Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four Author: George Orwell Creation Date: 1949 Location: United Kingdom Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the Hebridean island of Jura between 1946 and 1948, typing the final draft in a cold farmhouse at Barnhill while dying of tuberculosis. The title was arrived at by inverting the last two digits of the year of completion. Published in London on 8 June 1949 and in New York five days later, it sold out its first printing almost immediately and has never since gone out of print. Orwell died at University College Hospital on 21 January 1950, seven months after publication, aged forty-six.
The book's life has been a continuous sequence of attempts to restrict it from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. The Soviet authorities refused publication for the entire Cold War; the book circulated in samizdat copies and was issued legally only as the system it described was collapsing. American school districts have challenged it since the 1960s — sometimes as communist propaganda, sometimes as anti-communist, sometimes as obscene, sometimes as too dark for adolescents.
Formally the book draws on everything Orwell had done previously. The Ministry of Truth is recognisably the BBC Eastern Service. Newspeak is Basic English turned into a weapon. Doublethink is the habit of mind Orwell watched intellectuals cultivate as they defended whatever Moscow required. What makes it more than the sum of its influences is the completeness of its architecture: it does not merely describe a totalitarian regime but builds one, from the telescreens to the verb forms, and walks the reader through every room.
The Banning
The Soviet ban was the longest and most complete. From 1949 until 1988, Nineteen Eighty-Four could not legally be printed, possessed, sold, borrowed, or imported into the USSR. The KGB routinely treated copies in luggage as contraband; BBC Russian Service broadcasts were jammed through the 1950s and 1960s. Samizdat manuscripts circulated among Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia; possession could support a charge of anti-Soviet agitation under Article 70. The first authorised Russian edition appeared in 1988, serialised in Novy Mir; by 1989 a full book edition was available as the Berlin Wall came down. Every other Warsaw Pact state followed the same pattern.
In the United States the suppression has been a long series of local acts. The best-documented came in Jackson County, Florida, in 1981, when a school board voted to remove the novel as "pro-communist" and containing "explicit sexual matter" — two contradictory charges in the same resolution. The American Library Association has listed the book recurringly in its challenge reports for more than four decades.
In January 2017, Amazon sales surged to number one — Penguin ordered a 75,000-copy reprint — after a senior administration official used the phrase "alternative facts." Within weeks, fresh library challenges were filed arguing the book was being weaponised as political commentary. In Thailand, after the 2014 military coup, students were detained for reading it in public. The book's travel through the world has been a slow contest between those who want to read it and those who would prefer they did not.
The Fallout
In the Soviet Union the ban produced exactly the reading community it was designed to prevent. Samizdat typists copied the novel by hand and on carbon paper; each typescript spawned further copies through dissident networks in Moscow, Leningrad, and the Baltic states. When Andrei Amalrik titled his 1970 essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, the reference needed no gloss — the novel had become the shared framework through which Soviet dissidents described their own condition, and the KGB's determination to suppress it had conferred an authority no reviewer could have matched. Amalrik was arrested, sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, and eventually forced into exile; he died in a car accident in Spain in 1980, aged forty-two. Across the Warsaw Pact the same dynamic held: the ban certified the book as dangerous, and the certification made it essential reading for anyone who questioned the regime.
In the United States the pattern was the same in miniature. The 1981 Jackson County challenge generated national press coverage and helped prompt the American Library Association to launch Banned Books Week in 1982, an annual event that has run every September since and that regularly features Nineteen Eighty-Four on its most-challenged list. Each new challenge produced a sales spike. After Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about NSA bulk surveillance, publishers ordered emergency reprints as the telescreen was suddenly legible as the smartphone. In Thailand, students who read the book publicly after the 2014 military coup were detained and photographed by police — images that circulated worldwide and turned the act of reading itself into a gesture of resistance.
Every censor who touched the book advertised it. The advertisement spread precisely the vocabulary the censorship was designed to contain.
Why It Was Feared
In the Soviet Union the charge against it was straightforward and honest: the book depicted the USSR with unmistakable fidelity. The Party in Oceania is the CPSU with serial numbers filed off; Emmanuel Goldstein is Trotsky; the Two Minutes Hate is the mass denunciation campaigns of the 1930s; the falsification of photographs directly transcribes the Stalin-era practice of airbrushing purged officials from group portraits. To permit Soviet citizens to read the book would have been to hand them a glossary for their own political experience. The ban — formal, total, enforced until glasnost — was rational in the regime's own terms. It was dangerous precisely because it was accurate.
