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I have only 30 minutes in which to speak to you this evening, and I, therefore, will not be able to discuss in detail so much as I can write when I have all of the time and space that is allowed me for the subjects, but I will undertake to sketch them very briefly without manuscript or preparation, so that you can understand them so well as I can tell them to you tonight.I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult problem to solve in America, and that is the view of nearly everyone with whom I have discussed the matter here in Washington and elsewhere throughout the United States—that we have no very difficult problem to solve.

It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country—and by rich people I mean the super-rich—will not allow us to solve the problems, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.

We have a marvelous love for this Government of ours; in fact, it is almost a religion, and it is well that it should be, because we have a splendid form of government and we have a splendid set of laws. We have everything here that we need, except that we have neglected the fundamentals upon which the American Government was principally predicated.

How many of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights for the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" and it said further, "We hold the view that all men are created equal."

Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men are created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?

Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children's children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal or "That we hold that all men are created equal."

Nor was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it by 120,000,000 people?

Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling the fact that all people are created equal; when we have today in America thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear?

I do not think you will contend that, and I do not think for a moment that they will contend it.

Now let us see if we cannot return this Government to the Declaration of Independence and see if we are going to do anything regarding it. Why should we hesitate or why should we quibble or why should we quarrel with one another to find out what the difficulty is, when we know that the Lord told us what the difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a blind man could see it, then Jesus told us all about it, and it was later written in the Book of James, where everyone could read it?

I refer to the Scriptures, now, my friends, and give you what it says not for the purpose of convincing you of the wisdom of myself, not for the purpose, ladies and gentlemen, of convincing you of the fact that I am quoting the Scriptures means that I am to be more believed than someone else; but I quote you the Scripture, or rather refer you to the Scripture, because whatever you see there you may rely upon will never be disproved so long as you or your children or anyone may live; and you may further depend upon the fact that not one historical fact that the Bible has ever contained has ever yet been disproved by any scientific discovery or by reason of anything that has been disclosed to man through his own individual mind or through the wisdom of the Lord which the Lord has allowed him to have.

But the Scripture says, ladies and gentlemen, that no country can survive, or for a country to survive it is necessary that we keep the wealth scattered among the people, that nothing should keep the wealth scattered among the people, that nothing should be held permanently by any one person, and that 50 years seems to be the year of jubilee in which all property would be scattered about and returned to the sources from which it originally came, and every seventh year debt should be remitted.

Those two things the Almighty said to be necessary—I should say He knew to be necessary, or else He would not have so prescribed that the property would be kept among the general run of the people, and that everyone would continue to share in it; so that no one man would get half of it and hand it down to a son, who takes half of what was left, and that son hand it down to another one, who would take half of what was left, until, like a snowball going downhill, all of the snow was off of the ground except what the snowball had.

I believe that was the judgment and the view and the law of the Lord, that we would have to distribute wealth ever so often, in order that there could not be people starving to death in a land of plenty, as there is in America today.

We have in America today more wealth, more goods, more food, more clothing, more houses than we have ever had. We have everything in abundance here.

We have the farm problem, my friends, because we have too much cotton, because we have too much wheat, and have too much corn, and too much potatoes.

We have a home loan problem, because we have too many houses, and yet nobody can buy them and live in them.

We have trouble, my friends, in the country, because we have too much money owing, the greatest indebtedness that has ever been given to civilization, where it has been shown that we are incapable of distributing the actual things that are here, because the people have not money enough to supply themselves with them, and because the greed of a few men is such that they think it is necessary that they own everything, and their pleasure consists in the starvation of the masses, and in their possessing things they cannot use, and their children cannot use, but who bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth, casting darkness and despair and impressing it on everyone else.

"So, therefore," said the Lord in effect, "if you see these things that now have occurred and exist in this and other countries, there must be a constant scattering of wealth in any country if this country is to survive."

"Then," said the Lord, in effect, "every seventh year there shall be a remission of debts; there will be no debts after 7 years." That was the law.

Now, let us take America today. We have in America today, ladies and gentlemen, $272,000,000,000 of debt. Two hundred and seventy-two thousand millions of dollars of debts are owed by the various people of this country today. Why, my friends, that cannot be paid. It is not possible for that kind of debt to be paid.

The entire currency of the United States is only $6,000,000,000. That is all of the money that we have got in America today. All the actual money you have got in all of your banks, all that you have got in the Government Treasury, is $6,000,000,000; and if you took all that money and paid it out today you would still owe $266,000,000,000; and if you took all that money and paid again you would still owe $260,000,000,000; and if you took it, my friends, 20 times and paid it you would still owe $150,000,000,000.

You would have to have 45 times the entire money supply of the United States today to pay the debts of the people of America and then they would just have to start out from scratch, without a dime to go on with.

So, my friends, it is impossible to pay all of these debts, and you might as well find out that it cannot be done. The United States Supreme Court has definitely found out that it could not be done, because, in a Minnesota case, it held that when a State has postponed the evil day of collecting a debt it was a valid and constitutional exercise of legislative power.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I may proceed to give you some other words that I think you can understand—I am not going to belabor you by quoting tonight—I am going to tell you what the wise men of all ages and all times, down even to the present day, have all said: That you must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own. You cannot let any man own §300,000,000,000 or $400,000,000,000. If you do, one man can own all of the wealth that the United States has in it.

Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.

So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition by which about 10 men dominate the means of activity in at least 85 percent of the activities that you own. They either own directly everything or they have got some kind of mortgage on it, with a very small percentage to be excepted. They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other until there is not any kind of business that a small, independent man could go into today and make a living, and there is not any kind of business that an independent man can go into and make any money to buy an automobile with; and they have finally and gradually and steadily eliminated everybody from the fields in which there is a living to be made, and still they have got little enough sense to think they ought to be able to get more business out of it anyway.

If you reduce a man to the point where he is starving to death and bleeding and dying, how do you expect that man to get hold of any money to spend with you? It is not possible.

Then, ladies and gentlemen, how do you expect people to live, when the wherewith cannot be had by the people?

