Literature of English Modernism 1930–1980
The early years of the 1930s started a red turbulent decade for English
Modernism. That “low, dishonest decade,” according to W. H. Auden
(1907-1973), started with the Great Depression of the early 1930s. The
civil war of 1936 in Spain, the outbreak of the Second World War in
September 1939, Hitler’s pact with the Soviet Union in August of 1939,
and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fell heavily not only
on the British political and literary elite, but also on people worldwide.
Despite winning the war, Great Britain completely lost its dominions;
the jewel of the Empire Crown, India, gained its independence in 1947,
together with the newly formed Muslim state of Pakistan. The Irish
Republic withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949, as did the Republic
of South Africa in 1961. In 1982, however, Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher managed to keep the remnants of the empire, the Falkland
Islands, from Argentina’s takeover. The inside of Britain, beginning from
the reign of George V (1910- 1936), on to George VI (1936-1952) and
into the time of Elizabeth II, who came to the throne in 1952 changed
too; the primary role shifted from the royalists to the commoners and
rebels, from the queen to the prime minister. To such positive image of
non-royal leadership added the courageous and inspiring prime
minister, Winston Churchill, who led the country through World War II.
London, as the capital of the former empire, had long been in control
over the culture, politics and the economy of the United Kingdom.
London used to broadcast for Britain in perfect Queen’s English with the
southern English intonations of its radio announcers of the British
Broadcasting Corporation, or the BBC. But, beginning in the 1960s,
regional dialects and later even foreign accents were heard on the air.
The Arts Council, which had long financed the nation’s drama,
literature, music, painting and plastic arts from London, redirected
much of its grants to regional arts councils. When Great Britain elected
its first socialist government in 1945, the country was on the way from
the former ideal of individual freedom to the new form of social
security. This government undertook its responsibility for public
housing, pensions, unemployment, and the nation’s infrastructure, such
as railroads and mines. It was a period of remarkable political
regeneration of British society after the horror of the 1930s and World
War II. Yet, its possible consequences as well as the threat of
Communism, were exposed to their extreme in George Orwell’s (1903-
1950) novels Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
where the state controls every aspect of human life and the individuals
obey it. Similarly life may become awful under those who exercise their
technological culture to its extremes, as shown in Brave New World
(1932) by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).
G. Orwell’s life and works.
George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair, (born June 25,
1903, Motihari, Bengal, India—died January 21, 1950, London,
England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his
novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter
a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers
of totalitarian rule.
Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original
name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared
in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the
beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became
so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real
name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift
in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British
imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.
He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor
British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French
extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in
Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,”
as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions
to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus
brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning
with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory
boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished
among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He
grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of
the miseries of those years in his posthumously published
autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).
Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington
and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies
at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was
one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing
in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell
decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as
assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served
in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model
imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer,
and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were
ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial
police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions
to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant
autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,”
classics of expository prose.
