A Hanging

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, who was born in India in 1903. His father worked for the opium department of the Indian Civil Service, and his mother’s family was based in Burma. His grandfather had been the owner of two Jamaican sugar plantations with 359 enslaved African people and had received ample compensation from the 1837 Slave Compensation Act. Orwell’s family, then, was inextricably tied up with and indebted to the imperial project. He was raised and educated in England, where he won a scholarship to study at Eton College. At Eton, he was highly conscious of his own social status and grew to hate the cruelty and snobbery of that institution. This resistance to tyranny would characterize Orwell’s whole career.

After leaving school, Orwell joined the Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. He soon grew disgusted with the tyranny and unfairness of the British Empire. Although frustrated with the understandable hostility of the Burmese people, he displayed a significant interest in local culture, learning to speak the language fluently and adopting the local custom of tattooing his knuckles.

When Orwell contracted dengue fever after five and a half years in Burma, he was granted leave in England and resolved to abandon the Imperial Police and pursue a career as a writer. In addition to “A Hanging,” two other early works by Orwell are based on his experience of colonialism in Burma: the 1936 essay “Shooting an Elephant” and the 1934 novel Burmese Days.

The hatred of tyranny and inequality that emerges in “A Hanging” endured throughout Orwell’s career, both in his treatment of poverty and social inequality in novels such as Down and Out in London and Paris (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and in his damning portrayal of totalitarian political systems in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945). In order to understand the experiences of the most disadvantaged members of society firsthand, Orwell spent several years in the late 1920s and early 1930s dressing to present himself as an impoverished person. In December 1932, he even deliberately got himself arrested so that he might experience Christmas in prison. The attempt was unsuccessful, and he was released after a couple of days. In 1936, Orwell traveled to Spain to fight against Francisco Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 46.