I
n 1954, four years after George Orwell’s premature death from tuberculosis, his friend Christopher Hollis recalled: “One of the most interesting and deepest of Orwell’s beliefs was his belief in the profound evil of contraception.” Near the end of his life, Orwell expressed the view that even the Catholic teaching on “the safe period” was too lax. He thought, according to Hollis, “that people who desired intercourse without desiring children were guilty of a profound lack of faith in life, and that a generation which slipped into the way of thinking such a desire legitimate was inevitably damned.”
Orwell was an awkward character during his lifetime, too independent to fit into anybody else’s ideology. In death, he has proved slightly easier to manipulate, because commentators can simply ignore his more inconvenient opinions. But though Orwell’s antipathy to birth control has been largely overlooked, it is far from incidental to his worldview.
