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Nineteen Eighty-FourNineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes 1984) is a bitingly satirical and nightmarish novel published in 1949 and written by George Orwell, describing a dystopia where all individuality has been subordinated to the will of the state, in a London of the not-so-distant future.The novel introduced the now infamous concept of the ever present all-seeing Big Brother, the notorious Room 101, the thought police who use telescreens (televisions that contain a surveillance camera—they are found in everyone's home), and the fictional language Newspeak (pronounced news-speak'). The original idea was to call it "1948", but Orwell changed the title in order to highlight the parallels between post-WWII society and the policies of a fictional totalitarian regime.
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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. The structure of the government also resembled that of the British government, at least in nomenclature:
The government in Nineteen Eighty-Four has four major ministries, each focused on an object which is, in exquisite irony, utterly antithetical to its name: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation."
The three slogans of the Ministry of Truth, visible everywhere, are
While by definition these words are antonyms, in the world of 1984 the world is in a state of constant war, no-one is free, and everyone is ignorant. Through the universality of the extremes the terms become meaningless, and the slogans become axiomatic.
The world is controlled by three functionally identical totalitarian superstates—Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc (English Socialism)), Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism) and Eastasia (ideology: Death Worship). London is the capital of the Oceanian province of Airstrip One.
Newspeak, the "official language" of Oceania, is extraordinary in that its vocabulary decreases every year; the state of Oceania sees no purpose in maintaining a complex language, and so Newspeak is a language dedicated to the "destruction of words". As the character Syme puts it:
The true goal of Newspeak is to take away the ability to adequately conceptualize revolution, or even dissent, by removing words that could be used to that end. Since the thought police had yet to develop a method of reading people's minds to catch dissent, Newspeak was created so that it wasn't even possible to think a dissenting thought. This concept has been examined in linguistics: see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
To understand why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, one only has 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".
The state of perpetual war as justification for domestic surveillance and limits on civil liberties is seen by some as being mirrored in the unending War on Terrorism and related actions like the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and passage of the PATRIOT Act.
The atmosphere of control and change inspired the British TV show The Prisoner and the film Brazil directed by Terry Gilliam and A Clockwork Orange directed by Stanley Kubrick. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been made into a cinematic film twice, in 1956 and in 1984, and has been made into a television adaptation rather more often.
(Orwell titled the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is frequently rendered 1984, as in the link below.)
See also: Brave New World
but to the world.
In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, "you" to
inconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else so
is easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lend
LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES
lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend
in reading. Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem.html">poem.html">poem that makes a
the dead; they are "equal virgins," and you must assign the
surely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings. It
TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON
Should they be "birds.html">birds.html">birds.html">birds.html">birds" or "gods.html">gods.html">gods" that wanton in the air in the
with admirable judgment suggested "birds," an amendment adopted by
for the other phrase.html">phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace. But
of the poem, in which the "gods" proved to be "birds" long before
between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with
from birds and fishes to winds.html">winds, and from winds to angels.
"When linnet-like confined" is another modern reading. "When, like
it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored;
in this little poem.
"He earned the glorious name," says a biographer of Andrew Marvell
faults), "of the British Aristides." The portly dulness of the
not, in fairness, to affect a reader's thought of Marvell himself
award was not made in his own age; he did but live on the eve of
and made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell's political
his poetry, at its rare best, has a "wild civility," which might
this phrase of the "British Aristides." Nay, it is difficult not
.
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