5. Nineteen Eighty-Four: Big Brother, Surveillance, and Fear

Why is 1984 as relevant today as when it was published? Who is Big Brother, and why is he so powerful? What was George Orwell's intention when creating the world of 1984, and what does it tell us about politics today? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of 1984, the world it was born of, and the novel itself. You can order 1984 and explore our favourite Folio books at http://foliosociety.com/thebookclub Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Social Producer: Emma Jackson Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:00Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by the Folio Society.

• 2:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Now, the Folio Society is a small, independent publisher owned by its employees and based in South London, and they revisit the stories that we keep coming back to on this show, and they reshape how you experience them.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  One of those is 1984, a dystopian vision that escaped the page and entered our language.

• 2:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Orwell wasn't just imagining a bleak future. He understood that if language narrows, then thought narrows with it, and control often begins by adjusting the record one word at a time. Folio treat books as living texts, and here, the design mirrors the novel's ideological machinery. So this Folio Society doesn't just depict the world of airstrip one, it inhabits it. It draws you into a world where facts fall into line and reality follows.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  You can order 1984 and explore the other books we keep coming back to at foliosociety.com/thebookclub. That's foliosociety.com/thebookclub.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it, a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked toward the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide, the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the

• 3:57Speaker 02

  best of times, it was seldom working, and at present, the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. Big Brother is watching you, the caption beneath it ran. So that was the opening of George Orwell's unforgettably chilling novel, 1984,

• 4:39Speaker 02

  published in 1949, and I think the definitive novel of the 20th century. And it's surely one of the greatest openings in modern fiction. You know, it's packed with so many tantalizing, leading details, you know, almost eerily familiar, but clearly alien as well. So we have the clock striking thirteen, the glass doors of victory mansions, the smell of boiled cabbage, this lift that doesn't work, the power cuts, and hate week, all of this unexplained. And then finally, we have the poster with that enormous face. And that's a face which to readers, reading this for the first time in 1949,

• 5:23Speaker 02

  clearly recalled Stalin, or perhaps Hitler, you know, that massive moustache, you know, glowering down at you. And then there's that unforgettable caption now, I think, so established in kind of culture. Big Brother is watching you. So Dominic, the, the big brother of the book club.

• 5:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  What's going on there for people who haven't read?

• 5:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is the story of a bloke called Winston Smith, who lives in a totalitarian future Britain in the year 1984. And lots of readers will be familiar with this, but let's, um, if we just pick up from that very first page, the bit that you read out. So we're obviously in London, it feels very 1940s in many ways. The boiled cabbage, the rubble, the bombed out buildings that are patched up with cardboard and corrugated iron, there's a sort of, an air that you get in that first paragraph of shabbiness and weariness. But also, as you said, there's, there are things that are alien, the 24 hour clock, the clock striking 13, there are the posters everywhere, a big brother. There are, as we discover, posters with the word Ingsoc. There's a helicopter carrying a police patrol, there's talk of sort of three year plans and whatnot.

• 6:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it turns out that this is a Britain that has been renamed airstrip one. It's part of the superpower Oceania, and it's fighting a sort of world war. With East Asia against Eurasia, though that will change. And as we later discover, Oceania is ruled by the the principles of English socialism by Big Brother and the party. So English socialism is INGSOC. And those principles, which we'll go into later in the episode, are Newspeak. So a new version of English, Double Think and the changeability of the past, the mutability of the past. And we'll explain all of these things later in the episode.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's Winston's job to falsify the past. He works for the party's Ministry of Truth and he literally rewrites old editions of the Times. So I wonder what he'd make of some of your more famous headlines.

• 7:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  He'd probably approve of things like time to scrap scrap election campaigns, but.

• 7:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  What, did I write that?

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one of your headlines.

• 7:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Have you been doing some, this is your research for the episode?

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this wasn't the Times, but my favorite is Chairman Corbyn's Maoist Britain. I mean, that screams nineteen eighty four. Anyway.

• 7:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's nineteen eighty four. I can't believe you brought that up.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  So this is a world of total surveillance. And when Winston reaches his flat, he reflects that the the telescreen in his flat will capture every sound and gesture. So he lives with the assumption that everything will be overheard, every moment scrutinized. He even says at one point that there's only, there's one kind of safe moment in his day. And that's when he's in his bed with his eyes closed in the darkness.

• 8:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And as the story unfolds, he starts to kind of gradually rebel in very, very small ways against the suffocating grip of the party and Big Brother. So for instance, you know, it's really, really small. He buys an antique journal and starts keeping a diary. Because the reason that's a rebellion is because that's kind of his own. It's his own thoughts and considerations. It doesn't belong to the party. He has seditious thoughts of his own and he buys an amber paperweight from this kind of antiquarian shop. And the reason that's seditious is it's because from a former age. So.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  And then perhaps it's from the past, exactly. And the past doesn't exist anymore. And perhaps most memorably, he starts an illicit affair with a character called Julia, who's his colleague. And together, they become involved with another colleague called O'Brien, who they think is part of a resistance group called the Brotherhood.

