Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian novel by the English writer George Orwell. He wrote it between 1947 and 1948, and it was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg. It was the last complete book Orwell finished before his death in 1950. He conceived it as a satire of totalitarian regimes and as a warning about where centralised economies and political control could lead, though he also believed something resembling it could indeed come to pass.

The story is set in a Britain renamed Airstrip One, a province of Oceania, one of three superstates that divide the world after decades of war and revolution. Oceania is governed by the Party under the ideology of Ingsoc, or English Socialism, and is led by Big Brother, a mysterious figure around whom an intense cult of personality has been built. Surveillance is constant, carried out through telescreens and hidden microphones, and the Thought Police hunt down dissent, even dissent that exists only in the mind. Those who fall from favour are erased from records and become "unpersons".

The protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites documents so that the past always matches the state's latest version of it. Secretly he hates the Party and begins a diary in which he sets down his resistance. He starts a clandestine affair with Julia, a young woman who outwardly appears loyal to the regime, and the two come to believe in the Brotherhood, a supposed underground movement led by the public enemy Emmanuel Goldstein. The novel then reveals that their contact, O'Brien, is in fact a member of the Thought Police.

The second half follows Winston's arrest, torture and re-education at the Ministry of Love, culminating in the ordeal of Room 101. The ending shows his complete defeat: he accepts the official truth and comes to love Big Brother. An appendix, "The Principles of Newspeak", written in a retrospective tone, ambiguously hints that the regime may eventually have fallen.

The book has become a touchstone of twentieth-century political literature. Terms such as "Big Brother", "doublethink", "Thought Police", "thoughtcrime" and "Newspeak" have entered everyday language, and the adjective "Orwellian" is used to describe societies that manipulate information and practise mass surveillance. Its influence extends to debates over propaganda, control of the truth and surveillance, and it has been adapted for film and other media, the best known version being the 1984 film starring John Hurt and Richard Burton.

Orwell drew partly on Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, often regarded as an early modern dystopian novel, and on the experience of the totalitarian regimes of his own century. Although the title year is no longer in the future for readers, the novel continues to be read as a meditation on power, truth and freedom of thought.