Major Works
Main message behind his work
In George Orwell’s essay “Why I write” (1947), he mentioned that he saw his duty as being to “attack the Right, but not to flatter the Left”. As you can see, the common idea that most of his works have is that they are “written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism and for Democratic Socialism”. This is partially due to Orwell’s childhood education that he spent in a series of private preparatory and secondary schools which determined his views on the English class system. His experiences in the Spanish Civil War also left a large mark on Orwell’s memory, and after having first hand experiences on poverty, war and the Communist purges, it was hard for him to avoid sharing his experiences to his readers through his memoirs and fiction novels. In all his works, he had conveyed his experiences exceptionally well, as “he had touched poverty and pain, challenged capitalism and imperialism, tried various forms of social identification, and come to speak not only for the unemployed and displaced workers of the Depression but the new half-life of British suburbia” (Bradbury, 1987).