The American charges were more various. When the novel reached high school classrooms in the late 1950s it was taught as anti-communist, attracting challenges from Catholic groups objecting to Orwell's language and sexuality — Winston and Julia's affair was sexually explicit by the standards of the era. By the 1970s a second stream opened: parents who believed the book was pro-communist, or that its depiction of a state-run society was itself indoctrination into the ideas it was supposedly warning against.
What unites every charge is a recognition, usually unspoken, that the book's vocabulary is portable. Once a population has doublethink and Newspeak, those words can be turned against any regime. The book is banned not because it attacks a particular enemy but because it names a particular activity — and that activity is one every state at some point engages in.
The Reading
The world is divided into three. Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia. They are at war, and have always been at war, and will go on being at war, and the only thing that changes is which two are allied against the third. The alliance changes without announcement. When it changes, the newspapers are corrected. Every back issue. Every photograph. Every recorded speech in which a Party leader praised the present enemy or denounced the present friend. The corrections are done by men in cubicles. Winston Smith is one of them.
He is thirty-nine. He has a varicose ulcer above his right ankle. He works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, in London, which is the chief city of Airstrip One, which is a province of Oceania. His job is to rewrite the past. A speech delivered six months ago no longer matches the present line; Winston rewrites the speech. The previous version is dropped into a slot in the wall. The slot is called the memory hole. It carries the paper down to a furnace somewhere in the building. Once the paper is gone, no record of it survives. The Party then announces what the speech has always said, and because no copy of the original survives, what the Party announces is true.
There are four ministries. The Ministry of Truth concerns itself with information, education, news, and entertainment, and is therefore the ministry of lies. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war. The Ministry of Love concerns itself with the maintenance of order, by which is meant the application of pain to bodies in basements. The Ministry of Plenty concerns itself with rationing, which is to say, with the management of permanent scarcity. The names are not ironic. To call a thing by its opposite, and to know that it is its opposite, and at the same time to believe that it is what its name says it is — this is doublethink. Everyone in the Party practises it. Eventually no one is aware that they are practising it. Eventually the very condition of thinking otherwise is no longer available.
On every wall of every building, in every corridor and on every landing of every block of flats, there is the same poster. It shows an enormous face — a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and a calm steady gaze. The caption is: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. The eyes follow. In every room of every flat there is a telescreen, a flat plaque the size of a small picture which receives and transmits at the same time. It cannot be turned off, only dimmed. Through it the Party broadcasts its news, and through it the Thought Police watches and listens. Whether the Thought Police is listening at any particular moment to any particular person is not knowable. One assumes that it is.
Winston, in defiance of all this, has begun a diary. He bought it some weeks back at a small junk shop in the prole quarter — the quarter where the 85 per cent of the population who are not Party members live and where the Party does not greatly concern itself. He keeps the diary in a shallow alcove beside the door of his flat, the one corner of the room where, by careful trial, he has worked out that the telescreen cannot see. Keeping a diary is not formally illegal. Nothing is formally illegal, because there are no laws. But if discovered it would be punished by death, or by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. He sits down and writes the date: 4 April 1984. He is not certain that it is 1984. He has long since lost track of the years. He writes, in capitals, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER. He writes it again. He writes it down the page. He understands, sitting there, that whether he stops now or goes on makes no difference at all. He has already committed the only crime that matters, which is the crime of intending. The Thought Police will come for him. It is only a question of when. He goes on writing.
He is not, by temperament, a rebel. There is nothing of the partisan about him. He is a thin man, prone to coughing, with a vague indigestion, whose pleasures consist of a glass of Victory Gin in the evening and a careful walk through the streets, taking note of what is and what is not still there. What has begun to move in him is something he cannot name and would not, even in the diary, attempt to name precisely. It is a small obstinate kernel of refusal that has not been absorbed.
At the Ministry he works in a room of cubicles. The man at the cubicle across from him is Parsons, a fat sweating cheerful Party enthusiast who lives in the same block of flats and whose two small children, members of the Spies youth movement, are being trained, like all Party children, to denounce their parents. Parsons believes everything the Party tells him without strain. He will, in due course, be denounced by his small daughter for crying out something against Big Brother in his sleep. He will accept his arrest with gratitude.
At the cubicle to his right is Syme, a small, dark, sharp-faced philologist working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, an English from which words are being removed. The work of the dictionary, Syme explains with cheerful pride, is destruction. Every year the dictionary is shorter. In time no word will exist for any concept the Party prefers no one to think. There will be no word for freedom, and consequently no available way to form the idea of freedom. There will be no word for justice, and so on. The thought will not survive the loss of the word. Heresy will not be available because the vocabulary of heresy will not be available. Winston listens, and as he listens he sees that Syme is too intelligent to live. Some weeks later Syme is gone. His name is removed from the lists; his photographs, where they exist, are altered. No one mentions him.
