III.

Early Writings

Orwell’s early books were highly autobiographical. His experiences as a dishwasher in Paris, a hop-picker in rural England, and a tramp in the English countryside provided the material for his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), an account of the sordid conditions of the homeless poor. Burmese Days (1934), an indictment of imperialism, was largely derived from his experiences in Asia. Like the heroine of his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he had worked as a master in seedy private schools, and like the hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), as a bookseller’s assistant.

In 1936 the socialist Left Book Club sent Orwell to study how the unemployed were living in the working-class districts of northern England. The immediate result of this journey was his harrowing report on the conditions of unemployed coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell lived in northern England for over two months, talking to miners, their families, their neighbors, and labor union officials. He went down the mines and endured the same conditions as the miners to see for himself the hardships of a life quite unlike his own. He was appalled by “the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.”

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Orwell went to Spain as a journalist. But immediately after arriving in Barcelona he joined a militia unit on the Republican (antifascist) side. He was seriously wounded by a sniper and he became involved in fighting in Barcelona between a Marxist militia unit and anarchists on one side and communists on the other side. His personal account of trench fighting, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), forms one of the most moving accounts of this war ever written. The book also exposes Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin’s bid for power in Spain. Orwell’s description of the power struggles in Barcelona offered a glimpse of what was to come in his later work: