Great Schools Trust

Book 6: 1984

Use this booklet to support your

reading of ‘1984’.

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Pre-Reading

What is ‘1984’ about?

‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as a looming punishment.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, begins a subtle rebellion against the party by keeping a diary of his secret thoughts, which is a deadly thoughtcrime. With his lover Julia, he begins a foreordained fight for freedom and justice, in a world where no one else appears to see, or dislike, the oppression the protagonist opposes.

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Pre-Reading

Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903 in India; died January 21, 195 in London).

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell.

After returning with his parents to England, he won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. In the autumn of 1927, donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants. Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print in 1937, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there. When World War II came, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and in 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin.

Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

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Pre-Reading

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Reading the Novel: Making Predictions

Can you judge a book by its cover? Based on the cover, what are your predictions about what it will be about?

Why do you think it is called ‘1984’? What does the blurb suggest?

Blurb

‘1984’ is a dystopian novella by George Orwell published in 1949, which follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler Big Brother.

‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as a looming punishment.

Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, totalitarianism and how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

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Orwell’s Politics Orwell was known for his non-fiction writing as well as his fiction, though the lines between the two are not as clear-cut as you might at first think.

Orwell’s personal ‘Down and Out in Paris politics infiltrated his work on all levels. and London’

Orwell’s first full-length work, published in 1933, was an account of his time spent surviving as a dishwasher and living amongst the impoverished, destitute souls of London and Paris.

Here are two quotes from ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’: “The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.”

“The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

How might Orwell’s thinking have been shaped by experience?

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1948 - What was life like at this time?

World War II had ended 2 years before. Use these images to work out what life was like in 1948. Rationing

Blitz Survivors War-time deprivation continued until 1954. Cities bore the scars of Sugar, eggs, butter, meat bombing. Large-scale and clothing rationed. rebuilding required. Atomic Bomb

Dropped on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

Futurism Leisure NHS Advancing technologies, Colour seeped onto the National Health Service coupled with the necessity big screen but household TVs remained small and founded on 5 July 1948. to rebuild, pointed towards a radically monochrome. Radio was Established the principle different future. the dominant form of of free healthcare for all. information and More affordable modes of entertainment. Part of a wider rise in the travel impacted upon the welfare state – the natural rhythm of life. Women who had worked socialist value of looking during the war largely out for one another. Since the turn of the returned to the domestic century, science fiction sphere. had been fostering Great Schools Trust March 2021 dazzling images of a Brave Sunday was a day of rest New World. and worship.

Legacy

Orwell’s imagined future is now past, so why are we still learning about it?

Many of the themes of Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, are pervasive: just as the real 1948 shared deep-seated anxieties and values with the fictional 1984, 21st century ideologies can be similarly traced backwards and forwards in time.

The term Orwellian has entered the dictionary to describe anything characteristic of the author’s work, particularly with reference to totalitarian practices. And since 1994 the Orwell Prize has been awarded ‘to celebrate honest writing and reporting, to uncover hidden lives, to confront uncomfortable truths, to promote Orwell’s values of integrity, decency and fidelity to truth’.

Ideologies Belief systems; modes of thinking.

Totalitarian Systems of government that are oppressive and all- powerful.

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Defining a Genre

Dystopia noun An imagined society – often totalitarian or post-apocalyptic – in which there is great suffering or injustice.

Write a descriptive acrostic made up of eight dystopic words:

D

Y

S

T

O

P

I

A

Etymology The origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.

Utopia and Dystopia

The term utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 work of the same name on a fictional island society. It derives from the Greek prefix οὐ (meaning not) and topos (place) so it translates as ‘no-place’ and could be used to refer to any imagined land.

Philosopher John Stuart Mill coined dystopia (old English dys- meaning bad) when criticising government policy in 1868.

It was from this opposing term that the narrower meaning of utopia as a perfect society emerged.

Can you spot any other discrepancies between the two words and their etymology?

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Doublethink

What did Anthony Burgess, the famous author of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, say about Doublethink and how it links to dystopia?

