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

Tabitha Syrett

'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.'

That was the opening of George Orwell's unforgettably chilling novel *1984*, published in 1949, and I think the definitive novel of the twentieth century. It's surely one of the greatest openings in modern fiction. It's packed with so many tantalising, leading details — almost eerily familiar, but clearly alien as well. We have the clock striking thirteen, the glass doors of Victory Mansions, the smell of boiled cabbage, this lift that doesn't work, the power cuts, and Hate Week, all of it unexplained. And then finally we have the poster with that enormous face — a face which, to readers reading this for the first time in 1949, clearly recalled Stalin, or perhaps Hitler, that massive moustache glowering down at you. And then that unforgettable caption, now so established in the culture: Big Brother is watching you.

So, Dominic — the Big Brother of The Book Club. What's going on there, for people who haven't read it?

Dominic Sandbrook

Thanks. This is the story of a bloke called Winston Smith who lives in a totalitarian future Britain in the year 1984. Let's pick up from that very first page, the bit you read out. We're obviously in London. It feels very 1940s in many ways — the boiled cabbage, the rubble, the bombed-out buildings patched up with cardboard and corrugated iron. There's an air in that first paragraph of shabbiness and weariness. But there are also things that are alien: the twenty-four-hour clock, the clock striking thirteen. There are posters everywhere of Big Brother, posters with the word Ingsoc. There's a helicopter carrying a police patrol. There's talk of three-year plans.

It turns out this is a Britain that has been renamed Airstrip One. It's part of the superpower Oceania, and it's fighting a world war with East Asia against Eurasia — though that will change. Oceania is ruled by the principles of English Socialism, Ingsoc, by Big Brother and the Party. Those principles are Newspeak — a new version of English — doublethink, and the mutability of the past.

Tabitha Syrett

And it's Winston's job to falsify the past. He works for the Party's Ministry of Truth, and he literally rewrites old editions of *The Times*. So I wonder what he'd make of some of your more famous headlines.

Dominic Sandbrook

He'd probably approve of 'Time to scrap scrap election campaigns.'

Tabitha Syrett

Did I write that? That's one of your headlines. Is this your research for the episode?

Dominic Sandbrook

This wasn't *The Times*, but my favourite is 'Chairman Corbyn's Maoist Britain'. That screams 1984.

Tabitha Syrett

It is 1984. I can't believe you brought that up. So this is a world of total surveillance. When Winston reaches his flat he reflects that the telescreen will capture every sound and gesture. He lives with the assumption that everything will be overheard, every moment scrutinised. He says at one point that there's only one safe moment in his day, and that's when he's in his bed with his eyes closed in the darkness.

As the story unfolds he starts to rebel in very small ways against the suffocating grip of the Party. He buys an antique journal and starts keeping a diary — that's a rebellion because it's his own, his own thoughts and considerations, and it doesn't belong to the Party. He has seditious thoughts. He buys an amber paperweight from an antiquarian shop, and that's seditious because it's from a former age.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's from the past, exactly. And the past doesn't exist any more.

Tabitha Syrett

And perhaps most memorably he starts an illicit affair with a character called Julia, his colleague, and together they become involved with another colleague called O'Brien, who they think is part of a resistance group called the Brotherhood.

Dominic Sandbrook

This doesn't end well, does it?

Tabitha Syrett

Big spoiler alert — it doesn't end well. They're arrested and Winston ends up in the dreaded Ministry of Love.

Dominic Sandbrook

The most nauseating name.

Tabitha Syrett

And specifically in its most feared room, Room 101.

Dominic Sandbrook

*1984* is a dystopian political warning. It's a doomed love story. It's a horror story. It's a work of science fiction. It's a reflection on the importance of history, a warning about the corruption of language. But more than any of those things, at bottom, it is a really gripping and terrifying story. It's a brilliant read. My son read it when he was about eleven or twelve, and he didn't care about any of those things. He just loved it as a gripping story.

Tabitha Syrett

Totally. It's a page-turner throughout, and Orwell is a master of suspense. And it's a phenomenon — probably unmatched in the twentieth century, maybe apart from Tolkien and *The Lord of the Rings*, which is a comparison we'll touch on later. Its legacy is gigantic. So many of the words and concepts from *1984* are familiar today: Big Brother, Room 101 — both of which, interestingly, have spawned reality TV shows.

Dominic Sandbrook

So there's George Orwell, the progenitor of *Love Island*.

Tabitha Syrett

And then thoughtcrime, doublethink, the Two Minutes Hate, Airstrip One. The word Orwellian has come to denote something in itself. It's associated with totalitarianism, with the curtailment of freedom — people even used it during the COVID lockdowns — and above all with the surveillance culture most people today are so familiar with. I always think it's interesting to explore whether it's a period piece born of that particular moment, or a prophecy with lessons for us today.

A boy book?

Dominic Sandbrook

I love George Orwell — the man as much as the books. I once made a television programme about Britain in the early Cold War that touched on *1984*. In my days as a columnist for Britain's best-loved mid-market newspaper I must have quoted from George Orwell about six thousand times. He's one of those writers that basically, when you run out of ideas and you're groping desperately for a conclusion, Orwell is the writer you reach for.

But interestingly, Tabby, I have a sense that Orwell appeals much more to men than to women. I've never really heard you wax lyrical about George Orwell. And I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that the person producing this podcast, Aliyah, is not an Orwell fan.

Tabitha Syrett

No, she described this as a boy book. And I think she is not entirely wrong. It's clearly ingenious and highly original. But I think there's a big difference between admiring a book and liking it, and I don't really like *1984*. I did a bit of digging — there was a YouGov poll in 2014 which showed that men were much more likely to read *1984* than women. In part because it's a book that deals much more in structures and systems of power than in relationships. It's not very interior. It's emotionally really stark and cold. There's very little relational fulfilment. And the whole thing is centred on one man's perspective — it's the male gaze throughout. Reading it on a chilly London January on the quite 1940s-ish Northern Line back from work every night with the shadows closing in, I found it a pretty bleak read.

Dominic Sandbrook

Oh no. This is shocking.

