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NOTE Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell (1903–1950)

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.

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Eric Arthur Blair, who is best known under his pseudonym George Orwell, was born 107 years ago this month in India, where his father was a British civil servant.

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His father's job, according to Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker, was to oversee the growing

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of opium, mainly for export to China.

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Though young Eric's mother had herself grown up in Burma, the daughter of yet another British

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civil servant, she had long since tired of Asia, and when her son was only a year old

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she prevailed successfully on her husband to ship her and their two children, Eric and

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and his older sister Marjorie, back to England.

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Eric did not see his father again for eight years, until he was nine years old, and had

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come home for Christmas vacation from his prep school, St. Cyprian's.

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Here in the States, a prep school is a high school.

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It preps, that is, prepares its students for college, which on this side of the Atlantic

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Eric is something that comes after high school and comprises, in effect, grades 13-16.

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In the England Eric Blair grew up in, however, a prep school was for children 8-13.

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What it was preparing these children for was what we would call high school, but what Eric

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grew up thinking of as college.

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College in turn prepared you for university.

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Hayek was sent to St. Cyprian's when he was eight years old, and remained there until

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he was 13, whereupon he transferred for another five years to Eaton College, a very famous

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and very expensive private high school, long favored by the British upper classes.

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After Eaton graduated him in 1921, he never went to school again.

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Why?

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Orwell answered that question in an autobiographical essay called Such!

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Such Were the Joys, written in the early 40s, but never published until the early 1950s,

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a few years after his death, and then only in the United States.

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It was not published in England until nearly 20 years after his death.

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In this essay, Orwell judged the education he had received at St. Cyprian's to be inferior.

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The whole process, he wrote, was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick.

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Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression

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that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your

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brain with anything else.

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Subjects which lacked examination value, such as geography, were almost completely neglected.

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Mathematics was also neglected.

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Science was not taught in any form.

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Indeed, it was so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged, and even

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Even the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were chosen with one eye

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on the English paper.

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Latin and Greek, the main scholarship subjects, were what counted, but even these were deliberately

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taught in a flashy, unsound way.

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We never, for example, read right through even a single book of a Greek or Latin author.

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We merely read short passages which were picked out because they were the kind of thing likely

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to be set as an unseen translation.

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At St. Cyprian's, or well remembered, history was a series of unrelated, unintelligible,

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but in some way that was never explained to us, important facts, with resounding phrases

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tied to them.

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Disraeli brought peace with honor.

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Clive was astonished at his moderation.

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Pitt called in the new world to redress the balance of the old, and the dates and the

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the mnemonic devices. Did you know, for example, that the initial letters of, A black negros

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was my aunt, there's her house behind the barn, are also the initial letters of the

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battles in the wars of the roses? He also remembered the history teacher calling out

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dates to the class, and the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness

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to shout out the right answers, the historical events that had taken place on those dates.

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and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious

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events they were naming.

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But worse than the pedagogical limitations of the place, in Orwell's memory at least,

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were the cruelties and brutalities it employed and encouraged among its students.

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Orwell remembered his years at St. Cyprian's as like being locked up in a hostile world,

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A world in which you had to be perpetually on your guard against the people surrounding

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At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a world

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of force and fraud and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank full of pike.

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Orwell knew, of course, that not everyone's home was really a warm nest.

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He considered his own home to be far from optimal, for once he had become reacquainted

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With his father, he had learned that, as he put it, I disliked my own father, who appeared

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to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying, don't.

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Still, he wrote, your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled

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by love rather than by fear.

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For that reason alone, Orwell argued, boarding schools are worse than day schools.

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A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand.

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School life was not only ruled by fear, it was best symbolized by the image of a soccer

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or perhaps a rugby match.

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Football, Orwell wrote, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about,

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but is a species of fighting.

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The lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobly boys who are good at knocking down and

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and trampling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life, a continuous

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triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning. It consisted in being

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bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than

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other people, in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them

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One of the main ideas inculcated in students at St. Cyprian's was, as Orwell put it, something

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Something called guts or character, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others.

