The class quiz
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George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair (1903-50), author of the visionary satires Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which made famous the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you.’ A democratic socialist, Orwell attacked both the evils of capitalism and the tyranny of Communist states. He came from a lower-middle-class background and was acutely conscious of how precarious his social position was. He also wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), about life as a tramp, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), about mass unemployment, from which this quote comes. In it, Orwell gives the following as examples of the ‘sinking middle class’ of the 1930s: ‘the private schoolmaster, the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel's spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship's officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns.’
