George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, in Bengal, India, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was an official in the Opium Department. Like many middle-to-upper-class men of his time, Richard Blair served the British Empire in its most prized and lucrative colony. In 1896, he met Ida Amble Limouzin, a British governess 20 years his junior, also living in India. After their marriage, the couple lived in Bengal for eight years, where they had two children: Marjorie (born 1898) and Eric. One year after Eric’s birth, Ida moved back to England. For the next eight years, Eric would see his father for only three months in 1907, during one of his leaves. A third child, Avril, was born in 1908. Richard did not see his youngest child until his return to England when he retired from the Opium Department in 1912.
Eric spent his early boyhood in Henley, Oxfordshire, where he was an admittedly “chubby boy” who enjoyed walks in the Oxfordshire countryside. During this time, he began to vaguely understand his family’s need to spend money to “keep up appearances” and the differences between members of different social classes: A friendship with a plumber’s daughter was broken by his mother because she found the girl “too common.” Not surprisingly, Eric was enthralled with books, notably Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels — a novel whose political satire would find its way into the books of George Orwell.
