A Dystopian Vision of the Future: A Review of “1984” by George Orwell

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Nineteen Eighty-Four was finished in a farmhouse with no electricity, on a Hebridean island where the nearest shop was twenty-five miles away. George Orwell had rented Barnhill, on Jura, in 1946. He wrote there while tuberculosis wore him down, and by the final stretch he was too weak to sit at a desk and worked from bed.

The novel that came out of those conditions reached bookshops in June 1949. Its vocabulary (Big Brother, Room 101, doublethink, thoughtcrime) is now part of ordinary English. What follows covers where the book came from, what it argues, how it has been filmed, and why sales jumped in 2013 and again in 2017.

The Author and the Publication History

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, British India. He settled on the name in late 1932, partly so that his family would not be embarrassed by an account of his years living as a tramp. The first book to carry it, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared on 9 January 1933. Animal Farm followed in August 1945, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was his last novel.

He began the book on Jura in 1946, finished a first draft on 7 November 1947, and completed the manuscript late in 1948. The working title was The Last Man in Europe; the final title is reported to have been his publisher Warburg’s suggestion. Secker & Warburg published it in London on 8 June 1949, and Harcourt Brace followed in the United States on 13 June.

Orwell had already left Jura for a sanatorium in January 1949. He died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46, a little over seven months after the book appeared.

The Story in Brief

The setting is Oceania, a superstate run by the Party and its figurehead, Big Brother, whose face looks down from posters warning that he is watching. Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his task is to alter old records so they match whatever the Party now says. Telescreens in homes and offices watch and listen. Winston keeps a secret diary, begins an affair with a colleague named Julia, and comes to trust O’Brien, an Inner Party official who turns out to be an agent of the Thought Police.

What follows takes Winston to Room 101. The book offers him no rescue.

How the Book Is Built

The novel runs in three parts. Part One sets up Oceania and Winston’s private rebellion through the diary. Part Two follows his affair with Julia. Part Three is the Party’s answer, and it is the part readers tend to remember longest.

A whitewashed stone farmhouse on a windswept Scottish island at dusk with one lamp glowing in the window

Late in Part Two comes an unusual interruption: excerpts from a forbidden text attributed to Emmanuel Goldstein, the Party’s official enemy, which set out how the system works and give the book its formal definition of doublethink. The device lets Orwell state the theory outright and then test it on a single person.

Themes: Language, Memory, and Who Controls the Past

The Ministry of Truth is the plainest picture of the novel’s central idea: a state that can edit the record can edit belief. The Party states the principle itself in Part One, Chapter 3.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 3

The sentence describes a loop. The past is rewritten to justify the present, and the present’s authority then rests on the rewritten past. Nothing outside the loop is permitted to contradict it, which is why the book gives so much attention to small things: a figure in a report, a word that is no longer allowed.

Language does the same work on a smaller scale. Newspeak, the Party’s controlled vocabulary, is meant to make unwelcome ideas hard to express and so hard to think. Doublethink, defined in the novel as holding two contradictory beliefs at once and accepting both, lets Party members live inside the contradictions without feeling them. The slogans on the Ministry’s wall compress the method into three lines: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Surveillance supplies the enforcement. Telescreens watch and listen, and the Thought Police treat even a stray expression as evidence. Thoughtcrime, the offense of thinking against the Party, makes the inside of a person’s head the last territory left to take. That is why Winston’s diary is such a dangerous object: the risk lies less in what it says about the Party than in the fact that it exists at all.

Against all that, Winston writes one sentence in his diary that needs no theory to defend it.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 7

The Party’s motive is spelled out late in the book, when O’Brien describes the future it intends.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Three, Chapter 3

The line has been quoted for decades because it declines to dress power up as a means to something else. The Party wants control for its own sake, which is a harder claim to argue with than one that pretends to a higher purpose.

What Orwell Said the Book Was For

A month after publication, Orwell issued a statement to correct a common reading of the novel. According to the Open University’s OpenLearn course on the book, he said it was not an attack on the British Labour Party or on democratic socialism. Its target, he said, was the danger of totalitarian systems, communism and fascism both, and the argument could apply to many others.

That framing explains how easily the book travels. Its subject is a method of rule, not a particular regime or party.

Watch: Thug Notes on 1984

Wisecrack’s Thug Notes series covers the novel in a summary-and-analysis format, a quick refresher before a reread:

A bare mid-century records office with rows of identical grey steel desks under cold fluorescent light

The Book on Screen

The BBC adapted the novel for television in December 1954, in a version written by Nigel Kneale that drew about seven million viewers in Britain. A feature film titled 1984 followed in 1956. The adaptation most people mean, though, is Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, released in the UK on 10 October 1984, with John Hurt as Winston, Richard Burton as O’Brien and Suzanna Hamilton as Julia. A closing title card says it was shot in and around London from April to June 1984, in the year of the book’s title.

The soundtrack became a dispute of its own. Radford had wanted an orchestral score by Dominic Muldowney, but the financier, Virgin Films, used its final-cut right to bring in pop music by Eurythmics. Radford disowned that version and withdrew the film from BAFTA consideration in protest, while Eurythmics said they had accepted the work in good faith. Reviews of the film were largely positive. BBC Radio 4 broadcast a further adaptation in 2013, with Christopher Eccleston.

Why It Keeps Selling

Time placed the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and it came eighth in the BBC’s 2003 Big Read. Sales have also followed the news. In the first week of the 2013 mass-surveillance disclosures they rose by as much as sevenfold, and in 2017 the book reached the top of Amazon.com’s sales chart after the phrase “alternative facts” entered American political debate.

Not every reader treats it as prophecy. Writing on the book blog Reading Matters, the blogger kimbofo calls the novel “a warning shot from the past” while pointing out that the idea of rewriting history by altering a single newspaper looks quaint beside today’s crowd of media outlets, and that its forecast of a sexless future never really arrived.

That is a fair test for the book. The machinery of 1949 looks dated. The method (control the record, control the language, punish private doubt) has aged less.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Nineteen Eighty-Four about the Soviet Union?
Orwell rejected a one-country reading. In the statement he issued a month after publication, he described the book as a warning about totalitarian systems in general, naming communism and fascism both, and said it was not an attack on the British Labour Party or democratic socialism.

An open hand-stitched leather notebook with a steel-nibbed pen resting across the blurred page

Where did Orwell write it?
On the Scottish island of Jura, at Barnhill, a rented farmhouse reached by two ferries, a long drive and a last stretch by motorbike or pony. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1947 and was writing from bed by the end.

Why is “Big Brother” still such a common phrase?
The novel’s posters show a watching face with a caption warning that Big Brother is watching you. History.com’s account of the book’s publication notes that the name has since become a symbol of intrusive government, which is the sense it still carries.

Did Orwell live to see its success?
Only briefly. The book was an immediate success in 1949, but he died on 21 January 1950, a little over seven months after publication.

Is it in the public domain?
Not in the United States for now. Cornell University Library’s copyright chart puts a US work published in 1949, if it carried a notice and was renewed, into the public domain on 1 January 2045. Terms differ from country to country, so check the rules where you live before downloading a copy from anywhere.

Where to Read It

1984 by George Orwell is the place to check how much of the book’s reputation holds up against the text itself. (affiliate link)

Further Reading

Sources

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