Eric Blair

Dominic Sandbrook

The funny thing about Orwell is that he's renowned for his clarity, his honesty, his sympathy for the underdog and his hostility to authority. But there's an irony here, because he's a son of empire, a son of privilege, and a former imperial policeman who writes under a name not his own. His name is actually Eric Arthur Blair.

He's born in Bengal in 1903. His father was in the Indian Civil Service and worked on the export of opium. He described his family famously as lower upper middle class. Orwell was fascinated by class basically because his family were genteel but didn't have the money to sustain it — so there's always a widening gap between their expectations and their capacity to pay for them.

He's a very bright boy. He wins a scholarship to prep school and then a King's scholarship to Eton, where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley, the author of *Brave New World*.

Tabitha Syrett

That is a great detail, though. The two fathers of dystopian literature.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. He wasn't a great star at Eton. His parents thought he probably wouldn't win a scholarship to university and they didn't have the money to send him, so they applied for him to join the Indian Imperial Police. He passes the exam and goes off to Burma. Some of his biographers see Burma as formative, because in Burma he has an experience of repression and punishments and surveillance — but he's on the other side of that equation, because he's working for the authorities.

Tabitha Syrett

And he really doesn't enjoy Burma, does he?

Dominic Sandbrook

Not at all. He wrote brilliantly about his time there — there's a brilliant essay about shooting an elephant, everyone staring at him, the pressure he felt as the representative of imperial authority surrounded by people whose lives he didn't really understand. He went back to England in 1928, and that's when he first had a stab at becoming a writer.

He lived mainly in a sleepy Sussex seaside town called Southwold, where his family had retired. That's when he takes the name George Orwell — from the King, and from the local river, because he sees it as a solid English name. Then he really gives the writing his best shot. He writes *Down and Out in Paris and London*, published in 1933, and four books after that: *Burmese Days*, *A Clergyman's Daughter*, *Keep the Aspidistra Flying*, and *Coming Up for Air*. None of these are very successful, and we probably wouldn't know them today if it hadn't been for his later works.

The common theme is a central character trapped by his times. It's very claustrophobic, and the character tries to escape and fails. That's a constant theme for Orwell — it's obviously the theme of *1984* — and I think it reflects his personality. He's shaped very much by the establishment, but he's also thoughtful, spiky, awkward, a man apart. He likes to see himself as a man apart. The paradox is that on the one hand he's anti-authority and anti-establishment, but on the other he's very loyal to his old school friends. The people at his bedside when he was dying were all Old Etonians.

He gets married in 1936 to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who's Oxford-educated and basically becomes his typist. And then at the end of 1936, the defining political event of his life: he goes off to the Spanish Civil War. Before then I think Orwell had been interested in politics, but he hadn't been fundamentally political. He volunteers for the Republicans and joins a militia called the POUM. What's so formative is that the left-wing forces in Spain are fighting among themselves. There's a rift in Barcelona between all these sectarian militias like the POUM on the one hand and the orthodox communists on the other, and the Stalinist communists basically stamp on the other militias. Orwell is really shocked by this. He's shocked by Stalinism, shocked by the experience of truth and language being threatened by propaganda and totalitarian orthodoxy. And that stays with him politically forever.

Tabitha Syrett

And Stalin's shadow looms large in *1984*. Big Brother isn't entirely Stalin — there are shadows of Hitler in him — but the similarities are impossible to miss. The moustache is not alone.

Dominic Sandbrook

The moustache is definitely Stalin's and not Hitler's. And the description of the face, ruggedly handsome. But also the way the history books have been constantly rewritten to emphasise the role of Big Brother and to push him back earlier and earlier into the beginning of the revolution. That's exactly what the Stalinists did — they wrote out the other leaders of the Russian Revolution and put Stalin centre stage.

When Orwell comes back to England, this is the point at which Stalin's show trials are being reported. Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin — the so-called Old Bolsheviks — are being dragged in front of the courts in Moscow. The shadow of the show trials hangs over *1984*. There are three characters, Aaronson, Jones and Rutherford, who are basically the Old Bolsheviks of Airstrip One, and exactly the same thing happens to them.

The war, the BBC, and Room 101

Tabitha Syrett

He finally returns to England from Spain to recover from his wounds — he's shot in the neck — and from illness. That's when he writes *Homage to Catalonia* and makes his name as a reviewer and an essayist. And then in September 1939, as he had warned, Britain finds itself in the Second World War. I think this is probably an overlooked part of *1984*. People say it's the Cold War and Bolshevism, but the Second World War is a massive part of the book — the atmosphere of it, the world.

Dominic Sandbrook

I think completely. You mentioned Tolkien and *The Lord of the Rings*, which is *1984*'s great rival as the formative book of the twentieth century. The interesting thing about those books is that they're both written against the backdrop of the Second World War. They're conceived in it and written while it's going on. There are lots of elements of *1984* that are inconceivable without that context.

Two small things. The shifting alliances — Oceania is always at war with one of these great superpowers against the other, but it's always changing. That mirrors the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union being allies, and then all that being rewritten in 1941 when Nazi Germany attacks the Soviet Union and suddenly the Soviet Union is our gallant ally and everybody's going on about Uncle Joe.

Tabitha Syrett

Totally. There's a scene where they're having a rally to watch the execution of Eurasian prisoners and everyone's very excited, baying for blood. And then the speaker's handed a note halfway through the rally to tell him the alliances have shifted. It's chilling, but faintly comical. Suddenly all these people realise the banners and posters are all wrong, because as it turns out Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

Another World War moment: they go to the cinema to watch a newsreel of a refugee ship being bombed, and the audience are laughing. It's a really horrific scene — children are being killed and the audience are laughing and cheering.

Dominic Sandbrook

This is based on a real incident, a refugee ship called the *Struma*, carrying Jewish refugees from Romania, torpedoed in 1942. Orwell clearly takes that from the headlines. But generally the atmosphere of the book — the bomb damage, the shabbiness, the fear, the rationing — this is not so much the atmosphere of the Cold War as of Britain in 1942 or 1943, when he first conceives of what becomes *1984*.

