Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on 1984, Newspeak, and Orwell’s Vision of Power for Its Own Sake

George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is read here less as Cold War prophecy than as a book soaked in the Britain of 1942 — bomb damage, rationing, boiled cabbage, and a propagandist’s office at the BBC whose editorial meetings were held in Room 101. Sandbrook rates it ten out of ten and calls it the definitive novel of the twentieth century; Syrett, who admires it without liking it, deducts for a portrayal of women she argues is straightforwardly sexist. The disagreement is the episode’s spine, and neither host wins it.

Key ideas

1. The party wants power, and nothing else — which is what separates it from its real-world models. O’Brien’s explanation in the Ministry of Love is that the party has no ideals at all: ‘the object of persecution is persecution, the object of torture is torture, the object of power is power’. Sandbrook draws the contrast that gives this its force — the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Nazi Party had ideals, however twisted, and Orwell’s party has stripped that away, leaving the machinery with nothing behind it. What follows is the boot stamping on a human face forever.

2. Control begins with language, because a narrowed vocabulary narrows thought. Winston’s colleague Syme is compiling the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary and is candid about the aim: ‘We are destroying words, scores of them, hundreds of them every day… In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there’ll be no words in which to express it.’ By 2050 the whole literature of the past will exist only in Newspeak versions — Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Byron ‘changed into something contradictory of what they used to be’. Syme sees the project too clearly and is himself vaporised.

3. The deepest horror is not death but retrospective erasure. To be vaporised is to have every record of your existence removed — your name struck from the registers, your existence denied and then forgotten. Both hosts land on the same point independently: everyone reconciles themselves to not existing in future, but the thought of never having existed at all is what gets under the skin. O’Brien puts it to Winston directly: posterity will never hear of you, you will be annihilated in the past as well as the future.

4. The book is drenched in 1942, not 1948. Orwell worked as a wartime propagandist at the BBC — an office block with a dingy canteen, handling material he called ‘muck and filth’, attending editorial meetings in Broadcasting House’s Room 101. The shifting alliances between Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia mirror the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its reversal in 1941. The newsreel of a refugee ship being bombed to an audience’s laughter is drawn from the sinking of the Struma. The Ministry of Truth is Senate House, where Orwell’s wife Eileen had worked for the Ministry of Information.

5. Syrett’s dissent: the novel’s women are symbols, not people. Katharine is the frigid obedient wife, the prole woman below the window is fertility and broad hips, and Julia is ‘the sexually available maidenly youth’ whose rebellion is entirely sexual and who falls asleep while Winston reads her the party’s ideology. Syrett is careful about where the criticism lands — a character’s thoughts are not the author’s, and there is no evidence Orwell was a predator — but holds that the distance between Winston and Orwell is unusually short. She deducts two points, one of them for Orwell’s conduct off the page, which Sandbrook objects to and she declines to withdraw.

Context

Orwell, and the ironies in him

Sandbrook’s Orwell is a man renowned for clarity, honesty and sympathy for the underdog who was also a son of empire, a son of privilege, a former imperial policeman, and a writer working under a name not his own. Eric Arthur Blair was born in Bengal in 1903, his father in the Indian Civil Service working on the opium export; he described the family as ‘lower upper middle class’, genteel without the money to sustain it, which Sandbrook reads as the source of his lifelong preoccupation with class. Scholarships took him to prep school and then to Eton, where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley — the two fathers of English dystopian fiction in one classroom.

Without the money for university he joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to Burma, where he experienced repression, punishment and surveillance from the administering side. He returned to England in 1928, took his pen name from the King and the local Suffolk river as a solidly English combination, and wrote five books — Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air — none successful, and all sharing a protagonist trapped by his times who attempts escape and fails.

The Spanish Civil War made him political. He volunteered for the Republicans and joined the POUM militia, and what marked him was not the fascists but the rift in Barcelona, where orthodox Stalinist communists turned on the sectarian militias. He came home shot through the neck and permanently fixed on Stalinism, and on the way truth and language buckle under totalitarian orthodoxy.

He died on 21 January 1950 of a burst artery in a lung ravaged by tuberculosis, aged forty-six, weeks after his proposal was finally accepted by Sonia Brownell. The hosts do not tidy the contradictions: the lifelong atheist wanted a Church of England burial, and the anti-establishment writer was attended in his final illness almost entirely by old Etonians. One of them, David Astor, secured his grave at Sutton Courtenay, where Orwell had no connection but the Astor estate — next to H.H. Asquith.

