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It is easy to see why George Orwell’s last novel, published in June 1949 seven months before the author’s death, was such an instant success. First, it is a wickedly disreputable yarn that takes adolescent fantasy – of lonely defiance, furtive sex and deadly terror – to a shockingly unacceptable extreme. Second, and more important, this singular tale was widely read as social comment, and even prophecy.

That it should have been so regarded is not, perhaps, surprising. Drabness, shortages, government red tape were a way of life not just in the novel but in the Britain where it was written. At the same time, totalitarianism was a stalking fear. Nazi Germany in the recent past, Russia and China in the present, framed the Western political consciousness. There was a sense of grimly staring into a crystal ball at a just-imaginable near-distance.

Today it is impossible to think of the novel in quite the same way. It is a mark of the author’s astonishing influence that, as the historical 1984 approached, the date on the calendar was discussed throughout the world almost with trepidation, as though it were a kind of millennium. But that is now over, and some may wonder whether the novel has exceeded its shelf life. For how can a story about a future that is past continue to alarm its readers?

There are certainly aspects of the novel which tempt the modern critic to be condescending. Not only has the supposed warning been largely wrong within its time-span (there has, so far, been no third world war or Western revolution, and totalitarian systems are not more but less common than forty years ago). The novel’s literary weaknesses can now be seen in clearer focus. If Nineteen Eighty-Four is an accessible novel, that is partly because of the lucidity of Orwell’s writing. But it is also because of a lack of subtlety in his characterisation, and a crude plot.

The latter may be briefly summarised. The novel is set in the year 1984 in London (‘Airstrip One’) in Oceania, a superpower controlled by the restrictive ‘Party’ and led by its symbolic head, Big Brother. Within this state there is no law and only one rule: absolute obedience in deed and thought. Oceanian society is divided hierarchically between a privileged Inner Party, a subservient Outer Party, and a sunken mass of ‘proles’. The hero, Winston Smith, is a member of the Outer Party and is employed at the Ministry of Truth (that is, of Lies) as a routine falsifier of records. Despite overwhelming pressure to conform to the system, Winston secretly reacts against it. He is approached by another minor official, Julia, who recognises a kindred spirit. Emboldened by love, they ask a high-ranking Inner Party bureaucrat, O’Brien, to put them in touch with an opposition force called the Brotherhood, supposedly led by Big Brother’s arch-enemy, the Trotsky-like Emmanuel Goldstein. The encouragement they receive from O’Brien, however, turns out to be a ploy. They are arrested and separated. Both are broken under interrogation and betray each other. Released before his final liquidation, Winston discovers that he has learnt to love Big Brother.

This works well, at one level, as entertainment. But it has limitations as art. The narrative lacks development, the dialogue is sometimes weak, and most of the people are two-dimensional, existing only to explain a political point or permit a side-swipe at a species in the real world. Among the novel’s minor figures, a woman singing as she hangs out washing cheers us, and we are haunted by the mournful image of Winston’s long-disappeared mother.

But the hero’s Outer Party acquaintances – the fatuously eager Parsons, for instance, or the zealot Syme – are merely caricature political activists; while most of the proles, with their dropped aitches and jumbled cockney clichés, seem to come from a pre-war copy of Punch. Mr Charrington, the junk-shop dealer who rents Winston a room as a love-nest and turns out to be a Thought Policeman wearing make-up, is plucked from a hundred cheap thrillers.

Of the three main characters, the sinister O’Brien is an intellectual construct: not a flesh-and-blood human being at all, but the ultimate, black image of totalitarianism. Winston and Julia are more substantial. Aspects of Winston have been encountered in Orwell’s earlier novels. He is a loner and a loser, a prospectless member of the lower upper-middle class, filled with impotent rage at those who control his life. We are depressed by Winston’s plight, and when he is elevated by love and political commitment we wish him well. Yet he never rises much above his own self-pity, and it is hard to feel the downfall of this unprepossessing fellow as a tragedy.

Julia is altogether a more sympathetic and pleasing creation. Perhaps she contains something of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, who died in 1945. Certainly Julia has a solidity and a touch of humour that are lacking elsewhere. The biggest relief is to discover, just as we are about to be suffocated in Oceania’s slough of despond, that politics bores Julia stiff:

‘I’m not interested in the next generation… I’m interested in us.’
‘You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,’ he told her.
She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms round him in delight.

Yet Julia contains a contradiction. As well as the most engaging character in the book, she is also the least appropriate. Unlike the morose Winston, she is a free spirit. ‘Life as she saw it was quite simple,’ the author recounts. ‘You wanted a good time; “they”, meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.’

We are grateful for Julia. But we are left wondering how this public-schoolboy’s fantasy ideal of uncomplicated, healthy, outdoors femininity could possibly have survived the mind-rotting propaganda of the Party. Or, if she could survive, why not others? Winston (‘the last man in Europe’) just about makes sense as an unreformed relic of the old era, but Julia looks like proof that the methods of the new age do not work. Yet a theme of the book is that they are inescapably ineffective. In the novel’s own terms, Julia seems an anachronism: her clandestine affair belongs to a country under occupation, the land of Odette, rather than to one totally controlled.

Julia (for all this inconsistency) breathes life into the novel; but her presence alone would barely sustain a short story. If there were nothing to the novel apart from the characters and the narrative, it would scarcely be read today except as a curiosity. In fact, there is a great deal more. What makes it a masterpiece of political writing – the modern equivalent, as Bernard Crick has rightly claimed, of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan – is the extraordinary texture of the backcloth. Disguised as horror-comic fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is really a non-fiction essay about the demon power. It works for us in the same way that Emmanuel Goldstein’s heretical book, analysing and attacking the political system, works for Winston:

In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible to set his scattered thoughts in order… The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

As elsewhere in Orwell’s writings, the deceptive, collusive amateurism of the author’s style lulls us into the realisation not only that he is right, but also that he is saying what we always thought but never managed to formulate into words.

As satire Nineteen Eighty-Four has been hard to place. Some have seen it as an attack on Stalinism, or on totalitarianism in general, or on the directive tendencies (at a time of Labour government) of British state socialism. Others have read it as an assault on the pretensions and illiberalism of Western left-wing intellectuals. Others, again, have explained it as a feverish tubercular hallucination, as a lampoon of prep-school life or (what might be the same thing) as a sado-masochistic reverie. Probably it contains elements of all these. Yet it is more than just a satirical attack, and much more than the product of febrile imagination. Though it contains a kind of warning, it is not prophecy (which Orwell knew, as well as anybody, to be impossible and meaningless). Neither is it much concerned with contemporary events. It is a book about the continuing present: an update on the human condition. What matters most is that it reminds us of so many things we usually avoid.

The book shocks where it is most accurate. We are unmoved by embarrassing descriptions of Winston’s encounters with the proles – which seem to say more about the author’s own class difficulties than about social apartheid in a real or threatened world. But the account of a system based on ideological cant and psychological manipulation immediately affects us. The dream-like misappropriation of reason touches our rawest nerve. It is no accident, indeed, that many word and concepts from Nineteen Eighty-Four that are now in common use by people who have never read the book – for example, Newspeak, thoughtcrime, Big Brother, unperson, doublethink – most relate to the power of the state to bend reality. At the core of the novelist’s perception is doublethink, defined as ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’. Like many of Orwell’s aphorisms, this seems at first absurd and then an aspect of everyday political life.

In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, an earlier novel which also explored the theoretical limits of totalitarianism, the author showed the moral annihilation produced by an ideology in which the end is allowed to justify any means. Orwell’s innovation is to abolish the end. Where other ideologies have justified themselves in terms of a future goal, Ingsoc, the doctrine of the Party in Oceania, is aimless. As O’Brien explains to Winston, ‘we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.’ But power for what? O’Brien’s answer tells us what we already know about oppression everywhere: ‘The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.’ Oceania is a static society running on an equilibrium of suffering. ‘If you want a picture the future,’ says O’Brien, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’

Nineteen Eighty-Four draws heavily on James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution, whose image of a world divided into three large units, each ruled by a self-elected elite, is reflected in Goldstein’s Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism and in the division of the world into the three superpowers of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, continually at war with one another. But there is also much, indirectly, of Sigmund Freud. The furnace of Orwellian society, in which everything is done collectively yet everyone remains alone, is the denial of the erotic. It is this that fires the prevailing moods of ‘fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph’. Sexual hysteria is used deliberately to ferment a sadistic loathing of imagined enemies and to stimulate a masochistic, depersonalised love of Big Brother.