In the beginning I quoted from the Scriptures. I hope you will understand that I am not quoting Scripture to you to convince you of my goodness personally, because that is a thing between me and my Maker; that is something as to how I stand with my Maker and as to how you stand with your Maker. That is not concerned with this issue, except and unless there are those of you who would be so good as to pray for the souls of some of UK. Rut the Lord gave His law, and in the Book of James they said so, that the rich should weep and howl for the miseries that had come upon them; and, therefore, it was written that when the rich hold goods they could not use and could not consume, you will inflict punishment on them, and nothing but days of woe ahead of them.

Then we have heard of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, and the greater Greek philosopher, Plato, and we have read the dialogue between Plato and Socrates, in which one said that great riches brought on great poverty, and would be destructive of a country. Read what they said. Read what Plato said; that you must not let any one man be too poor, and you must not let any one man be too rich; that the same mill that grinds out the extra rich is the mill that will grind out the extra poor, because, in order that the extra rich can become so affluent, they must necessarily take more of what ordinarily would belong to the average man.

It is a very simple process of mathematics that you do not have to study, and that no one is going to discuss with you.

So that was the view of Socrates and Plato. That was the view of the English statesmen. That was the view of American statesmen. That was the view of American statesmen like Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt, and even as late as Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Both of these men, Mr. Hoover and Mr. Roosevelt, came out and said there had to be a decentralization of wealth, but neither one of them did anything about it. But, nevertheless, they recognized the principle. The fact that neither one of them ever did anything about it is their own problem that I am not undertaking to criticize; but had Mr. Hoover carried out what he says ought to be done, he would be retiring from the President's office, very probably, 8 years from now, instead of 1 year ago; and had Mr. Roosevelt proceeded along the lines that he stated were necessary for the decentralization of wealth, he would have gone, my friends, a long way already, and within a few months he would have probably reached a solution of all of the problems that afflict this country today.

But I wish to warn you now that nothing that has been done up to this date has taken one dime away from these big fortune-holders; they own just as much as they did, and probably a little bit more; they hold just as many of the debts of the common people as they ever held, and probably a little bit more; and unless we, my friends, are going to give the people of this country a fair shake of the dice, by which they will all get something out of the funds of this land, there is not a chance on the topside of this God's eternal earth by which we can rescue this country and rescue the people of this country.

It is necessary to save the government of the country, but is much more necessary to save the people of America. We love this country. We love this Government. It is a religion, I say. It is a kind of religion people have read of when women, in the name of religion, would take their infant babes and throw them into the burning flame, where they would be instantly devoured by the all-consuming fire, in days gone by; and there probably are some people of the world even today, who, in the name of religion, throw their own babes to destruction; but in the name of our good government, people today are seeing their own children hungry, tired, half-naked, lifting their tear-dimmed eyes into the sad faces of their fathers and mothers, who cannot give them food and clothing they both need, and which is necessary to sustain them, and that goes on day after day, and night after night, when day gets into darkness and blackness, knowing those children would arise in the morning without being fed, and probably go to bed at night without being fed.

Yet in the name of our Government, and all alone, those people undertake and strive as hard as they can to keep a good government alive, and how long they can stand that no one knows. If I were in their place tonight, the place where millions are, I hope that I would have what I might say—I cannot give you the word to express the kind of fortitude they have; that is the word—I hope that I might have the fortitude to praise and honor my Government that had allowed me here in this land, where there is too much to eat and too much to wear, to starve in order that a handful of men can have so much more than they can ever eat or they can ever wear.

Now, we have organized a society, and we call it "Share Our Wealth Society," a society with the motto "Every Man a King."

Every man a king, so there would be no such thing as a man or woman who did not have the necessities of life, who would not be dependent upon the whims and caprices and ipsi dixit of the financial barons for a living. What do we propose by this society? We propose to limit the wealth of big men in the country. There is an average of $15,000 in wealth to every family in America. That is right here today.

We do not propose to divide it up equally. We do not propose a division of wealth, but we propose to limit poverty that we will allow to be inflicted upon any man's family. We will not say we are going to try to guarantee any equality, or $15,000 to a family. No; but we do say that one third of the average is low enough for any one family to hold, that there should be a guarantee of a family wealth of around $5,000; enough for a home, an automobile, a radio, and the ordinary conveniences, and the opportunity to educate their children; a fair share of the income of this land thereafter to that family so there will be no such thing as merely the select to have those things, and so there will be no such thing as a family living in poverty and distress.

We have to limit fortunes. Our present plan is that we will allow no one man to own more that $50,000,000. We think that with that limit we will be able to carry out the balance of the program. It may be necessary that we limit it to less than $50,000,000. It may be necessary, in working out of the plans that no man's fortune would be more than $10,000,000 or $15,000,000. But be that as it may, it will still be more than any one man, or any one man and his children and their children, will be able to spend in their lifetimes; and it is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond that point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.

Another thing we propose is old-age pension of $30 a month for everyone that is 60 years old. Now, we do not give this pension to a man making $1,000 a year, and we do not give it to him if he has $10,000 in property, but outside of that we do.

We will limit hours of work. There is not any necessity of having overproduction. I think all you have got to do, ladies and gentlemen, is just limit the hours of work to such an extent as people will work only so long as it is necessary to produce enough for all of the people to have what they need. Why, ladies and gentlemen, let us say that all of these labor-saving devices reduce hours down to where you do not have to work but 4 hours a day; that is enough for these people, and then praise be the name of the Lord, if it gets that good. Let it be good and not a curse, and then we will have 5 hours a day and 5 days a week-, or even less than that, and we might give a man a whole month off during a year, or give him 2 months; and we might do what other countries have seen fit to do, and what I did in Louisiana, by having schools by which adults could go back and learn the things that have been discovered since they went to school.

We will not have any trouble taking care of the agricultural situation. All you have to do is balance your production with your consumption. You simply have to abandon a particular crop that you have too much of, and all you have to do is store the surplus for the next year, and the Government will take it over.