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The will of the headmaster of St. Cyprian's, and the will of his wife, who ran the school

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with him, was imposed on the students in the form of a series of beatings, beatings administered

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sometimes by the headmaster himself, sometimes by certain favored older boys, who were in

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effect licensed to beat younger boys.

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I remember more than once, Orwell writes, being led out of the room in the middle of

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a Latin sentence, receiving a beating, and then going straight ahead with the same sentence,

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just like that.

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All in all, Orwell wrote, attending St. Cyprian's was about as bad as being in an army, but

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perhaps not quite as bad as being in prison.

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After five years at St. Cyprian's, and another five years at Eaton, Eric Blair decided he'd

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Fried had enough of school and never went back. Instead, he followed in his father's

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footsteps, signing up for the British Civil Service. But after spending yet another five

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years as a police officer in Burma, he knew a civil service career in Asia was not for

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him. He had enough saved from his years as a policeman to live for about a year, so he

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quit his job and moved to Paris, where he had decided to try to make it as a writer.

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His eccentric bohemian Aunt Nellie, his mother's sister, lived there.

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She was, in fact, living there in sin with an anarchist named Eugène Adam.

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And she was helpful to young Eric in many ways in the nearly two years he spent in Paris,

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1928 and 1929.

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She fed him as often as he'd let her, and her elderly anarchist boyfriend gave young

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Eric much to think about under the heading of politics.

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Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker says that young Eric went to Paris with an almost anarchistic

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hatred of authority and returned to England nearly two years later with an even more anti-authoritarian

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outlook. He was unwilling, however, to live off his aunt's largesse.

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Though it took him only a few months in Paris to get into print under the name E. A. Blair,

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He was unable to earn enough from his writing to pay his bills.

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When he ran out of money, he lived as a bum, rather than sponge off his Aunt Nellie.

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He continued this practice after returning to England late in 1929, and it was this period

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of living hand-to-mouth that provided him with the experience he needed to write his

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first book, a piece of thinly fictionalized reportage called Down and Out in Paris and

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in London, which was published in 1933 under the name George Orwell.

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Up to then all of young Eric's journalism, mostly book reviews and articles on cultural

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and political subjects for weekly, fortnightly and monthly magazines, had appeared under

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the name E.A. Blair.

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It continued to do so for another couple of years, but starting in 1935 all those articles

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Books and Reviews, as well as a steady flow of books came out under the name George Orwell,

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a novel called Burmese Days, other novels called A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for

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Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

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There were also two volumes of reportage, Homage to Catalonia on the Spanish Civil War

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and The Road to Wigan Pier on Poverty in Northern England.

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None of these books sold particularly well, decently but not particularly well, and though

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the periodical work became more and more frequent, it was never especially remunerative.

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Eric Blair, George Orwell, scraped by, but little more.

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He did this through the thirties and through the war that followed, and then, suddenly,

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he hit it big.

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The vehicles for his breakthrough were a short satirical novel called Animal Farm, which

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tells of the efforts of the animals at the Manor Farm to overthrow their human rulers

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and establish a communist utopia under the leadership of the pigs.

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This was published in 1945, and a much longer, brutally naturalistic novel of a totalitarian

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future called 1984, published in 1949.

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These two books made Orwell rich, but he was dead from tuberculosis before the winter of

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1949 and 1950 had ended, aged 46, so he had precious little time to spend any of his new

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riches on anything but medical bills.

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A few years after Orwell's death, as I have noted, his unflattering memoir of his years

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at St. Cyprian's finally saw print in the United States, and when it did, it became

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and the subject of an essay in the New Yorker by the British journalist Anthony West.

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West noted that most of the terrifying things in 1984 clearly derive from the experience

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described in such such were the joys.