And the final element: Orwell was a propagandist in the war, with the BBC. He worked as a producer and presenter for shows that went out in Asia. That BBC experience is crucial. He works, like Winston, in an office building with a dingy canteen. He handles propaganda, which Orwell called muck and filth. And when he goes to editorial meetings at Broadcasting House in London, the meetings are held in Room 101.

Tabitha Syrett

So how does he go from that — the BBC, being a full-time propagandist — to actually writing *1984*?

Dominic Sandbrook

He quits the BBC at the end of 1943 and writes the satirical fable attacking Stalinism, *Animal Farm*. But that's not published for a couple of years, because publishers are very wary about touching it — Stalin is now our gallant ally and they don't want to publish anything critical of the Russians.

Tabitha Syrett

Very 1984.

Dominic Sandbrook

Very 1984. Meanwhile Orwell has been reading loads of dystopian fiction — his old French teacher's *Brave New World*, H.G. Wells, Jack London. He gets the idea in about 1943 or 1944, and it's basically: what will the world be like when Hitler is beaten? The writer Isaac Deutscher, who met him in 1945, said Orwell had told him, 'I think that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill are planning to divide the world between them' — consciously plotting, as in some ways they were, at conferences like Yalta, where they divide the world into spheres of influence. That gives him the idea of Oceania, East Asia and Eurasia.

Jura

Dominic Sandbrook

Then there's a hiatus, because he's distracted by *Animal Farm* but also by his own personal life. He and Eileen have not had children; they've adopted a baby who they call Richard Horatio Blair. Then in March 1945 Eileen has a routine operation, has an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic, and dies. Everybody expects Orwell to give up the baby, who's only nine months old, but he says no. He gets a succession of people in to look after him. But he's really lonely, and he basically spends two years proposing. If you met him for a cup of tea, Tabby, he would end up by proposing to you.

Tabitha Syrett

He sounds excellent. I think that's how everyone should behave. Everyone should propose to me all the time.

Dominic Sandbrook

Don't take this personally — I think he would do it to any woman.

Tabitha Syrett

He could definitely play a bit harder to get. Bless him.

Dominic Sandbrook

He's working like a demon. He writes 130 essays a year. But there's a starkness and a sadness to his life now, and this is what draws him to the Scottish island of Jura.

Tabitha Syrett

This has become such a fated story — the ideal of the writer driven to write at all costs, living like a Spartan. He said at the time that his own success had shot him in the foot, because he had no time. The minute *Animal Farm* was published people were constantly trying to get him to do talks and write essays, and I think he felt overwhelmed. He said to a friend, 'You don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again.'

Dominic Sandbrook

His Old Etonian friend David Astor finds him a rented farmhouse called Barnhill on the north coast — an incredibly bleak, grim, forbidding landscape.

Tabitha Syrett

You can feel that in *1984*, can't you? The grim greyness of it all. And he's now seriously ill himself with TB. He's always been a smoker, he's struggled with London smog, the cold weather. But all this time he's working insanely hard, and it's now that he turns to *1984*.

Dominic Sandbrook

Two more influences to flag. One is that the Cold War is now under way — and it's Orwell who popularised the term. He first used it in 1945, then again in March 1946, talking about having a cold war with Russia. That's the same month Winston Churchill gave his speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he talks about the Iron Curtain dividing Europe.

Tabitha Syrett

He references it obliquely once. He never really directly addressed that influence, but he said to his publisher about the last phase of writing the book that it was about, I quote, 'the possible state of affairs if this atomic war isn't conclusive'.

Dominic Sandbrook

And then the shadow of the atom bomb — there are references to atom bombs throughout the book. But he's also read an older book which is a massive influence: *We*, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, published in Russian in 1921. It's set in the far future. It's got a one-party state. It has a surveillance culture. It has a ruling figure, not Big Brother but the Benefactor. It has a hero who's got a number, not a name, who falls in love, has an illicit relationship, rebels, is interrogated, is tortured, is broken. It kind of is *1984* in embryo. The tone is a bit different — it's more ironic — but it's remarkably similar.

Tabitha Syrett

And writing *1984* was a terrible slog for Orwell, wasn't it? He said of writing itself that it was 'a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of illness. One would not attempt it unless driven by some demon.' *1984* is even worse than that. It's slow. It's grueling. The book feels like the work of a sick, tired, lonely man sitting on his own in a farmhouse, no electricity, no hot water, a Scottish gale howling outside. And 1946 and 1947 were the coldest winters of the century in Britain.

Dominic Sandbrook

His health is close to a terminal breakdown. He's lost two stone. He's coughing uncontrollably. He has terrible night sweats. Eventually he's confined to a hospital in Glasgow. Then in the summer of 1948 he's discharged, and against medical advice he goes back to work on Jura and finishes the handwritten manuscript by November.

But handwritten is not good enough for the publisher. He asks Fred Warburg to find him a typist. They can't find one. And he says, fine, I'll do this myself — even though his doctors have told him not to. He's sitting in bed chain-smoking, coughing up blood, typing four thousand words a day, dripping with sweat while the TB is ravaging him. He finishes it on the 4th of December 1948 and collapses straight afterwards with exhaustion. He leaves Jura forever and goes off to a sanatorium in the Cotswolds.

Tabitha Syrett

He survived on strong tea and rolled cigarettes, sitting in bed.

Publication, and the list

Dominic Sandbrook

His publisher, Fred Warburg, loved it. He wrote an internal memo saying it's one of the most terrifying books he'd ever read — but then said it's 'worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party', because he saw it as a warning against socialism. Orwell himself always denied this. He wrote several times saying this is not an anti-Labour book, it's not an anti-socialist or social-democratic book, it's a warning against totalitarianism. It could be communism, it could be fascism. He resented the implication that he'd written an anti-socialist book.

Tabitha Syrett

This is why Orwell's always the poster boy for both sides. His own politics are always so difficult to pin down.

Dominic Sandbrook

I agree completely. Orwell sees himself as a man of the left, but in many ways he's a small-c conservative. And he often comes alive when he's actually attacking other socialists, more so than conservatives.

