Why george orwell wrote 1984

In , George Orwell traveled to the house of an acquaintance in Scotland to write his final book. A study by John Ross published in Infectious Diseases , indicates that Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, experienced terrible suffering because of his disease and the complications it caused. Those experiences may have helped make the suffering of the main character of , Winston, more realistic. As he was working on the first draft of his novel, Orwell got sicker and sicker, Science Daily writes.

Western literary history is full of tuberculosis sufferers, and it is a disease that is often seen as being historical, although it still affects millions of people each year.

In , Goldstein is the stand-in for Leon Trotsky, the revolutionary figurehead who Stalin cast out of the party and denounced as a traitor to the cause. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford symbolize people who were executed or sent to forced-labor camps. When was written, World War II had ended only a few years prior, and many people believed World War III was inevitable, making the wars of the novel feel not just realistic but unavoidable.

Additionally, was written three years after the U. Frequent bombing raids on London appear in as well, an echo of the Blitz campaign carried out by Germany on London and the surrounding areas, in which 40, people died and almost a million buildings were destroyed. Ace your assignments with our guide to !

SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Charrington Emmanuel Goldstein. Why is the war in never ending? Why is the photo of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford important? The editor professed great admiration for Orwell's "absolute straightforwardness, his honesty and his decency", and would be his patron throughout the s.

The closeness of their friendship is crucial to the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's creative life had already benefited from his association with the Observer in the writing of Animal Farm. As the war drew to a close, the fruitful interaction of fiction and Sunday journalism would contribute to the much darker and more complex novel he had in mind after that celebrated "fairy tale".

It's clear from his Observer book reviews, for example, that he was fascinated by the relationship between morality and language. There were other influences at work. Soon after Richard was adopted, Orwell's flat was wrecked by a doodlebug. The atmosphere of random terror in the everyday life of wartime London became integral to the mood of the novel-in-progress. Worse was to follow. In March , while on assignment for the Observer in Europe, Orwell received the news that his wife, Eileen, had died under anaesthesia during a routine operation.

Suddenly he was a widower and a single parent, eking out a threadbare life in his Islington lodgings, and working incessantly to dam the flood of remorse and grief at his wife's premature death. In , for instanc e, he wrote almost , words for various publications, including 15 book reviews for the Observer.

Now Astor stepped in. His family owned an estate on the remote Scottish island of Jura, next to Islay. There was a house, Barnhill, seven miles outside Ardlussa at the remote northern tip of this rocky finger of heather in the Inner Hebrides. Initially, Astor offered it to Orwell for a holiday. Speaking to the Observer last week, Richard Blair says he believes, from family legend, that Astor was taken aback by the enthusiasm of Orwell's response. In May Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura.

He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was "almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage". It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of was one of the coldest of the century. Postwar Britain was bleaker even than wartime, and he had always suffered from a bad chest. At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. Ironically, part of Orwell's difficulties derived from the success of Animal Farm.

After years of neglect and indifference the world was waking up to his genius. On Jura he would be liberated from these distractions but the promise of creative freedom on an island in the Hebrides came with its own price.

Years before, in the essay "Why I Write", he had described the struggle to complete a book: "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist or [sic] understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's personality.

From the spring of to his death in Orwell would re-enact every aspect of this struggle in the most painful way imaginable. Privately, perhaps, he relished the overlap between theory and practice. He had always thrived on self-inflicted adversity. At first, after "a quite unendurable winter", he revelled in the isolation and wild beauty of Jura. Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen.

Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin.

In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. Orwell, a gentle, unworldly sort of man, arrived with just a camp bed, a table, a couple of chairs and a few pots and pans. It was a spartan existence but supplied the conditions under which he liked to work.

He is remembered here as a spectre in the mist, a gaunt figure in oilskins. The locals knew him by his real name of Eric Blair, a tall, cadaverous, sad-looking man worrying about how he would cope on his own.

The solution, when he was joined by baby Richard and his nanny, was to recruit his highly competent sister, Avril. Richard Blair remembers that his father "could not have done it without Avril. She was an excellent cook, and very practical. None of the accounts of my father's time on Jura recognise how essential she was. Once his new regime was settled, Orwell could finally make a start on the book.

At the end of May he told his publisher, Fred Warburg: "I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft.