Lyndon Ashmore explores the adolescent appeal of George Orwell.

As a young boy tentatively toeing the brink of adolescence my Grandfather imparted a small pearl of wisdom to me. He advised that as I grow older it was important to “not stop believing what one believes as a young man”, this was quickly followed by the witticism that “if you aren’t a communist at 18 you haven’t a heart, and if you aren’t a conservative by 40 you haven’t a brain”. Despite these gently contrasting and potentially problematic nuggets the sentiment was clear: the problems and injustices that you notice (and are convinced as to a simple resolution of) when a youngster should not be ignored as years elapse and security becomes a more desirable option.

Coincidentally, it is also around this time that I first thumbed a copy of George Orwell’s Down and out in Paris and London – which was coyly catalogued in the ‘adult’ section of my secondary school library. Behind the plastic protective cover, not only did I find the first of many works that would affirm a love of literature, but I also found an accessible and daring writer that shared my then world view – as Gordon Comstock observes in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, “every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist”. Orwell had seen the underbelly of Paris and London and experienced the trials of vagrancy and hardship that so intrigue growing boys who are trying to grasp an understanding of the varied world tapestry around them. The feeling seems to be shared with many similarly aged boys of a literary persuasion who always found Orwell somewhat of a sanctuary and informer in their formative years.

But the question arose of how does an Etonian who was posted to India for the British Empire become the champion for the left leaning, angst ridden demographic that I awkwardly fitted into? The contrast seems mockingly ironic and it is true that Orwell’s situation often seemed oddly contrasting to the sentiments that readers identify with him.

However, there are I think a number of reasons that Orwell has found himself in such a position. Firstly, it seems significant that although Orwell went to private school for much of his life, he did so through the merit of scholarships and consequently was made poignantly aware of his lesser financial status on a frequent basis. As a result Orwell came to loathe his time at such institutions feeling that they were telling him (as he observes in his essay ‘Such, such were the joys’) “this kind of education hasn’t much to offer to a boy with your background and your outlook”. I am sure the feeling was mutual, but the placing of blame was not, and even years later Orwell’s experiences at school still left a bad taste in his mouth.

Following his time at Eton, Orwell signed up to the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. His distaste for the inequalities in education that he had experienced soon extended to British Imperialism and he quickly formed a strong indignation and loathing for the behaviour and actions of Britain within its empire. It is from these varied and often harrowing experiences in Burma that I think some of Orwell’s best essays have sprung. The well crafted structure and subtle works ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’ represent Orwell at his best – a best that is always achieved when he is writing against a perceived injustice or an imbalance of right and wrong.

In all of Orwell’s work this acute understanding of his individual morality becomes the furnace that fuels his words. It is the same catalyst that pushed him to Spain to participate in the civil war when Franco led the nationalistic uprising despite very much being an outsider to the troubles. Orwell narrowly escaped from the battles with both a bullet wound to the neck and the material for the novel Homage to Catalonia. To an idealistic teenager the stubbornness of Orwell’s opinions – combined with his willingness to act upon them – was impressive and inspiring.

This vein of action and the hint at revolution continued throughout his work and underpinned the novels Animal Farm and 1984 whose presence on the GCSE syllabus did much to help awaken me and my peers to a writer that was oddly kindred in outlook, but also wrote in an engaging and accessible way that made it difficult not to identify.

The political convictions of Orwell combined with his suffering as a fringe individual easily enamoured him to become the literary hero of many adolescent boys who, as he points out in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, “don’t see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait” of Socialism. Furthermore, the crackly brown veil that covers most his writing – particularly in Aspidistra and 1984 – manages to mirror the angst of the hormonal years that provide a melodramatically bleak outlook.

As my Grandfather would probably say, Orwell is a man who has not left behind the ideals of his youth and is not afraid to pursue them wholeheartedly, which is why, despite a shifting perception of the world, Orwell still occupies an esteemed and well thumbed place on the shelves of post-adolescents.