What is 1984 about? Orwell's novel and its ideas, explained

Nineteen Eighty-Four, usually written 1984, is a novel by George Orwell, published on 8 June 1949, about a state that controls not only what people do but what they are able to think. Its hero, Winston Smith, rewrites old newspapers for a living in a London ruled by one Party and its leader, Big Brother. He tries to keep a private mind, falls in love, rebels, and is caught and broken. That is what 1984 is about: power that wants the truth itself.

In short

• The story follows one man's quiet rebellion against a total state, and ends with the state winning: Winston comes to love Big Brother.
• The book's real subject is control of information: of the news, of the past, and of the words people have to think with.
• Orwell said he wrote against totalitarianism of any kind, left or right, and set the story in Britain to show it could happen anywhere.

What happens in 1984?

The novel opens on "a bright cold day in April" in Airstrip One, once Britain, now a province of Oceania, one of three superstates permanently at war. Posters everywhere say BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, and they mean it: a two-way television called a telescreen watches every Party member at home and at work. The Party's three slogans are WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, which handles news, entertainment and education. His job is to alter old newspaper articles so the record always agrees with whatever the Party says now. He starts a secret diary, which is itself a crime, and writes in it that "if there is hope, it lies in the proles," the poor majority the Party barely bothers to watch.

He begins an affair with Julia, a young woman who rebels for pleasure rather than principle. They rent a room above a junk shop and believe they are hidden. Winston trusts O'Brien, a senior Party official he suspects of belonging to a secret resistance, the Brotherhood. O'Brien gives them a forbidden book said to be by the enemy of the state, Emmanuel Goldstein, which explains how the Party keeps power.

It is a trap. The shopkeeper is in the Thought Police, the room has a telescreen behind a picture, and O'Brien is the Party's interrogator. In the Ministry of Love, Winston is tortured until he will believe that two and two make five if the Party says so. In Room 101, faced with his worst fear, rats, he betrays Julia. Released, empty, he sits in a café and the last line of the story is: "He loved Big Brother."

What do Big Brother, doublethink and Newspeak mean?

Much of the book's lasting power is in its vocabulary. Many of these words left the novel and entered ordinary English, often with their meanings stretched. This is what each means inside the book.

Term	What it means in the novel	How it is used today
Big Brother	The Party's leader, seen only on posters and screens; he may not exist as a person	Any intrusive watcher, often surveillance by a state or company
Doublethink	Holding two contradictory beliefs at once and accepting both, while forgetting you've done it	Self-deception, or believing whatever is convenient
Newspeak	The Party's official language, built to shrink vocabulary until rebellious thoughts can't be put into words	Jargon or euphemism that hides what is meant
Thoughtcrime	Thinking anything against the Party; Winston writes that "thoughtcrime IS death"	Punishing or policing opinions
Memory hole	Slots in the Ministry wall that carry documents to furnaces	Quietly deleting or forgetting inconvenient facts
Unperson	Someone erased from every record, as if they had never lived	A person written out of history or official memory
Two Minutes Hate	A daily ritual of screaming at film of Goldstein and the enemy	Organized outrage at a chosen target

The idea that ties them together is in a Party slogan: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." The Party's deepest aim is not to make people obey but to make them unable to know anything except what it says. That is why Winston's crime begins with a diary, a private record the Party didn't write.

Newspeak is the clearest case. An appendix at the end of the book, "The Principles of Newspeak", explains that its purpose was "to make all other modes of thought impossible". It rests on a claim Orwell had made three years earlier in his essay Politics and the English Language: "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." How far words really limit what people can think is a long-running question in the study of language, and most linguists today doubt any language could make a thought impossible.

What was Orwell writing against?

Orwell answered this himself. In his 1946 essay Why I Write, he said: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." He had fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and watched Soviet-backed Communists hunt down other left-wing groups on his own side, then lie about it in print.

So the targets were the totalitarian states of his time: Nazi Germany and, above all, Stalin's Soviet Union, with its show trials, purges and doctored photographs. Big Brother's mustache and the rewriting of history recall Stalin. But Orwell meant the warning to cover both fascism and the communism of states that claimed to follow Marx, which the note on communism separates from the idea itself.

When some American readers took the book in 1949 as an attack on socialism and on Britain's Labour government, Orwell replied in a statement that it was neither; Labour was the party he supported. He described it as a satire and a "show-up" of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable", which had already been partly realized in communism and fascism. He did not believe such a society "will necessarily arrive", he wrote, but that "something resembling it could arrive". The statement added that he had set the story in Britain to stress that English-speaking peoples were no better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought, could win anywhere.

Orwell wrote most of the book on the remote Scottish island of Jura, seriously ill with tuberculosis, and died on 21 January 1950, seven months after it came out.

Why is it called 1984?

The year is a near future seen from 1948, when Orwell finished it. A common story says he simply swapped the last two digits of 1948, but there is no firm evidence for that. An early working title was The Last Man in Europe, and his publisher, Fredric Warburg, preferred Nineteen Eighty-Four. Inside the book the date itself is uncertain: Winston can't be sure what year it is, because the Party controls the calendar too.

What does "Orwellian" mean, and how is it misused?

"Orwellian" describes a state or organization that controls people through surveillance, propaganda and the rewriting of facts, and especially one that uses language to mean the opposite of what it says, as the Ministry of Peace runs the war. In that sense it is precise.

It is often used more loosely, as a label for almost any rule, ban or policy the speaker dislikes. A quick test helps tell the strict use from the loose one:

• Is the falsehood official, and are people required to repeat it?
• Is the record being changed after the fact, not just argued over?
• Is the surveillance aimed at thought and private life, not only at crimes?
• Is the language built to make an opposing view impossible to say?

The more of these are true, the closer something is to what Orwell described. A thing can be wrong, unfair or intrusive without being Orwellian in his sense, and a word stretched to cover everything stops warning about anything.

Still argued

Readers still disagree about the appendix on Newspeak. It is written in the past tense, as if looking back on Oceania from a later time, and it says that in 1984 nobody yet used Newspeak as their only language. Some critics read that as a quiet sign that the Party eventually fell; others think it is simply the convention of a scholarly note. The book itself doesn't say.

Why does 1984 still matter?

The novel is still widely read, taught and argued over, and by 1989 it had been translated into 65 languages. It belongs to the line of dystopian fiction with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and it gave everyday speech a set of words for how power works on the mind. Whether a political novel can also be great art is the question Orwell set himself in Why I Write: "to make political writing into an art."

Its sharpest point is not about cameras. Winston loses because he has no record, no word and no fact the Party cannot reach. Machines that can fake a voice or a photo, which the note on deepfakes explains, give that old fear a new form: if the record can be altered, the question of who keeps it matters more.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what is Winston's job, and why is it central to how the Party rules?
• In your own words, what is doublethink, and how is it different from simple lying?
• What did Orwell say the book was against, and why did he set it in Britain?

Sources

• Nineteen Eighty-Four, the full text — George Orwell, 1949, via Project Gutenberg Australia
• Why I Write — George Orwell, 1946, The Orwell Foundation
• Politics and the English Language — George Orwell, 1946, The Orwell Foundation
• Nineteen Eighty-Four — Wikipedia