Orwell and the Spanish Civil War: Political thinker, writer, and volunteer
So now we’re going to look at George Orwell, and through looking at his writing, we’re going to explore who he was as a political thinker, a writer, and an international volunteer.
Orwell was born in British India in 1903. After a brief stint as a police officer in Burma, Orwell embraced a desire to write. He moved to Portobello Road with the help of a family friend and this became his base for venturing into the overcrowded, poverty-ridden East End. His tramping across the area saw him adopt a completely different life. Orwell became P.S. Burton, a ‘tramp’ who did not oblige in middle-class behaviour or norms. His experiences of a working-class lifestyle were echoed in Paris where he lived for almost two years, almost dying once and working menial jobs to earn money. In the years that followed, Orwell wrote whilst moving around England, living with both his sister in Leeds, and his parents in Suffolk for some time. He also spent some time in London working as both a tutor and a second-hand bookseller.
At the end of 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to take part in the Spanish Civil War as an International Brigades volunteer. He became involved in the POUM faction, translated to the Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification, and was stationed on the Aragon Front during the winter, a relatively quiet posting, and later went onto Huesca. Orwell returned to Barcelona in the April of 1937 and was caught up in the May Days (a very important event — we’ll come back to this in another post!). The POUM were accused by the Communist press of collaborating with fascist forces and an atmosphere which consisted of ‘fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men’ (Homage to Catalonia) pervaded over Spain. Following another near brush with death, Orwell and his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, fled Spain after being charged with ‘rabid Trotskyism’ (Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. xxix) by the pro-Soviet Communists. Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish conflict are the basis of Homage to Catalonia which we’ll go further into a bit later on in this post.
Both Orwell and Eileen returned to Britain prior to the outbreak of the WW2. Whilst his wife worked in the Ministry of Information during the war, Orwell was deemed unfit for military service, yet joined the Home Guard and continued with his writing. In mid-1941, Orwell was taken on by the BBC to create cultural programmes alongside broadcasts to India sent to undermine Nazi propaganda. From late 1943, Orwell had resigned from both the Home Guard and the BBC with the hopes of focusing more on his writing. From these efforts, Animal Farm was published in 1945 following the death of Eileen, and became a global success with Orwell becoming highly sought after in literary circles.
The final years of Orwell were spent in poor health as he fluctuated between London and a barn house in the Isle of Jura where he began writing Nineteen Eighty Four in 1946. At the end of 1947, Orwell was taken into hospital with a diagnosis of tuberculosis but responded well to treatment, allowing him to return to Jura and complete Nineteen Eighty Four, which was published in 1949 to immediate acclaim. As his health deteriorated, Orwell returned to London and was moved to University College Hospital where he continued to decline until finally passing in January 1950.
So now we have an understanding of George Orwell and the Spanish Civil War as separate entities. Some more questions that could guide your study here are the following:
- Why did Orwell go to Spain in the first place?
- What does Orwell’s experiences tell us about the reality of war?
Now we’re going to tie all this information together! Some questions that could be useful in the future are…
- Why did Orwell go to Spain in the first place?
- What does Orwell’s experiences tell us about the reality of war?
But we’re going to focus on working out whether or not we think Orwell was well-equipped to become the voice of the International Brigades. I’ve provided an example answer on the question ‘To what extent did Orwell represent the voices of the international volunteers?’ at the bottom of this page, so let’s start going through some of the arguments!
Orwell had described himself as coming from a ‘lower-upper-middle class’ background within his work (The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 941–2). He knew the customs of the gentility, yet had little of their prosperity. He was educated at Eton due to a scholarship earned by his academic prowess rather than the scholastic progression of the wealthy elite. However, his middle-class education saw him use a ‘distinctly bourgeois accent’ among a sea of working-class volunteers in Spain. Orwell’s behaviour is stressed as a point of tension by Bob Edwards, who describes the distance he kept between himself and fellow volunteers as ‘highbrow’.
Yet, under this gentile surface, Orwell often appeared uncomfortable with his middle-class status, especially within his 1933 publication, The Road to Wigan Pier. Within his account, Orwell embarks upon first-hand investigations of the bleak living conditions in the industrial working-class areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire prior to WW2. Throughout, Orwell takes on an apologetic tenor as he explores the poverty found in these areas. Whilst Orwell didn’t hail from the working-class, urban background of many international volunteers, his writings and his politics share their resentment of inequality. His ardent conviction in socialism is explored as he describes it as ‘such elementary common sense’ (TRWP, p. 88). However, he isn’t ignorant to ignore that the theory is ‘confined entirely to the middle classes’ (TRWP, p. 90). Orwell argues that if an actual working man walked into an Independent Labour Party meeting, ‘they would have been embarrassed, angry, and disgusted’ (TRWP, p. 91). Here, Orwell highlights his distain towards members of his own class who proclaim themselves for the workers, and instead argue that the true socialist is the ordinary working man who understands ‘socialism means justice and common decency’ (TRWP, p. 91).
Within The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell abandons his middle-class values in order to ‘understand how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another’ (TRWP, p. 68). However, whilst admirable that Orwell is attempting to understand the working man, his middle-class privilege never truly goes away. Through his experience of living with ‘the lowest of the low’ in Down and Out in Paris and London, it can’t help but be said that ultimately Orwell is choosing to live this way. Within the memoir, aimed at the upper and middle-classes, Orwell documents his experiences on the streets of two rich cities, Paris and London as he lived in destitution. For Orwell, this experience was a learning curve in a journey of his ‘complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life’ (TRWP, p. 83). However, whilst Orwell actively sought out poverty and squalor, the subjects within Down and Out have no other option. Whilst in Paris, Orwell was provided with financial and social support from his aunt, Nellie Limouzin, and upon his return to London he came straight back to his parents’ home and became a private tutor. For the people he encounters, their situation is their lives rather than a privileged whim to explore somewhere off the beaten track. While Orwell can understand the working-classes, he can never be representative of the working-class values that are demonstrated in the fighting in Spain.
It could be said that Orwell was so influenced by the working-classes that he used his privilege as a well-educated Etonian for the betterment of conditions for Britain’s working-class. Dundee volunteer, Arthur Nicoll, argued that part of being working-class was the need ‘to do something about it,’ something which Orwell advocated with his participation in the fighting and his political novels, Animal Farm and 1984. By using his platform as a respected intellectual, he used his social standing to display ideas around socialism far wider than a labourer would be able to. Therefore, his voice should remain an aspect of our interrogation of the Spanish Civil War as he used it to highlight the working-class cause of international volunteers, despite not coming from the same background.
I’ve wrote some of these points down into a cohesive mini-essay (around 650 words) so it’s a bit clearer to see for you hopefully! We’ve looked at Orwell and we’ve looked at the war, as well as seen how the two interlink. We’ve also been able to examine Orwell’s role in the conflict, as well as how he is remembered in history as being a key part of the international aspect of the war. I hope this has contained some useful information and that the resources here come into good use in the future! I’ll leave some resources below as well as the example essay!
Resources used:
George Orwell, Orwell in Spain, ed. by Peter Davidson (London: Penguin Books, 2001)
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, (London: Penguin Classics, 2001)
Valentine Cunningham, ‘Authors Take Sides,’ from Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War by Valentine Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
Francis Heywel, ‘Welsh Miners and the Spanish Civil War,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 5.3 (1970)
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 4th ed. (New York: Modern Library, 2001)
Example Essay:
