A shadow on his legacy: George Orwell’s statue outside BBC Broadcasting House. Image: Simon Matthews / Alamy

What if George Orwell hadn’t died 75 years ago?

He had at least a couple of big opportunities to perish before then—which might have altered his considerable legacy
January 7, 2025

Many periodicals recently ran stories about Donald Trump’s second electoral victory leading to a burst of new sales for two old books: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). There was nothing unusual about the members of this dystopian duo showing up together in these reports, just as they had eight years earlier, the first time Trump headed to the White House. The books have a lot in common, after all, despite differences such as only Atwood’s containing a critique of patriarchy. Both books deal with autocratic systems. Each includes symbols and slogans that show up in political essays and speeches. Each has sometimes even made its mark in protests, with “Big Brother is Watching You” appearing on banners and defenders of abortion rights dressing like the eponymous lead character in Atwood’s novel.

Still, it’s crucial to keep two contrasts in mind.

First, those who invoke Atwood’s most famous novel when protesting against real world situations tend to be on the left. Orwell’s last and most enduringly influential book, by contrast, is used by people at various points on the political spectrum, as shown lately by the simultaneous publication of op-eds castigating Trump as a bullying Big Brother and others decrying diversity rhetoric as Newspeak.

Second, of the two authors, only Atwood is around to tell us what she thinks of the way her book gets used and what she thinks of Trump. And tell us she does. She answers interviews, pens essays, posts on social media. There is no mystery about her disdain for the 45th—and soon to be 47th—president, nor about her support for activists who dress like handmaids.

The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four is in no position to let us know his thoughts on portrayals of Trump as Big Brother. Nor to tell what he thinks of people on the left, on the right or in the centre claiming that their opponents use language in a Newspeak-like manner. The reason is simple: he has been dead. For a long time. Seventy-five years, in fact, come 21st January in the new year. He wrote a lot of short pieces, including such classic essays as “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and “The Politics of the English Language” (1946), but, not surprisingly, none of them refer to Trump, who was merely a toddler when Orwell died in the 1950s. Nor do any of his many reviews and works of journalism refer to the way Nineteen Eighty-Four has been used to score political points—again, no surprise, as the novel was published less than a year before Orwell died.

It would be fascinating to know what Orwell would make of contemporary elections and how he feels about the widely varying ways his novel has become part of political debates and struggles over the years. It would also be fascinating to ask him for his thoughts on Handmaid’s Tale, which is by a self-professed Orwell fan, and about criticisms of Nineteen Eighty-Four for lacking any fully developed female characters. We just cannot get answers to such questions without resorting to mediums and Ouija boards.

A lack of actual comments by Orwell on these issues has not deterred people from engaging in speculation. Many people in many decades have played the What If Orwell Had Not Died in 1950 Game and played it in a specific forward-looking way. That is, they have used phrases like “if Orwell were alive today” and posited a longer—sometimes much longer—lifespan for the author.

While the Vietnam War raged, for example, people mused on what an Orwell into his sixties or early seventies would have made of it. Some thought he would oppose American actions due to his anti-imperialism, while others insisted that he would oppose the Viet Cong due to his suspicion of Communist party-led movements. In 1984, people speculated on what an Orwell in his eighties would have thought of the state of the world in the year he set his most influential story. In 2013, Stuart Jeffries even wondered what Orwell would have thought of Britain in that year had he lived to be 110, though he had to admit that, for the tubercular writer to have made it to such an advanced age, cryogenics might have had to be involved.

I haven’t seen anyone yet ponder what a supremely superannuated Orwell would feel about Trump’s latest electoral victory. But Tim Crook, who co-edits the journal George Orwell Studies, played the game in the Guardian eight years ago. The paper ran an article titled “Welcome to dystopia – George Orwell experts on Donald Trump”, which was inspired in part by Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s first White House spokesperson, introducing the world to “alternative facts”, a Newspeak-like phrase if there ever was one. The paper invited experts to channel Orwell in reflecting on American politics. The other two they asked, Jean Seaton, historian of the BBC and head of the Orwell Prize-giving Orwell Foundation, and DJ Taylor, whose 2003 book Orwell: The Life was at the time the most impressive biography of the author ever written, steered clear of the game. Crook went the “if Orwell were alive today” route, though, guessing that “Trump would amuse and horrify” the author “at the same time”.

