Great Schools Trust March 2021

Great Schools Trust

Book 6: 1984

Use this booklet to support your

reading of ‘1984’.

Great Schools Trust March 2021

Pre-Reading

What is ‘1984’ about?

‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the

language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political

rebellion; created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things

considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and

do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room

101 as a looming punishment.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, begins a subtle rebellion against the party

by keeping a diary of his secret thoughts, which is a deadly thoughtcrime.

With his lover Julia, he begins a foreordained fight for freedom and justice, in

a world where no one else appears to see, or dislike, the oppression the

protagonist opposes.

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Pre-Reading

Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903 in India; died January 21, 195 in London).

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell.

After returning with his parents to England, he won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. In the autumn of 1927, donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants. Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print in 1937, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there. When World War II came, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and in 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin.

Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism.

Orwell wrote the last pages of Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of Animal Farm. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

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Pre-Reading

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Reading the Novel: Making Predictions

Can you judge a book by its cover?

Based on the cover, what are your

predictions about what it will be about?

Why do you think it is called ‘1984’?

What does the blurb suggest?

Blurb

‘1984’ is a dystopian novella by George Orwell published in 1949, which follows the life of Winston Smith, a low-ranking member of ‘the Party’, who is frustrated by the omnipresent eyes of the party, and its ominous ruler Big Brother.

‘Big Brother’ controls every aspect of people’s lives. It has invented the language ‘Newspeak’ in an attempt to completely eliminate political rebellion; created ‘Throughtcrimes’ to stop people even thinking of things considered rebellious. The party controls what people read, speak, say and do with the threat that if they disobey, they will be sent to the dreaded Room 101 as a looming punishment.

Orwell effectively explores the themes of mass media control, government surveillance, totalitarianism and how a dictator can manipulate and control history, thoughts, and lives in such a way that no one can escape it.

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Orwell’s Politics

Orwell was known for his non-fiction writing as well as his fiction, though the lines between the two are not as clear-cut as you might at first think.

Orwell’s personal politics infiltrated his

work on all levels.

‘Down and Out in Paris and London’

Orwell’s first full-length work, published in

1933, was an account of his time spent

surviving as a dishwasher and living

amongst the impoverished, destitute souls

of London and Paris.

Here are two quotes from ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’:

“The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous

if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.”

“The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

How might Orwell’s thinking have been shaped by experience?

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1948 - What was life like at this time?

World War II had ended 2 years before. Use these images to

work out what life was like in 1948.

Leisure

Colour seeped onto the

big screen but household

TVs remained small and

monochrome. Radio was

the dominant form of

information and

entertainment.

Women who had worked

during the war largely

returned to the domestic

sphere.

Sunday was a day of rest

and worship.

Futurism

Advancing technologies,

coupled with the necessity

to rebuild, pointed

towards a radically

di fferent future.

More affordable modes of

travel impacted upon the

natural rhythm of l ife.

Since the turn of the

century, science fiction

had been fostering

dazzling images of a Brave

New World.

NHS

National Health Service

founded on 5 July 1948.

Established the principle

of free healthcare for all.

Part of a wider rise in the

wel fare state – the

socialist value of looking

out for one another.

Atomic Bomb

Dropped on Japanese

ci ties of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki to end World

War II .

Blitz Survivors

Cities bore the scars of

bombing. Large-scale

rebuilding required.

Rationing

War-time deprivation

continued until 1954.

Sugar, eggs, butter, meat

and clothing rationed.

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Orwell’s imagined future is now past, so why are we still learning about it?

Many of the themes of Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four, are

pervasive: just as the real 1948 shared deep-seated anxieties and values with

the fictional 1984, 21s t century ideologies can be similarly traced backwards

and forwards in time.

The term Orwellian has entered the dictionary to describe anything

characteristic of the author’s work, particularly with reference to totalitarian

practices. And since 1994 the Orwell Prize has been awarded ‘to celebrate

honest writing and reporting, to uncover hidden lives, to confront

uncomfortable truths, to promote Orwell’s values of integrity, decency and

fidelity to truth’.

