George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a literary classic – not just a science-fiction classic but one that has become set texts in various English literature classes. In terms of science-fiction, it is the single most influential Dystopian work, with dozens of books and films having borrowed the imagery of Orwell’s malevolently omnipresent totalitarian state and its breaking of the individual’s spirit. There are no more potent and savage a series of indictments of the anonymous machinery of totalitarian power than the images that Orwell emphasises – of the future of the omniscient state as a boot stamping into the face of humanity forever, or of O’Brien holding his fingers up before Winston to ask how many he sees – “Four” “And if the state says three fingers, how many do you see?” Terms like Newspeak, Thought Police and Big Brother have gone on into general recognition – it even became the name of a reality tv series Big Brother (2001– ) wherein contestants are placed in a house wired with tv cameras – and phrases like ‘Orwellian’ or a ‘1984 scenario’ are frequently used to suggest a totalitarian nightmare.
george Orwell was the literary pseudonym of Eric Blair (1903-50). Blair came from a lower middle-class British family – his father was a civil servant who worked in the Opium Department in India. Blair for a time joined the Imperial Police in Burma, worked as a teacher and then went to fight for the socialist cause in the Spanish Civil War. It was back in England that he found his calling as a writer, with non– and semi-fictional works such as Down and Out in London and Paris (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Throughout all of Blair/Orwell’s work is a strong feeling of empathy for the poor and working classes and a desire to act as moral voice and tell their story. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was Orwell’s last and greatest book. He was suffering from tuberculosis when he wrote...