The title remained to be decided. He wants to call it *The Last Man in Europe*. His publishers say they think a date is better. Interestingly the date didn't have to be 1984 — there's a really nice book on it by Dorian Lynskey, and he points out that in the final stages Orwell toyed with 1980 and 1982, and only switches to 1984 quite late on. None of these numbers would have had any meaning in 1949. They don't have the personality yet that we associate with years once they've gone by.

It's published in June 1949 to a torrent of praise. People's ideological anxieties in the early Cold War are so raw, and the experience of the Second World War so recent, that they're primed to like a book such as this — although that sounds like I'm making excuses. They liked it because it's such a gripping, compelling, unputdownable read.

Tabitha Syrett

V.S. Pritchett in the *New Statesman*: 'I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing, and yet of such originality, suspense, speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down.'

Dominic Sandbrook

Winston Churchill also loved it — he told his doctor he'd read it twice. On the other hand the Soviet newspaper *Pravda* calls it a filthy book, a work of misanthropic fantasy typical of the propaganda churned out by venal writers on the orders of Wall Street, which speaks to how successful Orwell was in conjuring his totalitarian regime.

Tabitha Syrett

But you know who wasn't so keen — his old teacher. This is so typical of the spite of writers, isn't it? Aldous Huxley said it was good, but his own was better. He said that his vision of the future was far more realistic, that the lust for power would be satisfied more by suggesting people into loving servitude than by flogging and kicking them into obedience — because in *Brave New World* people become followers through a drug called soma, which is euphoric and makes them joyously obedient.

Dominic Sandbrook

Orwell is going to make some cash from *1984*, because it's chosen by the US Book of the Month Club, which means he'll make at least £40,000 — perhaps £5 million today. But he'll never get to enjoy his newfound fortune, because he's effectively dying by this point.

Before he dies there's one ironic thing. An old friend from the Foreign Office, Celia Kirwan, comes to visit him in the sanatorium, and he gives her a list. He's just written a book about people being informed upon, and he gives her a list of people who he says are too close to communism to be relied on. There are writers, people like the historian E.H. Carr, the playwright J.B. Priestley, some Labour MPs like the future Labour leader Michael Foot. When it came out this was very controversial, and lots of people who didn't like Orwell said, look at this, Orwell's a complete hypocrite, he's actually informing on all these people, some of whom were his friends. Orwell himself would have said communism is the great evil and he was doing the right thing for his country. Listeners can make up their own minds.

One of his proposals is finally accepted, by a publishing assistant called Sonia Brownell, who becomes his second wife. By this point he's been moved to University College Hospital in London and he's obviously dying. He's visited by his Old Etonian mates day after day. But on the 21st of January 1950 an artery bursts in his lung — his lungs have been left absolutely ravaged by TB — and he dies immediately. He's only forty-six. Plausibly Orwell would have had another twenty or twenty-five years of books in him.

Tabitha Syrett

Such a terrible cliché to say Orwell was a man of contradictions, but what a contradictory end. He'd been an atheist all his life, not a joiner, but he wants a Church of England funeral and to be buried in a Church of England graveyard.

Dominic Sandbrook

And his Old Etonian pal David Astor, the one who sorted out the Scottish farmhouse, says he'll take charge of it. He gets Orwell a grave at Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire, where Orwell has no connections, but it's next to the Astor estate. That's where Orwell rests to this day — buried, interestingly, next to the former British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith.

Tabitha Syrett

Two great men, both with dubious records with women. You wouldn't want to be buried next to either of them.

Dominic Sandbrook

A word on the book's success. It's an even more instant hit than *The Lord of the Rings*. In America, within ten years, the paperback sold a million copies. In total by now, estimates are that it's sold forty to fifty million copies — a lot for a book as stark and bleak and grim as *1984*. But the ultimate tribute to his achievement is that it was banned in the Soviet Union and its satellites until the 1980s, and illicit samizdat copies would circulate among dissidents. The Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz wrote that people in the Eastern bloc just could not believe that somebody who had never lived there could know with such insight exactly what it was like to live under such a regime. And in the 1980s the historian Timothy Garton Ash spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe, and reported afterwards that people would come up to him with dog-eared copies of *1984* — Czechs, Poles — and say, 'How on earth could he know?'

Winston Smith and his world

Tabitha Syrett

Orwell very neatly constructs the book into three parts. You have Winston and his world; you have his affair with Julia and their rebellion, which is probably the warmest, brightest portion of the book, more colourful; and then you have the bleakest portion, which is Winston's imprisonment and his torture by O'Brien. Why don't we follow that line ourselves? First, Winston Smith and his world — because he's not your typical hero.

Dominic Sandbrook

Not at all. He's a very twentieth-century hero, I think. Flawed, weak, fragile. Very unglamorous. His varicose ulcer. He has to pause going upstairs because he's out of breath. He's got five false teeth. He's got a terrible cough, rather like Orwell's TB.

Tabitha Syrett

John Hurt actually looks just right for him, I think, in the film.

Dominic Sandbrook

I think so. The point about Winston Smith is that he is an everyman. He's so mundane.

Tabitha Syrett

And that's the point of him. The name obviously — Winston, a little nod to Winston Churchill, and Smith, the most ordinary of English surnames.

Dominic Sandbrook

The Englishness is massively important to Orwell. He's obsessed with England and Englishness. But Winston's weakness is partly because he's had such a terrible life. When he's thinking about his boyhood, which would have been in an imaginary 1950s, it's all air raids and rubble and people firing machine guns — these confused impressions of a country under attack in an atomic war, but also falling apart because of a civil war and a revolution. His father disappeared when he was a small boy, one of so many. And he has this dreadful memory of his mother: when he was a little boy he stole some chocolate from his sister, because supplies were very limited. His mother was upset. He ran away, and when he came back both his mother and his sister were gone, and he never saw them again. They had been disappeared.

Tabitha Syrett

His recollections of that are horrible, and I actually think that in quite an unemotional book they're the most emotional portions. But he's definitely not perfect. I don't think he's even admirable, really. For example, and strikingly, he's sexist — I'd say to the point of misogyny. He's been married to a woman called Katharine, but he absolutely loathes her. She 'had, without exception, the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered'. What it really boils down to for him is sex, because he says that as soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen; 'to embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image'.

