Nineteen Eighty-Four

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which has also appeared under the title 1984, is a speculative dystopian novel. Secker & Warburg published it on 8 June 1949, and it was his ninth completed book and the last one finished in his lifetime. It centres on totalitarianism, mass surveillance and the regimentation of behaviour, and it has been treated as a classic since. Its future setting is not dated exactly.

Oceania, the superstate where the book is set, is at war more or less continuously. Britain has become one of its provinces, named Airstrip One, and its ruler is Big Brother, around whom the Party's Thought Police have built a personality cult. Decades of global war, civil conflict and revolution have left the world damaged, and the narrative begins in April 1984.

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to correct old newspaper records until they agree with the Party's current account of events. Doing it properly requires holding two contradictory facts in mind at once, which is what the Party calls doublethink. Winston keeps a diary, which is a capital offence, drifts into an affair with a woman from the fiction department and writes down the reasons he believes the regime cannot last.

Orwell wrote the novel in the years after the Second World War, and it draws on the politics of the period as well as on earlier dystopian fiction. The Party's control works through rewritten records, invented language and a telescreen in every room, and the book spends a long section explaining its own system.