A Hanging

In “A Hanging,” George Orwell uses a single event in colonial Burma to critique the death penalty and the corrupt tyranny of empire. Whether “A Hanging” should be considered fiction or autobiography is not entirely clear. As a member of the Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell would likely have witnessed hangings, although he is known to have told a friend that “A Hanging” was “just a story” (Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1980, p. 151). On the other hand, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he writes, “I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders” (Orwell, George. Complete Works of George Orwell. Vol. 5, Secker & Warburg, p. 136). This statement could easily be read as referring to the narrator’s reaction to the execution in “A Hanging.”

Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick, concluded that “A Hanging” is “a compound of fact and fiction, honest in intent, true to experience but not necessarily truthful in detail” (Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1980, p. 318). This theory is supported by the critic James Wood, who suggests that the puddle episode in “A Hanging” may have been inspired by a passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867) in which a condemned man adjusts his blindfold moments before his execution (Wood, James.