Nobody, not even the sceptical Winston, is immune. Mass emotion, the author repeatedly reminds us, is almost irresistible. The ‘Two Minutes Hate’ is one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s most notorious inventions. The author shows his hero, in the midst of this organised mania, unable to stop himself joining in. Winston manages to turn the ‘hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness’ that ‘seemed to flow through the whole group like an electric current’ into hatred for the girl sitting behind him (who later turns out to be Julia). ‘Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. Her would flog her to death and cut her throat at the moment of climax.’ Why? Because ‘she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so…’. Such private hatred, Orwell makes clear, is the purpose of Oceania’s Puritanism. Sexual happiness is the biggest threat to the system and Julia’s code (‘What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter’) is much more dangerous than Winston’s intellectual doubts. ‘We shall abolish the orgasm,’ says O’Brien, with his usual knack of getting to the heart of things. ‘Our neurologists are at work on it now.’

The psychic balance between private misery and the acceptance of official cruelty in Nineteen Eighty-Four did not so much anticipate the future as help to shape the way others- including survivors – would describe totalitarianism. Works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle, for example) show clearly the imprint of Orwell’s notion of a stable, purposeless evil, into which victims and persecutors are mutually locked. It is Nineteen Eighty-Four’s account of the plasticity of reason, however, that has had the sharpest impact. The full horror of the book begins when it becomes plain that everybody in Oceania, even among members of the cynical-yet-fanatical Inner Party, is in flight from logic. Doubtless Orwell was thinking of Stalin’s attempt to make the laws of genetics accord with Marxism-Leninism, when he presented Big Brother as master of the universe:

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out… For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

This, of course, is madness. But who is to determine what is mad and what is sane in a society where all, including the thought controllers, learn to believe that two and two can equal five? Orwell reminds us how shaky is our hold on objective knowledge, and how uncertain our grip on the past.

Primo Levi – who lived through Auschwitz to become the finest writer on the Holocaust – has described in The Drowned and the Saved how Hitler contaminated the morality of his subjects by refusing them access to the truth. He concludes that ‘the entire history of the brief “millennial Reich” can be reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of reality…’. Oceania’s unceasing war on memory, in which every shred of evidence that conflicts with the latest official line is systematically destroyed and a false trail is laid in its place, is one of the novel’s most ingenious and terrifying devices.

Another is the assassination of language. Accurate history is one essential vessel of liberty, perhaps the most essential, and Nineteen Eighty-Four can be seen as a charter for historical scholarship. A second is linguistic purity. Language is testimony: it contains geological strata of past events and out-of-fashion values. Orwell was making an observation that is as relevant to the behaviour of petty bureaucrats as of dictators, when he noted the eagerness with which truth-evaders shy away from well-known words and substitute their own. In Oceania the Party has created a sanitised language, Newspeak, to take the place of traditional English with its uncomfortable associations. This ideological Esperanto is composed of short, clipped words, ‘which aroused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind’, and which will eventually render the faming of heretical thoughts impossible,. Orwell gives real-world examples of Newspeak: Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Agitprop. There are many others. Thus Levi notes how, in Hitler’s Germany, phrases like ‘final solution’, ‘special treatment’, ‘prompt employment unit’ disguised a frightful reality. We could make our own additions from the age of nuclear terror: overkill, the verb to nuke, the semi-jocular star wars.

Doublethink, Newspeak, crimestop (the faculty of ‘stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought… In short… protective stupidity’) are hardy perennials in any authoritarian or totalitarian state, which helps explain why the novel, secretly distributed, has been so keenly appreciated in Eastern Europe. At the same time, they also refer to aspects of any bureau, corporation or political party in a democracy, not to mention any jargon-ridden profession or orthodoxy-driven academic discipline. They are predictions only in the sense that any polemic predicts a dire consequence if its injunction is not heeded.

Nevertheless, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its very specific date, does have an historical reference point. It is not by chance that Orwell calls the Party ideology Ingsoc, and presents it as a perversion of English socialism. Some have seen it as an indictment of the Labour government of Clement Attlee. In fact Orwell, who continued to think of himself both as a democratic socialist and as a Labour Party supporter, was not greatly interested by the fast-moving politics of the mid-1940s, and much of the time during the gestation and writing of the novel (interrupted by a long spell in hospital with tuberculosis) he spent far from London political gossip at his farmhouse on the island of Jura.