Doublethink may not be laughed or shuddered off as a chilling fantasy of the author: Orwell knew he was doing little more than giving a formulation to a thought process that man has always found to be ‘indispensably necessary’… Meat is both delicious and Useful dystopian disgusting… Birth is the beginning of death… Man is a double creature, in whom flesh contradicts spirit and conventions: instinct opposes aspiration. Authority Orwell recognized his own doubleness very sharply. He Decay was both Eric Blair and George Orwell, a product of the Misinformation fringe of the ruling class who tried to identify himself Manipulation of with the workers, an intellectual who distrusted language intellectuals, a word-user who distrusted words. The uncanny Doublethink, though rightly presented as an instrument of oppression, seems also a very reasonable technique. Our own attitude to doublethink is inevitably doublethinkful. Anthony Burgess, 1985 (1978)

Burgess has also written, ‘Perhaps every dystopian vision is a figure of the present, with certain features sharpened and exaggerated to point a moral and a warning.’

What aspects of life today could be exaggerated into a dystopian nightmare?

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Setting the Scene

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…

Read the opening paragraphs of Nineteen Eighty-Four. • What do you learn? • In what ways in this society dystopian? • What questions do you have?

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty- five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

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Scale of Trust

Where on the scale of trust would you place…

Government?

Police?

Co-workers/classmates?

Neighbours?

Family?

Mother Country

In Oceania, people live largely in isolation – the ties of social interaction have been cut so that individuals are dependent on, and therefore loyal to, the Party.

Winston is married but he doesn’t know what’s become of his wife Katharine, nor does he particularly care since he never loved her.

Marriage exists only for the purpose of procreation (sexual intercourse is otherwise outlawed) and Winston and Katherine were unable to have children.

Likewise, children only exist to propagate the Party. The family is a unit of convenience rather than of love.

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Winston Smith has begun compiling a diary of thoughts, which constitutes illegal activity in Oceania. Interrupted by a knock at the door, he leaves the incriminating material on show but is relieved to find it is only his neighbour, Mrs Parsons, asking if he would be so kind as to unblock the kitchen sink. Mrs Parsons has a haggard, creased face and looks older than her years. Her husband is a militant colleague of Winston’s at the Ministry of Truth. In this extract, Winston has just finished fixing the sink when he is accosted by the Parsons children…

‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice. A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game. ‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought- criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’ Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’, the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought. Mrs Parsons’s eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face. ‘They do get so noisy,’ she said. ‘They’re disappointed because they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them, and Tom won’t be back from work in time. ‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy in his huge voice. ‘Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!’ chanted the little girl, still capering round.

1. What is the effect of the extract’s opening line?

2. Who or what do you think the Spies are?

3. What simile is used to describe the children’s behaviour and what is the effect of it?

4. What does Winston notice about Mrs Parsons and why is this significant?

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A Nightmare Family

Winston’s parents (and his wife) are only present in the book as memories. And to what extent you can trust memories, is one of the main themes in ‘1984’.

Read the extract below.

• What do you learn about Winston’s family? • What feelings are created by his dream? • What do you think its meaning might be?

This extract comes at the start of Part I, Chapter III. At the end of Chapter II, Winston resigns himself to death as a result of being a thought-criminal but resolves to stay alive as long as possible…

Winston was dreaming of his mother. He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared. She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the first great purges of the ’fifties. At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in some subterranean place – the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave – but it was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down, down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part of the unavoidable order of things.

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Helping Hand

If you could invent something to help future generations with their schoolwork, what would it be and why?

The technology of the 21st century can make the futurism of Nineteen Eighty-Four seem dated. However, Orwell thought up the following office equipment for Winston, which were group-breaking ideas at the time:

Telescreen – not dissimilar to television except it’s two-way, so users can be watched through the screen;

Speakwrite – a voice-activated word processor inspired by Dictaphones;

Pneumatic tubes – pipelines for conveying documents - such systems were already in use in some industries but appeared strikingly modern in 1948.

