Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the last novel of George Orwell, published in June 1949, seven months before his death, and the most influential political novel of the twentieth century. It imagines Britain — now called Airstrip One, a province of the superstate Oceania — in the year 1984, ruled by the Party under the leadership of Big Brother, whose face stares from every poster above the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. Every citizen is watched through telescreens; history is constantly rewritten; thought itself is a crime; and the official language, Newspeak, is being designed to make rebellious thoughts impossible to express. Winston Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old clerk who falsifies records at the Ministry of Truth, secretly hates the Party, keeps a diary, falls in love with a young woman, Julia, and believes he has found an ally in a powerful Inner Party member, O’Brien. He is betrayed, tortured and re-educated, until he believes that two and two make five and loves Big Brother.

Its vocabulary — Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, unperson, memory hole, Room 101, Thought Police, “Orwellian” — has become the language in which we talk about surveillance, propaganda and tyranny.

At a glance

Published	8 June 1949, by Secker & Warburg, London
Written	1946–48, on the island of Jura, while Orwell was dying of tuberculosis
Working title	The Last Man in Europe
Setting	London, “chief city of Airstrip One”, in April–(perhaps) 1985
Models	Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany; also wartime Britain, the BBC and the Ministry of Information; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924)

The world

The world is divided among three totalitarian superstates permanently at war: Oceania (the Americas, Britain, Australia, southern Africa), Eurasia (Russia and Europe) and Eastasia (China and its neighbours). The war is never won or lost; its purpose is to use up surplus production and keep the population in fear and poverty. Alliances shift without notice, and the Party announces that Oceania “has always been at war” with whichever power is now the enemy.

Oceania’s society has three classes: the Inner Party (about 2 per cent), the Outer Party (about 13 per cent), who staff the bureaucracy, and the proles (85 per cent), left in poverty and ignorance, distracted by beer, lotteries, sport, pornography and songs produced by machines, and not thought worth watching. The Party’s ideology is Ingsoc (English Socialism). Its slogans: “WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” Its four ministries are named for their opposites: the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue: propaganda and falsification), the Ministry of Peace (war), the Ministry of Love (torture and police) and the Ministry of Plenty (rationing and shortage). The enemy of the state is Emmanuel Goldstein, a former leader turned traitor, against whom the citizens perform the daily Two Minutes Hate.

The story

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Winston Smith, a frail Outer Party member with a varicose ulcer above his ankle, comes home for lunch to his flat in Victory Mansions, where the telescreen pours out statistics about pig-iron production and watches him. In an alcove out of its sight he begins a diary — itself a crime punishable by death — writing, in a flood of emotion, “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” over and over.

At the Ministry of Truth, Winston works in the Records Department, rewriting old newspaper articles so that the Party’s predictions always appear to have been correct, and dropping the originals into a “memory hole” to be incinerated. People who have been “vaporised” by the Thought Police become “unpersons”, erased from all records. He creates a fictional war hero, Comrade Ogilvy, to replace a disgraced official. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” He remembers, dimly, a time before the Party; but there is no evidence of anything — except once, when he held in his hands a photograph proving that three disgraced revolutionaries had been where the Party said they could not have been, before he destroyed it.

He wonders whether the proles, if they ever became conscious of their strength, might overthrow the Party: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” He visits the prole districts, talks to an old man in a pub who can remember nothing useful about the past, and buys a coral paperweight and the diary from an antique shop run by kindly Mr Charrington, who has a room upstairs without a telescreen.

He works with Syme, a philologist compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary, who explains its purpose: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Winston thinks Syme is too intelligent to survive; he is soon vaporised. He also knows his neighbour Parsons, a stupidly enthusiastic Party loyalist whose children are fanatic members of the Spies.

During the Two Minutes Hate, Winston notices a dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, who wears the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League, and thinks she is spying on him; he hates her and fantasises about raping and murdering her. He also exchanges a look with O’Brien, a heavy, urbane member of the Inner Party, and feels that O’Brien shares his heresy.

The girl falls in front of him in a corridor and, when he helps her up, slips him a note: “I love you.” She is Julia, twenty-six. They arrange to meet secretly in the country, in a clearing where a thrush sings, and make love. Julia is not an ideological rebel; she simply enjoys breaking the Party’s rules — she has had many lovers, obtains real coffee and chocolate on the black market, and thinks the war is probably invented by the Party to keep people frightened. “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.” Winston rents Mr Charrington’s room above the antique shop, and they meet there regularly, living a few weeks of happiness, while a prole woman sings in the yard below as she hangs out washing.

Hate Week arrives; in the middle of a speaker’s oration, the enemy changes from Eurasia to Eastasia, and the crowd tears down the posters, believing the speech was sabotaged. Winston must work feverishly to rewrite the records.