Legacy

Ideologies Belief systems; modes of

thinking.

Totalitarian Systems of government that

are oppressive and all- powerful.

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Defining a Genre

Dystopia noun

An imagined society – often totalitarian or post-apocalyptic – in which there is great suffering or injustice.

Write a descriptive acrostic made up of eight dystopic words:

D

Y

S

T

O

P

I

A

Utopia and Dystopia

The term utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 work of the same name on a fictional island

society. It derives from the Greek prefix οὐ (meaning not) and topos (place) so it translates as ‘no-place’ and

could be used to refer to any imagined land.

Philosopher John Stuart Mill coined dystopia (old English dys- meaning bad) when criticising government policy

in 1868.

It was from this opposing term that the narrower meaning of utopia as a perfect society emerged.

Can you spot any other discrepancies between the two words and their etymology?

Etymology The origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning.

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Doublethink

What did Anthony Burgess, the famous author of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, say about Doublethink and how it links to dystopia?

Doublethink may not be laughed or shuddered off as a chilling fantasy of the author: Orwell knew he was doing little more than giving a formulation to a thought process that man has always found to be ‘indispensably necessary’… Meat is both delicious and disgusting… Birth is the beginning of death… Man is a double creature, in whom flesh contradicts spirit and instinct opposes aspiration.

Orwell recognized his own doubleness very sharply. He was both Eric Blair and George Orwell, a product of the fringe of the ruling class who tried to identify himself with the workers, an intellectual who distrusted intellectuals, a word-user who distrusted words. Doublethink, though rightly presented as an instrument of oppression, seems also a very reasonable technique. Our own attitude to doublethink is inevitably doublethinkful.

Anthony Burgess, 1985 (1978)

Burgess has also written, ‘Perhaps every dystopian vision is a figure of the present, with

certain features sharpened and exaggerated to point a moral and a warning.’

What aspects of life today could be exaggerated into a dystopian nightmare?

Useful dystopian conventions:

Authority Decay

MisinformationManipulation of

language The uncanny

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Setting the Scene

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…

Read the opening paragraphs of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

• What do you learn?• In what ways in this society dystopian?

• What questions do you have?

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.

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Scale of Trust

Where on the scale of trust would you place…

Government?

Police?

Co-workers/classmates?

Neighbours?

Family?

Mother Country

In Oceania, people live largely in isolation – the ties of social interaction have been cut so

that individuals are dependent on, and therefore loyal to, the Party.

Winston is married but he doesn’t know what’s become of his wife Katharine, nor does he

particularly care since he never loved her.

Marriage exists only for the purpose of procreation (sexual intercourse is otherwise

outlawed) and Winston and Katherine were unable to have children.

Likewise, children only exist to propagate the Party. The family is a unit of convenience

rather than of love.

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Winston Smith has begun compiling a diary of thoughts, which constitutes illegal activity in Oceania.

Interrupted by a knock at the door, he leaves the incriminating material on show but is relieved to find

it is only his neighbour, Mrs Parsons, asking if he would be so kind as to unblock the kitchen sink. Mrs

Parsons has a haggard, creased face and looks older than her years. Her husband is a militant colleague

of Winston’s at the Ministry of Truth. In this extract, Winston has just finished fixing the sink when he is

accosted by the Parsons children…

‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice.

A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him

with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture

with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts and red

neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with

an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought- criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll

vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’, the little girl

imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of

tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the

boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big

enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.

Mrs Parsons’s eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the children, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dust in the creases of her face.

‘They do get so noisy,’ she said. ‘They’re disappointed because they couldn’t go to see the hanging,

that’s what it is. I’m too busy to take them, and Tom won’t be back from work in time.

‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy in his huge voice.

‘Want to see the hanging! Want to see the hanging!’ chanted the little girl, still capering round.

1. What is the effect of the extract’s opening line?

2. Who or what do you think the Spies are?

3. What simile is used to describe the children’s behaviour and what is the effect of it?

4. What does Winston notice about Mrs Parsons and why is this significant?

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A Nightmare Family

Winston’s parents (and his wife) are only present in the book as memories. And to what extent you can trust memories, is one of the main themes in ‘1984’.

