Orwell

"I belong to the left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country."

George Orwell, in a letter to the Duchess of Atholl, 15th November 1945.

George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903 in India, and his family returned to England in 1907. After college, he travelled to Burma to serve in the police force there from 1922 to 1927. During this time he developed a keen hatred of Imperialism and had many experiences which were to surface in his first essays (e.g. A Hanging) and novels (e.g. Burmese Days). The next ten years, particularly his experiences in Paris and London living the life of a working-class pauper, and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, saw Orwell become a committed democratic Socialist, who wrote biting attacks on those other left-wingers he saw as mere poseurs, those who “talked the talk” without “walking the walk”, or adopted a fashionable leftist political stance without the factual experience to support their ideas.

"Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Orwell, from "Why I Write", 1946.

Being a firm believer in backing one’s political views with positive action, Orwell joined the Soviet-backed forces fighting Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During the Second World War, he spent much of his time working as a writer of propaganda for the BBC and the British Ministry of Information, as did many other respected English writers of the day. The huge 1930s concrete building he worked in during WWII, the Senate Building of London University in Russell Square, was the inspiration for the four great Ministries of the novel, and the description of the Ministry of Truth on pages 5 & 6 describes a building very similar in appearance to the one which still stands in London (and which actually features in a very brief exterior shot in Michael Radford's film of the novel).

Having seen Stalinist Communism’s brutal treatment of surviving fighters on both sides after both wars, and doubtless having read of events such as the firestorm-creating British bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945, he came to have grave concerns about the "rightness" of propaganda, even when used for the best and most well-intentioned of reasons; he felt that propaganda had a damaging and corrupting effect upon all those who came into contact with it.

All of these events and experiences would be made use of in some way by Orwell during his later work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, and would contribute to the ideas put forward in the novel.