For some weeks Winston has been aware of a young woman with dark hair who works in the Fiction Department, two floors down. She has often seemed to be looking at him. He takes her at first for a Party zealot, perhaps a member of the Thought Police. He hates her for it. He imagines violence done to her. Then, one morning in a corridor, she stumbles and falls against him; as he catches her she slips a folded scrap of paper into his palm. Hours later, alone in a cubicle, he unfolds it. It reads: I LOVE YOU.
Her name is Julia. She is twenty-six, a mechanic on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department, where mass-produced fiction for the proles is generated. She has been a serial violator of the Party's prohibitions on sex for years. Their first proper meeting is in a wood outside London, in a clearing that Winston, when he comes upon it, recognises with a shock as a place he has been dreaming of since childhood. He calls it, privately, the Golden Country. They become lovers there, in the grass. Her hatred of the Party, he discovers, is nothing like his own. It is not theoretical. She has read no books, examined no doctrines, formed no political analysis. She hates the Party because it is the thing that wants her to be unhappy. Every act of pleasure is, by virtue of the Party's prohibition of pleasure, an act against the Party. She is, she says, a rebel from the waist down. To Winston, after the grey celibate years of his married life, this is a deliverance for which he has no vocabulary.
They cannot meet in a wood for ever. Winston has, for some weeks, been frequenting a small junk shop in the prole quarter run by an old man called Charrington. Charrington seems harmless and a little nostalgic; he sells objects from before the Revolution that no one any longer knows the use of. A glass paperweight with a piece of coral set inside it. A steel engraving of St Clement's Church. A fragment of a nursery rhyme that begins Oranges and lemons. Winston has bought the paperweight; it sits in his palm and feels, somehow, like proof of an earlier world. Charrington offers him the room above the shop. It has a double bed, a wooden mantelpiece, an old-fashioned twelve-hour clock. There is no telescreen. Winston checks. There is no telescreen. They begin to meet there. For some weeks they have what would, in another world, be called a life. Julia steals real coffee from Inner Party stores, and real sugar, and real tea. Winston reads to her from the diary. He tells her his theories: that hope, if it exists at all, lies with the proles, who are 85 per cent of the population and whose spirit has not been broken because the Party has never bothered to break it. She listens kindly and falls asleep.
There is also O'Brien. O'Brien is a large, powerful man, an Inner Party official whose duties Winston does not know. Once, during the Two Minutes Hate — the daily ritual at which the staff of the Ministry assemble before a screen, watch a film of Emmanuel Goldstein, the renegade leader of the Brotherhood and the Party's designated traitor, and scream their hatred into the air for two minutes — once, in the middle of this ritual, O'Brien's eye and Winston's eye had met, and there had been, Winston was certain, something in O'Brien's face for an instant that said: I know. I am with you. Winston has carried this around for years. He has come to believe that O'Brien is secretly a member of the Brotherhood. Now O'Brien stops him in a corridor on the pretext of lending him the latest Newspeak dictionary and gives him an address.
A few evenings later Winston and Julia go to O'Brien's flat. The flat is in the Inner Party quarter, and is furnished with things — wine, a clean carpet, a manservant — that Winston has only heard of in rumours. O'Brien turns off his telescreen. This is a privilege only Inner Party members may exercise, and only briefly, and it is a sign that what is about to happen has been licensed, even if its content is treason. He pours wine. He asks them what they are prepared to do for the cause. He proposes a series of acts. Murder. Sabotage. The betrayal of one's country. The throwing of acid in the face of a child. To each, Winston and Julia answer: yes. Then he asks: are you prepared, if it should be necessary, to be separated from each other? They answer: no. O'Brien marks this. He gives Winston a copy of the book — the long forbidden theoretical work by Goldstein — in a heavy briefcase, to be read in the room above Charrington's shop.
The book is called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Winston and Julia go to the room. Winston reads passages aloud. The argument is straightforward. The three superpowers do not want to win the war. Victory would unsettle the hierarchy on which their power depends. The war is permanent by design. It performs three functions. It consumes the surplus production that would otherwise raise the standard of living of the lower orders. It sustains a state of emergency in which all civil rights are suspended. And it provides the population with a permanent enemy against whom loyalty can be demanded. The three states are identical in structure. They differ only in their slogans. The proles are left alone because they are not dangerous. They do not have the conceptual vocabulary to be dangerous. As long as they have beer, football, the lottery, and a sensational press, they will not rise. He reads on. Julia falls asleep against his shoulder.