Read the extract below.

• What do you learn about Winston’s family?• What feelings are created by his dream?• What do you think its meaning might be?

This extract comes at the start of Part I, Chapter III. At the end of Chapter II, Winston resigns himself to

death as a result of being a thought-criminal but resolves to stay alive as long as possible…

Winston was dreaming of his mother.

He must, he thought, have been ten or eleven years old when his mother had disappeared.

She was a tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow movements and magnificent fair

hair. His father he remembered more vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat dark

clothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin soles of his father’s shoes) and

wearing spectacles. The two of them must evidently have been swallowed up in one of the

first great purges of the ’fifties.

At this moment his mother was sitting in some place deep down beneath him, with his young

sister in her arms. He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeble baby, always

silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of them were looking up at him. They were down in

some subterranean place – the bottom of a well, for instance, or a very deep grave – but it

was a place which, already far below him, was itself moving downwards. They were in the

saloon of a sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkening water. There was still air in

the saloon, they could still see him and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,

down into the green waters which in another moment must hide them from sight for ever.

He was out in the light and air while they were being sucked down to death, and they were

down there because he was up here. He knew it and they knew it, and he could see the

knowledge in their faces. There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only

the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive, and that this was part

of the unavoidable order of things.

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Helping Hand

If you could invent something to help future generations with their schoolwork, what would it be and why?

The technology of the 21st century can make the futurism of Nineteen Eighty-Four seem dated. However,

Orwell thought up the following office equipment for Winston, which were group-breaking ideas at the

time:

Telescreen – not dissimilar to television except it’s two-way, so users can be watched through the screen;

Speakwrite – a voice-activated word processor inspired by Dictaphones;

Pneumatic tubes – pipelines for conveying documents - such systems were already in use in some

industries but appeared strikingly modern in 1948.

Read the next extract and consider how these things “help” in Winston’s work…

With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when

his day’s work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his

spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the

pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written

messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large

oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Si milar slits existed in thousands

or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some

reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even

when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole

and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were

hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building…

Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. As for the third message, it

referred to a very simple error which could be set right in a couple of minutes. As short a time ago as Fe bruary, the

Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no

reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced

from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original

promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate

copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible

unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into

the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

How does Winston feel about his work?

Why are the slits through which unwanted documents are posted known as ‘memory holes’?

What else about Orwell’s description of the work stands out to you and why?

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Ministry of Truth

An artist’s impression of one of the ministries, as described by Orwell.

What is your impression of this as a workplace and as a centre of state? Is it what you’d expect? Why/why not?

Vacancy

Write a job description for Winston’s employment.

You can do either an official version or a satirical one.

Satire

Send-up using humour, irony or exaggeration to critique and expose elements of truth.

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Safe Distance

Winston does not have ‘friends’. His work is solitary, but he is occasionally joined in the canteen by Syme, who

likes to talk to (or rather at) him about Newspeak.

He is also drawn to O’Brien, an Inner Party manager who he thinks might be a fellow dissident. But there is no

means of substantiating this because any such conversation would be proof of thoughtcrime.

Somebody else who Winston knows by sight but has never spoken to is a ‘dark haired girl’. Winston had disliked

her from the very first moment of seeing her. Why might this be?

‘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.’

‘…during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was

shouting loudly enough.’

Winston last saw her on one of his ‘out of bounds’ expeditions to the proletarian zone

when they studiously ignored each other.

She is now approaching Winston in the Ministry corridors. She falls on an already injured

arm. He goes to her aid and she slips a scrap of folded paper into his hand. They part.

Winston resolves not to read it until he is confident that he is not being watched.

Winston and Julia embark on a dangerous affair. As we’ve seen, forming any kind of

relationship in Oceania is perilous. Their romance is built on resistance – they often seem

more in love with breaking Big Brother’s stranglehold than they do with each other.

The Girl with Dark Hair Hair

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Structure

Orwell uses a classic three-part structure to tell his story. The note appears in Part II, Chapter I and marks a turning point.