Writing it on Jura

The composition is a story of physical ruin. Orwell went to the Scottish island of Jura, to a rented farmhouse at Barnhill found for him by Astor, in the coldest winters of the century, with no electricity and no hot water, already seriously ill with tuberculosis, recently widowed — Eileen had died in 1945 under anaesthetic for a routine operation, leaving him with an adopted nine-month-old son he refused to give up. He wrote 130 essays a year and told a friend, ‘You don’t know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again.’

He finished the handwritten manuscript in November 1948, could not find a typist, and typed it himself against medical advice — sitting up in bed, chain-smoking, coughing blood, four thousand words a day, dripping with sweat. He completed it on 4 December 1948 and collapsed. He never returned to Jura.

The title was late and nearly otherwise. Orwell wanted The Last Man in Europe; his publisher preferred a date, and the manuscripts show him trying 1980 and 1982 before settling on 1984. As Sandbrook notes, none of those numbers meant anything in 1949 — a year acquires its personality only after it has gone by.

What Orwell owed to Zamyatin, and what Huxley thought

The largest single debt is to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in Russian in 1921: a one-party state in the far future, a surveillance culture, a ruling figure called the Benefactor, and a hero with a number rather than a name who falls in love, rebels, is interrogated, tortured and broken. Sandbrook calls it 1984 in embryo, differing mainly in its more ironic tone.

Huxley, reading his former pupil’s novel, wrote him the letter that also appears in this show’s Brave New World episode — congratulating him and then explaining that his own vision was the more realistic, since ‘the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience’. The publisher Fred Warburg thought the novel ‘worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party’, reading it as an attack on socialism. Orwell denied this repeatedly and in writing: the target was totalitarianism, communist or fascist, and he resented the implication that he had written an anti-socialist book. Sandbrook’s gloss is that Orwell saw himself as a man of the left while being in many ways a small-c conservative, and came most alive attacking other socialists.

Period piece or prophecy

Both hosts answer both. Sandbrook thinks the Stalin-and-communism material has dated, while the machinery of rewriting the past has not — reaching, with an explicit wince at his own columnist’s reflex, for the retrospective editing of Roald Dahl as the contemporary case, and arguing that things from the past should be allowed their own independent existence rather than smoothed to fit present sensibilities. Syrett takes it somewhere Orwell could not have: an age in which curiosity is continuously shaped by advertising and recommendation, and in which artificial intelligence is obsequious and tells you what you want to hear. Her sharper point is that not long ago there was no such thing as my truth and your truth — only true and not true — and that the drift toward a subjective truth is the genuinely Orwellian development.

They disagree about hope. The novel offers two flickers: the appendix on Newspeak is written in the past tense from a future in which the party is gone, a device Margaret Atwood later reuses in The Handmaid’s Tale; and Winston’s repeated conviction that if there is hope, it lies in the proles. Syrett rejects the second as patronising and internally inconsistent — a world that has abolished pleasure has nothing with which to keep the proles content, and O’Brien’s account leaves no room to think beyond the party at all. Sandbrook, who reads it as Orwell’s standing argument about the English from The Lion and the Unicorn, is left conceding the question turns on whether you believe in the British people.

The Tolkien comparison

Sandbrook’s closing argument pairs 1984 with The Lord of the Rings as the two formative books of the century — both conceived and written against the Second World War, by men born nine years apart who shared a horror of modernity and of the worship of power. Winston’s picture of the party’s future is ‘huge, terrible and glittering, a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons, a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans’ — which Sandbrook reads as an army of orcs before the walls of Helm’s Deep. The likeness extends to what each man loved: ordinariness, smallness, England, and old words. Winston’s line that ‘the obvious, the silly and the true have got to be defended’ would sit unremarked in Gandalf’s mouth.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host
• 1984 — the book under discussion
• George Orwell — the author
• Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Brave New World, Fordism, and Huxley's Ambivalent Dystopia — the companion episode on the other great dystopia, and the source of Huxley’s letter
• Totalitarianism — the wiki’s account of the historical model; this episode adds power pursued as an end in itself