1984
1984
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
George Orwell on 1984
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
When history stopped making senseOrwell went to Spain in 1936 as a committed anti-fascist and returned with something worse than disillusionment: evidence that the written record of events could be systematically falsified by people nominally on his side. His own POUM militia was retroactively branded Trotskyist by Soviet-backed Communist forces, and the London press reported battles that never happened. That experience produced a one-sentence verdict that became the novel’s founding premise.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
By November 1943, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met at Tehran to divide the post-war world into spheres of control, Orwell had already been accumulating the novel’s raw material for years. That conference gave the accumulated fears a narrative architecture. He explained the structural logic to Roger Senhouse, an associate at his publisher, in terms precise enough to serve as the book’s own design document.
What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of Influence’ (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism.
Orwell was equally precise about which political system he was using as the novel’s primary model, and about the imaginative leap he wanted the book to perform. Writing to Sidney Sheldon, who had purchased the stage rights, he drew a clear line between his target and any simple equation of the book with Soviet Russia.
[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.
Two years at the BBC, producing radio broadcasts during the war, gave Orwell a close-range look at institutional lying that had nothing to do with dramatic political persecution. It was quieter and in some ways more disturbing: conscientious people performing meaningless work with institutional gravity. His diary in April 1942 recorded the corrosive effect of living inside that system, and the register there is not detached analysis but something closer to moral nausea.
You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth.... I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
The Ministry of Truth, where Winston Smith rewrites old newspaper articles to match the Party’s current version of events, is this diary entry given institutional form.
How he wrote it
A synthesis built from documented realitiesOrwell did not invent the novel’s world so much as distill it from years of reading: first-person accounts of Stalinist terror, transcripts of Soviet show trials, analyses of Nazi propaganda technique. His working notes, held in the Orwell Archive at University College London, show that Newspeak (the contracted official language designed to make dissent literally unthinkable), the Two Minutes Hate, and what he called “the nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth” were assembled long before he wrote a continuous draft. A letter to Noel Willmett in May 1944, nearly a year before the war ended, shows how far the core argument had already traveled.
Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie, there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.
Orwell had been working toward the formal problem that Nineteen Eighty-Four would solve since at least Animal Farm (1945): how to write a book in which the political argument and the fictional world are structurally inseparable, so that the story cannot be separated from the idea without both collapsing. In “Why I Write,” completed in 1946 while the novel was still in progress, he described Animal Farm as the first time he had attempted this deliberately.
Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.
The BBC years also contributed something beyond subject matter: a model of how bureaucratic language operates. He had observed firsthand how institutional structures produce people who perform work they know to be useless, and speak in formulations designed to obscure that fact. He described the BBC’s wartime output to a colleague with a bluntness that would not have survived the institution’s own style of communication.
Much of the stuff that goes out from the BBC is just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody, and known to those responsible for it, not to be listened to by anybody.
The final draft was completed under conditions that directly compromised the execution Orwell was aiming for. He finished the manuscript in December 1948, writing in a cold, isolated farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura while in the advanced stages of tuberculosis. His assessment of the result, given after the book was done, was characteristically unsentimental about the gap between the idea and what illness had allowed him to make of it.
I am not absolutely dissatisfied with it. I think it is a good idea, but the execution would have been better if I had not been under the influence of TB when I wrote it. [paraphrased from audio]
He died in January 1950, six months after the book was published, having written it in the knowledge that he might not survive to see its reception.
The personal thread
A writer who needed to get a hearingOrwell never described his writing practice in aesthetic terms. The motivation he returned to, across letters and essays, was forensic: a specific lie needed exposing, a specific fact needed to be on record. That instinct was already fully formed when he wrote “Why I Write” in 1946, and it explains why Nineteen Eighty-Four is structurally organized around the destruction of the very conditions that would make such an act possible.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
Spain in 1936 taught Orwell that truth could be annihilated not only by censorship but by the manufacture of a competing and fully documented alternative record. That lesson arrived before the novel had a form, before the Tehran Conference gave it a structure, before the BBC gave it a texture. It was the raw experience underneath all of those, and he named it in “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1942) as the moment a particular fear became concrete.
History stopped in 1936.
Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth, which involves rewriting historical newspaper articles so that the Party’s current claims are retrospectively confirmed, is the institutional machinery built around this single observed fact.
What he wants us to sit with
A parody that was also a warningAfter publication in June 1949, some readers and reviewers took the novel as a prediction that Britain under Attlee was heading toward totalitarianism, or as an attack on socialism broadly. Orwell issued a corrective statement through his publisher. Its first move was to confirm that the threat he described was real, not simply a fictional extrapolation.
I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time.
Orwell was careful to specify that the danger he had in mind was not confined to regimes that openly called themselves totalitarian. The corrective statement his publisher issued made clear that the threat he feared most was intellectual: the adoption of a totalitarian way of thinking by people across the political spectrum who would not identify themselves as totalitarians.
the danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.
The statement Orwell issued through his publisher closed with a sentence addressed directly to the reader, not to critics or governments. It was the clearest possible statement of what he believed the book was for, and it placed the responsibility for the outcome it described on the person holding the novel rather than on the historical forces it depicted.
The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.
He wrote the book while dying, in a remote farmhouse, because he believed the lie it described was real and accelerating. The instruction in that final sentence is the most direct thing he ever said about what the novel was supposed to do.