Quiz answers: George Orwell
1. Where was George Orwell born, and in what year?
Motihari, India; in 1903
2. And what was his name?
Eric Arthur Blair
3. Orwell didn’t like his preparatory school much, and wrote an essay about it – “Such, Such Were The Joys”. It was so potentially defamatory that it wasn’t published until two years after his death. In it, he describes a boy whose teeth turned green with neglect; a human turd floating in a bath; and the porridge in the dining hall containing “more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose.” What was the school’s name, and where was it?
St Cyprian’s, Eastbourne
4. Later, at Eton – which he liked a bit better – he was taught French by which fellow dystopian writer?
Aldous Huxley
5. One more school question (because this is too good to miss). After Eton, Orwell was despatched to a crammer school in Southwold – Craighurst – to prepare for his Imperial Police Force exams. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, he was expelled. What for?
For sending a birthday message attached to a dead rat to the town surveyor.
6. On to the books. After a five year stint as a police officer in Burma (1922-1928), Orwell returned to Europe and took on various jobs – teacher, bookseller, dishwasher, hop-picker – while honing his writing skills. He published his first book in 1934. Which one was it?
Down and Out In Paris and London
7. Down and Out in Paris and London was influenced by Jack London’s People of the Abyss (recounting the six weeks that London spent living in the Whitechapel district of the East End). What book inspired Orwell’s novel, Burmese Days?
A Passage to India (E.M. Forster)
8. Keeping with Burmese Days, tell us the name of the novel’s ill-fated hero:
Flory
9. Here’s Orwell two years later in a 1936 publication – this time an essay, and drawing again on his time in Burma:
“He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees.”
… What poor animal has he just shot?
An elephant
10. In 1936 Orwell and his wife also travelled to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona, they were at the Hotel Continental (a “neutral” gathering point for the different Republican factions) when intense gunfire broke out on the streets outside. There, Orwell recounts:
“No sooner had the fighting broke out when the hotel filled to the brim with the most extraordinary collection of people. There were foreign journalists, political suspects of every shade, an American airman in the service of the Government, various communist agents, including a fat, sinister looking Russian, said to be an agent of the Ogpu, who was nicknamed Charlie Chan and wore attached to his waist band a revolver and a neat little bomb…”
What did this Russian agent do which radically soured Orwell’s view of Russia and its Communist state – and would profoundly influence both Animal Farm and 1984?
He lied about the cause of the gunfire outside, actively spreading rumours to undermine the Anarchist faction.
11. What injury did Orwell receive in Spain?
He was shot in the neck.
12. Fast forward three years and Orwell’s third novel, Coming Up For Air (1939), nearly didn’t get released at all. Why?
Because he insulted his own publisher – Victor Gollancz – in it, lampooning the ‘Left Book Club’s’ (Gollancz’s company and Orwell’s imprint) local lectures in several passages, depicting them as less than useless.
13. Throughout the Second World War Orwell – declared “unfit for service” because of his lungs, continued to write – keeping a war-time diary and publishing a steady stream of articles and essays. His wife, Eileen, got a job at the Ministry of Information (the inspiration for 1984’s Ministry of Truth). After countless applications to various places, Orwell was finally accepted for some “war work”. Where?
The BBC
14. In 1943, while the UK was in its wartime alliance with the USSR, Orwell started writing another novel. Which one?
Animal Farm
15. Animal Farm, which was published in 1945 (and which Orwell called his first attempt to “fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”), was famously rejected by numerous publishers – including Orwell’s regular publisher, Gollancz, and T.S. Eliot over at Faber, who argued that “what was needed… was not more communism, but more public-spirited pigs”.
… What else happened to the manuscript of Animal Farm which meant that it nearly didn’t see the light of day?
Orwell’s house was struck by a flying bomb.
16. OK! Let’s have some questions on the goings-on in Animal Farm itself. Napoleon is one of the leading pigs in Animal Farm… What breed is he?
A Berkshire Boar
17. And on the allegory front, who does he represent?
Joseph Stalin
18. What about his comrade, Snowball. Who is he based on?
Leon Trotsky
19. The first battle between the humans and the animals quickly becomes known as:
The Battle of the Cowshed
20. After that battle, Boxer and Snowball are bestowed with which honour for their bravery:
Animal Hero, First Class
21. Two more questions on those pigs. “Four legs good, two legs bad”. Who says this in Animal Farm?
Snowball
22. And who teaches the sheep to sing “Four legs good, two legs better”?
Squealer
23. OK! Onto Orwell’s ninth and final book published in his lifetime, 1984 (published in 1949) – which he remembers first thinking of in 1944 (after the 1943 Tehran Conference, and the dangerous implications of dividing the world up into “Zones of influence”) – and after being alerted to the genre of dystopian fiction by a particular novel, which inspired him to write down a few of his own ideas. … Which novel was this?
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
24. In 1984, where is Winston Smith employed?
Ministry of Truth
25. And what is Great Britain called?
Airstrip One
26. Room 101 plays a big part in the later sections of 1984. What was the real-life inspiration?
A meeting room at the BBC
27. At the end of 1984, a broken Winston Smith scrawls a message in the dust at the Chestnut Tree Café. What does it say?
2 + 2 = 5
28. When 1984 was published, it was an immediate success, sold by the truckload and received almost universal acclaim. Not all of Orwell’s fellow writers liked it, however – including Isaac Asimov, who said “if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.” Someone else called it “odious rather than tragic”. Who?
C.S. Lewis
29. In 1952, after Orwell’s death (he died just seven months after the publication of 1984, on 21 January 1950), his second wife and widow Sonia Orwell sold the only surviving manuscript of 1984 at a charity auction. How much did it go for?
£50
30. Finally, in 2013 and in the Guardian column ‘My hero’, which contemporary novelist selected George Orwell (writing: “I am forever grateful to Orwell for alerting me early to the danger flags I’ve tried to watch out for since. As Orwell taught, it isn’t the labels – Christianity, socialism, Islam, democracy, two legs bad, four legs good, the works – that are definitive, but the acts done in their names”)?
Margaret Atwood
To read an extract of Adam Biles’ upcoming sequel to Animal Farm – Beasts of England – head here.
To pre-order a first edition paperback, with three limited edition postcards, head here.
‘Beasts of England is just fantastic – really funny, clever, timely, and sufficiently uncategorisable to deliver itself of its dark message with lightness and charm.’ —Rachel Cusk
‘Adam Biles has written a sly, topical updating of Orwell for the twenty-first century.’ —Hari Kunzru
‘In Beasts of England, Adam Biles hooks readers into a world that should be impossible – but becomes even more real than our own. An ambitious, brilliant, compelling novel.’ —Jenni Fagan
‘A cunning, bold and timely act of artistic hijacking… that, like Orwell, contains within its vision the seeds of a possible, brighter tomorrow.’ —Rob Doyle