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At St. Cyprian's, West reminds his readers, the headmaster's wife seemed to be spying

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on Orwell all the time and seemed by some kind of magical omniscience to know what every

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In 1984, of course, every room of every dwelling is equipped with a device called a telescreen,

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a sort of two-way TV. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously, Orwell wrote.

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Any sound that Winston made above the level of a very low whisper would be picked up by

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Moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded,

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he could be seen as well as heard.

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There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

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How often or on what system the thought-police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.

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It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.

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But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.

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You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every

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sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

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Anthony West contended that if you read 1984 closely, you would see, must see, that the

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The whole pattern of society in the novel shapes up along the lines of fear laid down

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in such such were the joys, until the final point of the dread summons to the headmaster's

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study for the inevitable beating.

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In 1984, the study becomes Room 101 in the Ministry of Love, and the torturers correspond

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closely to the schoolmasters.

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In effect, West argued, what George Orwell did in 1984 was to send everybody in England

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to an enormous St. Cyprian's to be as miserable as he had been.

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The American science fiction writer C.M. Cornbluth agreed with West. In a lecture he delivered

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at the University of Chicago early in 1957, Cornbluth pointed out a few other parallels

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Cornblath noted, for example, that sexual activity is forbidden to Winston Smith, as

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it is to a boy, under pain of dire punishment.

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He noted also that there are no laws or clear-cut rules of conduct for Winston Smith to obey.

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He, like a child, may transgress without meaning to. He must not only do what is right,

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he must be good. Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker acknowledged in 2003 that Anthony West's

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This way of reading 1984 has been rather dismissed by critics, but he wrote that there are associations

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and reverberations connecting 1984 and such such were the joys, cannot be denied.

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According to Bowker, Orwell certainly developed the individual consciousness to pit against

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unreasonable authority while at St. Cyprian's.

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The small boy waiting outside the headmaster's study for a beating is only the youthful version

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of Winston Smith waiting to be summoned to Room 101.

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The deceitfulness of authority, the feeling that spies are everywhere, the harsh cross-examinations,

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the rote learning in an atmosphere of threat, these are all present in both essay and novel.

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It seemed to Orwell, according to Bowker, that whereas most English people found it

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In one of the radio talks he wrote and presented for the BBC during World War II Orwell said,

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A human being is what he is largely because he comes from certain surroundings and no one ever fully escapes from the things that have happened to him in early childhood.

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The following year, in an essay called Why I Write, he elaborated on this idea a bit.

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Before a writer ever begins to write, or well asserted, he will have acquired an emotional

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attitude from which he will never completely escape.

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For if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse

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to write.

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Few of us today go to boarding schools.

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You went to them a hundred years ago when young Eric Blair did.

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Why then did so many millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean respond so

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strongly to a political nightmare based on its authors' unhappy experience at an English

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boarding school?

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Why did these readers make 1984 not only a huge and perennial best-seller on both sides

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of the Atlantic, but also, probably, the most widely influential libertarian novel ever

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published. Because, as Orwell himself acknowledged, everything that happened to me at St. Cyprian's

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could happen in the most enlightened school, though perhaps in subtler forms. The totalitarian

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essence of the St. Cyprian's experience, the experience of being dominated, bullied, spied

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on, the experience of being made to suffer pain and to look foolish by more powerful

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others against whom one had no defense.

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This could be visited upon a child at almost any sort of school one could imagine.

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It is, then, the compulsory school experience we have to examine, not just the St. Cyprian's

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experience or the early 20th century British boarding school experience.

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Some libertarians like John Holt have thought about all this and decided that a society

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without schools, at least for those too young to choose for themselves whether to attend

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one, would be a better society. The home-schoolers who populate the movement Holt launched back

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in the 1970s agree. One doesn't have to read far into the works of George Orwell to discover

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George Orwell presents us with yet another

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Another case of a writer who was not himself a libertarian as we understand the term today,

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but whose last two novels, Animal Farm and 1984, have earned him a place in the libertarian

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tradition.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.