A voice speaks from the wall.
It is calm. It says: You are the dead. Remain exactly where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered. They had not known there was a telescreen. There had been a telescreen behind the steel engraving of St Clement's Church the whole time. The Thought Police are already in the building. They come in through the window and the door. The paperweight is knocked to the floor and shatters; the small coral within it is lost somewhere on the boards. Charrington enters. He is no longer the old man Charrington. He has put off the disguise — the white hair, the stoop, the careful kindly voice. He is perhaps thirty-five, alert, in uniform. He has been an officer of the Thought Police for the entire time the room above the shop has existed. The room itself has been the trap. The Brotherhood, Winston understands instantly, does not exist, or if it does it does not exist as he had imagined it. He and Julia are taken away separately.
What follows takes place in the Ministry of Love. Winston is held in a cell. He is beaten. He is starved. After some weeks of this he is brought to a long room in which O'Brien is waiting. O'Brien has been his interrogator from the beginning. He has, he says calmly, been watching Winston for seven years. He is not a member of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was an invention of the Party for the precise purpose of identifying and collecting people like Winston. O'Brien administers electric pain. He asks Winston a question. Winston gives the wrong answer. O'Brien administers more pain. Then O'Brien sits down beside the bed, almost tenderly, and explains.
The Party, O'Brien says, does not seek power as a means to other ends. The Party seeks power for the sake of power. Other tyrannies have wanted obedience. The Party wants something further: it wants love. It is not enough that Winston should submit to Big Brother. He must love Big Brother. Martyrs are useless. The Party does not allow martyrs. The Party will not let Winston die believing anything that might be passed on. The Party will reach into Winston's mind, find the small obstinate kernel of refusal, and remove it. Then the Party will release him and let him live out his life as one who loves what he was made to love. O'Brien lifts his hand. He holds up four fingers. He asks Winston how many fingers there are. Winston says four. O'Brien administers pain. Winston says four. Pain. Winston, after some time, says five. Pain still. Winston says five, and tries to see five, and for an instant sees five — perceives five, where there are four, because to perceive what the Party requires is, in the end, the same as to believe it, and to believe what the Party requires is the only condition under which the pain stops. If you want a picture of the future, O'Brien says, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
There is a final room. It is called Room 101. Room 101, O'Brien explains, contains the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is different for each person. For some it is fire, for some it is drowning, for some it is being buried alive. For Winston, it is rats. O'Brien knows this. The Party knows this. They have been watching Winston for seven years. O'Brien wheels in a cage. In the cage there are large hungry rats. The cage is fitted with a mechanism that allows the front of it to be clamped against a face, so that when an inner door is lifted the rats will reach the eyes and the mouth within seconds. O'Brien shows him this. O'Brien moves the cage closer. The rats squeal. Winston, before he has the time to know that he is doing it, screams: Do it to Julia. Not me. Julia. Do anything to her. He has betrayed her. The words have come out of him as out of an animal. The cage is taken away. The interrogation is over.
After this he is released. He is given a small job of no responsibility, with a salary, in a sub-committee of the Ministry of Truth. He sits most afternoons in the Chestnut Tree Café drinking Victory Gin and playing chess with himself. He has met Julia once, in a park in winter; they walked a short way together and said almost nothing. Each had betrayed the other. Each knew the other had betrayed and was glad to have done it. There was nothing left between them. They parted without arranging to meet again.
In the café, one afternoon, the telescreen announces a great victory on the African front. Hundreds of thousands of the enemy have been killed or taken. Winston, hearing this, feels a sudden warmth rise through him, brought up perhaps by the gin, and tears come into his eyes. He understands, finally, that the long struggle is over. The two contradictory beliefs have been fused. There is no longer any distance between what the Party requires him to feel and what he feels. He has won the victory over himself. He loves Big Brother.
After the last page there is an appendix. It is written in another voice — the dry voice of a scholar describing the principles of Newspeak from somewhere after the Party has come to an end. Whether the Party did come to an end, whether Oceania did fall, is not said. The last picture remains: a man at a marble table in an empty café in the late afternoon, looking up at a poster of a face, weeping, grateful at last to the boot that has stamped him into his place.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the books that power tried to silence. See the full collection →
The Signet Classics mass-market paperback has been the standard American classroom edition for decades. The Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon, is the best annotated version for adult readers.
The definitive American mass-market paperback — in continuous print since 1950 and the edition most commonly assigned in schools.
The Penguin Classics edition with a celebrated introduction by Thomas Pynchon — the best annotated edition for adult readers.
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