In part you could say this is fair, because it's not about her gender, it's about her being the representation of a Party person through and through, someone who has lost their identity to the Party — because the Party doesn't believe in lust and love and sex, it believes sex is for procreation alone, so it's a duty. But on the other hand, that in itself is a bit of a sexist stereotype: the frigid, sexually repressed woman who is blindly obedient.

Dominic Sandbrook

What grabs your attention when you start the book, the reason you keep reading, is not Winston — it's the world. Orwell is a very good physical writer. You get a sense of the physicality of it, the dinginess, the damp, the rot, nothing working. Among the non-fiction that had made his name — *Down and Out in Paris and London*, *The Road to Wigan Pier* — one of the things that made those books come alive was how vividly Orwell captured the sights and smells and sensations of life at the bottom. There are lots of scenes in *1984* very reminiscent of those books.

He's reflecting on how shabby and decaying the cities are, everything smelling of cabbage and leaking toilets, and he has this vision of London, 'the city of a million dustbins' — a brilliant image. And he has this picture of one of his neighbours, Mrs Parsons, a woman with a lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste pipe. That image comes directly from *The Road to Wigan Pier*, which was reportage, where he remembered seeing a slum girl kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up a leaden waste pipe 'with the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen'. He's a very empathetic writer for people who don't share his privilege.

Tabitha Syrett

And that makes it different from other dystopias, because other dystopias are set in the future or on remote islands or in fantasy locations — *Brave New World*, or *When the Sleeper Wakes*. But *1984* is drenched in physical details of contemporary London. The bomb craters, the crumbling houses, the terrible food, the rationing, the description of Victory Gin and the harsh sensation of swallowing it. I think the raw physicality of it is one of Orwell's crowning achievements. And I like that he's unafraid to look into the gutters.

Dominic Sandbrook

Even where he works, the Ministry of Truth — 'an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace', with the three slogans of the Party in gigantic lettering: 'War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.' Anyone in London would know that building is Senate House, the office block of the University of London, which in the war had been the Ministry of Information — and that is where Orwell's wife Eileen had worked.

And when Winston goes in, it's full of people who have appeared in Orwell's previous books of non-fiction, because they're precisely the people he most despises.

Tabitha Syrett

He famously hated fruit-juice drinkers, nudists, vegetarians, pacifists, feminists — essentially earnest people with progressive opinions and weird hobbies. There's Parsons.

Dominic Sandbrook

Orwell always pictures Parsons dressed in the uniform of the Boy Scouts, or the Spies as they become — 'with dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms', even though Parsons is dressed perfectly normally. What about the next one, Tabby?

Tabitha Syrett

Comrade Ogilvy. 'He was a total abstainer and a non-smoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy.' Goody two-shoes, just opted out.

Rewriting the past

Dominic Sandbrook

Winston's job in the Ministry of Truth is to rewrite history in the pages of *The Times*. 'Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.' They're rewriting history so that the Party was always right and what the Party wanted to have happened, happened. This is crucial to the totalitarian project, because the Party's slogan is: who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

And Winston knows what he's doing — this is where doublethink comes in. You can know that something happened, that there were aeroplanes before the Party came along, but you have to convince yourself that the reality is otherwise. You have to compartmentalise your mind so that the truth is buried. You know the truth is there, but you bury it deep down and you almost come to believe the lie you yourself are propagating.

Tabitha Syrett

There's no such thing as objective truth. And the chilling insight Orwell has is that it's not just newspapers that are being rewritten. It's everything: leaflets, posters, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs. There's even a woman whose job it is to erase the names of people who've been vaporised, so they never existed. She even has to erase her own husband's existence — and has to do it willingly and almost zealously, because otherwise you're not a member of the Party and you're in big trouble. There you have an example of doublethink. She must know her husband existed, but she's in charge of suppressing every last vestige of the fact that he was ever there.

Dominic Sandbrook

And this speaks to Orwell's traditionalism and his small-c conservatism. He loves Britain's past, he loves traditions, even though in many ways he's a radical. Cultural traditions really speak to something in Orwell — his love of the right way to make a cup of tea, the English breakfast. And that's something he has in common with his contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tabitha Syrett

The book's full of little jokes. They use a twenty-four-hour clock, the metric system, dollars and kilometres, not pounds and miles.

Dominic Sandbrook

There's a scene where an old man goes into a pub and asks for a pint, and the barman doesn't know what it is — he says he doesn't even know what the word means, because they serve beer in litres. The use of the metric system is a massive red flag for George Orwell. Somebody who uses dollars and kilometres is the worst possible person, because Orwell really believes in the old, quirky, traditional ways.

Tabitha Syrett

So this scene with the pint is really the tragedy at the heart of *1984*.

Dominic Sandbrook

It is, absolutely. And Orwell's — sorry, I say Orwell, I'm confusing Orwell and Winston, which speaks volumes, because in many ways they're very similar. Winston's whole project is to try to recover the past, to bring the past to life. That's why he buys the antique journal and keeps the diary. And he has this fascination with a nursery rhyme, which recurs in a slightly ghostly way throughout the book: 'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's.'

Tabitha Syrett

This is one of the most evocative threads in the book for me, because a nursery rhyme is always used in horror films — the sweet, innocent thing contorted into something horrific. But it's also faintly moving, because it's a breath of this old world. Everyone remembers it, but only little bits of it. It's like being an adult and suddenly smelling something that takes you back to a memory from childhood. It's really effectively done.

Dominic Sandbrook

Getting rid of such rhymes is exactly what the Party is about, because they don't just want to erase Britain's history — they want to change its culture and its language. In the Ministry of Truth, Winston has a colleague called Syme who is working on the eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Syme explains the whole thing: 'We are destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.'

And he says, 'By 2050, earlier probably, all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.'

Tabitha Syrett

And that is classic of totalitarian regimes — taking a text and distorting it to suit your ends. The Nazis did it.

