Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by hispen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and essayist, journalistand critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism,opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democraticsocialism.As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction andpolemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novellaAnimal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four(1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937),documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England,and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldieringfor the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are ascritically respected as his essays on politics and literature, language andculture. In 2008, The Times ranked George Orwell second among "The50 greatest British writers since 1945".Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in politicalculture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian andauthoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like manyof his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Two MinutesHate", "Room 101", "memory hole", "Newspeak", "doublethink", "proles","unperson", and "thoughtcrime". Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comChapter It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were strik-ing thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into hisbreast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quicklythrough the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though notquickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from enter-ing along with him.The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. Atone end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display,had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enor-mous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man ofabout forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and rugged-ly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It wasno use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was sel-dom working, and at present the electric current was cutoff during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drivein preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up,and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcerabove his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times onthe way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the posterwith the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one ofthose pictures which are so contrived that the eyes followyou about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHINGYOU, the caption beneath it ran.Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of fig- ures which had something to do with the production ofpig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque likea dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of theright-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voicesank somewhat, though the words were still distinguish-able. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could bedimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off complete-ly. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blueoveralls which were the uniform of the party. His hair wasvery fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened bycoarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the win-ter that had just ended.Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the worldlooked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind werewhirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though thesun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemedto be no colour in anything, except the posters that wereplastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazeddown from every commanding corner. There was one onthe house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER ISWATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyeslooked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level an-other poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,alternately covering and uncovering the single word IN-GSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed downbetween the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the po-lice patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comnot matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen wasstill babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilmentof the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received andtransmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up byit, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vi-sion which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seenas well as heard. There was of course no way of knowingwhether you were being watched at any given moment. Howoften, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in onany individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivablethat they watched everybody all the time. But at any ratethey could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. Youhad to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—inthe assumption that every sound you made was overheard,and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It wassafer, 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 populousof the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out somechildhood memory that should tell him whether Londonhad always been quite like this. Were there always these vis-tas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shoredup with baulks of timber, their windows patched with card-board and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombedsites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the wil-low-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the placeswhere the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there hadsprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chick-en-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostlyunintelligible.The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [New-speak was the official language of Oceania. For an accountof its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was star-tlingly different from any other object in sight. It was anenormous pyramidal structure of glittering white con-crete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into theair. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read,picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the threeslogans of the Party:WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTHThe Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, threethousand rooms above ground level, and correspondingramifications below. Scattered about London there werejust three other buildings of similar appearance and size.So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architec-ture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comall four of them simultaneously. They were the homes ofthe four Ministries between which the entire apparatusof government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, whichconcerned itself with news, entertainment, education, andthe fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itselfwith war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law andorder. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsiblefor 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 beeninside 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 barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gunnests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers wereroamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armedwith jointed truncheons.Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his featuresinto the expression of quiet optimism which it was advis-able to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed theroom into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at thistime of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, andhe was aware that there was no food in the kitchen excepta hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be savedfor tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf abottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label markedVICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chineserice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medi-cine.Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran outof his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, inswallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the backof the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however,the burning in his belly died down and the world began tolook more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpledpacket marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiouslyheld it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to thefloor. With the next he was more successful. He went backto the living-room and sat down at a small table that stoodto the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he tookout a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sizedblank book with a red back and a marbled cover.For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was inan 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 sideof it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was nowsitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probablybeen intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove,and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outsidethe range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He couldbe heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his presentposition he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual ge-ography of the room that had suggested to him the thingthat he was now about to do.But it had also been suggested by the book that he had Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comjust taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautifulbook. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, wasof a kind that had not been manufactured for at least for-ty years past. He could guess, however, that the book wasmuch older than that. He had seen it lying in the window ofa frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town(just what quarter he did not now remember) and had beenstricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possessit. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinaryshops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but therule was not strictly kept, because there were various things,such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossibleto get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glanceup and down the street and then had slipped inside andbought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was notconscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He hadcarried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothingwritten 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 nolonger any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certainthat it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib intothe penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The penwas 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 paperdeserved to be written on with a real nib instead of beingscratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usu-al to dictate everything into the speak-write which was ofcourse impossible for his present purpose. He dipped thepen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A trem-or had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was thedecisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:April 4th, 1984.He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had de-scended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with anycertainty that this was 1984. It must be round about thatdate, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine,and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; butit was never possible nowadays to pin down any date withina year or two.For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was hewriting this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mindhovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page,and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeakword DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude ofwhat he had undertaken came home to him. How could youcommunicate with the future? It was of its nature impossi-ble. Either the future would resemble the present, in whichcase it would not listen to him: or it would be different fromit, and his predicament would be meaningless.For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. Thetelescreen had changed over to strident military music. Itwas curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the pow- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comer of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what itwas that he had originally intended to say. For weeks pasthe had been making ready for this moment, and it had nev-er crossed his mind that anything would be needed exceptcourage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had todo was to transfer to paper the interminable restless mono-logue that had been running inside his head, literally foryears. At this moment, however, even the monologue haddried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begun itchingunbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so italways became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. Hewas conscious of nothing except the blankness of the pagein front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, theblaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by thegin.Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imper-fectly aware of what he was setting down. His small butchildish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shed-ding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. Onevery good one of a ship full of refugees being bombedsomewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amusedby shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away witha helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing alongin the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through thehelicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the searound him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as thoughthe holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with ahelicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged womanmight have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a littleboy about three years old in her arms. little boy screamingwith fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if hewas trying to burrow right into her and the woman puttingher arms round him and comforting him although she wasblue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as muchas possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bulletsoff him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in amongthem terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. thenthere was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up upright up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nosemust have followed it up and there was a lot of applause fromthe party seats but a woman down in the prole part of thehouse suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting theydidnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt itaint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turnedher turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to hernobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction theynever——Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffer-ing from cramp. He did not know what had made him pourout this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was thatwhile he was doing so a totally different memory had clar-ified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost feltequal to writing it down. It was, he now realized, becauseof this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comhome and begin the diary today.It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if any-thing so nebulous could be said to happen.It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records De-partment, where Winston worked, they were dragging thechairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the cen-tre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation forthe Two Minutes Hate. Winston was just taking his placein one of the middle rows when two people whom he knewby sight, but had never spoken to, came unexpectedly intothe room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed inthe corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew thatshe worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably—sincehe had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying aspanner—she had some mechanical job on one of the nov-el-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of abouttwenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift,athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of theJunior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times roundthe waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out theshapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from thevery first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It wasbecause of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold bathsand community hikes and general clean-mindedness