When you have good crops in the area in which the crops that have been planted are sufficient for another year, put in your public works in the particular year when you do not need to raise any more, and by that means you get everybody employed. When the Government has enough of any particular crop to take care of all of the people, that will be all that is necessary; and in order to do all of this, our taxation is going to be to take the billion-dollar fortunes and strip them down to frying size, not to exceed $50,000,000, and if it is necessary to come to $10,000,000, we will come to $10,000,000. We have worked the proposition out to guarantee a limit upon property (and no man will own less than one-third the average), and guarantee a reduction of fortunes and a reduction of hours to spread wealth throughout this country. We would care for the old people above 60 and take them away from this thriving industry and give them a chance to enjoy the necessities and live in ease, and thereby lift from the market the labor which would probably create a surplus of commodities.

Those are the things we propose to do. "Every Man a King." Every man to eat when there is something to eat; all to wear something when there is something to wear. That makes us all a sovereign.

You cannot solve these things through these various and sundry alphabetical codes. You can have the N. R. A. and P. W. A. and C. W. A. and the U. U. G. and G. I. N. and any other kind of dad-gummed lettered code. You can wait until doomsday and see 25 more alphabets, but that is not going to solve this proposition. Why hide? Why quibble? You know what the trouble is. The man that says he does not know what the trouble is is just hiding his face to keep from seeing the sunlight.

God told you what the trouble was. The philosophers told you what the trouble was; and when you have a country where one man owns more than 100,000 people, or a million people, and when you have a country where there are four men, as in America, that have got more control over things than all the 120,000,000 people together, you know what the trouble is.

We had these great incomes in this country; but the farmer, who plowed from sunup to sundown, who labored here from sunup to sundown for 6 days a week, wound up at the end of the time with practically nothing.

And we ought to take care of the veterans of the wars in this program. That is a small matter. Suppose it does cost a billion dollars a year—that means that the money will be scattered throughout this country. We ought to pay them a bonus. We can do it. We ought to take care of every single one of the sick and disabled veterans. I do not care whether a man got sick on the battlefield or did not; every man that wore the uniform of this country is entitled to be taken care of, and there is money enough to do it; and we need to spread the wealth of the country, which you did not do in what you call the N. R. A.

If the N. R. A. has done any good, I can put it all in my eye without having it hurt. All I can see that the N. R. A. has done is to put the little man out of business—the little merchant in his store, the little Italian that is running a fruit stand, or the Greek shoe-shining stand, who has to take hold of a code of 275 pages and study it with a spirit level and compass and looking-glass; he has to hire a Philadelphia lawyer to tell him what is in the code; and by the time he learns what the code is, he is in jail or out of business; and they have got a chain code system that has already put him out of business. The N. R. A. is not worth anything, and I said so when they put it through.

Now, my friends, we have got to hit the root with the ax. Centralized power in the hands of a few, with centralized credit in the hands of a few, is the trouble.

Get together in your community tonight or tomorrow and organize one of our Share Our Wealth Societies. If you do not understand it, write me and let me send you the platform; let me give you the proof of it.

This is Huey P. Long talking, United States Senator, Washington, D. C. Write me and let me send you the data on this proposition. Enroll with us. Let us make known to the people what we are going to do. I will send you a button, if I have got enough of them left. We have got a little button that some of our friends designed, with our message around the rim of the button, and in the center "Every Man a King." Many thousands of them are meeting through the United States, and every day we are getting hundreds and hundreds of letters. Share Our Wealth Societies are now being organized, and people have it within their power to relieve themselves from this terrible situation.

Look at what the Mayo brothers announced this week, these greatest scientists of all the world today, who are entitled to have more money than all the Morgans and the Rockefellers, or anyone else, and yet the Mayos turn back their big fortunes to be used for treating the sick, and said they did not want to lay up fortunes in this earth, but wanted to turn them back where they would do some good; but the other big capitalists are not willing to do that, are not willing to do what these men, 10 times more worthy, have already done, and it is going to take a law to require them to do it.

Organize your Share Our Wealth Society and get your people to meet with you, and make known your wishes to your Senators and Representatives in Congress.

Now, my friends, I am going to stop. I thank you for this opportunity to talk to you. I am having to talk under the auspices and by the grace and permission of the National Broadcasting System tonight, and they are letting me talk free. If I had the money, and I wish I had the money, I would like to talk to you more often on this line, but I have not got it, and I cannot expect these people to give it to me free except on some rare instance. But, my friends, I hope to have the opportunity to talk with you, and I am writing to you, and I hope that you will get up and help in the work, because the resolutions and bills are before Congress, and we hope to have your help in getting together and organizing your Share Our Wealth Societies.

Now, that I have but a minute left, I want to say that I suppose my family is listening in on the radio in New Orleans, and I will say to my wife and three children that I am entirely well and hope to be home before many more days, and I hope they have listened to my speech tonight, and I wish them and all of their neighbors and friends everything good that may be had.