Imagine not that Orwell had a longer life—but that he had an even shorter one

I’ve long wanted to play the game myself, but with a twist—going backwards, not forwards. That is, what I will do here is imagine not that Orwell, who was born in India in 1903 and died in London at the age of just 46, had a longer life, but that he had an even shorter one. While a much less common approach, there is a stronger logic to following this path when venturing into “what if” terrain with Orwell.

By the time he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, the author, who was born Eric Blair but gained fame writing under a pen name, was so ill with tuberculosis that it was an open question whether he would finish the book that he hoped would be his masterpiece before the disease finished him. And he had at least two brushes with death unrelated to illness, one in 1937 and the other in 1947.

What if either of those two near-death experiences had proved fatal? How would an earlier demise have changed how we think about Orwell and his texts? How might “Orwell Studies” as a field have been different (if it existed at all) and how might “Orwellian” be a different sort of adjective (if it was used at all) had Orwell died three years or 13 years before did?

The first time Orwell almost died was when he was shot in the neck in Spain in May of 1937, two months after the publication of The Road to Wigan Pier, a work of reportage based on time he spent with English miners. The second time he almost died was in August of 1947 when he faced drowning near a famously treacherous whirlpool off the coast of Jura. He had left London to live on that isolated island soon after he published Animal Farm (1945), which was his first truly successful book in terms of sales. At the time of his nearly fatal boating accident, his main writing project was a book he referred to as The Last Man in Europe.

Orwell’s biographers naturally tend to discuss both the shooting in Spain and the accident in Scotland, at least in passing. The most extensive treatments of them are in a 2023 book that stripped Taylor’s 2003 book of the distinction it held for two decades as the top biography of the author. Taylor surely did not mind having his Orwell: The Life knocked off its perch, though, because the book that accomplished it was his own Orwell: The New Life, a magisterial 608-page successor to his more compact—but far from slim—480-page earlier book. Both of Taylor’s lives of Orwell are elegantly crafted, but the more recent one benefits from being able to draw on some significant materials, including letters and diaries written by women who knew Orwell, that only became available after The Life appeared, and that in some cases cast aspects of the author’s character and behaviour towards women in a negative light. The New Life includes three lively pages on the 1937 incident and the author’s own narrative of it. “Orwell’s account of the experience of being shot,” Taylor notes, “is one of his great literary set pieces – crammed with unrelenting detail yet oddly dispassionate and detached, as if it were someone else toppled into the mud and coughing blood over the friends who came to tend him.” We also get two lively pages on the 1947 accident at sea, during which, Taylor says, Orwell “maintained an enviable sangfroid”.

At least one of Orwell’s near-death experiences is also discussed in many of the recent Orwell books—and there really are a great many of these—that are not biographies, or at least not straight biographies. I have in mind works that take more thematic approaches to the author. The shooting in Spain, for example, figures in Orwell’s Roses (2021) by Rebecca Solnit, an engaging set of essays that focuses on what brought joy and hope to a man often remembered for a final work associated with fear and despair.

The shooting also comes up in Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (2023) by Laura Beers. This highly readable and thoughtful short volume is concerned above all with how Orwell’s writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four, can help us think about contemporary predicaments. Like some other significant recent works on Orwell, it mixes admiration for the author’s keen appreciation of some forms of injustice with a sharp critique of specific blind spots and prejudices he had. Most notably, in a chapter titled “Patriarchy”, Beers elucidates deeply problematic aspects of Orwell’s treatment of women, noting a sexism that he himself did not re-examine and put behind him in his thirties and forties the way he did some other prejudices he had earlier in life. This is a subject that Anna Funder explores at greater length and with an even sharper critical edge in Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (also 2023), a stylishly written work, which again brings up the 1937 shooting. It is natural that it does so, as its focus is on the life of the extraordinary woman, born Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who accompanied her husband to Spain and tended him after he was shot.

In most cases, when biographers and other kinds of writers bring up the moments when Orwell could easily have died but did not, they focus on issues other than the one that interests me here: how dying earlier would have altered how we think about him and his writings. Instead, those brushes with death are used to make other points. For example, the 1937 shooting is used to remind readers of Orwell’s flair for humorous quips, which is sometimes forgotten when the focus is on his dark, dystopian imaginings. We hear of Orwell noting that, while he was recovering, people kept saying that a man who gets a bullet in his throat and lives is supremely lucky, but it seemed to him that the truly lucky man would be the one who did not get shot in the throat in the first place. Beers does note, more in line with my concern here, that had Orwell died in Spain, “as he almost did”, it is “unlikely that many today would remember his name”—but leaves this as just a brief aside.