Yet the novel can certainly be seen – like its predecessor Animal Farm – as a contribution to the debate within socialism. Like Animal Farm it does not look forward to future controversies but harks back to pre-war ones. The most important political experience in Orwell’s life (described in Homage to Catalonia) was the Spanish Civil War, in which the author was wounded fighting for the revolutionary POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) militia. Orwell came back from Spain bitterly hostile towards Moscow-led communism, whose influence on the progressive British intelligentsia continued to be pervasive. He was less surprised than many on the Left by the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 (to be followed by the German invasion of Russia in 1941, which brought Stalin into the war on the side of the Allies, and then by the cooling of Allied-Soviet relations, which turned Russia back into a potential enemy of the West almost as soon as the war was over). The cynicism and impermanence of big power alliances is a feature of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Oceania is not, in any sense, a socialist society. On the contrary, A cardinal example of doublethink is that ‘the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement ever stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism’. Oceania cannot therefore be taken as an argument for socialism’s failure. The point is not the achievement of socialist promises, but their rejection and distortion. Some may hear an echo of Friedrich von Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in Goldstein’s account of how ‘in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned’. Yet Orwell is no less critical of anti-socialists. By the 1940s, says Goldstein, ‘all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian… Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.’ If Airstrip One is a version of austerity London (as Michael Radford’s interesting film of the novel suggests), then Labour socialism is scarcely singled out for particular criticism. Indeed, Goldstein also makes clear that th systems on the other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, are practically identical.

Orwell’s attack is not on socialism, but on credulous or self-serving people who call themselves socialists, and on some of their illusions. One illusion – still part of platform rhetoric – is that, whatever obstacles and setbacks may be encountered on the way, the working class will eventually and inevitably triumph. Orwell turns this on its head. In Oceania the relative freedom of working-class people is merely a symptom of the contempt in which they are held. ‘From the proletarians,’ declares Goldstein, ‘nothing is to be feared.’ They can be granted intellectual liberty, he adds (with a kick in the groin for the liberal, as well as socialist, assumptions), ‘because they have no intellect’.

Yet the proles have an important place in the novel If there is hope, Winston ruminate, it lies with them. Is there hope? The surface message of the novel seems to be that there is none. Oceania is a society beyond totalitarianism. Even in Auschwitz or the Gulag a community of sorts could continue to exist and heroism was possible. But in Oceania heroism is empty because there is nobody to save. Hope flickers briefly and then it is extinguished: Winston’s attempt to preserve his identity is a mere spitting in the wind. Physical resistance to the Party’s terrorism is self-defeating. Orwell underlines Koestler’s argument in Darkness at Noon that to fight oppression with the oppressor own methods is a moral capitulation. He uses O’Brien, while apparently testing Winston’s resolve as a fellow-conspirator, trap the hero into a monstrous pledge:

‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?’
‘Yes.’

Later, O’Brien the interrogator asks Winston:

‘And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and cruelty?’

He has only to turn on a tape of the earlier conversation to make his point.

For all this, however, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a far from despairing book. As an intellectual puzzle it is almost watertight: every facile answer or objection is cleverly anticipated and blocked off. But the grotesque world it portrays is imaginary. There is no reason to read into the blackness of Orwell’s literary vision the denial of any real-life alternative. The novel, indeed, can be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them. Most of these forces can be summed up in a single word: lies. The author offers a political choice – between the protection of truth, and a slide into the expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled, in whom genuine feeling and ultimate hope reside.

This the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by governments. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against every orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist. ‘It is intolerable to us,’ says the evil O’Brien, ‘that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be.’ Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel and a great tract because of the clarity of its call, and it will endure because its message is a permanent one: erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom.

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Professor Ben Pimlott was a leading historian and political biographer of post-war Britain. His works include lives of Hugh Dalton (1985, winner of the Whitbread Prize for biography), Harold Wilson (1992), and a study of Queen Elizabeth II (1996). His other books include Labour And The Left In The 1930s (1977), The Trade Unions In British Politics (with Chris Cook, 1982), Fabian Essays In Socialist Thought (1984), The Alternative (with Tony Wright and Tony Flower, 1990), Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks (1994) and Governing London (with Nirmala Rao, 2002).

He wrote about Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in the 1970s (work which drew comparisons with Orwell in Catalonia), and during the 1980s he was a prolific essayist and book reviewer for the New Statesman, The Guardian and The Independent. He was also a political commentator at times for The Sunday Times, The Times and the New Statesman, where he was political editor in 1987-88. Chairman of the Fabian Society in 1993, he joined the politics and sociology department at Birkbeck College in 1981, and was Warden of Goldsmiths College until shortly before his death in 2004.

Although George Orwell (Eric Blair) was born in India and grew up in Henley-on-Thames, he was a Londoner by adoption[1]. He lived and worked in various places around the city, not all of them marked with commemoration plaques. It was in London in the early 1930s that he was down-and-out, and in London in the late 40s that he found a fame and fortune he would never live fully to enjoy. London features in much of his writing, and one can still recreate important stretches of his life by visiting parts of the city where, at various times, he tried to scratch a living as schoolteacher, bookseller, novelist and reviewer.