I thank you, my friends, for your kind attention, and I hope you will enroll with us, take care of your own work in the work of this Government, and share or help in our Share Our Wealth Societies.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.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of fig1984
ures which had something to do with the production of
pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like
a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable.
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be
dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,
the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue
overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was
very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by
coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter
that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the
sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed
to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed
down from every commanding corner. There was one on
the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes
looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another
poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC.
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down
between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,
and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police
patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did
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not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was
still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment
of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by
it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision
which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen
as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable
that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You
had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.
A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work,
towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This,
he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London,
chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous
of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some
childhood memory that should tell him whether London
had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas
of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored
up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard
and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy
1984
garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed
sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-
herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-
houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:
nothing remained of his childhood except a series of brightlit
tableaux occurring against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak
was the official language of Oceania. For an account
of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was startlingly
different from any other object in sight. It was an
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete,
soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the
air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read,
picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three
slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three
thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding
ramifications below. Scattered about London there were
just three other buildings of similar appearance and size.
So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture
that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see
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all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of
the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which
concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and
the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself
with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and
order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue,
Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.
There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been
inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it.
It was a place impossible to enter except on official business,
and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbedwire
entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun
nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were
roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed
with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features
into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable
to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the
room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this
time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and
he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved
for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a
bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked
VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese
rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved
1984
himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out
of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in
swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back
of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however,
the burning in his belly died down and the world began to
look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled
packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously
held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the
floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back
to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took
out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized
blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in
an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal,
in the end wall, where it could command the whole room,
it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side
of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now
sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably
been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove,
and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside
the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could
be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present
position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography
of the room that had suggested to him the thing
that he was now about to do.
But it had also been suggested by the book that he had
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just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful
book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was
of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty
years past. He could guess, however, that the book was
much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of
a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town
(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been
stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess
it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary
shops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the
rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things,
such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible
to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance
up and down the street and then had slipped inside and
bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not
conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had
carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing
written in it, it was a compromising possession.
The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary.
This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no
longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain
that it would be punished by death, or at least by twentyfive
years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into
the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen
was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures,
and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty,
simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper
deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being
scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to
10 1984
writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual
to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of
course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the
pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor
had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the
decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984.
He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended
upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any
certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that
date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine,
and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but
it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within
a year or two.
For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he
writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind
hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,
and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak
word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of
what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you
communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible.
Either the future would resemble the present, in which
case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from
it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The
telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It
was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the powFree
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er of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it
was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past
he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never
crossed his mind that anything would be needed except
courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to
do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue
that had been running inside his head, literally for
years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had
dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itching
unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so it
always became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He
was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page
in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the
blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the
gin. Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly
aware of what he was setting down. His small but
childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding
first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:
April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One
very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused
by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with
a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along
in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the
helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea
round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though
the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter
12 1984
when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a
helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman
might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little
boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming
with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he
was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting
her arms round him and comforting him although she was
blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much
as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets
off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among
them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then
there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up
right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose
must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from
the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the
house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they
didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it
aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned
her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her
nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they
never——
Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering
from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour
out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that
while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified
itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt
equal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, because
of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come
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home and begin the diary today.
It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything
so nebulous could be said to happen.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department,
where Winston worked, they were dragging the
chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre
of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for
the Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his place
in one of the middle rows when two people whom he knew
by sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly into
the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in
the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that
she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—since
he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a
spanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-
writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about
twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,
athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the
Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round
the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the
shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the
very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was
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. 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 unortho14
1984
doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of
being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed
in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance which
seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled
him with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mind
that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it
was true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiar
uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as
hostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.
The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member
of the Inner Party and holder of some post so important
and remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.
A momentary hush passed over the group of people round
the chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Party
member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with
a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite of
his formidable appearance he had a certain charm of manner.
He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose
which was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way,
curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had
still thought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-
century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston
had seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as many
years. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely because
he was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbane
manner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it was
because of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a belief,
merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy was
not perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 15
And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was
written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate
he had the appearance of being a person that you could
talk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and get
him alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort to
verify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. At
this moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it
was nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay in
the Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate was
over. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a couple
of places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who worked
in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girl
with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some
monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the
big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set
one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s
neck. The Hate had started.
As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of
the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses
here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired
woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein
was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago
(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of
the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big
Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary
activities, had been condemned to death, and had
mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of
the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was
