Aldous Huxley: An introduction
Aldous Huxley was born in the year 1894 in Surrey, England. He had been the third son of the novelist and school teacher Leonard Huxley, who transcribed Cornhill Magazine also his first wife, Julia Arnold, who established Prior’s Field School. Julia was the poet and critic’s Matthew Arnold’s niece and Ms. Humphry Ward’s son. Huxley, nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog, was the grandson of great agnostic, zoologist, and controversialist Thomas Henry Huxley. Also, Julian Huxley (his brother) and Andrew Huxley (his half-brother) was an excellent biological researcher. Aldous Huxley’s nephew, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who after a time of clinical depression, took his own life.
Huxley’s learning began in the well-equipped horticultural laboratory of his father, after which he was registered at the Hillside School near Godalming (Surrey). His mom taught him there for many years before she had taken seriously ill. He then moved on to Eton College. His mother passed away in 1908 when he was barely 14. In 1911, he developed an eye disease that made him completely blind for two or three years. This incident destroyed his early hopes of being a physician, which was his initial pursuit. In October 1913, Huxley joined Balliol College, Oxford, where he pursued English literature.
In January 1916, he tried to enroll himself for the British Army, for the Great War (World War I); however, he was refused on health grounds, being half-blind. His eyesight eventually was retrieved partially. In 1916, he revised Oxford Poetry and graduated with first-class honors in June in the same academic year. His brother Julian once narrated that he believed Huxley’s blindness was a hidden blessing. For one thing, it compensated his idea to take medicine as a profession. His distinction lay in his universalism. He was able to take all the information for his province. Having been financially indebted to his father, Huxley intended to seek jobs after spending his years at Balliol. Huxley later taught French at Eton College for one year. Eric Blair (who later grew popular as George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his students. He was known mostly as being an inept faculty unable to maintain discipline in college. However, Orwell and others spoke highly of his outstanding command of language. Noticeably, Huxley was also employed at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham, County Durham, northeast England, for a brief period in the 1920s. According to the introductory concept to the latest version of his science fiction Brave New World (1932), the significant inspiration for the novel was the impression he had thereof an ordered cosmos in a world of unplanned incoherence.

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