Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final completed book.

Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.

Orwell, a staunch believer in democratic socialism and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, modelled the Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and on the very similar practices of both censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany.

More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future. The current year is uncertain, but believed to be 1984. Much of the world is in perpetual war.

Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party’s Thought Police.

The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent mid-level worker at the Ministry of Truth who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. Smith keeps a forbidden diary.

He begins an illegal relationship with a colleague, Julia, and they learn about a shadowy resistance group called the Brotherhood.

However, their contact within the Brotherhood turns out to be a Party agent, and Smith and Julia are arrested.

He is subjected to months of psychological manipulation and torture by the Ministry of Love. He ultimately betrays Julia and is released; he finally realises he loves Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term “Orwellian” as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “Thought Police”, “thoughtcrime”, “Newspeak”, and the expression that “2 + 2 = 5”.

Parallels have been drawn between the novel’s subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression, among other themes.

Orwell described his book as a “satire”, and a display of the “perversions to which a centralised economy is liable,” while also stating he believed “that something resembling it could arrive.”

Time included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors’ list and number 6 on the readers’ list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.

It has been adapted across media since its publication, most notably as a film, released in 1984, starring John Hurt, Suzanna Hamilton and Richard Burton.

Writing and publication

The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notebooks have been deemed “unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944”, and “there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war”.

In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have “first thought of [the book] in 1943”, while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943’s Tehran Conference as inspiration: “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 had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvring he thought would probably lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.

In January 1944, literature professor Gleb Struve introduced Orwell to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We.

In his response Orwell expressed an interest in the genre, and informed Struve that he had begun writing ideas for one of his own, “that may get written sooner or later”.

In 1946, Orwell wrote about the 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in his article “Freedom and Happiness” for the Tribune, and noted similarities to We.

By this time Orwell had scored a critical and commercial hit with his 1945 political satire Animal Farm, which raised his profile. For a follow-up he decided to produce a dystopian work of his own.

Writing

In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel.

He could only earn a living from journalism, however, and predicted the book would not see a release before 1947. Progress was slow; by the end of September 1945 Orwell had written some 50 pages.

Orwell became disenchanted with the restrictions and pressures involved with journalism and grew to detest city life in London. He suffered from bronchiectasis and a lesion in one lung; the harsh winter worsened his health.

In May 1946, Orwell arrived on the Scottish island of Jura. He had wanted to retreat to a Hebridean island for several years; David Astor recommended he stay at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island that his family owned, with no electricity or hot water. Here Orwell intermittently drafted and finished Nineteen Eighty-Four.

His first stay lasted until October 1946, during which time he made little progress on the few already completed pages, and at one point did no work on it for three months.

After spending the winter in London, Orwell returned to Jura; in May 1947 he reported to Warburg that despite progress being slow and difficult, he was roughly a third of the way through.

He sent his “ghastly mess” of a first draft manuscript to London, where Miranda Christen volunteered to type a clean version.

Orwell’s health worsened further in September, however, and he was confined to bed with inflammation of the lungs.

He lost almost two stone (28 pounds or 12.7 kg) in weight and had recurring night sweats, but he decided not to see a doctor and continued writing.

On 7 November 1947, he completed the first draft in bed, and subsequently travelled to East Kilbride near Glasgow for medical treatment at Hairmyres Hospital, where a specialist confirmed a chronic and infectious case of tuberculosis.

Orwell was discharged in the summer of 1948, after which he returned to Jura and produced a full second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in November.

He asked Warburg to have someone come to Barnhill and retype the manuscript, which was so untidy that the task was only considered possible if Orwell was present, as only he could understand it.

The previous volunteer had left the country and no other could be found at short notice, so an impatient Orwell retyped it himself at a rate of roughly 4,000 words a day during bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits.

On 4 December 1948, Orwell sent the finished manuscript to Secker & Warburg and left Barnhill for good in January 1949. He recovered at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds.

Title

Shortly before completion of the second draft, Orwell vacillated between two titles for the novel: The Last Man in Europe, an early title, and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Warburg suggested the latter, which he took to be a more commercially viable choice.

There has been a theory – doubted by Dorian Lynskey (author of a 2019 book about Nineteen Eighty-Four) – that 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed.

Lynskey says the idea was “first suggested by Orwell’s US publisher”, and it was also mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to the 2003 edition of Animal Farm and 1984, which also notes that the date was meant to give “an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule”. However, Lynskey does not believe the inversion theory:

This idea … seems far too cute for such a serious book. … Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school’s centenary called ‘End of the Century: 1984.’ G. K. Chesterton’s 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984.

The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel … First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment.

Publication

In the run up to publication, Orwell called the novel “a beastly book” and expressed some disappointment towards it, thinking it would have been improved had he not been so ill.

This was typical of Orwell, who had talked down his other books shortly before their release. Nevertheless, the book was enthusiastically received by Secker & Warburg, who acted quickly; before Orwell had left Jura he rejected their proposed blurb that portrayed it as “a thriller mixed up with a love story.”

He also refused a proposal from the American Book of the Month Club to release an edition without the appendix and chapter on Goldstein’s book, a decision which Warburg claimed cut off about £40,000 in sales.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 in the UK; Orwell predicted earnings of around £500. A first print of 25,575 copies was followed by a further 5,000 copies in March and August 1950.

The novel had the most immediate impact in the US, following its release there on 13 June 1949 by Harcourt Brace, & Co. An