Part I Beginning

Sets scene – establishes horror

of dystopian world.

Part II Middle

Building relationships and resistance – raises

hope of change.

Part III End

?

The Brotherhood

It is rumoured that there is a wider resistance that they long to be a part of. Compare the feelings evoked by

O’Brien in the left-hand extract below, to those aroused by Julia in the right-hand extract below. How are the

extracts structured?

He was walking down the long corridor at the Ministry,

and he was almost at the spot where Julia had slipped

the note into his hand when he became aware that

someone larger than himself was walking just behind

him. The person, whoever it was, gave a small cough,

evidently as a prelude to speaking. Winston stopped

abruptly and turned. It was O’Brien.

At last they were face to face, and it seemed that his only

impulse was to run away. His heart bounded violently. He

would have been incapable of speaking. O’Brien, however,

had continued forward in the same movement, laying a

friendly hand for a moment on Winston’s arm, so that the

two of them were walking side by side. He began speaking

with the peculiar grave courtesy that differentiated him from

the majority of Inner Party members.

‘I had been hoping for an opportunity of talking to you,’ he

said. ‘I was reading one of your Newspeak articles in the Times

the other day. You take a scholarly interest in Newspeak, I

believe?’

Winston had recovered part of his self-possession. ‘Hardly

scholarly,’ he said. ‘I’m only an amateur. It’s not my subject. I

have never had anything to do with the actual construction

of the language.’

‘But you write it very elegantly,’ said O’Brien. ‘That is not

only my own opinion. I was talking recently to a friend of

yours who is certainly an expert. His name has slipped my

memory for the moment.’

Again Winston’s heart stirred painfully. It was inconceivable

that this was anything but a reference to Syme. But Syme was

not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson. Any

identifiable reference to him would have been mortally

dangerous. O’Brien’s remark must obviously have been

intended as a signal, a code- word. By sharing a small act of

thoughtcrime he had turned the two of them into accomplices.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’

‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please

himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’

The birds sang, the proles sang, the Party did not sing... You

were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in

that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the

body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two

make four.

‘We are the dead,’ he said.

‘We are the dead,’ Julia echoed dutifully.

‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.

They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned

into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s

eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge

that was stil l on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as

though unconnected with the skin beneath.

‘You are the dead,’ repeated the iron voice. ‘It was behind

the picture,’ breathed Julia.

‘It was behind the picture,’ said the voice. ‘Remain exactly

where you are. Make no movement until you are ordered.’

It was starting, it was starting at last! They could do nothing

except stand gazing into one another’s eyes. To run for l ife,

to get out of the house before it was too late – no such

thought occurred to them. Unthinkable to disobey the iron

voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had

been turned back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture

had fallen to the floor, uncovering the telescreen behind it.

‘Now they can see us,’ said Julia.

‘Now we can see you,’ said the voice.

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We Are the Dead

Much of Winston and Julia’s affair is conducted in the upstairs room of an antique shop

belonging to Mr Charrington, its aged and seemingly benign proprietor. Charrington and his

shop appeal to Winston because they appear to offer a bridge to the past.

At the same time they have both been taken into O’Brien’s secretive network but they know

the risks and accept that they are now living on borrowed time.

Big Brother is Watching You

Re-read the second extract on the previous page.

What would you say or do if you were Winston? Will you go

meekly or is there some fight left in you?

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Breaking Resistance

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party seeks to exert total control over

the thoughts and perceptions of the population. This includes

making them believe that two plus two can equal five. Winston

ponders whether the consensus acceptance does indeed make the

falsehood true.

What do you think of this existential conundrum?

The alternative perceptions of Orwell’s Oceania were based on

reality. In the 1930s, Russian propaganda posters had it that the

state’s five year plans could be achieved in four: ‘Arithmetic of an

Alternative Plan: 2 + 2 plus the Enthusiasm of the Workers = 5’.

Existential Philosophical inquiry into the nature of the lived human experience and

understanding.

Doublethink

Winston and Julia vowed that Big Brother could break their bodies but that their mind and spirit belonged to them; even if

they agreed to false ideas and confessed to false accusations, the reality was that they knew otherwise, and they would

never betray each other.