Dominic Sandbrook

This is the defining characteristic of twentieth-century regimes: they don't just want overt public ideological conformity, they want to get into your heads and change the way you think. And the way they do that is by book burnings, by changing the curriculum in schools. If something in the past doesn't fit, you change it. That's obviously why so many people in the twenty-first century get agitated about rewriting texts from the past and say it's Orwellian — because it kind of is. That's precisely what Syme and his colleagues want to do.

Tabitha Syrett

It's also that the things they're changing are very familiar to you. It's like changing the texture of the ground on which you walk. But the thing is that Winston recognises that Syme, being able to say this and point it out, sees too much. He's too perceptive, and he speaks too plainly. And sure enough, later in the book, Syme ceases to exist. He had never existed.

Dominic Sandbrook

Syme's too honest about the project, and so he has to go. And that threat of cancellation — it sounds like a twenty-first-century word, but this is absolutely the threat that hangs over Winston from the first page. 'Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporised was the usual word.' It's not just that you'll be killed. In a weird way being killed is not so frightening — everybody dies. It's the fact that you would never have existed that is so scary and gets under your skin.

Tabitha Syrett

This is a world of surveillance, and there are informers everywhere, particularly children. Even your own children can't be trusted. 'They adored the Party and everything connected with it. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.' At one point Winston sees Parsons's children playing at being spies, and the son shouts, 'You're a traitor! You're a thought criminal! You're a Eurasian spy! I'll shoot you, I'll vaporise you, I'll send you to the salt mines!'

Dominic Sandbrook

Which calls to mind the Hitler Youth, of course, but also a real story from the Soviet Union, about a boy called Pavlik Morozov. Orwell would have known it, because it was very widely reported. Morozov was a thirteen-year-old said to have denounced his own father, and in 1932 he was murdered by his other relatives. Morozov became a hero in Stalin's Soviet Union. Historians now think this is pretty much a legend concocted by the Stalinists — that in so far as he existed at all, the real story was completely different.

The Morozov thing hangs over the book, because Parsons ends up being denounced by his own seven-year-old daughter for thoughtcrime. In his sleep he was muttering 'Down with Big Brother', and she was listening at the keyhole and reported him. And when Parsons tells Winston about this, he's actually still proud of her.

Tabitha Syrett

'I was guilty, and I'm going to thank the tribunal when they convict me.' He's so indoctrinated that he believes, as people appeared to in the Stalin show trials, that he is guilty and deserves to be punished. But he's also looking around him like — did you hear that? Did you hear me say I'm proud of her?

Julia

Tabitha Syrett

We need to get to the second third of the book, and the character with whom Winston becomes involved: Julia. We first meet her at the Ministry of Truth where Winston works. And Winston really isn't a big fan.

Dominic Sandbrook

Not at all. 'He disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her' because of 'the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her'. You can hear the echoes of Orwell there — earnest people with weird hobbies. 'He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.'

He's especially repelled by her membership of the Junior Anti-Sex League. And there's an aggressively sexual dimension to all this. During the Two Minutes Hate, directed at the Trotskyist figure Emmanuel Goldstein, 'Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity.'

Tabitha Syrett

Reading that, it screams incel — men who would hate women and be violent because fundamentally they feel rejected by them. This has led people to wonder whether this is Orwell's subconscious. Some biographers have even gone so far as to accuse him of being a predator. And equally they've accused his vision in *1984* of being really misogynistic, and Julia herself of being a caricature.

To the first thing — was George Orwell a predator? I think that's massively reductive. He is voicing the thoughts of a character in a book. We've got to remember that. People have accused him of mistreating his wife, of being controlling and cruel, and I think he probably was all those things. But there's zero evidence to suggest that George Orwell was ever a predator in his real life, and that's an important distinction. Ditto: his problematic representation of women in the novel is not the same as culpability for personal sexual abuse. That's a massive accusation. And you've got to be careful not to judge a character in a novel by the moral frameworks of today.

Dominic Sandbrook

There were women who said later that he'd lunged at them or made advances, going back to the 1930s, and you never know the truth of these things.

Tabitha Syrett

You can't just reduce him to a label on the basis of the book. I still don't think he was a sexual predator in real life. He did have dodgy dealings with women, for sure — by the standards of today we wouldn't perceive his treatment of women as acceptable, particularly his treatment of his wife. But I don't think you should label him on the basis of *1984*.

Having said that, this is not to say I don't think his portrayal of Julia and his general attitude to women in the book is sexist, because I do. The women in *1984* are the least likely to resist. They are the most controllable. They're nosey, they're bigoted. They are constantly stereotyped and filtered through Winston's hate-filled male gaze. All the main female characters are stereotypes, and they serve as symbols rather than being real people. Katharine is the frigid obedient wife, symbolic of Party indoctrination. Then you have the prole woman who sings outside Winston's window — the maternal figure, all about fertility, with broad hips, doing domestic chores. And then you have Julia, who I think is a massive caricature: the sexually available maidenly youth. Thoughtless, mindless rebellion. There's nothing very cerebral about her. She's constantly defined in terms of her body. Her rebellion is all about promiscuity. She seems ignorant. She even falls asleep when Winston is articulating the ideology of the Party to her. And O'Brien uses her as a symbol to finally break Winston. She has no interior life and no individuality.

In 2023 Sandra Newman wrote a book called *Julia*, reframing the whole of *1984* from her perspective. In it Julia is thoughtful, she's complex, she has a deep understanding of the Party, she sees the world from a female perspective. It's a much more *Handmaid's Tale*-esque vision of this world.

Dominic Sandbrook

You can see *The Handmaid's Tale*, which we did an episode about when we were doing these books episodes within the aegis of The Rest Is History Club, as a female equivalent to *1984*. The two books are very similar in the way you see the world unfold through a single character who rebels — and rebels in a slightly cautious and half-hearted way, as June does and as Winston does.

Everything you say about the women being perceived in terms of their physicality or their relations with men, Julia having no interior life, Winston objectifying and despising them — all of these things are completely true. No one can argue with any of them. But there is a difference between the writer and the character.