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By 1917, young Blair was a scholarship boy at Eton. At about that time, his mother moved from Henley to London to do war-work for the Ministry of Pensions, renting a pied-à-terre at 23 Cromwell Crescent, Earl’s Court, a house sadly no longer there. Later, in one of his ‘London Letters’ for the Partisan Review, he wrote disdainfully of ‘The foul… endless… “London fogs” of my childhood’, and, in The Road to Wigan Pier, about ‘the dreary wastes of Kensington and Earl’s Court’, home of the slowly expiring upper middle-classes.
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But not everything about Georgian London was distasteful to him. His Bohemian Aunt Nellie Limouzin lived not far away, in a top-floor flat at 195, Ladbroke Grove where she frequently entertained her Suffragette and literary friends. There he met such figures as G.K. Chesterton and E. Nesbit, the children’s writer and composer of socialist hymns, and the communist vicar, Conrad Noel, who famously ran the red flag up the tower of his parish church at Thaxted. It was through Nellie (a one-time vaudevillian) that he first discovered the London music halls (the world of the vulgar seaside postcard brought to life, as he saw it), and came to relish the bawdy humour of Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Little Tich and later Max Miller.

During the Second World War, he reviewed a Miller performance at the Holborn Empire for Time and Tide. ‘Max Miller, who looks more like a Middlesex Street hawker than ever when he is wearing a tail coat and a shiny top hat,’ he wrote, ‘is one of a long line of English comedians who have specialized in the Sancho Panza side of life, in real lowness. To do this probably needs more talent than to express nobility.’ However, he rated Little Tich ‘the real master’ of the low comedic art, concluding that ‘It would seem that you cannot be funny without being vulgar.’

The musical theatre obviously appealed to the young Etonian. Seeing the long-running musical Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, as a boy, gave him a vision of the mysterious East (somewhat different from that of Kipling), which may have coloured his expectations of Burma when he went there as a nineteen year-old. The charm of the show, he recalled, ‘lay in the fantastic unreality of the whole thing, and the droves of women, practically naked and painted to an agreeable walnut-juice tint. It was a never-never land, the “gorgeous East”, where, as is well-known, everyone has fifty wives and spends his time lying on a divan, eating pomegranates.’ And he long remembered seeing Nigel Playfair’s acclaimed productions of The Beggar’s Opera and The Blue Lagoon in 1920 at the Lyric Hammersmith.

By 1918, the Blairs had moved to a flat in Mall Chambers on Kensington Mall at Notting Hill Gate. They were not particularly well-off (his father was a retired Indian Civil Servant), and Mall Chambers was a block of low-rental flats provided mainly for artisans. The area probably suited him well because of its many literary associations — Wyndham Lewis, Hilaire Belloc and Ford Madox Ford lived nearby and William Cobbett had set off on his rural rides from Notting Hill.

After Eton, Blair joined the Indian Police Service in Burma, but resigned after five years, disgusted with what policing the Empire had required of him. (Famously, he was once witness to a hanging.) His first novel, Burmese Days, and the confessional passages in The Road to Wigan Pier are good guides to his state of mind at that time. He was determined to seek redemption by sinking into the lower depths. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, his third novel, he writes of his alter ego, Gordon Comstock:

He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to sink…It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.

Gordon finds that purgatorial underground in the slums of old Lambeth, but initially the twenty-four year-old Eric Blair sought it elsewhere.

In late 1927, his friend Ruth Pitter, the poet, found him an unheated attic at 22 Portobello Road, a short walk from his old home at Notting Hill Gate. The room was so cold that he had to warm his hands over a candle-flame before he could start writing in the morning. From this icy cell he set out in old clothes to mingle with the tramps and down-and-outs who slept along the Embankment, in common lodging-houses and ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses. Most of these spikes and lodging-houses (or ‘kips’) have long gone, though a few of the old workhouse buildings survive, often as NHS hospitals. It was from a kip in Lambeth that he tramped down to Kent to go hop-picking among the East Enders and gypsy families who migrated there every year for a working holiday. This experience is recaptured in his very first article for the New Statesman in October 1931, and also lies at the heart of his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.

After almost two years in Paris, where poverty forced him into working as a menial plongeur in the kitchens of a luxury hotel, he returned home. His family were now living in Southwold on the Suffolk coast, but he often tramped to London to spend time with his friends the Fierzes, who lived in Oakwood Road, Golders Green. Mabel Fierz, a vivacious and opinionated middle-aged woman, considered herself something of a talent-spotter, and it was she who took the manuscript of what was then called Days in Paris and London to the literary agent who sold it to Victor Gollancz. The re-entitled Down and Out in Paris and London, for which he first took the pseudonym ‘George Orwell’, appeared in 1933.

