Eric Arthur Blair (he never legally changed his name to George Orwell) was born on 25 June 1903 at Motihari in Bengal, India, where his father was an undistinguished administrator in the Opium Department of the Government of India. He was the second child of Richard Walmsley and Ida Mabel Limouzin Blair. His mother returned to England with her children by 1905, although his father did not return permanently until 1911, when he retired. These early years in England, living at Henley-on-Thames, a very Edwardian town, would come to represent a period of happiness and security that affected Orwell's consciousness for the rest of his life. And yet he was also aware of conflicts. Years later he described himself as a member of the "lower-uppermiddle class," a phrase which was meant to contrast the family's social rank (as servants of king and country) with their middle-class economic status. Although the family was by no means impoverished, Orwell was later to insist that in this kind of "shabby-genteel family . . . there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any workingclass family above the level of the dole." His awareness of having an ambivalent social position and of money's extraordinary importance would become prominent themes in Orwell's first four books and helped to shape his attitudes to what he came to see as the privileged intelligentsia.
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