Read the extract below. What examples of doublethink are you able to identify? How is Orwell’s account of Winston’s

experience effective?

Their real weapon was the merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, tripping him up, laying traps for

him, twisting everything that he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction, until he began weeping as

much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of

the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again; but

sometimes they would suddenly change their tune, call him comrade, appeal to him in the name of Ingsoc and Big

Brother, and ask him sorrowfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Party to make him wish to undo

the evil he had done. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to

snivelling tears. In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards.

He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to

find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed

to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public

funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Eastasian

government as far back as 1968. He confessed that he was a religious believer, an admirer of capitalism and a sexual

pervert. He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his

wife was still alive. He confessed that for years he had been in personal touch with Goldstein and had been a member of

an underground organisation which had included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess

everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the

Party, and in the eyes of the Party there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.

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Room 101

Room 101 is the ultimate tool for breaking resistance. It is a basement room in which prisoners are forced to

confront their greatest fear. Read the extract below. How does Orwell build tension? What do you find to be

the most horrific element and why?

O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made

a frantic effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless, every part of him, even his head, was held

immovably. O’Brien moved the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston’s face.

‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over

your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes

will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap onto your face and

bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and

devour the tongue.’

The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second

left – to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a

violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an

instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one

and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being,

between himself and the rats.

The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple

of hand-spans from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them was leaping up and down, the

other, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely snuffed

the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow teeth. Again the blank panic took hold of him. He was

blind, helpless, mindless.

The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek. And then – no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny

fragment of hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was

just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and

the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over:

‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the

bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’

He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he

had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the

atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars – always away, away, away from the rats. He was

light-years distant, but O’Brien was still standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of a wire against his

cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage

door had clicked shut and not open.

Great Schools Trust March 2021

Rats might be his biggest fear but what really breaks Winston is conceding to Big Brother by betraying Julia

and, even more potently, his own thoughts and beliefs.

Winston and Julia meet once more, coincidentally and in the open, and are shadows of their former selves,

now lifeless, mechanical, unthinking.

They fulfil the objectives that O’Brien laid out to them:

‘There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.

There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no

literature, no science… If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for

ever.’

A Broken Man

Paint an alternative picture of the future: if you were to write it, what metaphor

would you use?

MetaphorDescribing one thing as another, imbuing

it with symbolism.

The End

‘He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what

kind of smile was hidden behind the dark moustache. O cruel, needless

misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-

scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything

was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He

loved Big Brother.’

What is your reaction to this?

Is it a satisfying conclusion?

Why? Why not?

Great Schools Trust March 2021

The Principles of Newspeak

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’, since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

Newspeak is the official language of Oceania. Nineteen Eighty-Four contains an appendix that explains it.

As with much of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s future vision had

a basis in historical fact.

In the 1920s, linguists C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards developed a

reduced form of English whittled down to just 850 words.

Basic (British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial)

English was intended as an international medium that would be

easy to learn. Famous exponents included Winston Churchill and

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Why do you think Basic English didn’t flourish?

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The Grammar of Newspeak

He ran extremely quickly = He runned doubleplusspeedwise

Look at the following translations:

I slept wonderfully = I sleeped doubleplusgoodwise

We swam, then ate a delicious lunch = We swimmed anteeat doubleplusfood or We eated

doubleplusfoodpostswim

How successful is Newspeak in replacing Oldspeak?

Look closely at the appendix.

NEWSPEAK was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard

English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.

The little word ‘was’ suggests that the introduction of Newspeak fared little better than Basic

English. This has been taken by some as an alternative, more triumphant conclusion – the

historical appendix written in Standard English suggests that the Party is defeated some time

after the events of the novel. Others have interpreted it as Orwell’s complacent declaration that

totalitarianism belongs to the past. What do you think?

Great Schools Trust March 2021

After You Have Read…

Write a book review and send it to your English

teacher!

Great Schools Trust March 2021

After You Have Read…

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