A Biography of Orwell & Huxley

Part One: Key Influences

Huxley came from a distinguished, comfortable family whose Victorian forebears (Darwin collaborator and grandfather Henry Huxley, maternal great-uncle Mathew Arnold) set a high standard for thought and achievement for him and for his brother Julian, who would become a famous scientist and geneticist.

George Orwell (born Eric Blair) lived an ascetic life, setting cruelly exacting standards of privation, for himself and for those close to him. His family were minor colonial officials long stationed in Burma, who, once back in England barely hung on with their fingernails to the precipice of what Orwell himself called the “lower upper middle class.”

Huxley went from his family home to Eton to Oxford. The early death of his mother and a drastic loss in vision marked his teen years with tragedy. But he loved Oxford and afterwards moved fairly effortlessly into a coterie of writers living easily between France and Italy and England. He also travelled extensively, including to the United States, where he eventually settled, lived for many years and died.

George Orwell went from a difficult childhood in Burma to the upper class world of Eton (where Huxley was one of his teachers)  and then, not to Oxford or Cambridge, but into the colonial service in Burma. He passionately hated being an enforcer for the Empire and returned to England after five years to eke out a hard existence as a chronicler of the lives led by the poor and dispossessed. He was less celebrated and much less comfortable than Huxley. He died tragically young after life-long illness, just after writing his famous satire of the Soviet Union, Animal Farm and his great anti-totalitarian novel, Nineteen Eighty-four.

Orwell and Huxley were public intellectuals of a kind that hardly exists any more. In the days before television and the internet, their novels, short stories and essays had an impact which writing doesn’t come close to achieving today. Although both men were progressive, and Orwell was a self-proclaimed leftist, neither was a joiner or orthodox in his beliefs and neither was wholly embraced by political parties.  Huxley was considered by many a passive intellectual, even a flake who knew nothing about the fundamentals of organizing for change. Orwell was more of a man of action, living with the underclass and joining the republican militia in the Spanish civil war. But his radical critique of Stalinism and the lies and disinformation it entailed made him a black sheep to the communists and their fellow travellers – who exercised much influence within the English left.

Huxley’s and Orwell’s differences in class position, upbringing and life experience help explain the elements of society each chose to emphasize and project into their respective future visions. They did share important experiences  – Eton, for example, and the great bubbling brew of contemporary ideas and experiences they lived through in the first half of the twentieth century. While Huxley’s social and intellectual background naturally led him to take a great interest in art and science and to imagine a world of relative material comfort, Orwell lived for a good part of his life in poverty and illness.  Harsh experiences in Burma, Spain and England informed his understanding of brutality and physical repression in all its forms. Hence, despite the times and ideas they shared, the dystopias these two authors envisioned were fundamentally different in content, in feeling, in tone.

Brave New World was written in 1931, after Aldous Huxley returned from his first trip to the United States and his first journey to the North of England to visit and observe the lives of miners two years into the Great Depression.  Nineteen-Eighty-Four was written in 1949, after George Orwell had lived through the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and witnessed the entrenchment of Stalinism in the Soviet Union.