Read the next extract and consider how these things “help” in Winston’s work…

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Si milar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building… Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as Fe bruary, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

How does Winston feel about his work?

Why are the slits through which unwanted documents are posted known as ‘memory holes’?

What else about Orwell’s description of the work stands out to you and why?

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Ministry of Truth

An artist’s impression of one of the ministries, as described by Orwell. What is your impression of this as a workplace and as a centre of state? Is it what you’d expect? Why/why not?

Vacancy

Write a job description for Winston’s employment.

You can do either an official version or a satirical one.

Satire Send-up using humour, irony or exaggeration to critique and expose elements of truth.

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Safe Distance

Winston does not have ‘friends’. His work is solitary, but he is occasionally joined in the canteen by Syme, who likes to talk to (or rather at) him about Newspeak.

He is also drawn to O’Brien, an Inner Party manager who he thinks might be a fellow dissident. But there is no means of substantiating this because any such conversation would be proof of thoughtcrime.

Somebody else who Winston knows by sight but has never spoken to is a ‘dark haired girl’. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. Why might this be?

‘He hated her because she was ‘…during the Two Minutes young and pretty and sexless, Hate, she had sat immediately because he wanted to go to bed behind him when there was with her and would never do so, no apparent need to do so. because round her sweet supple Quite likely her real object waist, which seemed to ask you to had been to listen to him and encircle it with your arm, there was make sure whether he was only the odious scarlet sash, shouting loudly enough.’ aggressive symbol of chastity.’

The Girl with Dark Hair

Winston last saw her on one of his ‘out of bounds’Hair expeditions to the proletarian zone when they studiously ignored each other.

She is now approaching Winston in the Ministry corridors. She falls on an already injured arm. He goes to her aid and she slips a scrap of folded paper into his hand. They part. Winston resolves not to read it until he is confident that he is not being watched.

Winston and Julia embark on a dangerous affair. As we’ve seen, forming any kind of relationship in Oceania is perilous. Their romance is built on resistance – they often seem more in love with breaking Big Brother’s stranglehold than they do with each other.

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Structure Orwell uses a classic three-part structure to tell his story. The note appears in Part II, Chapter I and marks a turning point.

Part I Part II Part III Beginning Middle End Sets scene – Building establishes horror relationships and of dystopian world. resistance – raises ? hope of change.

The Brotherhood

It is rumoured that there is a wider resistance that they long to be a part of. Compare the feelings evoked by O’Brien in the left-hand extract below, to those aroused by Julia in the right-hand extract below. How are the extracts structured?

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry, first day, at the edge of the wood?’ and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped the note into his hand when he became aware that ‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please someone larger than himself was walking just behind himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’ him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough, The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing... You evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in abruptly and turned. It was O’Brien. that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He make four. would have been incapable of speaking. O’Brien, however, ‘We are the dead,’ he said. had continued forward in the same movement, laying a friendly hand for a moment on Winston’s arm, so that the ‘We are the dead,’ Julia echoed dutifully. two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking ‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them. with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from the majority of Inner Party members. They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s ‘I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,’ he eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge said. ‘I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I though unconnected with the skin beneath. believe?’ Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. ‘Hardly ‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice. ‘It was behind scholarly,’ he said. ‘I’m only an amateur. It’s not my subject. I the picture,’ breathed Julia. have never had anything to do with the actual construction ‘It was behind the picture,’ said the voice. ‘Remain exactly of the language.’ where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.’ ‘But you write it very elegantly,’ said O’Brien. ‘That is not only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my except stand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for life, memory for the moment.’ to get out of the house before it was too late – no such Again Winston’s heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron that this was anything but a reference to Syme. But Syme was voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture identifiable reference to him would have been mortally had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind it. dangerous. O’Brien’s remark must obviously have been ‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia. intended as a signal, a code- word. By sharing a small act of Great Schools Trust March 2021 thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into ‘Now we can see you,’ said the voice. accomplices.

