Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was already dying when he arrived on the island of Jura. His lungs had been worsening for several years and tuberculosis was beginning to take hold. Despite his weak condition, Orwell was determined to finish what would be his final novel. The result was Nineteen Eighty-Four, published 75 years ago in 1949—the name being an inversion of the year in which Orwell spent writing the book. Six months later, he was dead, laid to rest at a quaint Oxfordshire church.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is, then, the last words, the final warning, of a dead man walking. It must have been extremely physically painful for Orwell to write, beset by fits of bloody coughing and isolated in a draughty cottage on Scotland’s wind-swept West coast. In an earlier essay titled “Why I Write”, he described the process of writing a novel as “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” The irony of these words would not have been lost on the author.
Regardless of these challenges, Nineteen Eighty-Four was an immediate commercial success, a tribute to Orwell’s talent as a writer and the importance of his message. The novel was to be a literary bulwark against the rise of totalitarianism and the erosion of personal freedoms—in post-war Europe, the unthinkable brutality of Hitler and Stalin’s dictatorships could never be repeated.
So, from the very first pages, Orwell’s ailing everyman, Winston Smith, struggles for his freedom, and ultimately his right to exist, against the omnipresent Big Brother. Smith is eventually found guilty of “thoughtcrime” by the forces of the state and is finally released—albeit only momentarily—after a long period of torture in the shadowy “Ministry of Love”. The author’s characteristically plain style of writing brings a crushing reality to the novel and is part of what makes it so difficult to put down as the reader follows Smith’s futile struggle.
Contemporaries took the novel to be a direct critique of Stalinism and the Soviet Union, and the book enjoyed strong sales in the USA as a result. Orwell was, however, also heavily influenced by his own experiences of the Second World War in Britain. At the outset of War, the British government had introduced powerful legislation that effectively gave the state control over all aspects of civilian life, including censorship and an expansion of the death penalty. The writer found himself working at the BBC—his role being to counteract Nazi propaganda aimed at undermining the British Empire—and he based the “Ministry of Truth” of the novel on this experience.
Orwell’s time as a cog in the formidable machine of the state had a marked effect on the author. He recognised that Britain had teetered on the brink of its own dictatorship but had pulled back from the precipice—although not before seeing up close just how smothering the control of the modern technological bureaucracy could really be. The bleak dystopia of Airstrip One had been narrowly avoided in Britain while other nations were not so lucky.
Three-quarters of a century later, the adjective Orwellian is bandied around freely across the political spectrum and anything deemed restrictive can be said to be “literally 1984.” But calling upon the horrors of Orwell’s dystopia is the heaviest of accusations. As state power and surveillance technology continues to advance worldwide, it remains important that the warnings of Nineteen Eighty-Four are heeded. As Winston writes in his diary: “Freedom is the Freedom to say that two plus two makes four.”
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