II.

Early Life

Orwell was born in Motihari, India, where his father was a minor official of the customs service in British India. He was educated in England at St. Cyprian’s, the preparatory school he later described as Crossgates in his autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” In 1917 he won a scholarship to Eton College, which he attended until 1921. The consciousness of being a poor boy in a setting where poverty was despised helped make him a youthful radical and iconoclast in his later years at Eton.

From 1922 to 1927 Orwell served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar). This was the period that decisively transformed his outlook. Orwell gradually came to detest his role as a representative of a colonial government and to identify himself with the subject people. In England on leave in 1927 he decided to quit the Imperial Police, to take up writing and to speak out against the domination of any person over another.