When his 1947 boating accident is discussed, meanwhile, this is sometimes done to remind us of Orwell’s complexity and contradictions. Taylor, for instance, uses the accident to highlight the fact that Orwell had his practical and impractical sides, that he could be careful and careless, and that, while he had many talents, seamanship was not among them. For he was steering the vessel when it capsized. He paid less attention than he should have to the dangers of the Corryvreckan Whirlpool. His action, Taylor reminds us, did more than just come close to ending Orwell’s life; it also endangered the lives of others in the boating party. One of these people was Richard Blair, Orwell’s adopted son, who, as a three-year-old, the biographer claims, stayed blissfully “unaware of the danger”, and merrily “set up a chorus of ‘Up-Down splish-splosh’” before the group made dry land.

Orwell had his practical and impractical sides, he could be careful and careless

In thinking about how an earlier death might have altered our sense of him and his writing, it makes sense to move backwards, step by step, from 1950. So, let’s begin with imagining that the 1947 accident, which everyone on the boat survived, had been a fatal one, at least for the man steering the craft. What would be different if the notorious whirlpool—a menace that the careful captain of the boat I took for a literary pilgrimage to Jura in 2023, organised by Prospect contributing editor Isabel Hilton, stayed well clear of—had ended the life of the famous author at the age of 44 and his son Richard, who is now in his eighties and an active supporter of the Orwell Foundation?

Most obviously, Nineteen Eighty-Four would never have been read, reviewed and assigned. None of the many dramatisations of it, from radio plays and films to 1984! The Musical! would exist. Gone would be various songs, including a pair recorded half a century apart and both titled “Big Brother”: a 1973 rocker by David Bowie and a 2023 number by the Thai hip-hop collective Rap Against Dictatorship. Also vanished would be the many adaptations and spin-offs of the novel. There would be no renderings of the book into other languages ranging from Czech to Chinese (67 translations and counting), no graphic novel versions, no 1985 (1978) by Anthony Burgess, no Little Brother (2008) by Cory Doctorow, no 1955 Goon Show sketch parodying scenes from the novel. And, alas, there would be no Julia: A Novel (2023), Sandra Newman’s skillful rewriting of Orwell’s novel from its main female figure’s perspective.

Gone from periodicals would be countless essays about Nineteen Eighty-Four, which constitute the biggest subfield within academic Orwell Studies. Gone from library and bookstore shelves would be the dozens of individually authored books and edited volumes specifically about that novel. This includes two volumes with the same title but different subtitles. One is On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (2005), edited by Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldstone and Martha C Nussbaum. The other is On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography of George Orwell’s Masterpiece (2019), a book by the prolific Taylor, who, along with writing various novels and works of criticism not linked to Orwell, recently had a lively short volume of essays come out, titled Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (2024).

People might have wondered how good a book The Last Man in Europe would have been had Orwell lived long enough to finish it. No one would have wondered what Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been like, though, since that title was not yet being used.

Moving further into the realm of speculation, it is easy to imagine that two late works by Orwell that already figure prominently in assessments of him would figure even more prominently without Big Brother casting his very big shadow: “The Politics of the English Language” and Animal Farm. The former would stand out as his definitive work on rhetoric. The latter would stand out as his final word on dictatorship.

It also easy to imagine that Animal Farm would be interpreted in a different way than it is now. It is routinely paired with Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the two works seen largely as tales about power and control. If Orwell had died in 1947, however, Animal Farm might instead be paired with Homage to Catalonia, with The Road to Wigan Pier, or placed together with both of those works. This could lead to focusing on two aspects of it—related to inequality and to revolutionaries failing to live up to their claims—which are always acknowledged but sometimes get lost a bit in the focus on totalitarianism. Like Homage, Animal Farm is about a group that claimed to stand for liberatory principles but ended up suppressing dissent. Like Road, it is about unfair social hierarchies.

