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Book Details

1984

50% complete
1949
88,942
1980
Never (or unknown...)
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299
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Copyright © 1949 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
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Comments may contain spoilers
I read this book the summer after 9th grade.  I discovered that I was going to be in the class of 1984 when someone signed my yearbook "Sr '84".  So I was slow - still am I suppose.  This book reminds me of politics and the news agencies today.  It is amazing how similar "political correctness" is to Newspeak.
Synopsis (may contain spoilers)
Three superpowers dominate the world.  Eurasia and Eastasia are two and Oceania is the other.  Oceania is always at war with one whilst allied with the other.

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in Oceania.  Big Brother controls everything in Oceania through the ministries of Peace, Love, Plenty and Truth.  Winston’s job is to revise historical documents so that inadequicies of the Party, the government of Oceania, are not known.  The Party monitors every move with "telescreens", hidden microphones and spies.  The Thought Police help the Party by eliminating all who appear to think or act against the Party.

Winston buys a diary and writes “Down With Big Brother.”  By writing this he has commited "thoughtcrime".  Many of his "crimes" are due to his attempts to remember things from his childhood.  He tries to determine specifics about London before the Revolution, but the Party has removed all records of how life was lived back then.

Winston and another employee of the Ministry of Truth, Julia, have an affair.  This, of course, is forbidden.  They start out having the affair as a rebellion against the Party but it soon starts having emotional strings attached.  Winston and Julia are eventually found out and arrested at their meeting place.

Winston is taken to the Ministry of Love and is tortured by O’Brien, who was a supposed confidant of his and Julia's in their "rebellion".  He reveals himself to be an Inner Party member.  The Party finally breaks and gains control of him.  The last sentence of the book is: “He loved Big Brother.”

Extract (may contain spoilers)
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plate commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
    Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometer away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste - this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with balks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
    The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

    The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. The were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

 

Added: 29-Dec-2002
Last Updated: 11-Jul-2023

Quotes

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Publications

 01-Dec-1982
Buccaneer Books
Hardback
Order from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Dec-1982
Format:
Hardback
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
277
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-899-66368-0
ISBN-13:
978-0899663685
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
Large print
 01-Apr-1983
Harcourt Brace
Hardback
Order from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Apr-1983
Format:
Hardback
Pages*:
294
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
275
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-452-26293-3
ISBN-13:
978-0-452-26293-5
Country:
United States
Language:
English
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
And Big Brother is watching...


Thought Police.  Big Brother.  Orwellian.  These words have become part of our national vocabulary because of George Orwell's classic novel 1984, the story of one man's nightmare odyssey through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but individual thought and memory.  A minor functionary named Winston Smith joins a covert brotherhood and pursues a forbidden love affair against the cold, gray backdrop of the Republic of Oceania - only you become a hunted enemy of the state... and of Big Brother.

Today, half a century after it was written, Orwell's prophetic, haunting tale of conformity and identity strikes a disturbing chord.  As we follow Winston Smith through his rebellion, imprisonment, torture, and reeducation, we witness firsthand the worst crime we can inflict upon ourselves and others: the destruction of the truths and freedoms that make us who we are.

With an Afterword by Erich Fromm

A PLUME/HARCOURT BRACE BOOK
http://www.penguinputnam.com

Cover design by Melissa Jacoby
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
 01-Oct-1983
New American Library
Order from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-Oct-1983
Pages*:
314
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
276
ISBN:
8-422-61579-7
ISBN-13:
978-8-422-61579-8
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:
 01-May-1990
Signet
Order from amazon.comHas a cover imageBook Edition Cover
Date Issued:
Cir 01-May-1990
Pages*:
268
Cover Link(s):
Internal ID:
274
Publisher:
ISBN:
0-451-52493-4
ISBN-13:
978-0-451-52493-5
Country:
United States
Language:
English
1984
George Orwell


1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever.  1984 is still the great modern classic of "Negative Utopia" - a startingly [sic] original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last for words.  No one can deny this novel's power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions - a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.

With an Afterword by Erich Fromm
Cover:
Book Cover
Notes and Comments:

Related

Author(s)

George Orwell  
Birth: 25 Jun 1903 Motihari, India
Death: 21 Jan 1950 London, England, UK

Notes:
From The Literature Network

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 the1930s 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 Orwell said was written "to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after." Sadly Orwell never lived to see how successful it would become.

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.

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Presented: 29-Mar-2024 08:17:29

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