ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the social, literary and political contexts of George Orwell’s work and speculates about how they affected him. Orwell repudiated the world-view he had acquired earlier in life. He admitted he had been a social snob who had a ‘long drilling in patriotism’, the latter evident in the first of his published manuscripts in the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, at the beginning of the First World War in 1914. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of military ‘mucking in’ was spreading quickly through the nascent Boy Scout Movement. This was spurred by ‘wavering imperial self-confidence in Britain following the pyrrhic victory of the Anglo-Boer War. Of Orwell’s Burman period, Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor states, Asking what Orwell was “like” in his early twenties, in the sense that it can be asked of writers such as Waugh and Powell, is a fruitless endeavour.