O’Brien invites Winston to his luxurious flat on the pretext of lending him an advance copy of the Newspeak Dictionary. Winston and Julia go. O’Brien turns off his telescreen — Inner Party members may — and tells them he is a member of the Brotherhood, the secret resistance led by Goldstein. He asks what they are prepared to do — commit murder, sabotage, throw acid in a child’s face, betray their country — and they agree to everything, except to separate. He promises them a copy of “the book”.

Winston receives The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein and reads parts of it aloud to Julia in their room, while she falls asleep. The book explains the world: the permanent war that destroys surplus wealth; the three classes of every society and their cycles of revolution; how the Party has stopped history by making itself a self-perpetuating collective oligarchy; how doublethink — “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them” — allows the Party to rewrite reality while believing in its own lies. Winston understands how; he has not yet read why.

As Winston and Julia lie in bed, a voice behind the picture on the wall repeats their words: “You are the dead.” It is a hidden telescreen. Thought Police burst in, smash the paperweight, beat Julia. Mr Charrington, transformed, is revealed as a member of the Thought Police.

In the Ministry of Love, a windowless place “where there is no darkness” (the lights never go out), Winston is held in a cell with other prisoners — including Parsons, denounced by his own daughter for saying “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep — and beaten and tortured for weeks until he confesses to every crime imaginable. Then O’Brien appears: he was never a member of the Brotherhood; he has watched Winston for seven years; he wrote Goldstein’s book, or helped to. In a long series of sessions, Winston is strapped to a machine that inflicts pain by turning a dial, while O’Brien, patient and almost tender, educates him. Reality exists only in the Party’s mind: “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.” He holds up four fingers and asks how many there are; Winston says four; pain; at last Winston sees five, or doesn’t know. O’Brien explains the Party’s motive: not the welfare of others, but power for its own sake:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power… Power is not a means; it is an end… If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.

Winston tells him that the spirit of Man will defeat the Party; O’Brien shows him his emaciated, broken body in a mirror. “You are the last man. You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are.” Yet Winston has one thing left: he has not betrayed Julia.

He is taken to Room 101, which contains “the worst thing in the world” — for each person, something different. For Winston it is rats. O’Brien brings a cage of starving rats strapped to a mask that will be fitted over his face, so that the rats will eat his eyes and tongue. In terror, Winston screams: “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me!” He has betrayed her. He is broken.

Released, Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking Victory Gin, a shell of himself, playing chess problems, given a sinecure job. He meets Julia once in a park; she has grown thicker and stiffer; each admits betraying the other; they feel nothing. On the telescreen comes news of a great victory in Africa. Winston weeps:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache… But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

An Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”, written in standard English in the past tense, explains the structure of the language and its goal of reducing vocabulary until heretical thought becomes impossible — a detail many readers take as a sign that the Party eventually fell.

Themes

Totalitarianism. Orwell drew on Stalin’s purges, show trials, cult of personality and rewriting of history, and on Nazi propaganda, to imagine a state whose control is total — over action, speech, sex, memory and finally belief itself. Unlike earlier tyrannies, the Party demands not obedience but love.

Truth and history. The Party’s power rests on controlling the past: if all records agree, and memory can be altered, then the past is what the Party says. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The novel defends objective truth as the foundation of freedom.

Language and thought. Newspeak, doublethink and the Party’s slogans embody Orwell’s belief, set out in “Politics and the English Language”, that corrupted language corrupts thought. “Doublethink” names the capacity to believe contradictions — a mental discipline the Party requires.

Surveillance. The telescreen, the Thought Police, the hidden microphones, the children informing on their parents create a world in which privacy — the condition of an inner life — has been abolished.

The individual and love. Winston’s rebellion is private — a diary, a love affair, a paperweight, a memory — and the Party’s ultimate victory is to destroy even these. Love and loyalty are the last human things the Party must break.

Power. O’Brien’s speech presents power as an end in itself, a vision of pure domination that Orwell saw as the hidden logic of totalitarianism.

Reception and afterlife

Nineteen Eighty-Four was an immediate bestseller and has sold tens of millions of copies. Some on the left read it as an attack on socialism; Orwell insisted it was “NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party… but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable.” It was filmed in 1956 and, memorably, in 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton; adapted for stage and radio; and in 2017 returned to the top of bestseller lists after a White House adviser spoke of “alternative facts”. “Big Brother” became the name of a reality-television show. The novel has been banned in the Soviet Union and challenged in American schools.

In conversation

• Big Brother — an all-seeing authority; “Big Brother is watching you” — surveillance.
• Doublethink — holding contradictory beliefs; Newspeak — language designed to limit thought.
• Room 101 — the place of one’s worst fear.
• “Who controls the past controls the future” — the politics of memory.