1949 The author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1948) was critically ill with tuberculosis but his doctor, the distinguished chest specialist Andrew Morland, thought the disease might be damped down to a chronic state, allowing the author to work quietly.
Orwell himself was full of hope and ideas for future projects, including a book on Joseph Conrad’s political fiction. He was happy at his marriage to his beautiful young wife, and now for the first time well-off, thanks to the success – in the United States as well as Britain – of Nineteen Eighty-four.
At first the book’s popularity in the West owed something to the accelerating Cold War, since its dystopian satire was so apparently aimed at the Soviet Union, what with the manipulation of information through constant erasure and rewriting of the newspaper of record, and with ‘Big Brother’ and Goldstein (the regime’s fantasy hate figure) so obviously resembling Stalin and Trotsky.
But Orwell insisted that his target was not socialism or communism, but the totalitarianism into which parties of either left or right could harden. He set the book in England to suggest that ‘the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere’.1 Another reminder that the book was not just about Russia lay in the totalitarian regime’s practice of turning allies into enemies overnight, just as Britain and America had done with the Soviet Union.
By 1989 Nineteen Eighty-four would be translated into more than 65 languages, and phrases like ‘newspeak’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thought crime’ – not to mention ‘Orwellian’ (to suggest the insidious control of a whole population) – have entered the language.
Not that Orwell himself would live to see any of this. He never left the hospital. Just three months after his wedding there, on 21 January 1950, he died of a massive lung haemorrhage. The editor of the Observer and long-time supporter David Astor found him a grave plot in an Oxfordshire village. Another friend, Malcolm Muggeridge, noted in his diary that Orwell dying on Lenin’s birthday and being buried by the Astors, ‘seems to me to cover the full range of his life’.2
1 Letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Automobile Workers, dated 16 June 1949; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950, London: Secker & Warburg, 1968, p. 502.
2 D.J. Taylor, ‘Last Days of Orwell’, Guardian, 15 January 2000.