About the Author¹

George Orwell (1903-1950) was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair was a civil servant for the British government. In 1904 Orwell moved with his mother and sister to England where he remained until 1922. He began to write at an early age, and was even published in college periodicals, but he did not enjoy school. Orwell wrote about his unfavorable prep-school experiences in the essay Such Such were the Joys (1968).

Orwell failed to win a university scholarship and without the opportunity to continue his education he went to Bruma and served in the administration of the Indian Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927 when he resigned in part due to his growing dislike of British imperialism, a dislike he vocalized in his essays Shooting an Elephant (1950), and A Hanging (1931).

When Orwell returned to Europe he was in poor financial condition and worked low paying jobs in France and England. Finally, in 1928, he decided to become a professional writer. Starting in 1930 Orwell became a regular contributor to the New Adelphi, and in 1933 he assumed the name "George Orwell" by which he would become famous. For his first novel he used his recent experience with poverty as inspiration and wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). While teaching in a private school he published his second major work, Burmese Days (1934). Two years later Orwell married Eileen O'Shaugnessy.

During the 1930s Orwell had adopted the views of a socialist and traveled to Spain to report on their civil war. He took the side of the United Workers Marxist Party militia and fought alongside them, which earned him a wound in the neck. It was this war that made him hate communism in favor of the English brand of socialism. Orwell wrote a book on Spain, Homage to Catalonia, which was published in 1938.

During the second World War Orwell served as a sergeant in the Home Guard and also worked as a journalist for the BBC, Observer and Tribune, where he was literary editor from 1943 to 1945. It was toward the end of the war that he wrote Animal Farm, and when it was over he moved to Scotland.

It was Animal Farm that made finally Orwell prosperous. His other world wide success was Nineteen Eighty-Four, which in his essay, “Why I Write,” published in 1947, two years before the publication of 1984, Orwell stated that he writes, among other reasons, from the “[d]esire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” Orwell used his writing to express his powerful political feelings, and that fact is readily apparent in the society he creates in 1984.

And Hence 1984²

Orwell wrote 1984 just after World War II ended, wanting it to serve as a warning to his readers. He wanted to be certain that the kind of future presented in the novel should never come to pass, even though the practices that contribute to the development of such a state were abundantly present in Orwell’s time.

Orwell lived during a time in which tyranny was a reality in Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries, where government kept an iron fist (or curtain) around its citizens, where there was little, if any freedom, and where hunger, forced labor, and mass execution were common. Orwell espoused democratic socialism in his works.

The society in 1984, although fictional, mirrors the political weather of the societies that existed all around him. Orwell’s Oceania is a terrifying society reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union—complete repression of the human spirit, absolute governmental control of daily life, constant hunger, and the systematic “vaporization” of individuals who do not, or will not, comply with the government’s values.

Orwell despised the politics of the leaders he saw rise to power in the countries around him, and he despised what the politicians did to the people of those countries. Big Brother is certainly a fusing of both Stalin and Hitler, both real and terrifying leaders, though both on opposite sides of the philosophical spectrum. By combining traits from both the Soviet Union’s and Germany’s totalitarian states, Orwell makes clear that he is staunchly against any form of governmental totalitarianism, either from the left or the right of the political spectrum.

By making Big Brother so easily recognizable (he is physically similar to both Hitler and Stalin, all three having heavy black mustaches and charismatic speaking styles), Orwell makes sure that the reader of 1984 does not mistake his intention—to show clearly how totalitarianism negatively affects the human spirit and how it is impossible to remain freethinking under such circumstances.

Eileen O'Shaugnessy, Orwell's wife died in 1945 and in 1949 he remarried to a woman named Sonia Browell. Orwell's second marriage was short-lived however, as he died from tuberculosis in London on January 21, 1950. Sadly Orwell never lived to see how successful 1984 would become.

A Full Introduction to 1984²

Orwell’s 1984, like many works of literature, unmistakably carries with it literary traditions reaching back to the earliest of storytellers. Among the literary traditions that Orwell uses is the concept of utopia, which he distorts effectively for his own purposes. Utopia, or Nowhere Land, is an ideal place or society in which human beings realize a perfect existence, a place without suffering or human malady. Orwell did not originate this genre. In fact, the word utopia is taken from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516. The word is now used to describe any place considered to be perfect.

In 1984, Orwell creates a technologically advanced world in which fear is used as a tool for manipulating and controlling individuals who do not conform to the prevailing political orthodoxy. In his attempt to educate the reader about the consequences of certain political philosophies and the defects of human nature, Orwell manipulates and usurps the utopian tradition and creates a dystopia, a fictional setting in which life is extremely bad from deprivation, oppression, or terror. Orwell’s dystopia is a place where humans have no control over their own lives, where nearly every positive feeling is squelched, and where people live in misery, fear, and repression.

The dystopian tradition in literature is a relatively modern one and is usually a criticism of the time in which the author lives. These novels are often political statements, as was Orwell’s other dystopian novel, Animal Farm, published in 1945. By using a dystopian setting for 1984, Orwell suggests the possibility of a utopia, and then makes very clear, with each horror that takes place, the price humankind pays for “perfect” societies.

The Mutability of History in 1984²

One of the issues raised in 1984 is the idea that history is mutable or changeable, that truth is what the Party deems it to be, and that the truths found in history are the bases of the principles of the future. Some Fascist German leaders of the time boasted that if you tell a lie loud enough and often enough, people will accept it as truth. The Stalinists perfected this modus operandi by re-writing people and events in and out of history or distorting historical facts to suit the Party’s purposes. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” runs the Party slogan in 1984.