A year earlier, in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled, Orwell decided to get himself arrested. He thought of starting a bonfire in Trafalgar Square — where occasionally he slept out under newspapers with the other vagrants — but his friend, Jack Common, told him that if he wanted a decent stretch inside he should go in for theft. Finally, he went down to the Mile End Road, drank five pints followed by a quarter bottle of whisky and ended up in an East End police cell. Sadly for Orwell, however, after just one night behind bars, the magistrate dismissed him with a small fine. This experience produced a short essay, ‘Clink’, published for the first time in The Complete Works of George Orwell (2000), and also found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Other experiences of underground London further informed his novels. Rayner Heppenstall, the novelist and broadcaster, remembered how difficult it was to pry Orwell loose from the clutches of an eager tart in a Hampstead pub, and earlier he had been thrown out of lodgings in Paddington for entertaining ladies of the night in his room. But this was all grist to his fiction-mill. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, he describes how Dorothy finds herself unexpectedly in a house of ill-fame, and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying how Gordon is whisked off to a brothel by a Piccadilly prostitute. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith recalls a loveless encounter with an aging hooker (‘She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary, in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.’) Each of these descriptions smacks of first-hand experience.

In 1934, like certain other contemporaries — Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, for example — Orwell did a stint as a schoolteacher, first in Hayes (The Hawthorns) then at Uxbridge (Frays College), where he lamented the encroachment of hideous suburbs across the idyllic country landscape of southern England. Even so, it was amid this urban desolation that first he completed Burmese Days, then caught pneumonia and came close to death. The following year, he was back in the city, working at a Hampstead bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, at the corner of South End Green and Pond Street, just below the Royal Free Hospital. The bookshop has gone, but Orwell’s time there is commemorated with a plaque[2]. The shop and his life as a bookseller were described in his 1936 essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’, later included in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968), and feature in somewhat exaggerated form in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

For a while he lived at 77, Parliament Hill, overlooking Hampstead Heath, and there at a party he met his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, an Oxford English graduate who had been taught by J.R.R. Tolkien. She was then doing an MA in psychology at University College and living with her widowed mother in Greenwich. Finding the rent too high, Orwell moved into a flat with his young friends, Heppenstall and the Irish poet and critic, Michael Sayers, at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, where Sayers made a strange discovery about their eccentric housemate. One day, in the first-floor living-room, he found the man he called ‘Eric Orwell’ copying passages from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trying, he said, to perfect a style which excluded adjectives. It was a style he demonstrated soon afterwards in his celebrated essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ — probably the first example of the windowpane-like prose for which he is now celebrated.

For the next four years, after marrying Eileen in 1936, he lived in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington, with absences to investigate unemployment in the North, fight in the Spanish Civil War, and finally, after an attack of TB, convalesce in Morocco. Before leaving for Spain and after his return, the couple stayed at 24 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, the home of Eileen’s surgeon brother Laurence. It was there in October 1939, that Orwell had a grim but prophetic vision of the looming war, as he told Rayner Heppenstall — ‘I was down at Greenwich the other day and looking at the river I thought what wonders a few bombs would work among the shipping.’ He was also staying with Laurence in Greenwich on the day war broke out, 3 September 1939, and from there that in August 1940 he watched the first real raid of the London blitz and saw the East India docks going up in flames.

Occasionally during those immediate pre-war years, he travelled into the city to visit his publishers, whose offices stood just off the Strand — Victor Gollancz, to the north, at 14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and Secker and Warburg to the south, at 22 Essex Street, down towards the Thames. The Strand is where George Bowling, hero of Coming Up For Air, has the Proustian moment — a newspaper headline and the recalled smell of sainfoin chaff evoking the Golden Age of his Thameside childhood — which sends him off in search of lost time. Pedestrians swarming along the Strand also provided him with another eve-of-war vision — a recurrent one for Orwell — of England sleeping even as bombs and a war of annihilation threaten:

The usual crowd that you can hardly fight your way through was streaming up the pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their faces that people have in London streets, and there was the usual jam of traffic with the great red buses nosing their way between the cars and the engines roaring and horns tooting. Enough noise to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleep walkers…And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round the corner and that war’s the end of all things… We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what’s coming to them. It was as if I’d got X rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking.