16 1984
none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He
was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity.
All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries,
acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out
of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and
hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the
sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps
even—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hidingplace
in Oceania itself.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never
see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions.
It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of
white hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yet
somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness
in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair
of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was
delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines
of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a
child should have been able to see through it, and yet just
plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that
other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken
in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing
the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate
conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating
freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly,
freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that
the revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapid
polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the haFree
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bitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained
Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any
Party member would normally use in real life. And all the
while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which
Goldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head on
the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men with
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface
of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly
similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots
formed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half
the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on
the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army
behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or
even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.
He was an object of hatred more constant than
either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war
with one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the
other. But what was strange was that although Goldstein
was hated and despised by everybody, although every day
and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen,
in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed,
ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish
that they were—in spite of all this, his influence never
seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting
to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and
saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked
18 1984
by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast
shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators
dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered
stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies,
of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated
clandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.
People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But one
knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither
the Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any ordinary
Party member would mention if there was a way of
avoiding it.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People
were leaping up and down in their places and shouting
at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening
bleating voice that came from the screen. The
little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and
her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed
fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting
very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and
quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a
wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying
out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up
a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It
struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued
inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he
was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently
against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about
the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act
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a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid
joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always
unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,
a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer,
seemed to flow through the whole group of people
like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will
into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that
one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could
be switched from one object to another like the flame of a
blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not
turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against
Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such
moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic
on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world
of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the
people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed
to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of
Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed
to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like
a rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spite
of his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hung
about his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchanter,
capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.
It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s hatred
this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by the
sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head
away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded
in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to
20 1984
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. Better
than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that he
hated her. 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.
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had
become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face
changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into
the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,
huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming
to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some
of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards
in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh
of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the
face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full
of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost
filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was
saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the
sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable
individually but restoring confidence by the fact
of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away
again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 21
in bold capitals:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
But the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several
seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had
made on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off immediately.
The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself
forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a
tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she extended
her arms towards the screen. Then she buried her
face in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering a
prayer.
At this moment the entire group of people broke into a
deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!...B-B!’—over and over
again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’
and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow
curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed
to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tomtoms.
For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it
up. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of
overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the
wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was
an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness
by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemed
to grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not help
sharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chant22
1984
ing of ‘B-B!...B-B!’ always filled him with horror. Of course
he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.
To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what
everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. But
there was a space of a couple of seconds during which the
expression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.
And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing
happened—if, indeed, it did happen.
Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stood
up. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act of
resettling them on his nose with his characteristic gesture.
But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met,
and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew—yes, he
KNEW!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself.
An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though
their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing
from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’
O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely what
you are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred,
your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ And
then the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s face
was as inscrutable as everybody else’s.
That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it had
happened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that they
did was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that others
besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhaps
the rumours of vast underground conspiracies were true
after all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It was
impossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 23
and executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was not
simply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.
There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that might
mean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conversation,
faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, when
two strangers met, a small movement of the hand which
had looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. It
was all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.
He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brien
again. The idea of following up their momentary contact
hardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivably
dangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal
glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that
was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which
one had to live.
Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let out
a belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.
His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that
while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as
though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same
cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid
voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat
capitals—DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN
WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd,
since the writing of those particular words was not
24 1984
more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary,
but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled
pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was
useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER,
or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference.
Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did
not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police
would get him just the same. He had committed—would
still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—
the essential crime that contained all others in itself.
Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing
that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully
for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they
were bound to get you.
It was always at night—the arrests invariably happened
at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking
your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of
hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there
was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared,
always during the night. Your name was removed
from the registers, every record of everything you had ever
done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied
and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED
was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began
writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:
theyll shoot me i don’t care theyll shoot me in the back of the
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 25
neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you
in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother——
He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and
laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently.
There was a knocking at the door.
Already! He sat as still as a mouse, in the futile hope that
whoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no,
the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would be
to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,
from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up and
moved heavily towards the door.
26 1984
Chapter 2
As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw that
he had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITH
BIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost big
enough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceivably
stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in his
panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by
shutting the book while the ink was wet.
He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantly
a warm wave of relief flowed through him. A colourless,
crushed-looking woman, with wispy hair and a lined face,
was standing outside.
‘Oh, comrade,’ she began in a dreary, whining sort of
voice, ‘I thought I heard you come in. Do you think you
could come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’s
got blocked up and——’
It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same
floor. (’Mrs’ was a word somewhat discountenanced by the
Party—you were supposed to call everyone ‘comrade’—
but with some women one used it instinctively.) She was
a woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One had
the impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.
Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur repair
jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansions
were old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 27
to pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings and
walls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leaked
whenever there was snow, the heating system was usually
running at half steam when it was not closed down altogether
from motives of economy. Repairs, except what you
could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees
which were liable to hold up even the mending of a
window-pane for two years.
‘Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,’ said Mrs
Parsons vaguely.
The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingy
in a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-on
look, as though the place had just been visited by some large
violent animal. Games impedimenta—hockey-sticks, boxing-
gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turned
inside out—lay all over the floor, and on the table there was
a litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. On
the walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and the
Spies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was the
usual boiled-cabbage smell, common to the whole building,
but it was shot through by a sharper reek of sweat, which—
one knew this at the first sniff, though it was hard to say
how—was the sweat of some person not present at the moment.
In another room someone with a comb and a piece of
toilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military music
which was still issuing from the telescreen.
‘It’s the children,’ said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-apprehensive
glance at the door. ‘They haven’t been out today.
And of course——’
28 1984
She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the middle.
The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthy
greenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.
Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of the
pipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down,
which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsons
looked on helplessly.