Winston’s position in the Ministry of Truth is that of creating or forging the past into something unrecognizable to any person with an accurate memory (even memory is controlled in 1984) so that each forgery “becomes” historic fact. One moment, Oceania is and always has been at war with one enemy, the next moment it is and has always been at war with another, and the people of Oceania accept the information as true. It is an exaggeration of a phenomenon that Orwell observed in his own time and reported with true clarity in 1984: People most readily believe that which they can believe most conveniently.

The novel makes the distinction between truth (the actual issues and circumstances of an event) and fact (what are believed to be the issues and circumstances of an event) and then explores the social-political-ethical-moral nuances of the evil manipulation of facts in order to control individuals and societies for political gain. Orwell was concerned that the concept of truth was fading out of the world. After all, in the arena of human intercourse of which politics is a part, what is believed is much more powerful than what is actual. If the leaders of nations are the people dictating the what, where, when, who, and how of history, there can be little question that lies find their way into the history books, that those lies are taught to school children, and that they eventually become historical fact.

This concern is quite obvious in 1984. During Orwell’s time as a resistance fighter in Spain, he experienced this rewriting of history first-hand: He noticed that newspaper stories were often inaccurate: There were often reports of battles where no fighting had occurred or no report at all of battles where hundreds of men had died. Orwell conceded that much of history was lies, and he was frustrated by the fact that he believed that history could be accurately written.

This “rewriting” of events is not reserved for totalitarian governments. Even in our own time, candidates for all levels of government, including those for President, “remember” things differently, and politicos nationwide attempt to put their “spin” on events that affect us all. It is as if an event can be stricken from history if the population does not remember it. And again, at all levels, non-specific or ambiguous language is used to shade or change the actual events to favor the candidates’ or leaders’ position or ideology. With every era, our “heroes” are disclaimed, and history books rewritten. As the culture and the ideology change, history changes. Sometimes these distortions are innocent and innocuous differences of perspective; other times, they are deadly dangerous.

The Role of the Author²

George Orwell lived in a time in which he felt oppressed in terms of his writing—publication was difficult in general, and his important work, Animal Farm, for example, had a difficult time finding a publisher. So it is not hard to see why he made Winston a kind of writer, giving him such an intense urge to write that Winston risks his existence to begin a journal. Winston’s work in the Records Department is also a kind of writing, even though he is essentially producing propaganda that he knows to be lies. Orwell plainly reveals some of his own frustrations about the challenges of being a writer in a highly political time, war time and post-war Europe, through Winston’s experience.

Orwell uses writing and the role of the author to illustrate the particular horror of the environment in 1984. The printed word in 1984 is so dangerous, most books are banned. Winston even has to toss away Julia’s note professing her love for fear that three words printed on a scrap of paper would have them both “vaporized.” Letters to others are checked off according to purpose, books are written by machines, and many of the acceptable canonized writers, such as Shakespeare, are translated (mutilated) into Newspeak. In Orwell’s Oceania, in fact, authors are essentially “vaporized.” With books written by machine, the artist is useless. Orwell further emphasizes the danger to literature by having Shakespeare “translated” into Newspeak, effectively destroying that as well.

Orwell also uses the book supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the people, as a “bible” of sorts to show how the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, at least in theory. Of course, whether the book—and even its claimed author, Goldstein—is an authentic revolutionary document itself or an elaborate lie of the Party is purposefully left unclear. In 1984, Orwell strongly implies that even this book is a forgery.

The Purpose of Newspeak²

Orwell was sure that the decline of a language had political and economic causes. Although he had no solid proof, he presumed that the languages of countries under dictatorships, such as the Soviet Union or Germany, had deteriorated under their respective regimes. “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer,” Orwell writes in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” he continues. Here is the very concept behind the invention of Newspeak.

To illustrate this idea that language can corrupt thought and that totalitarian systems use language to restrict, rather than broaden, ideas, Orwell created Newspeak, the official language of Oceania. Without a word for freedom, for example, the concept of freedom cannot exist.

In his Appendix, Orwell explains the syntactical arrangement and the etymology of the Newspeak. A living language, such as English, one that has the capability of diverse expression, has the tendency to gain words and therefore broaden the awareness and knowledge of its speakers. Newspeak, on the other hand, loses words, by removing words that represent opposing concepts. Therefore, for example, because the word “good” presumes the opposite of “bad,” the word “bad” is unnecessary. Similarly, all degrees of “goodness” can be expressed simply by adding standard prefixes and suffixes to this one root word: ungood (bad) and plusgood (very good) and doubleplusgood (wonderful). In so doing, Newspeak not only eliminates “unnecessary” words, but it also promotes a narrowing of thought and, therefore, awareness. The idea behind Newspeak is that, as language must become less expressive, the mind is more easily controlled. Through his creation and explanation of Newspeak, Orwell warns the reader that a government that creates the language and mandates how it is used can control the minds of its citizens.

The Role of Language and the Act of Writing in Orwell’s 1984²

Newspeak, the “official” language of Oceania, functions as a devise of extreme Party control: If the Party is able to control thought, it can also control action. In the year 1984, Newspeak is not fully employed, and for good reason; we would not understand the novel otherwise. However, Orwell makes certain to choose a date, 2050, when Newspeak will be the only language anyone will understand. Even though the year 1984 has passed, the book is still timely due to Orwell’s vision and foresight. The decline of language troubled Orwell, who was a writer with political and historical agendas. If language could change for the worse, then truth could change into lies, and that was something that Orwell fought against, both in his personal life and in his writing.