Mostly, the ungainly, ascetic Orwell avoided London literary circles and what he called ‘the slimy careerism’ of certain writers and critics, but on at least one occasion in the 30s, at a time when left-wing politics were becoming fashionable, he attended a party thrown by his friend Cyril Connolly at his flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea (at number 312) attended by a number of fashionable women, and made an unexpected impression.

He came along, looking gaunt and shaggy, shabby, aloof [recalled Connolly], and he had this extraordinary magical effect on these women. They all wanted to meet him and started talking to him, and their fur coats shook with pleasure. They were totally unprepared for anyone like that and they responded to something — this sort of John the Baptist figure coming in from the wilderness — and suddenly the women feel it doesn’t matter what his political views are, he’s a wonderful man. And that was rather the effect he had everywhere, I think.

For a couple of years after the outbreak of war, he reviewed both plays and films for Time & Tide, for some months commuting from his cottage in Hertfordshire for the purpose. Eileen found employment first at the Censorship Office in Whitehall and later for the Ministry of Food in Portman Square; Eric (unfit to fight) went to work as a radio producer with the BBC’s India Service, for which he worked from August 1941 until November 1943 from make-shift offices in the old Peter Robinson store at 200, Oxford Street (known familiarly as the ZOO). To be near their work they moved back into London, living first in a tiny flat at Dorset Chambers in Chagford Street, close to Regent’s Park (where he drilled with his Home Guard platoon), then at the more spacious Langford Court in Langford Place off Abbey Road (said to be the model for Victory Mansions in Nineteen Eighty-Four), and finally at 10 Mortimer Crescent, in Kilburn, which was wrecked by a flying bomb in June 1944. They then found a large top-floor flat at 27 Canonbury Square, Islington, while Orwell worked as Literary Editor for the left-wing review, Tribune (at 222, the Strand). There, with some help from Eileen, he completed Animal Farm and began sketching out Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Islington flat was reached by a back-breaking climb up a brick staircase at the rear of the building, which was hard on Orwell’s weak lungs. But he ran a cosy household, the climax of each day being the 5 o’clock ritual of high-tea, always with the same appetizing menu. In a fond memoir, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’, first published in the London Magazine, Paul Potts, the rangy Irish-Canadian poet Catholic-educated libertarian, notorious sponger and haunter of London’s Bohemia, recalled the Pickwickian scene:

Nothing could be more pleasant than the sight of his living-room in Canonbury Square early on a winter’s evening at high tea-time. A huge fire, the table crowded with marvellous things, Gentleman’s Relish and various jams, kippers, crumpets and toast. And always the Gentleman’s Relish, with its peculiar unique flat jar and the Latin inscription on the label. Next to it usually stood the Cooper’s Oxford marmalade pot. He thought in terms of vintage tea and had the same attitude to bubble and squeak as a Frenchman has to Camembert. I’ll swear he valued tea and roast beef above the OM and the Nobel Prize. Then there was the conversation and the company, his wife, some members of his family or hers, a refugee radical or an English writer. There was something very innocent and terribly simple about him. He wasn’t a very good judge of character. He was of roast beef, however. He loved being a host, as only civilized men can, who have been very poor. There was nothing bohemian about him at all. However poor he had been it did not make him precarious. But he tolerated in others faults he did not possess himself.

One of his best and most lyrical short Tribune pieces, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, celebrated the end of the cruel winter of 1946 and the signs of a belated spring to be glimpsed in even the gloomiest of London streets and round and about the Bank of England. While some wartime winters had appeared to be permanent, he wrote, spring, like the common toad, always stirred eventually. Despite the grimness of the bombed-out city, Orwell was ever alert to the movement of the seasons and never as enshrouded in gloom as he is sometimes depicted.

After Eileen died unexpectedly during an operation in early 1945, he kept on the Islington flat but began spending more time on the Hebridean island of Jura with his young adopted son, Richard. There, in 1948, as his health continued to deteriorate and he was often too exhausted even to get out of bed, he finally completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The setting of that novel — a society terrorized by the all-seeing Big Brother whose Thought Police torture and brainwash their victims in Room 101 at the Ministry of Love — is really the bombed-out London Orwell remembered from his war years there. Winston Smith, the book’s persecuted hero, works at rewriting history along Party lines at the Ministry of Truth, based partly on London University’s Senate House in Malet Street, wartime headquarters of the Ministry of Information (where Orwell worked occasionally in 1941), and partly on Broadcasting House and 200 Oxford Street. The infamous Room 101 itself was a committee room at 55 Portland Place. On a day Orwell’s department is known to have had a meeting there he succumbed to a violent attack of bronchitis, which could explain why he associated that room with torture.

