Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes 1984) is a darkly satirical political novel by George Orwell. The story takes place in a nightmarish dystopia, in which an ever-surveillant State enforces perfect conformity among citizens through indoctrination, fear, lies and ruthless punishment. The bulk of the novel was written on the island of Jura, Scotland in the year 1948 (although Orwell had written small parts of it since 1945), and it was first published on June 8, 1949. It is Orwell's most famous work, and is the inspiration of the word "Orwellian."

The novel introduced the concepts of the ever-present, all-seeing Big Brother, the notorious Room 101, the thought police who use telescreens (televisions that contain a surveillance camera - found in almost every room of the apartments of the characters in the novel), and the fictional language Newspeak (pronounced 'new-speak').

Orwell had originally chosen the year 1980 for his work. But as the writing dragged on due to progression of his pulmonary Tuberculosis, Orwell changed it to 1982 and then to 1984. There are various ideas as to the meaning of the title. It is widely thought that Orwell simply switched round the year in which he wrote it (1948); however, it is also possibly an allusion to the centennary of the Fabian Society, a Socialist organisation founded in 1884, or alternatively it may refer to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel, in which the power of a political movement reaches its height in 1984. A fourth possiblity is it is a reference to a poem his wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, had written called End of the Century, 1984. Quite possibly the truth is something of a mixture of all, as Orwell was the master of double, and even triple meanings.

Along with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the world of 1984 is one of the first and most cited characterizations of a realistic dystopia to have appeared in English literature. It has been translated into many languages. Orwell acknowledged the influence on 1984 of Yevgeny Zamyatin's Russian language novel We, completed in 1921.

The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four

The world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four has striking and deliberate parallels to the Stalinist Soviet Union; notably, the themes of a betrayed revolution, which Orwell put so famously in Animal Farm, the subordination of individuals to "the Party", and the extensive and institutional use of propaganda, especially as it influenced the main character of the book, Winston Smith.

However, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is also reported to have said that the book described what he saw as the actual situation in the United Kingdom, where he lived, in 1948, where rationing was still in place, and the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs. At the time Orwell had also been working for the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which may help to explain one of his interpretations of four key ministries that governed the world of Big Brother.

Orwell's inspiration

To understand why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, one has only to look at his less famous writings: most significantly, Homage to Catalonia does a lot to explain his distrust of totalitarianism and the betrayal of revolutions; Coming Up For Air, at points, celebrates the individual freedom that is lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four; and his essay Why I Write explains clearly that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism."

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