Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in a fictionalised version of the world, with all of the novel’s events taking place in a fictionalised London, capital of the province known as Airstrip One. The year is thought to be 1984 but, due to the constant rewriting of history, this is never clarified. Airstrip One is located in Oceania, one of three superstates, the other two being Eurasia and Eastasia, with whom Oceania is alternately and perpetually at war.

Geographically, Oceania is comprised of the Americas, the Atlantic Islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern part of Africa. Eurasia is comprised of most of northern Europe and the former Soviet Union, stretching from Portugal to the Bering Sea. Eastasia takes in China, Japan, and central and western Asia, while the disputed area sits largely along the Equator, cornered by Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong.

Oceania has its own language, Newspeak, the structure and etymology of which is outlined in the novel’s Appendix. Newspeak is based on English but is distinguishable by its reducing vocabulary and is designed to diminish free thought until speech originates not from the brain but from the larynx.

Oceania’s totalitarian government has an oligarchical power structure, in that it is ruled by a minority, known as the Inner Party. The Party is personified through Big Brother and rules through the principles of Ingsoc (English Socialism). A form of political and psychological control, Ingsoc requires that citizens be in total submission to Big Brother, through means of torture where necessary, and that they love him more than their own lives.

Ingsoc’s social class system is comprised of three groups: the Inner Party, who represent 2% of the population, and who make policy and govern; the Outer Party, who implement party policy but who have no voice (of which the protagonist Winston Smith is a member); and the Proles or proletariats, who comprise 85% of the population, and who are the uneducated working class thus considered harmless.

Four large mega-structures, responsible for administering the work of the party, dominate the city. The names of these ministries are deliberately ambiguous, in that their actual functions are opposed to the ideas their names suggest. The Ministry of Love regulates law and punishment, the Ministry of Peace manages war, the Ministry of Truth, for whom Winston works, creates propaganda, and the Ministry of Plenty is in charge of rationing, which includes Victory cigarettes, Victory gin, and Victory coffee, all of which are of extremely poor quality. Crumbling remnants of non-fictional London, including St Clement’s Church, are mentioned as reminder of a bygone era.

Technology used within Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is contemporaneous to Orwell’s day; trucks, submachine guns, and planes were all in existence. The novel is particularly renowned for the use of the invented telescreen, a two-way television through which Party members were simultaneously exposed to a constant broadcast of propaganda while being watched by the Thought Police.