In the novel, Trafalgar Square becomes Victory Square and Nelson’s Column stands as a monument to Big Brother. The rundown proletarian district where Winston and Julia find a love-nest over Mr Charrington’s antique shop is the area between King’s Cross and Islington through which Orwell usually walked home while working at Tribune. Reading the book, anyone familiar with the capital will recognize the London where Winston is misguided enough to think that he can outwit Big Brother and remain a freethinking individual.

As most people know, finally, under the weighty effort of completing this depressing novel, Orwell’s health collapsed completely, and he spent several months in early 1949 trying unsuccessfully to recover at a Gloucestershire sanatorium. However, he did return one final time to London.

On 3 September 1949 he was transferred to University College Hospital where first he got married to the youthful Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of the literary magazine Horizon, the model for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia — the girl from the Fiction Department — and then, on 21 January 1950, died of a haemorrhage of the lungs brought on by TB. His last months were spent not only dying wretchedly but also observing in his then gloomy way how the equalities of austere wartime London were being eroded as advertisements for servants reappeared in The Times and Rolls Royces once again began to be seen on the streets.

He had two funerals, one for George Orwell, the now famous author, and the other for Eric Blair, the obscure presence behind the name. The first, Orwell’s funeral, attended by his many friends, was held at Christ Church, Albany Street, near Regent’s Park, now an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral whose patron saint, curiously enough, is St George. Blair’s funeral, attended by his widow and a solicitor, was held in Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire where he lies buried between the First World War Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and a family of local gypsies — taking in the compass-range of his whole being: the nineteenth century liberal on the one hand and the travellers and hop-pickers on the other.

One interesting feature of the London districts in which Orwell lived, is that all of them figure in the novels of his favourite author, Dickens. The Dickensian interest is also to be seen in some of the London characters in Orwell’s own work — Bozo the screever and Ginger the thief, in Down and Out in Paris and London; the down-and-out Mrs McElligot and the demonic Mr Tallboys in A Clergyman’s Daughter, kipping among the tramps in Trafalgar Square [3]; Gordon Comstock, the dropped-out poet, slumming through Lambeth in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Mr Charrington the antique-shop owner in Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of these characters would be out of place in a Dickens novel, and one might still come across them in the back-streets and dingier corners of the capital.

Orwell’s preferred Soho pub was the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place; his favourite restaurants were the long-gone Barcelona Café in Beak Street, the still-thriving Elysee in Percy Street and Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. It was at Bertorelli’s in 1935 that he entertained Sir Richard Rees and three others to the dinner at which he blew his £50 advance for the US edition of Burmese Days, and after which, in drunken high spirits, he knocked off a policeman’s helmet, leaving Rees to smooth things over and escort him home. The incident duly found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying, re-enacted with much panache by Richard E. Grant, with Julian Wadham, and Helena Bonham-Carter in attendance, in Robert Bierman’s 1997 film of the novel.

The Moon Under Water pub described so enthusiastically by Orwell in an Evening Standard article of February 1946, was imaginary, and the five pubs with that name in today’s London phonebook have clearly borrowed it from Orwell’s fantasy.

Orwell claimed to hate London, as did Eileen, but in many ways, along with Dickens, George Gissing, Patrick Hamilton and Peter Ackroyd, he is one of those novelists who has contributed most to the tradition of the London novel. He had a feeling, too, for the people who lived there. During the war he wrote movingly about the Londoners sheltering from air-raids in the city’s crypts and underground stations, praised London theatre audiences who remained to watch the show even while the bombs were falling, and told his friend Julian Symons, ‘I hate London. I really would like to get out of it, but of course you can’t leave while people are being bombed to bits all around you.’

What he loved about London were the art galleries — inexpensive places to take girls he fancied — and the parks — convenient spaces for casual seductions. He enjoyed the Regent’s Park zoo and had a great affection for the city’s junk-shops — treasure-houses of the past, as Winston Smith discovers in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But against what he might have regarded as the ‘romantic’ aspect of the city, he was ever conscious of its inhuman aspect. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote that ‘London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous. Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.’ That was his picture of the city in the mid-1930s, but, for those living on its margins, the grim London Orwell described there so vividly is no doubt still a cruel reality.

© Gordon Bowker 2008

The Orwell Prize is very grateful to Gordon Bowker for permission to publish this piece online. An earlier version of this article appeared in Planet in June 2006.

Notes