Tabitha Syrett

I suppose the complexity is that we know deep down that Orwell probably agrees with Winston. There's not much distance between author and protagonist, I wouldn't say. And we know how he treated women in his own life. I'm not saying he was sexually or physically abusive, but he was quite cruel to his wife. I don't think he took it that seriously. I think he wanted her to take care of him.

Dominic Sandbrook

He likes to be mothered. He likes women to mother him. That's why he's approaching all these women when Eileen dies — because his way of proposing was to say, 'Do you think you could take care of me?'

Tabitha Syrett

Oh, that's pathetic.

Dominic Sandbrook

So I'd say *1984* is quite a sexist book, and that's one of many reasons why it probably wouldn't go down as well with women as with men. But then the other thing is — take that out of it — I'm not sure their affair is entirely convincing. C.S. Lewis thought this too; he said he didn't believe in the affair between Julia and Winston. It's really purely physical. There's no meeting of minds or souls there.

When they do have their transcendent moment — they go out to the country and have this rural idyll. Winston has a dream of a place called the Golden Country, which he associates with his mother; he has it first just after he's been thinking about her. Then he takes Julia out to the countryside, and the sun is shining and there are lovely leaves and trees. It's pure wish fulfilment, a slightly chocolate-box countryside painting. Orwell's friends said of him that he would always have this ideal of an idyllic rural England to which he could escape from the pressures of modernity. But is it real? Does it feel like a proper relationship, or is it just a bit of fantasy?

Tabitha Syrett

It does feel to me like a bit of a fantasy. But maybe that's partly the point. Of course this isn't ever going to be a reality. I don't think either of them really believes it's going to be a reality. It's like a daydream. Because there is this sense of inevitability that hangs over *1984*. They have this mantra they say to each other: 'We are the dead.' It runs through the book, because they know, even in the middle of their rebellion and their moments of happiness, that they are eventually going to be doomed.

And so they throw it all to hell and take this crucial step. They go to see O'Brien, because they believe he's connected to this mysterious Brotherhood. But even then you get a massive sense of foreboding, because when Winston first talks to O'Brien, 'he had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.'

Dominic Sandbrook

They're at the room he's taken above Mr Charrington's antique shop, and it's a very sleepy, lazy atmosphere. They've been in bed and he's reading the book O'Brien has lent him, a manifesto by the Party's great enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. And they say to each other, 'We are the dead.' And then: 'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them. And you realise somebody is watching them and speaking to them. Then Mr Charrington comes in and he is completely changed. He looks younger, his hair is different, his face — previously benign — is alert and cold. And Winston realises that in looking at Mr Charrington he is looking at a member of the Thought Police.

Tabitha Syrett

And we realise this along with him. We thought he was an ally. But no — no one can be trusted.

The Ministry of Love

Tabitha Syrett

This takes us to the final third of the book, which is grim reading: Winston in the Ministry of Love and the mounting terror of the prospect of Room 101.

Dominic Sandbrook

They interrogate him, they beat him, they torture him. He confesses to loads of mad things he hasn't done — to assassinations, to embezzlements. He confesses that he's been a spy for the East Asian government, that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism and a sexual pervert. He confesses to murdering his wife, even though both he and the interrogators know his wife is still alive.

And then he has this very celebrated confrontation with O'Brien. O'Brien says he's going to make him realise that there is no such thing as the past, that it never existed, and that there is no such thing as reality — that reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. And the supreme symbol of this is some maths.

Tabitha Syrett

Even I can see that this maths doesn't make sense.

Dominic Sandbrook

O'Brien says that whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth — reality is whatever the Party decrees it to be. So what you think to be true is only true if the Party believes so too. And he outlines the whole goal of the totalitarian project, which is not to tell you that two plus two equals five, but to make you believe it.

Tabitha Syrett

I actually think this is the most affecting scene in the whole book, because it's so scary to have everything that you believe, everything you think to be true, to be told that actually it's subjective, not objective. And it's not enough for you to tell yourself that you believe two plus two equals five. The Party's goal is to make you truly believe it, in the same way as you once believed that two plus two equals four.

Dominic Sandbrook

O'Brien's threat to Winston is absolutely terrifying. 'Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'

Tabitha Syrett

That's almost sexual. It's almost like they're raping his mind.

Dominic Sandbrook

And then these really haunting lines, when O'Brien says: 'You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.' Of course, this is what rebels and martyrs always think — that in the long run I will be remembered, history will absolve me. I find that so frightening. It's not that you won't exist; once we reach a certain age we reconcile ourselves to the fact that one day we won't exist. But the thought that we might never have existed really gets under my skin.

Tabitha Syrett

The idea that you were never there, and no one will ever know that you were there. Brutally futile.

Dominic Sandbrook

And then O'Brien explains what the Party is all about. The chilling thing is that it's not like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union or the Nazi Party in the Third Reich, which had ideals, however twisted. O'Brien says: 'We have no ideals. Our only ideal is power. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Power over human beings. We are interested not in power as a means to something else — not in money, not in happiness, not in long life — but only power, pure power.'

And he goes on: the progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. We will destroy every emotion except hatred. We will destroy all love. We will cut all the relations between friends, between parent and child, between husband and wife. There'll be no love except the love of Big Brother. There'll be no laughter, no art, no literature, no science. And then this great line: 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.'

Tabitha Syrett

It's so grim. And there's something quite Tolkien about that, isn't there? Tolkien and Orwell were born only nine years apart, and they both have this similar horror of modernity and authority. Winston's picture of the Party's ideal 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'. That is so an army of orcs serving Saruman and Sauron, isn't it? Before the walls of Helm's Deep.

Dominic Sandbrook

I think they're reacting against the same thing, which is modern totalitarian dictatorships and the worship of power. But they have the same things that they like. They're such different characters, but they have the same sense of nostalgia, the love of ordinariness and smallness, the love of England and Englishness. There's a point where Winston says the obvious, the silly and the true have got to be defended. That sounds like the kind of thing Gandalf might say to the hobbits.

