George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, is an example of dystopian literature that explores political, social and economic structures and how they may be used to oppress and control people. Written in the third-person perspective, and primarily in the past tense, the novel introduces a futuristic world, set in the year 1984, in which a totalitarian government aims to eradicate all personal freedoms and individuality through methods of surveillance, propaganda and systematic oppression.

Protagonist Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, Oceania, who is under constant surveillance by the Party. At home and at work, Winston is monitored through a two-way live feed device known as a telescreen, and whenever he is outside, he is bombarded by billboards with the face of the Party’s God-like leader, Big Brother, captioned with the words, ‘Big Brother is watching you’, and the party slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. The Party wields total control over Oceania’s people using principles of Ingsoc (English Socialism), and is in a constant state of re-writing history so that it confirms with the Party’s aims. To enable this, the Party is in the process of implementing a new language, Newspeak, which eliminates any words that could be used to rebel against the Party’s agenda, aims to eradicate all independent thought, and reduces human speech to an automatic, unconscious function, until it resembles ‘the quacking of a duck’.

Winston works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, one of the Party’s four ministries, where he is tasked with altering past and present records so that they conform with the Party’s goals. Frustrated by the Party’s control of history, Winston asserts his individuality by illegally purchasing a diary in order to write down his thoughts, and by commencing a taboo personal relationship with a female Party member, Julia. Winston’s thought crime is eventually discovered and, by the end of the novel, he is tortured until he loves Big Brother, which is the ultimate intention of the Party for all its citizens.

The historical and political background for the novel comes from Orwell’s experiences in World War II, where he fought as a socialist in the Spanish Civil War, and from his knowledge of the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and, particularly, Stalin. Orwell’s desire to create better living conditions for the working poor, known as the proles (proletariats) in the novel, led him to support socialism in the 1930s, however he would eventually become deeply disappointed with the infighting between socialists and communist supporters. Compared to Karl Marx’s brand of socialism, which seized and reappropriated private property into communal and gave ownership of production to the working class, Stalin used communism to impose a totalitarian regime on the people of the Soviet Union and installed himself as its dictator. Stalin used secret police to torture false confessions from his enemies and, in similar fashion to the tactics of the thought police in Orwell’s novel in which people and their physical records were frequently eliminated, purged millions of people into non-existence by imprisonment or execution.

The impact of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is viewed as a cautionary tale, has been extensive. It received immediate acclaim upon its publication and is considered to be a work of political prophecy, given the subsequent rise in information technology and increasingly biased media. Elements of its vocabulary have entered the common English language, including Big Brother and thought police, while the adjective Orwellian has become associated with a dystopian future. The novel has been adapted for the cinema, radio, television, theatre, ballet and opera and was listed on the 2019 BBC’s list of the 100 most influential novels.