We Are the Dead

Much of Winston and Julia’s affair is conducted in the upstairs room of an antique shop belonging to Mr Charrington, its aged and seemingly benign proprietor. Charrington and his shop appeal to Winston because they appear to offer a bridge to the past.

At the same time they have both been taken into O’Brien’s secretive network but they know the risks and accept that they are now living on borrowed time.

Big Brother is Watching You

Re-read the second extract on the previous page. What would you say or do if you were Winston? Will you go meekly or is there some fight left in you?

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Breaking Resistance

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party seeks to exert total control over the thoughts and perceptions of the population. This includes Existential making them believe that two plus two can equal five. Winston ponders whether the consensus acceptance does indeed make the Philosophical inquiry falsehood true. into the nature of What do you think of this existential conundrum? the lived human experience and The alternative perceptions of Orwell’s Oceania were based on understanding. reality. In the 1930s, Russian propaganda posters had it that the state’s five year plans could be achieved in four: ‘Arithmetic of an Alternative Plan: 2 + 2 plus the Enthusiasm of the Workers = 5’.

Doublethink

Winston and Julia vowed that Big Brother could break their bodies but that their mind and spirit belonged to them; even if they agreed to false ideas and confessed to false accusations, the reality was that they knew otherwise, and they would never betray each other.

Read the extract below. What examples of doublethink are you able to identify? How is Orwell’s account of Winston’s experience effective?

Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction, until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism and a sexual pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of an underground organisation which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.

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Room 101

Room 101 is the ultimate tool for breaking resistance. It is a basement room in which prisoners are forced to confront their greatest fear. Read the extract below. How does Orwell build tension? What do you find to be the most horrific element and why?

O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless, every part of him, even his head, was held immovably. O’Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston’s face. ‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap onto your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.’ The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left – to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats. The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely snuffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the blank panic took hold of him. He was blind, helpless, mindless. The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over: ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’ He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars – always away, away, away from the rats. He was light-years distant, but O’Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of a wire against his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.

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A Broken Man

Rats might be his biggest fear but what really breaks Winston is conceding to Big Brother by betraying Julia and, even more potently, his own thoughts and beliefs.

Winston and Julia meet once more, coincidentally and in the open, and are shadows of their former selves, now lifeless, mechanical, unthinking.

They fulfil the objectives that O’Brien laid out to them:

‘There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science… If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

Paint an alternative picture of the future: Metaphor if you were to write it, what metaphor Describing one thing as another, imbuing would you use? it with symbolism.

The End

‘He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin- scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’

What is your reaction to this?

Is it a satisfying conclusion?

Why? Why not?

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The Principles of Newspeak

Newspeak is the official language of Oceania. Nineteen Eighty-Four contains an appendix that explains it.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

As with much of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s future vision had a basis in historical fact.

In the 1920s, linguists C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards developed a reduced form of English whittled down to just 850 words.

Basic (British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial) English was intended as an international medium that would be easy to learn. Famous exponents included Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Why do you think Basic English didn’t flourish?

Great Schools Trust March 2021

The Grammar of Newspeak

He ran extremely quickly = He runned doubleplusspeedwise

Look at the following translations:

I slept wonderfully = I sleeped doubleplusgoodwise

We swam, then ate a delicious lunch = We swimmed anteeat doubleplusfood or We eated doubleplusfoodpostswim

How successful is Newspeak in replacing Oldspeak?

Look closely at the appendix.

NEWSPEAK was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.

The little word ‘was’ suggests that the introduction of Newspeak fared little better than Basic English. This has been taken by some as an alternative, more triumphant conclusion – the historical appendix written in Standard English suggests that the Party is defeated some time after the events of the novel. Others have interpreted it as Orwell’s complacent declaration that totalitarianism belongs to the past. What do you think?

Great Schools Trust March 2021

After You Have Read…

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Great Schools Trust March 2021

After You Have Read…

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Great Schools Trust March 2021