George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari in India, which was at that time part of the British Empire. His family was not very wealthy and like most middle-class English families of that time, their livelihood depended on the Empire. In 1907, his family returned to England. His parents managed to send him to a private school in Sussex and when he was thirteen, he won a scholarship to Wellington. Soon after that, he won another scholarship to the well-known public school, Eaton. After being forced to work very hard at preparatory school, Blair lost interest in any further intellectual exertion that was not related to his personal ambition. In his book Why I Writ