• 9:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  This doesn't end well, does it?

• 9:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, it's a big spoiler alert. It doesn't end well. So as lots of readers will know, they're arrested and Winston ends up in the dreaded Ministry of Love.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  The most nauseating name.

• 9:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And specifically in its most feared room, which is room 101. And we'll come back to what happens in room 101. So 1984, it's a dystopian political warning. It is a doomed love story. It's a horror story. It's a work of science fiction. It is a reflection on the importance of history, a warning about the corruption of language. But more than any of those things, I mean, that all, you know, those are those are aspects of it. But at bottom, it is a really gripping and terrifying story. I mean, it is a brilliant read. My son read it when he was about 11 or 12 and he absolutely, I mean, he didn't care about any of those things. He just loved it as a gripping story.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, it's, it's a page turner throughout. And Orwell is a master of suspense. He builds that as, as we go on. And it's, it's a phenomenon. And I mean, I think probably unmatched in the 20th century, maybe apart from by Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. And surprisingly, you know, that, that's a comparison that we'll, we'll touch on later. You wouldn't think to put them together, but, but you can. And its legacy is just, it's gigantic. The words and concepts from 1984, so many of them are, are really familiar today. You know, Big Brother, Room 101, both of which, interestingly, have spawned reality TV shows. So that's the idea of being, of being watched. So it's George Orwell,

• 10:47Speaker 02

  the progenitor of Love Island. And then you have Thought Crime, Double Think, The Two Minutes Hate, Air Strip One, et cetera, all of this. And the word Orwellian has actually come to donate something in itself. It's associated with totalitarianism, with kind of the curtailment of freedom. Like, people even used it, I remember, during the, the Covid lockdowns.

• 11:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course, yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, massively. And the, above all the surveillance culture that I think. Most people today are so familiar with. So there's loads, loads to talk about here. There's Orwell, he's a very interesting figure, the times that he lived in, what this book's all about, why it's endured and has seeped into culture in the way that it has. And also, I always think it's interesting, like, to explore whether or not it is a period piece born of that particular moment, or whether or not it's actually a prophecy with lessons for us today.

• 11:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I love George Orwell. Um, the man as much as the books. He's a lodestar for me for lots of, uh, as he is for many writers. Um, I once made a TV programme about Britain in the early Cold War that touched on 1984. And actually, when I was, I mean, you were good enough to read one of my more inflammatory columns.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, the title of one of my more inflammatory columns. I mean, I probably, in my, in my days as a columnist for Britain's best loved mid-market newspaper.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  I must have quoted from George Orwell about 6,000 times. He's one of those writers that basically, whenever you, when you run out of a, when you've run out of ideas and you're groping desperately for a conclusion, Orwell is the writer that you, um, that you reach for. But interestingly, actually, Tabby, I have a sense that, um, Orwell appeals much more to men than, than to women. So you, I've never really heard you wax lyrical about George Orwell. And I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that the person producing this podcast, Aliyah, is not an Orwell fan.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  No, she described this as a boy book. And I think she is not entirely wrong there at all. I mean, I think, and I remember thinking this the first time around as well, and I was struck by it this time. It's, it's clearly, you know, ingenious and highly original. But I think there's a big difference between admiring a book and liking it. And I, I don't really like 1984. And I think there is something in, in the idea of it being much more of a boy book than a girl book. I actually, I did a bit of digging and they did a, a YouGov poll in 2014, which showed that men were much more likely to read 1984 than women. I think there's various, various reasons for that. I think in part because it's a book that deals much more in kind of structures and kind of.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Systems, power systems and structures than relationships. It's it doesn't it it's it's not very um interior. It's it's emotionally really, really stark and cold. There's very little kind of relational fulfillment. And the whole thing is centered on a one man's perspective. You know, it's the male gaze throughout. And I just I found it, you know, reading it in a in a chilly. You know, London, January, on the quite nineteen forty-esque northern line, back from work. Every night for the shadows closing in. Oh, I found it a pretty bleak read.

• 13:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, no, this is shocking.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  We'll explore that a bit more later, the the the idea of kind of perhaps the sexism in nineteen eighty four. But first of all, talk about George Orwell, your your hero.

• 14:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so the funny thing about Orwell is Orwell is renowned for his clarity and his honesty and his sympathy for the underdog and his hostility to authority. But there's an irony here because he's a son of empire, a son of privilege, and he's a former imperial policeman who writes under a name not his own. So his name is actually Eric Arthur Blair. Um, so he's born in Bengal in nineteen oh three. His father was in the Indian civil service and he basically worked as a on the export of opium. His family, interestingly, he described them um famously as lower, upper, middle class. Orwell was fascinated by class, basically because his his family were gentile, but they didn't have the money to sustain it.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that meant that there's always a huge or a widening gap between their expectations and their capacity to pay for them. And that meant that Orwell reflected a lot about the sort of social caste and so on. He's a very bright boy. He wins a scholarship to prep school and then another scholarship to Eton, um, a King Scholarship to Eton, where he was taught French by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  That is a great detail, though, the two kind of fathers of dystopian literature.