‘Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a moment,’
she said. ‘He loves anything like that. He’s ever so
good with his hands, Tom is.’
Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry
of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysing
stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those
completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom,
more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the
Party depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwillingly
evicted from the Youth League, and before graduating
into the Youth League he had managed to stay on in the
Spies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministry
he was employed in some subordinate post for which intelligence
was not required, but on the other hand he was
a leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the other
committees engaged in organizing community hikes, spontaneous
demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntary
activities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,
between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearance
at the Community Centre every evening for the past four
years. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious
testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 29
him about wherever he went, and even remained behind
him after he had gone.
‘Have you got a spanner?’ said Winston, fiddling with the
nut on the angle-joint.
‘A spanner,’ said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming
invertebrate. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps the children—
—’
There was a trampling of boots and another blast on the
comb as the children charged into the living-room. Mrs
Parsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the water
and disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that had
blocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he could
in the cold water from the tap and went back into the other
room.
‘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
30 1984
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’ eyes flitted nervously from Winston to the
children, and back again. In the better light of the livingroom
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.
Some Eurasian prisoners, guilty of war crimes, were to
be hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.
This happened about once a month, and was a popular spectacle.
Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. He
took his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But he
had not gone six steps down the passage when something
hit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It was
as though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spun
round just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son back
into the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 31
‘Goldstein!’ bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.
But what most struck Winston was the look of helpless
fright on the woman’s greyish face.
Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreen
and sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. The
music from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clipped
military voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish,
a description of the armaments of the new Floating Fortress
which had just been anchored between Iceland and
the Faroe lslands.
With those children, he thought, that wretched woman
must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and
they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of
unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.
What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations
as the Spies they were systematically turned into
ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them
no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the
Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything
connected with it. The songs, the processions, the
banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the
yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all a
sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned
outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners,
traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost
normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own
children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed
in which ‘The Times’ did not carry a paragraph describing
how some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the
32 1984
phrase generally used—had overheard some compromising
remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He picked
up his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could find
something more to write in the diary. Suddenly he began
thinking of O’Brien again.
Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—he
had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark
room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as
he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no
darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually—a statement,
not a command. He had walked on without pausing.
What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the
words had not made much impression on him. It was only
later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance.
He could not now remember whether it was before
or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the
first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified
the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification
existed. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the
dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after this
morning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure
whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even
seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding
between them, more important than affection or partisanship.
‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’
he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that
in some way or another it would come true.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 33
The voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,
clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice
continued raspingly:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this
moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South
India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say
that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war
within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash—
—’
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough,
following on a gory description of the annihilation of a
Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners,
came the announcement that, as from next week, the
chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to
twenty.
Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leaving
a deflated feeling. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate the
victory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—
crashed into ‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’. You were supposed to
stand to attention. However, in his present position he was
invisible.
‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Winston
walked over to the window, keeping his back to the
telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far
away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating
roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on
London at present.
34 1984
Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to
and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished.
Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak,
doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though
he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in
a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He
was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
What certainty had he that a single human creature now
living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the
dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like
an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry
of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There,
too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed,
and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother.
Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on
stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and
on the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Always
the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.
Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors,
in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except
the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows of
the Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 35
them, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heart
quailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was too
strong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombs
would not batter it down. He wondered again for whom he
was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an
age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay
not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced
to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police
would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of
existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal
to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous
word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically
survive?
The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes.
He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put
new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth
that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,
in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was
not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you
carried on the human heritage. He went back to the table,
dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is
free, when men are different from one another and do not
live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done
cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the
age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of
doublethink—greetings!
36 1984
He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him that
it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate
his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The consequences
of every act are included in the act itself. He wrote:
Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became
important to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of his
right hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detail
that might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry
(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-haired
woman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department)
might start wondering why he had been writing
during the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fashioned
pen, WHAT he had been writing—and then drop a
hint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroom
and carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty darkbrown
soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and was
therefore well adapted for this purpose.
He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite useless
to think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whether
or not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid across
the page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger he
picked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and deposited
it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to be
shaken off if the book was moved.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 37
Chapter 3
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
38 1984
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.
He could not remember what had happened, but he knew
in his dream that in some way the lives of his mother and
his sister had been sacrificed to his own. It was one of those
dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream
scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and
in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still
seem new and valuable after one is awake. The thing that
now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death,
nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a
way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged
to the ancient time, to a time when there was still
privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a
family stood by one another without needing to know the
reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she
had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish
to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember
how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of
loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he
saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred,
and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex
sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his
mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green
water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 39
Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a
summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded
the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred
so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain
whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking
thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old,
rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it
and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the
opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were
swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring
in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand,
though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream
where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow
trees.
The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across
the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off
her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body
was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed
he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that
instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had
thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness
it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system
of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the
Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single
splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture
belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the
word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.
The telescreen was giving forth an ear-splitting whistle
which continued on the same note for thirty seconds. It
40 1984
was nought seven fifteen, getting-up time for office workers.
Winston wrenched his body out of bed—naked, for a member
of the Outer Party received only 3,000 clothing coupons
annually, and a suit of pyjamas was 600—and seized a dingy
singlet and a pair of shorts that were lying across a chair.
The Physical Jerks would begin in three minutes. The next
moment he was doubled up by a violent coughing fit which
nearly always attacked him soon after waking up. It emptied
his lungs so completely that he could only begin breathing
again by lying on his back and taking a series of deep gasps.
His veins had swelled with the effort of the cough, and the
varicose ulcer had started itching.
‘Thirty to forty group!’ yapped a piercing female voice.
‘Thirty to forty group! Take your places, please. Thirties to
forties!’
Winston sprang to attention in front of the telescreen,
upon which the image of a youngish woman, scrawny but
muscular, dressed in tunic and gym-shoes, had already appeared.
‘Arms bending and stretching!’ she rapped out. ‘Take
your time by me. ONE, two, three, four! ONE, two, three,
four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! ONE, two,
three four! ONE two, three, four!...’
The pain of the coughing fit had not quite driven out of
Winston’s mind the impression made by his dream, and the
rhythmic movements of the exercise restored it somewhat.
As he mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing
on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered
proper during the Physical Jerks, he was struggling
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 41
to think his way backward into the dim period of his early
childhood. It was extraordinarily difficult. Beyond the late
fifties everything faded. When there were no external records
that you could refer to, even the outline of your own
life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which
had quite probably not happened, you remembered the
detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere,
and there were long blank periods to which you
could assign nothing. Everything had been different then.
Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map,
had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been
so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain,
though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been
called London.
Winston could not definitely remember a time when his
country had not been at war, but it was evident that there
had been a fairly long interval of peace during his childhood,
because one of his early memories was of an air raid
which appeared to take everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was
the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester.
He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember
his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down,
down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and
round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which
finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and
they had to stop and rest. His mother, in her slow, dreamy
way, was following a long way behind them. She was carrying
his baby sister—or perhaps it was only a bundle of
blankets that she was carrying: he was not certain whether
42 1984
his sister had been born then. Finally they had emerged into
a noisy, crowded place which he had realized to be a Tube
station.
There were people sitting all over the stone-flagged floor,
and other people, packed tightly together, were sitting on
metal bunks, one above the other. Winston and his mother
and father found themselves a place on the floor, and near
them an old man and an old woman were sitting side by
side on a bunk. The old man had on a decent dark suit and
a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair: his
face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and full of tears. He
reeked of gin. It seemed to breathe out of his skin in place
of sweat, and one could have fancied that the tears welling
from his eyes were pure gin. But though slightly drunk he
was also suffering under some grief that was genuine and
unbearable. In his childish way Winston grasped that some
terrible thing, something that was beyond forgiveness and
could never be remedied, had just happened. It also seemed
to him that he knew what it was. Someone whom the old
man loved—a little granddaughter, perhaps—had been
killed. Every few minutes the old man kept repeating:
’We didn’t ought to ‘ave trusted ‘em. I said so, Ma, didn’t I?
That’s what comes of trusting ‘em. I said so all along. We
didn’t ought to ‘ave trusted the buggers.’
But which buggers they didn’t ought to have trusted
Winston could not now remember.
Since about that time, war had been literally continuFree
eBooks at Planet eBook.com 43
ous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the
same war. For several months during his childhood there
had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of
which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history
of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any
given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since
no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention
of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment,
for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at
war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public
or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three
powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.
Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since
Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with
Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge
which he happened to possess because his memory was not
satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners
had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia:
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The
enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and
it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible.
The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth
time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward
(with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from
the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the
back muscles)—the frightening thing was that it might all
be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and
say of this or that event, IT NEVER HAPPENED—that,
44 1984
surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance
with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had
been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years
ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own
consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—
if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into
history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the
Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable,
never had been altered. Whatever was true now was
true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All
that was needed was an unending series of victories over
your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak,
‘doublethink’.
‘Stand easy!’ barked the instructress, a little more genially.
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled
his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine
world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to
be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully
constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions
which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic,
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe
that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the
guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary
to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 45
moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget
it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process
itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to
induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become
unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the
use of doublethink.
The instructress had called them to attention again. ‘And
now let’s see which of us can touch our toes!’ she said enthusiastically.
‘Right over from the hips, please, comrades.
ONE-two! ONE-two!...’
Winston loathed this exercise, which sent shooting pains
all the way from his heels to his buttocks and often ended by
bringing on another coughing fit. The half-pleasant quality
went out of his meditations. The past, he reflected, had
not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For
how could you establish even the most obvious fact when
there existed no record outside your own memory? He tried
to remember in what year he had first heard mention of
Big Brother. He thought it must have been at some time in
the sixties, but it was impossible to be certain. In the Party
histories, of course, Big Brother figured as the leader and
guardian of the Revolution since its very earliest days. His
exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until
already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties
and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical
hats still rode through the streets of London in great
gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides.
There was no knowing how much of this legend was true
46 1984
and how much invented. Winston could not even remember
at what date the Party itself had come into existence. He
did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before
1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—’English
Socialism’, that is to say—it had been current earlier.
Everything melted into mist. Sometimes, indeed, you could
put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example,
as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party
had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since
his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There
was never any evidence. Just once in his whole life he had
held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the
falsification of an historical fact. And on that occasion——
‘Smith!’ screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen.
‘6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do
better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S
better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and
watch me.’
A sudden hot sweat had broken out all over Winston’s
body. His face remained completely inscrutable. Never
show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker
of the eyes could give you away. He stood watching while
the instructress raised her arms above her head and—one
could not say gracefully, but with remarkable neatness and
efficiency—bent over and tucked the first joint of her fingers
under her toes.
‘THERE, comrades! THAT’S how I want to see you doing
it. Watch me again. I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four
children. Now look.’ She bent over again. ‘You see MY
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 47
knees aren’t bent. You can all do it if you want to,’ she added
as she straightened herself up. ‘Anyone under forty-five
is perfectly capable of touching his toes. We don’t all have
the privilege of fighting in the front line, but at least we can
all keep fit. Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And
the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what THEY
have to put up with. Now try again. That’s better, comrade,
that’s MUCH better,’ she added encouragingly as Winston,
with a violent lunge, succeeded in touching his toes with
knees unbent, for the first time in several years.
48 1984
Chapter 4
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. Similar 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 examined the four slips of paper which he had
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 49
unrolled. Each contained a message of only one or two lines,
in the abbreviated jargon—not actually Newspeak, but consisting
largely of Newspeak words—which was used in the
Ministry for internal purposes. They ran:
times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify
times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify
current issue
times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the
fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job
and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine
matters, though the second one would probably mean
some tedious wading through lists of figures.
Winston dialled ‘back numbers’ on the telescreen and
called for the appropriate issues of ‘The Times’, which slid
out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay.
The messages he had received referred to articles or news
items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary
to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For
example, it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth
of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous
day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain
quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be
50 1984
launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian
Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India
and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary
to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a
way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.
Or again, ‘The Times’ of the nineteenth of December
had published the official forecasts of the output of various
classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983,
which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year
Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output,
from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every
instance grossly wrong. 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 February, 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
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 51
the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the
pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did
know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which
happened to be necessary in any particular number of ‘The
Times’ had been assembled and collated, that number would
be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected
copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous
alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but
to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films,
sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature
or documentation which might conceivably hold
any political or ideological significance. Day by day and
almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.
In this way every prediction made by the Party could be
shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor
was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which
conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to
remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped
clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In
no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done,
to prove that any falsification had taken place. The largest
section of the Records Department, far larger than the one
on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons
whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of
books, newspapers, and other documents which had been
superseded and were due for destruction. A number of ‘The
Times’ which might, because of changes in political alignment,
or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have
52 1984
been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing
its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.
Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again,
and were invariably reissued without any admission that
any alteration had been made. Even the written instructions
which Winston received, and which he invariably got
rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or
implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always
the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations
which it was necessary to put right in the interests of
accuracy.
But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry
of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the
substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of
the material that you were dealing with had no connexion
with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion
that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just
as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified
version. A great deal of the time you were expected to
make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry
of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots
for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was
given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting
the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions,
so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been
overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer
the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.
Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still,
nobody knew how many had been produced, much less
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 53
cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical
numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps
half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was
with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything
faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the
date of the year had become uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding
cubicle on the other side a small, precise-looking, darkchinned
man named Tillotson was working steadily away,
with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very
close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of
trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself
and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted
a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what
work he was employed on. People in the Records Department
did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long,
windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless
rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston
did not even know by name, though he daily saw them
hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the
Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him
the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply
at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names
of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered
never to have existed. There was a certain fitness in
this, since her own husband had been vaporized a couple
of years earlier. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffec54
1984
tual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy
ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and
metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive
texts, they were called—of poems which had become
ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another
were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with
its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a
single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records
Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms
of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.
There were the huge printing-shops with their sub-editors,
their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped
studios for the faking of photographs. There was the teleprogrammes
section with its engineers, its producers, and
its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating
voices. There were the armies of reference clerks whose
job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals
which were due for recall. There were the vast repositories
where the corrected documents were stored, and the hidden
furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And
somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing
brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid
down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this
fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified,
and the other rubbed out of existence.
And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a
single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job
was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens
of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 55
programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of
information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to
a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from
a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the
Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of
the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower
level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole
chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature,
music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here
were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost
nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational
five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental
songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it
was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest
kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets
and which no Party member, other than those who worked
on it, was permitted to look at.
Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while
Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and
he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted
him. When the Hate was over he returned to
his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf,
pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles,
and settled down to his main job of the morning.
Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most
of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also
jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in
56 1984
them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate
pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you
except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your
estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was
good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been
entrusted with the rectification of ‘The Times’ leading articles,
which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled
the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:
times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs
unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling
In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:
The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in ‘The Times’
of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes
references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and
submit your draft to higher authority before filing.
Winston read through the offending article. Big Brother’s
Order for the Day, it seemed, had been chiefly devoted
to praising the work of an organization known as FFCC,
which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors
in the Floating Fortresses. A certain Comrade Withers, a
prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out
for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of
Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.
Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 57
with no reasons given. One could assume that Withers and
his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no
report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen. That
was to be expected, since it was unusual for political offenders
to be put on trial or even publicly denounced. The great
purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of
traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession
of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special
show-pieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of
years. More commonly, people who had incurred the displeasure
of the Party simply disappeared and were never
heard of again. One never had the smallest clue as to what
had happened to them. In some cases they might not even
be dead. Perhaps thirty people personally known to Winston,
not counting his parents, had disappeared at one time
or another.
Winston stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the
cubicle across the way Comrade Tillotson was still crouching
secretively over his speakwrite. He raised his head for
a moment: again the hostile spectacle-flash. Winston wondered
whether Comrade Tillotson was engaged on the same
job as himself. It was perfectly possible. So tricky a piece of
work would never be entrusted to a single person: on the
other hand, to turn it over to a committee would be to admit
openly that an act of fabrication was taking place. Very
likely as many as a dozen people were now working away
on rival versions of what Big Brother had actually said. And
presently some master brain in the Inner Party would select
this version or that, would re-edit it and set in motion
58 1984
the complex processes of cross-referencing that would be
required, and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent
records and become truth.
Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced.
Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big
Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate.
Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been
suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps—what was
likeliest of all—the thing had simply happened because
purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics
of government. The only real clue lay in the words
‘refs unpersons’, which indicated that Withers was already
dead. You could not invariably assume this to be the case
when people were arrested. Sometimes they were released
and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or
two years before being executed. Very occasionally some
person whom you had believed dead long since would make
a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would
implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing,
this time for ever. Withers, however, was already an
UNPERSON. He did not exist: he had never existed. Winston
decided that it would not be enough simply to reverse
the tendency of Big Brother’s speech. It was better to make
it deal with something totally unconnected with its original
subject.
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of
traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious,
while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph
of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 59
complicate the records too much. What was needed was a
piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind,
ready made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy,
who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances.
There were occasions when Big Brother devoted his Order
for the Day to commemorating some humble, rank-and-file
Party member whose life and death he held up as an example
worthy to be followed. Today he should commemorate
Comrade Ogilvy. It was true that there was no such person
as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of
faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.
Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite
towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s
familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and,
because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly
answering them (’What lessons do we learn from this fact,
comrades? The lesson—which is also one of the fundamental
principles of Ingsoc—that,’ etc., etc.), easy to imitate.
At the age of three Comrade Ogilvy had refused all toys
except a drum, a sub-machine gun, and a model helicopter.
At six—a year early, by a special relaxation of the rules—he
had joined the Spies, at nine he had been a troop leader. At
eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police
after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to
have criminal tendencies. At seventeen he had been a district
organizer of the Junior Anti-Sex League. At nineteen
he had designed a hand-grenade which had been adopted
by the Ministry of Peace and which, at its first trial, had
killed thirty-one Eurasian prisoners in one burst. At twen60
1984
ty-three he had perished in action. Pursued by enemy jet
planes while flying over the Indian Ocean with important
despatches, he had weighted his body with his machine gun
and leapt out of the helicopter into deep water, despatches
and all—an end, said Big Brother, which it was impossible
to contemplate without feelings of envy. Big Brother added a
few remarks on the purity and single-mindedness of Comrade
Ogilvy’s life. He was a total abstainer and a nonsmoker,
had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium,
and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the
care of a family to be incompatible with a twenty-four-houra-
day devotion to duty. He had no subjects of conversation
except the principles of Ingsoc, and no aim in life except
the defeat of the Eurasian enemy and the hunting-down of
spies, saboteurs, thoughtcriminals, and traitors generally.
Winston debated with himself whether to award Comrade
Ogilvy the Order of Conspicuous Merit: in the end he
decided against it because of the unnecessary cross-referencing
that it would entail.
Once again he glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle.
Something seemed to tell him with certainty that Tillotson
was busy on the same job as himself. There was no way of
knowing whose job would finally be adopted, but he felt a
profound conviction that it would be his own. Comrade
Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact. It struck
him as curious that you could create dead men but not living
ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the
present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of
forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authenticalFree
eBooks at Planet eBook.com 61
ly, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius
Caesar.
62 1984
Chapter 5
In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the
lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already
very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the
counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour
metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of
Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small
bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at
ten cents the large nip.
‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston’s
back.
He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in
the Research Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly
the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you
had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society
was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a
specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous
team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh
Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature,
smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant
eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to
search your face closely while he was speaking to you.
‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,’
he said.
‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. ‘I’ve
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 63
tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he
had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There
had been a famine of them for months past. At any given
moment there was some necessary article which the Party
shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons,
sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces;
at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of
them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the
‘free’ market.
‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he added
untruthfully.
The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he
turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy
metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.
‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said
Syme.
‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it
on the flicks, I suppose.’
‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.
His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know
you,’ the eyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very
well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In
an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He
would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter
raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions
of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the
Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of
getting him away from such subjects and entangling him,
64 1984
if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he
was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head
a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.
‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think
it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them
kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right
out, and blue—a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals
to me.’
‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.
Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille.
On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a
metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a
cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one
saccharine tablet.
‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said
Syme. ‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’
The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs.
They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked
their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one
corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy
liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston
took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his
nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he
had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered
that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of
the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes
of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation
of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 65
their pannikins. From the table at Winston’s left, a little
behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously,
a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck,
which pierced the general uproar of the room.
‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising
his voice to overcome the noise.
‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of
Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other,
and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said.
‘We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape
it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When
we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it
all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is
inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying
words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re
cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition
won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete
before the year 2050.’
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple
of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s
passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his
eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost
dreamy.
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course
66 1984
the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there
are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t
only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all,
what justification is there for a word which is simply the
opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite
in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like
‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’
will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite,
which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version
of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string
of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all
the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’
if you want something stronger still. Of course
we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak
there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion
of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—
in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that,
Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added
as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at
the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately
detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’
he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still
thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that
you write in ‘The Times’ occasionally. They’re good enough,
but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick
to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You dont grasp the beauty of the destruction of
Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com 67
words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically
he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it
briefly, and went on:
‘Don’t you see that the whole 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 concept that can ever
be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its
meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition,
we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be
continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer
and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a
little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse
for committing thoughtcrime. Its merely a question
of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t
be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete
when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and
Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the
year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will
be alive who could understand such a conversation as we
are having now?
Except began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say Except the
proles, but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that
68 1984
this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however,
had divined what he was about to say.
The proles are not human beings, he said carelessly. 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—