Room 101

Tabitha Syrett

Back to the Ministry of Love, and finally to Room 101. Winston asks O'Brien what's in it, and O'Brien says, 'The worst thing in the world.' So whatever a person most fears, you will find in Room 101. And for Winston Smith this is rats. I think for people who haven't even read *1984* and don't have a particularly good idea of what it's about, so many people know about the rat scene. It's Winston's greatest fear, foreshadowed earlier in the book, and there's something terribly intimate and personal about it. Interestingly, Orwell hated rats himself, and it's a fixture in his writing. What this entails is strapping a metal mask to Winston's face, with a little door, and on the other side are hungry rats — and if you lift up the door, the rats will eat your face.

Dominic Sandbrook

And this is what finally breaks him. The manifestation of his being broken is to say: 'Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Tear her face off, strip her to the bones.'

Tabitha Syrett

So there it is — O'Brien uses Julia as a representation of Winston's broken spirit, and he turns entirely on the woman he purports to love. And then you have this very depressing final scene, in the Chestnut Tree Café. He doodles in the dust on the table, two plus two equals five. He's come to believe it. There's news on the telescreen of a victory, a fake victory, over Eurasia. And he looks up at the picture of Big Brother.

Dominic Sandbrook

'He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache.' And there are gin-scented tears coming down Winston's face — a brilliant detail. 'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' And that's the end of the book.

Is there hope?

Dominic Sandbrook

Has Big Brother won? Fred Warburg, Orwell's publisher, said it felt like a book written by somebody who had lost hope — somebody on that island of Jura dying of tuberculosis, whose personal life had been haunted by tragedy, in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. No wonder he feels so miserable.

But there could be a couple of flickers of hope. One is that there's an appendix that purports to be written in the far future, looking back at the principles of Newspeak — in other words, there is a world in which the Party and Big Brother are dead and gone. That's a device Margaret Atwood uses in *The Handmaid's Tale*, where there's an academic paper at the end of the book.

But also, throughout the book Winston has said again and again: if there is hope, it lies in the proles. The working-class masses. They don't care about the Party. They're just interested in football and gambling. He says to Julia that they are immortal, and that in the end their awakening would come — which is the argument Orwell had always made about the English people. He made it in *The Lion and the Unicorn*, his great essay during the early years of the Second World War. He said one day the ordinary people of England, who are asleep, will wake up, and when they wake up they will discover their power and they will overthrow fascism — which of course they do in the Second World War.

So whether you find the book hopeful depends on whether you believe Winston, and whether you believe in the English or the British people. So, Tabby — or do you actually hate Britain and think they'll never wake up?

Tabitha Syrett

Well, according to this premise, I guess I do hate Britain, because I don't believe that. I don't think this is a book with hope. Unusually for Orwell, I think it's vaguely patronising to attribute to a massive people such basic attributes — they like heavy physical work, the care of the home and children. It's so reductive. And also, in the vision of the future presented by O'Brien, there is no possibility to think beyond the bounds of the Party. According to the world of *1984*, we have to accept that the Party wins here. There's no alternative to their winning. So why should we believe they won't win in the future? And this is a world that exiles pleasure — film, football, beer don't exist in the world of *1984*. So what is there to keep the proles happy but love of the Party?

Dominic Sandbrook

The argument would be that there are all these people who are not political at all, who don't care what's going on, who are just listening to what Winston describes as their terrible music, the pop music produced for them — and one day they will find their voices and rise up. But if you believe what O'Brien is saying, he's saying we're going to create an environment in which that's never possible.

Final question. Do you think it's a period piece, or a warning for the twenty-first century?

Tabitha Syrett

I think it's both. I think it probably started as a period piece, and then, as Orwell wrote it locked away in this little corner of Scotland, living day and night with this terrible vision of the world, it increasingly came to seem like a vision of the future for him, like a prophecy. What about you?

Dominic Sandbrook

I think the stuff that's dated is the stuff about communism and Stalin — I don't think that has quite the resonance it did. But the stuff about rewriting the past, changing language, erasing what doesn't seem convenient, cancelling people, literally rewriting texts — it's hard to read the passage where Syme says 'we will rewrite Shakespeare and Byron so that they will say what we want them to say, and their meaning will be different', and not to think about people rewriting Roald Dahl so that it says what we would like Roald Dahl to have said. I don't want this to turn into a rant in Britain's best-loved mid-market newspaper, but that does feel to me quite Orwellian. Let stuff in the past say what people in the past wanted it to say. Don't change it for our own sensibilities.

If Orwell were alive now — and this is such columnist bingo — he would be looking at that stuff and saying, this is insane, and incredibly dangerous. You have to allow things to have their own independent existence and independent value. You might not like them, but that's how they were, and you should respect that rather than try to smooth and streamline everything so that it conforms to the political dictates of your moment.

Tabitha Syrett

I agree with that, and two other things have jumped out at me. We live in an age of technology and AI, and whether you're on the internet or wherever, you're constantly being driven to look at something — something external is driving you towards it, whether that's ads or Instagram. AI is famously obsequious; it tells you what you want to hear. So our curiosity is constantly being shaped by something else, and curiosity informs learning a lot of the time — what we know and what interests us.

And it's easy to forget that once upon a time, not that long ago, there was no such thing as my truth and your truth. There was truth, and there was true and not true. We do live in a world now where truth has become something slightly more subjective. To be hackneyed myself, there is something quite Orwellian about that too.

The ranking

Dominic Sandbrook

What are we going to rate *1984* out of? I thought about this, and I thought what George Orwell would enjoy is if we rated it in metric litres of sour proletarian beer. I'm giving it ten out of ten.

Tabitha Syrett

Seriously? Wow.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's a great book. It's an absolutely canonical book. It's a great read. I can see why some female readers say this is very much a man's book — but I am a man. It's the most influential political book of the last century, no question. It has absolutely shaped the way we think about politics, and about our anxieties about surveillance, about control, about the way we view the past, about the way we use language. On top of that it is a rollicking read. It's a scary read and a bleak read, but it's a real page-turner. It's one of those books that if you haven't read it, you kind of should have — and weirdly, if you haven't read it you probably know about it already, because it's so embedded in the imagination. So I have to give it ten. And what are you going to give it? You're going to give it two.