In some parts of the world where the end of colonial rule by members of one foreign group was followed by a period in which many people felt they were being repressed by a set of new powerholders, who might look different from the old ones but were behaving in familiar ways, Animal Farm is already interpreted in a way that emphasises those two features of it. In 2014, when Hong Kong protesters called for an extension of democracy that had failed to take place after British colonial governors were replaced by chief executives beholden to Beijing who were from, or at least in league with, the local Chinese tycoon class, they felt Orwell’s 1945 novel more than his 1949 one spoke to them, and they used the phrase “Some Animals Are More Equal than Others” on a banner.

Similarly, in the country now officially known as Myanmar, one learns from Emma Larkin’s wonderful memoir-cum-travelogue Finding George Orwell in Burma (2005) that people sometimes say the author wrote a second book about the country after his Burmese Days (1934), which described its situation under colonial control. This second Burma book, they claim, was Animal Farm, which told of what happened when British rule ended but the new order was still disturbingly familiar. (They say as well, according to Larkin, that Orwell went on to write a third book about Burma, which earned him the title of The Prophet; namely, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which imagined correctly how tightly the country would be controlled by juntas of the future.)

People sometimes say Orwell wrote a second book about Burma—Animal Farm

Another way that Orwell’s reputation might be different if he had died before finishing his last book is that he might be thought of as an author whose greatest gift was as a creator of short works. He is now remembered for an important mid-length dystopian novel, various work of non-fiction, four realistic novels, and a single allegorical novella, as well as journalism. Had he died off Jura, he might be described as an author who achieved some limited success with his first four novels, one set in Burma and three in England, and three non-fiction books in the 1930s, then really came into his own as a writer in the 1940s with a breakthrough work of very short fiction and a flurry of journalistic writings.

What, then, would his reputation be if he had died a decade earlier still? There would then not only be no Nineteen Eighty-Four but also no Animal Farm and no Homage to Catalonia (1938), arguably his second and third most influential books. (It is possible, of course, that a different sort of chronicle of the Blairs in Spain would have still appeared, created by Eileen and with her name on the cover as a co-author.) There would also be no Coming up for Air (1938), no “Politics of the English Language” and also no “Why I Write” (1946), another notable essay dating from his very productive mid-thirties to mid-forties. In that same period, he also wrote a commentary sometimes called the locus classicus of the term “cold war” and scores and scores of pieces on books, including one that criticised his former Eton tutor Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), often thought of a major competitor to Nineteen Eighty-Four for top dystopian novel of the first half of the last century, and another that praised Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), a third work in the running for that same title.

One potential result of all this is that Orwell simply might not have been all that well remembered after death. He might, though, have been ripe for rediscovery at a later point by people who were particularly struck by his critical views on colonialism—a side of the author recently analysed with great skill by Douglas Kerr in Orwell and Empire (2022). With fewer other works to his name, more attention might be paid to Burmese Days and “Shooting an Elephant”, as well as “The Hanging” (1931), perhaps the most impressive piece he published as Eric Blair. These are all work that lay bare his contempt for British control of Burma, which he witnessed firsthand as a colonial policeman charged with doing, as he put it in “Shooting an Elephant”, “the dirty work of Empire”.

It is also natural for the last book an author writes to get special attention, so The Road to Wigan Pier might loom large in considerations of him. This is typically described as a look at class prejudice in England—and it is that—but it includes a section in which the author refers to his understanding of and ultimate disdain for this prejudice, as he discovered it in himself, to be rooted in his earlier understanding of and ultimate disdain for the prejudice that he and other representatives of the British empire had toward the Burmese people they encountered.

Had Orwell died either in 1937 or 1947, the term “Orwellian” might never have become a commonly used one. It is possible, though, that it could have come into circulation but have meant something very different than a setting in which surveillance, paranoia and vilification of political enemies are the order of the day. Asked about Orwellian as a term in the opening episode of a recent BBC radio series called Orwell vs Kafka, DJ Taylor brought up one alternative to the meaning it has generally taken on: a tendency, adopted by some literary critics, to see certain kinds of distinctively English antiheroes in the author’s novels as “Orwellian”. I can imagine, though, that, had the author died in 1947, we might refer at times to an “Orwellian” approach to revolutions, focussing on how they can leave old structures of domination in place. And, had he died in 1937, we might refer to an “Orwellian” take on empire.

And we might instead be listening to a BBC series called Orwell vs Kipling—pondering the way in which a pair of Englishmen born in India would go on to see and write about empire in dramatically different ways.