson. These hirings give a vague idea of the nature of the 1984 movie. And it might be slightly different than what we saw in the book.

The legacy: Nineteen Eighty-Four has inspired writers, artists and many others.

Despite his disdain for the institution, on 7 November 2017 a bronze statue of Orwell by Martin Jennings was unveiled outside Broadcasting House, the headquarters of the BBC in London. The inscription on it perhaps sums up the writer, but overall what a loss his early death was:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.

These words come from an unused preface to Animal Farm.

The UNESCO-registered George Orwell Archive, housed at UCL Special Collections, is the most comprehensive body of research material relating to the author anywhere. Manuscripts, notebooks and personalia of George Orwell were presented in 1960 on permanent loan by his widow.

On 5 March 2022 a permanent exhibition celebrating George Orwell opened at the Museum of Wigan Life in Wigan, Lancashire. It contains a collection of materials relevent to his life and work.

A writer’s estate remains in copyright for 75 years after their death. Nineteen Eighty-Four only became available in the public domain in the UK on 1 January 2021.

David Bowie: Growing up in postwar Bromley, in a house less than a mile away from the birthplace of HG Wells, David Bowie had been obsessed with Orwell’s novel. “You always felt you were in 1984,” he said. “That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in. It was a terribly inhibiting place.”

“I’m an awful pessimist,” Bowie confessed to NME in 1973. It was not at all surprising that his mind was turning to writing a rock musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In November 1973, Bowie told William Burroughs that he was adapting the novel for television and gave his NBC TV special the mischievous title The 1980 Floor Show. During the show, he debuted a new song called 1984/Dodo, one of twenty he claimed to have written for the adaptation, although attempts to write an actual script with the American playwright Tony Ingrassia had come to nothing.

He was understandably furious when Sonia Orwell, point blank refused permission for his rock musical. “For a person who married a socialist with communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” he told Circus writer Ben Edmonds. “‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It really was like that.”

Doubtless, Sonia did hate the idea, but then as Orwell’s widow and executor of his estate she had approved almost no adaptations in any medium since the fiasco of the 1956 movie and she certainly didn’t meet Bowie, so that anecdote can be taken with a pinch of salt.

Bowie’s eighth studio album, initially titled We Are the Dead, was, therefore, a salvage operation.

1984 is a 1974 single by David Bowie, from his album Diamond Dogs. Written in 1973, it was inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and, like much of the album, originally intended for a stage musical based on the novel, which was never produced because permission was refused by Orwell’s widow Sonia.

A studio version of 1984/Dodo was Bowie’s last recording with Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and producer Ken Scott at Trident Studios, London.

His album Diamond Dogs, featured the straight-forward 1984, with lines like, “They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air/ And tell that you’re 80, but brother, you won’t care,” highlighting the novel’s revisionism themes and totalitarian government. Other tracks like Big Brother and We Are The Dead double down on Bowie’s fascination with Orwell’s futuristic society.

When it came to Orwell, “what fascinated Bowie,” writes Pushing Ahead of the Dame, “what was arguably the only thing that truly interested him in the mid-‘70s, was power, and the schizophrenic manner of thinking — double-thought, basically — that allows, even encourages its abuses.”

Apple: Apple’s January 1984 TV commercial introducing the Macintosh computer famously paid homage to the novel. The Mac, represented by a female athlete, hurls a sledgehammer at a giant telescreen and explodes the shouting face of a man — oppressive technology — to the astonishment of a crowd of grey zombies. The message: “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’ ”

That ad was watched by 96 million people during the Super Bowl and became a marketing legend.

Music: As well as Bowie, Nineteen Eighty-Four has inspired numerous other musicians. The most recent being Vaughnty who in February 2023 released a song called George Orwell Was Right:

The disclaimer: Much has been written about George Orwell. Believe me, I know from researching this article. But whilst there’s lots of stuff out there, it’s hard to decipher the story of the man and his greatest novel. Orwell only really achieved any degree of fame towards the end of his life, a life that illness cut tragically short. He also spent most of his time hidden away, writing. As a result, he rarely gave interviews or had his photo taken. The more I read about Orwell, the more his story fascinated me. The more I read, the more information I found out. The first step was to put together the facts I’d gleaned from different sources, in chronological order. Verifying dates and the like could only be done by comparing one fact source with another, so whilst I’ve striven for accuracy, I can’t be absolutely certain of those particular dates or events that I’ve included.

The work: What appears here is the culmination of some two years of research, writing and finessing. And not a little procrastination. What to include and what to leave out were some of the biggest challenges in telling Orwell’s story, especially as I wanted to set his writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four amid the increasingly Orwellian world we find ourselves living in, perpetuated in particular by the likes of Trump and Putin and, closer to home, by Boris Johnson.

This essay was first published on 25 June 2022, which coincidentally happened to be the 119th anniversary of his birth.

About the author: Based in Sussex-by-the-Sea, on England’s south coast, Gary is a creative writer and image-maker. He specialises in out of the ordinary portraits of musicians and people with interesting faces, as well as photographing some of the world’s finest flowers and gardens. On the writing side, he also penned deep dives into some of his favourite songs beginning with Bryan Ferry’s ‘These Foolish Things’ ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials and ‘All The Young Dudes’ by Mott the Hoople. Most recently, he has written a biography of Robert Palmer and the story behind Whitesnake’s ‘Still Of The Night’. All these can be found here on Medium, along with his reviews of gigs and events and chats with musicians.