Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903 in India. At that time India was a part of the British Empire, and Blair’s father held a post as an agent in Indian Civil Service. Eric’s mother was about eighteen years younger than her husband. Eric had an elder sister. The Blairs led a relitevely priviliged and fairly pleasant life, helping to administer the Empire. In 1907 when Eric was about eight years old, the family returned to England and lived at Henley. Blairs sent their son to a private preparatory school in Sussex at the age of eight. At the age of thirteen he won a scholarship to Wellington and soon after, another to Eton. At Eton he apprenticed himself to the masters of English prose who most appealed to him- including Swift, Sterne and Jack London.

While the carreers of his school-fellows led to either Oxford or Cambridge, Eric Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922. He trained in Burma, and served there in the police force for five years. In 1927 he resigned, because he felt that he was supportin a political system in which he could no longer believe, Even as early as this, his ideas about writing and his political ideas were closely linked. In his work he expressed hate to every form of man’s dominion over man.

He settled in London and there at the age of twenty-four, he started to teach himself how to write. In 1928 he took a drastic step and he lived among the poor, first in London, then in Paris. For him the poor were victims of injustice. In Paris he lived and worked in a working-class quarter and he got to know there with many artists and would-be artists. When he returned to London, he lived for a couple of months among the tramps and poor people. His experiences gave birth to Down and Out in Paris and London entitled A Scullion’s Diary. In fact, it is not a novel, it is a kind of documentary account of life unknown to most of its readers. After two rejections from publishers Orwell wrote Burmese Days, a book based on his experiences in colonial service.

We owe the rescue of Down and Out to Mabel Firez. She was asked to destroy the script. Instead she took the manuscript and brought it to a literaly agent. Soon it was accepted, but Eric Blair insisted on publishing it pseudonymously. By taking the pseudonym George Orwell he shedded his old identity and took on a new.