Why was George Orwell a socialist?

When George Orwell’s publisher, Fredric Warburg, read the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four in December 1948 he wrote a rapturous report to his colleagues, saying that the book was ‘worth a cool million votes to the Conservative party’. He described it as ‘a deliberate and sadistic attack on Socialism and socialist parties generally. It seems to indicate a final breach between Orwell and Socialism’.

Warburg had known Orwell for more than a decade. If he believed that Orwell had swung to the right, it is hardly surprising that other readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four got the same impression. Orwell was too sick with tuberculosis in 1949 to write more than a few book reviews. He told Warburg that he had ‘a stunning idea for a very short novel which has been in my head for years’, but he was never able to write more than a few pages of this book – titled A Smoking-room Story – before he died in January 1950.