whichshe managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly allwomen, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was al-ways the women, and above all the young ones, who werethe most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowersof slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unortho- doxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression ofbeing more dangerous than most. Once when they passedin the corridor she gave him a quick sidelong glance whichseemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filledhim with black terror. The idea had even crossed his mindthat she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, itwas true, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a pe-culiar uneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well ashostility, whenever she was anywhere near him.The other person was a man named O’Brien, a memberof the Inner Party and holder of some post so importantand remote that Winston had only a dim idea of its nature.A momentary hush passed over the group of people roundthe chairs as they saw the black overalls of an Inner Partymember approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man witha thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutal face. In spite ofhis formidable appearance he had a certain charm of man-ner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nosewhich was curiously disarming—in some indefinable way,curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone hadstill thought in such terms, might have recalled an eigh-teenth-century nobleman offering his snuffbox. Winstonhad seen O’Brien perhaps a dozen times in almost as manyyears. He felt deeply drawn to him, and not solely becausehe was intrigued by the contrast between O’Brien’s urbanemanner and his prize-fighter’s physique. Much more it wasbecause of a secretly held belief—or perhaps not even a be-lief, merely a hope—that O’Brien’s political orthodoxy wasnot perfect. Something in his face suggested it irresistibly. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comAnd again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that waswritten in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any ratehe had the appearance of being a person that you couldtalk to if somehow you could cheat the telescreen and gethim alone. Winston had never made the smallest effort toverify this guess: indeed, there was no way of doing so. Atthis moment O’Brien glanced at his wrist-watch, saw that itwas nearly eleven hundred, and evidently decided to stay inthe Records Department until the Two Minutes Hate wasover. He took a chair in the same row as Winston, a coupleof places away. A small, sandy-haired woman who workedin the next cubicle to Winston was between them. The girlwith dark hair was sitting immediately behind.The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of somemonstrous machine running without oil, burst from thebig telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that setone’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’sneck. The Hate had started.As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy ofthe People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisseshere and there among the audience. The little sandy-hairedwoman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Gold-stein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago(how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one ofthe leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with BigBrother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolu-tionary activities, had been condemned to death, and hadmysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes ofthe Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. Hewas the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s pu-rity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries,acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly outof his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive andhatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond thesea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhapseven—so it was occasionally rumoured—in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could neversee the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emo-tions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole ofwhite hair and a small goatee beard—a clever face, and yetsomehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile sil-liness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pairof spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein wasdelivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrinesof the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that achild should have been able to see through it, and yet justplausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling thatother people, less level-headed than oneself, might be takenin by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncingthe dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the imme-diate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocatingfreedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of as-sembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically thatthe revolution had been betrayed—and all this in rapidpolysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the ha- Free eBooks at Planet eBook.combitual style of the orators of the Party, and even containedNewspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than anyParty member would normally use in real life. And all thewhile, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality whichGoldstein’s specious claptrap covered, behind his head onthe telescreen there marched the endless columns of theEurasian army—row after row of solid-looking men withexpressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surfaceof the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exact-ly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ bootsformed the background to Goldstein’s bleating voice.Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncon-trollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from halfthe people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face onthe screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian armybehind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight oreven the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger au-tomatically. He was an object of hatred more constant thaneither Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at warwith one of these Powers it was generally at peace with theother. But what was strange was that although Goldsteinwas hated and despised by everybody, although every dayand 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 rub-bish that they were—in spite of all this, his influence neverseemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waitingto be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies andsaboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vastshadowy army, an underground network of conspiratorsdedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,its name was supposed to be. There were also whisperedstories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies,of which Goldstein was the author and which circulatedclandestinely here and there. It was a book without a title.People referred to it, if at all, simply as THE BOOK. But oneknew of such things only through vague rumours. Neitherthe Brotherhood nor THE BOOK was a subject that any or-dinary Party member would mention if there was a way ofavoiding it.In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. Peoplewere leaping up and down in their places and shoutingat the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the mad-dening bleating voice that came from the screen. Thelittle sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, andher mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landedfish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sittingvery straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling andquivering as though he were standing up to the assault of awave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun cry-ing out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked upa heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. Itstruck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice contin-ued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that hewas shouting with the others and kicking his heel violent-ly against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing aboutthe Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act Free eBooks at Planet eBook.coma part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoidjoining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was alwaysunnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness,a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of peoplelike an electric current, turning one even against one’s willinto a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage thatone felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which couldbe switched from one object to another like the flame of ablowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was notturned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, againstBig Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at suchmoments his heart went out to the lonely, derided hereticon the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a worldof lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with thepeople about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemedto him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing ofBig Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemedto tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing likea rock against the hordes of Asia, and Goldstein, in spiteof his isolation, his helplessness, and the doubt that hungabout his very existence, seemed like some sinister enchant-er, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking thestructure of civilization.It was even possible, at moments, to switch one’s ha-tred this way or that by a voluntary act. Suddenly, by thesort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s headaway from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeededin transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucina-tions flashed through his mind. He would flog her to deathwith a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stakeand shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He wouldravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. Bet-ter than before, moreover, he realized WHY it was that hehated her. He hated her because she was young and prettyand sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her andwould never do so, because round her sweet supple waist,which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, therewas only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chas-tity.The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein hadbecome an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the facechanged into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted intothe figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing,huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seem-ing to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that someof the people in the front row actually flinched backwardsin their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sighof relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into theface of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, fullof power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almostfilled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother wassaying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, thesort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distin-guishable individually but restoring confidence by the factof being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded awayagain, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comin bold capitals:WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTHBut the face of Big Brother seemed to persist for sever-al seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it hadmade on everyone’s eyeballs was too vivid to wear off im-mediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herselfforward over the back of the chair in front of her. With atremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Saviour!’ she ex-tended her arms towards the screen. Then she buried herface in her hands. It was apparent that she was uttering aprayer.At this moment the entire group of people broke into adeep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!...B-B!’—over and overagain, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’and the second—a heavy, murmurous sound, somehowcuriously savage, in the background of which one seemedto hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept itup. It was a refrain that was often heard in moments ofoverwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to thewisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it wasan act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of conscious-ness by means of rhythmic noise. Winston’s entrails seemedto grow cold. In the Two Minutes Hate he could not helpsharing in the general delirium, but this sub-human chant- ing of ‘B-B!...B-B!’ always filled him with horror. Of coursehe chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise.To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do whateveryone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction. Butthere was a space of a couple of seconds during which theexpression of his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him.And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thinghappened—if, indeed, it did happen.Momentarily he caught O’Brien’s eye. O’Brien had stoodup. He had taken off his spectacles and was in the act ofresettling 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, heKNEW!—that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as him-self. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as thoughtheir two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowingfrom one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’O’Brien seemed to be saying to him. ‘I know precisely whatyou are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your ha-tred, your disgust. But don’t worry, I am on your side!’ Andthen the flash of intelligence was gone, and O’Brien’s facewas as inscrutable as everybody else’s.That was all, and he was already uncertain whether it hadhappened. Such incidents never had any sequel. All that theydid was to keep alive in him the belief, or hope, that oth-ers besides himself were the enemies of the Party. Perhapsthe rumours of vast underground conspiracies were trueafter all—perhaps the Brotherhood really existed! It wasimpossible, in spite of the endless arrests and confessions Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comand executions, to be sure that the Brotherhood was notsimply a myth. Some days he believed in it, some days not.There was no evidence, only fleeting glimpses that mightmean anything or nothing: snatches of overheard conver-sation, faint scribbles on lavatory walls—once, even, whentwo strangers met, a small movement of the hand whichhad looked as though it might be a signal of recognition. Itwas all guesswork: very likely he had imagined everything.He had gone back to his cubicle without looking at O’Brienagain. The idea of following up their momentary contacthardly crossed his mind. It would have been inconceivablydangerous even if he had known how to set about doing it.For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivo-cal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even thatwas a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in whichone had to live.Winston roused himself and sat up straighter. He let outa belch. The gin was rising from his stomach.His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered thatwhile he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, asthough by automatic action. And it was no longer the samecramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slidvoluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neatcapitals—DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITHBIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWNWITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHERover and over again, filling half a page.He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was ab-surd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary,but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiledpages and abandon the enterprise altogether.He did not do so, however, because he knew that it wasuseless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER,or whether he refrained from writing it, made no differ-ence. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he didnot go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Policewould get him just the same. He had committed—wouldstill have committed, even if he had never set pen to pa-per—the essential crime that contained all others in itself.Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thingthat could be concealed for ever. You might dodge success-fully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later theywere bound to get you.It was always at night—the arrests invariably happenedat night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shak-ing your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring ofhard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases therewas no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disap-peared, always during the night. Your name was removedfrom the registers, every record of everything you had everdone was wiped out, your one-time existence was deniedand then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: VA-PORIZED was the usual word.For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He be-gan 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.comneck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot youin the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother——He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, andlaid 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 thatwhoever it was might go away after a single attempt. But no,the knocking was repeated. The worst thing of all would beto delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face,from long habit, was probably expressionless. He got up andmoved heavily towards the door. Chapter As he put his hand to the door-knob Winston saw thathe had left the diary open on the table. DOWN WITHBIG BROTHER was written all over it, in letters almost bigenough to be legible across the room. It was an inconceiv-ably stupid thing to have done. But, he realized, even in hispanic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper byshutting the book while the ink was wet.He drew in his breath and opened the door. Instantlya 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 ofvoice, ‘I thought I heard you come in. Do you think youcould come across and have a look at our kitchen sink? It’sgot blocked up and——’It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the samefloor. (’Mrs’ was a word somewhat discountenanced by theParty—you were supposed to call everyone ‘comrade’—but with some women one used it instinctively.) She wasa woman of about thirty, but looking much older. One hadthe impression that there was dust in the creases of her face.Winston followed her down the passage. These amateur re-pair jobs were an almost daily irritation. Victory Mansionswere old flats, built in 1930 or thereabouts, and were falling Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comto pieces. The plaster flaked constantly from ceilings andwalls, the pipes burst in every hard frost, the roof leakedwhenever there was snow, the heating system was usuallyrunning at half steam when it was not closed down alto-gether from motives of economy. Repairs, except what youcould do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote com-mittees which were liable to hold up even the mending of awindow-pane for two years.‘Of course it’s only because Tom isn’t home,’ said MrsParsons vaguely.The Parsons’ flat was bigger than Winston’s, and dingyin a different way. Everything had a battered, trampled-onlook, as though the place had just been visited by some largeviolent animal. Games impedimenta—hockey-sticks, box-ing-gloves, a burst football, a pair of sweaty shorts turnedinside out—lay all over the floor, and on the table there wasa litter of dirty dishes and dog-eared exercise-books. Onthe walls were scarlet banners of the Youth League and theSpies, and a full-sized poster of Big Brother. There was theusual 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 sayhow—was the sweat of some person not present at the mo-ment. In another room someone with a comb and a piece oftoilet paper was trying to keep tune with the military musicwhich was still issuing from the telescreen.‘It’s the children,’ said Mrs Parsons, casting a half-ap-prehensive glance at the door. ‘They haven’t been out today.And of course——’ She had a habit of breaking off her sentences in the mid-dle. The kitchen sink was full nearly to the brim with filthygreenish water which smelt worse than ever of cabbage.Winston knelt down and examined the angle-joint of thepipe. He hated using his hands, and he hated bending down,which was always liable to start him coughing. Mrs Parsonslooked on helplessly.‘Of course if Tom was home he’d put it right in a mo-ment,’ she said. ‘He loves anything like that. He’s ever sogood with his hands, Tom is.’Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Minis-try of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralysingstupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of thosecompletely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom,more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of theParty depended. At thirty-five he had just been unwilling-ly evicted from the Youth League, and before graduatinginto the Youth League he had managed to stay on in theSpies for a year beyond the statutory age. At the Ministryhe was employed in some subordinate post for which in-telligence was not required, but on the other hand he wasa leading figure on the Sports Committee and all the othercommittees engaged in organizing community hikes, spon-taneous demonstrations, savings campaigns, and voluntaryactivities generally. He would inform you with quiet pride,between whiffs of his pipe, that he had put in an appearanceat the Community Centre every evening for the past fouryears. An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of uncon-scious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comhim about wherever he went, and even remained behindhim after he had gone.‘Have you got a spanner?’ said Winston, fiddling with thenut on the angle-joint.‘A spanner,’ said Mrs Parsons, immediately becominginvertebrate. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps the children——’There was a trampling of boots and another blast on thecomb as the children charged into the living-room. MrsParsons brought the spanner. Winston let out the waterand disgustedly removed the clot of human hair that hadblocked up the pipe. He cleaned his fingers as best he couldin the cold water from the tap and went back into the otherroom.‘Up with your hands!’ yelled a savage voice.A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped upfrom behind the table and was menacing him with a toyautomatic pistol, while his small sister, about two yearsyounger, 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 un-easy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it wasnot altogether a game.‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought-crimi-nal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you,I’ll send you to the salt mines!’Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightlyfrightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which willsoon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculat-ing ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit orkick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly bigenough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol hewas holding, Winston thought.Mrs Parsons’ eyes flitted nervously from Winston to thechildren, and back again. In the better light of the living-room he noticed with interest that there actually was dustin the creases of her face.‘They do get so noisy,’ she said. ‘They’re disappointedbecause they couldn’t go to see the hanging, that’s what itis. I’m too busy to take them. and Tom won’t be back fromwork in time.’‘Why can’t we go and see the hanging?’ roared the boy inhis 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 tobe hanged in the Park that evening, Winston remembered.This happened about once a month, and was a popular spec-tacle. Children always clamoured to be taken to see it. Hetook his leave of Mrs Parsons and made for the door. But hehad not gone six steps down the passage when somethinghit the back of his neck an agonizingly painful blow. It wasas though a red-hot wire had been jabbed into him. He spunround just in time to see Mrs Parsons dragging her son backinto the doorway while the boy pocketed a catapult. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com‘Goldstein!’ bellowed the boy as the door closed on him.But what most struck Winston was the look of helplessfright on the woman’s greyish face.Back in the flat he stepped quickly past the telescreenand sat down at the table again, still rubbing his neck. Themusic from the telescreen had stopped. Instead, a clippedmilitary voice was reading out, with a sort of brutal relish,a description of the armaments of the new Floating For-tress which had just been anchored between Iceland andthe Faroe lslands.With those children, he thought, that wretched wom-an must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, andthey would be watching her night and day for symptoms ofunorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.What was worst of all was that by means of such organi-zations as the Spies they were systematically turned intoungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in themno tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of theParty. On the contrary, they adored the Party and every-thing connected with it. The songs, the processions, thebanners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, theyelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother—it was all asort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turnedoutwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreign-ers, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almostnormal for people over thirty to be frightened of their ownchildren. And with good reason, for hardly a week passedin which ‘The Times’ did not carry a paragraph describinghow some eavesdropping little sneak—’child hero’ was the phrase generally used—had overheard some compromisingremark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.The sting of the catapult bullet had worn off. He pickedup his pen half-heartedly, wondering whether he could findsomething more to write in the diary. Suddenly he beganthinking of O’Brien again.Years ago—how long was it? Seven years it must be—hehad dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-darkroom. And someone sitting to one side of him had said ashe passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is nodarkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually—a state-ment, not a command. He had walked on without pausing.What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, thewords had not made much impression on him. It was onlylater and by degrees that they had seemed to take on signifi-cance. He could not now remember whether it was beforeor after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for thefirst time, nor could he remember when he had first identi-fied the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identificationexisted. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of thedark.Winston had never been able to feel sure—even after thismorning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be surewhether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it evenseem to matter greatly. There was a link of understandingbetween them, more important than affection or partisan-ship. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only thatin some way or another it would come true. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comThe voice from the telescreen paused. A trumpet call,clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voicecontinued raspingly:’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has thismoment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in SouthIndia have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to saythat the action we are now reporting may well bring the warwithin 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 aEurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and pris-oners, came the announcement that, as from next week, thechocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes totwenty.Winston belched again. The gin was wearing off, leavinga deflated feeling. The telescreen—perhaps to celebrate thevictory, perhaps to drown the memory of the lost chocolate—crashed into ‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’. You were supposed tostand to attention. However, in his present position he wasinvisible.‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Win-ston walked over to the window, keeping his back to thetelescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere faraway a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberatingroar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling onLondon at present. Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster toand fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and van-ished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak,doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as thoughhe were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost ina monstrous world where he himself was the monster. Hewas alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.What certainty had he that a single human creature nowliving was on his side? And what way of knowing that thedominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Likean answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Minis-try of Truth came back to him:WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTHHe 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 Broth-er. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, onstamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, andon the wrappings of a cigarette packet—everywhere. Al-ways 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 ex-cept the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.The sun had shifted round, and the myriad windows ofthe Ministry of Truth, with the light no longer shining on Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comthem, looked grim as the loopholes of a fortress. His heartquailed before the enormous pyramidal shape. It was toostrong, it could not be stormed. A thousand rocket bombswould not batter it down. He wondered again for whom hewas writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for anage that might be imaginary. And in front of him there laynot death but annihilation. The diary would be reducedto ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Policewould read what he had written, before they wiped it out ofexistence and out of memory. How could you make appealto the future when not a trace of you, not even an anony-mous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physicallysurvive?The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten min-utes. He had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty.Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have putnew heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truththat nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it,in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It wasnot by making yourself heard but by staying sane that youcarried 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 isfree, when men are different from one another and do notlive alone—to a time when truth exists and what is donecannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from theage of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age ofdoublethink—greetings! He was already dead, he reflected. It seemed to him thatit was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulatehis thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. The conse-quences 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 becameimportant to stay alive as long as possible. Two fingers of hisright hand were inkstained. It was exactly the kind of detailthat might betray you. Some nosing zealot in the Ministry(a woman, probably: someone like the little sandy-hairedwoman or the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Depart-ment) might start wondering why he had been writingduring the lunch interval, why he had used an old-fash-ioned pen, WHAT he had been writing—and then drop ahint in the appropriate quarter. He went to the bathroomand carefully scrubbed the ink away with the gritty dark-brown soap which rasped your skin like sandpaper and wastherefore well adapted for this purpose.He put the diary away in the drawer. It was quite uselessto think of hiding it, but he could at least make sure whetheror not its existence had been discovered. A hair laid acrossthe page-ends was too obvious. With the tip of his finger hepicked up an identifiable grain of whitish dust and depos-ited it on the corner of the cover, where it was bound to beshaken off if the book was moved. Free eBooks at Planet eBook.comChapter Winston was dreaming of his mother.He must, he thought, have been ten or elev-en years old when his mother had disappeared. She wasa tall, statuesque, rather silent woman with slow move-ments and magnificent fair hair. His father he rememberedmore vaguely as dark and thin, dressed always in neat darkclothes (Winston remembered especially the very thin solesof his father’s shoes) and wearing spectacles. The two ofthem must evidently have been swallowed up in one of thefirst great purges of the fifties.At this moment his mother was sitting in some placedeep down beneath him, with his young sister in her arms.He did not remember his sister at all, except as a tiny, feeblebaby, always silent, with large, watchful eyes. Both of themwere looking up at him. They were down in some subter-ranean place—the bottom of a well, for instance, or a verydeep grave—but it was a place which, already far below him,was itself moving downwards. They were in the saloon ofa sinking ship, looking up at him through the darkeningwater. There was still air in the saloon, they could still seehim and he them, but all the while they were sinking down,down into the green waters which in another moment musthide them from sight for ever. He was out in the light andair while they were being sucked down to death, and they