IV.

Later Writings

Spain gave Orwell a subject for the rest of his life. It revealed to him how far political motives, wrongly applied, can destroy the respect for truth and other decencies prized by the liberal 19th century, whose values Orwell had approvingly characterized in his essay “Charles Dickens.” In Coming Up for Air (1939), his last novel written before World War II, Orwell voiced his concerns about the rise of totalitarianism. Suffering from lung ailments, Orwell was deemed medically unfit to fight in the war. He wrote book reviews, articles, and essays for a number of journals and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

During the war, Orwell also wrote the witty allegorical fable Animal Farm, a condemnation of totalitarian society based on the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and their betrayal by Stalin. The animals, dissatisfied with their servitude to humans, take over their farm intending to run things fairly. However, they are betrayed by the pigs who adopt the commandment “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The tone is ultimately one of pessimism, suggesting that all revolutions will fail to realize their original ideals because there will always be someone to help the “pigs” gain their evil ends.

Orwell continued his condemnation of totalitarianism in the satirical, futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which presents a terrifying picture of life under the constant surveillance of “Big Brother.” He depicts a totalitarian regime that outlaws truth, love, thought, and the concept of the individual, and controls its populace with fear, brute force, and propaganda. The hero of the novel, Winston Smith, dares to resist and clings to the notion that something of him will survive the terrifying consequences that await him in Room 101 at the hands of the Thought Police: “They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

The financial security and international recognition Orwell enjoyed from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was short-lived. He died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, in London and was buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published posthumously in four volumes in 1968.