• 15:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So um he wasn't a great star at Eton. Uh, his parents thought that he probably wouldn't win a scholarship to university and they didn't have the money to send him. So they applied for him to join the Indian Imperial Police, which he does. He passes the exam, he goes off to Burma. And some of his biographers see Burma as formative for him because, of course, Burma, you know, he has an experience of repression and punishments and surveillance, but he's on the other side of that equation because he's working for the authorities.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and he he really doesn't enjoy Burma, does he?

• 15:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, not at all. I think he finds it very awkward. He wrote brilliantly, by the way, about his time in Burma. There's a brilliant essay about shooting an elephant and everyone's sort of staring at him. And the sort of pressure that he felt as the representative of imperial authority, surrounded by all these people whose lives he didn't really understand.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  So that's why, I guess, he went back to England eventually in 1928. And then that's when he first had a stab at becoming a writer.

• 16:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  And a big, big change. He lived mainly in a sort of sleepy Sussex seaside town called Southwold. And that's where his family retired to. And that's when he takes the name George Orwell, and he takes it from the king.

• 16:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, George.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Patriotic, yeah, a good patriotic man. And then the local river, because he sees it as a solid English name. And then he really gives the writing his best shot. And he writes Down and Out in Paris and London, and that's published in 1933. And then four books after that. So there's Burmese Days, A Clergymen's Daughter, Keep the Aspidastra Flying and Coming Up For Air. And none of these are very successful. And let's face it, we probably wouldn't know them well today if it hadn't been for his later works.

• 17:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  The common theme of those books is there's a central character who's trapped by his times. He feels it's very claustrophobic. And the character tries to escape and basically fails. So this is a constant theme for Orwell. And I think that reflects, I mean, obviously the theme of 1984, and I think that reflects his personality. He's shaped very much by the establishment, but also he's quite thoughtful, he's spiky, he's awkward, he's kind of a man apart. He likes to see himself as a man apart. Anyway, the paradox is, on the one hand, he's quite anti-authority, anti-establishment, but on the other, you know, he's very loyal to his old school friends. So the people at his bedside when he was dying were all Oldertonians. They were the people he kept in touch with all his life.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  And that's led some people to think retrospectively that he might have been gay, hasn't it?

• 17:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  I can't believe that people think that. Well, I can believe that people think it, but I think they're deluded. I mean, one of the great criticisms of Orwell now is that Orwell, you know, is no woman is safe without George Orwell. He's the sort of pouring feebly at them, or he's asking them to marry him. Anyway, talking about asking to marry him, he does get married in 1936 to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who is Oxford educated and basically becomes his typist. And then at the end of 1936, the defining political event of his life, he goes off to the Spanish Civil War. Before then, I think Orwell had, I mean, he'd been interested in politics, but he hadn't been fundamentally political. And the Spanish Civil War changes that. He volunteers for the Republicans, the left wing forces. He joins a militia called the Poom.

• 18:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  But what really is so formative is that the left wing forces in Spain are fighting among themselves. So there's a rift in Barcelona where he's been very excited and happy. There's a big rift between, on the one hand, all these different kind of sectarian militias like the Poom.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then the other, the Orthodox Communists. And the Orthodox kind of Stalinist Communists basically stamp on these other militias. And Orwell is really shocked by this. He's shocked by Stalinism. He's shocked by the experience of kind of truth and language being threatened by propaganda and by kind of totalitarian orthodoxy. And, and, and, and that stays with him politically forever. And that gives him his obsession, I think, with totalitarianism and with Stalinism.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Stalinism, I mean Stalin's shadow looms large in 1984. And obviously Big Brother, I mean, he's not, he's not entirely Stalin, like as we said, you know, the shadows of Hitler and him. But the similarities between Stalin and Big Brother are impossible to miss, I would say. I mean, the moustache is not alone, there's more than that as well.

• 19:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so the moustache is definitely giveaway because it's definitely Stalin's moustache and not Hitler's.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And the description of the face, kind of raggedly, solidly handsome.

• 19:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. But also the way in which, in the history books, we discover they've been constantly rewritten to emphasize the role of Big Brother and to push Big Brother back earlier and earlier into the beginning of the revolution. And this is of course exactly what Stalin's court historians did with him. They wrote out the other leaders of the Russian Revolution and put Stalin centre stage. And there's also lots of stuff, I mean, when Orwell has come back, when he comes back to England, this is the point at which- Stalin's show trials are being reported. So people like Grigorizhnoviev or Lev Kamenev or Nikolai Bukharin, the so-called old Bolsheviks, they are being dragged in front of the courts in Moscow in these terrible show trials.

• 20:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And that the shadow of the show trials hangs over nineteen eighty four and there's three characters, Aaronson, Jones and Rutherford in the book, who are basically like the old Bolsheviks of airstrip one and the same thing, exactly the same thing happens to them.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they disappeared, aren't they?

• 20:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  But anyway, back to Orwell's life. So he finally returns to England from Spain to recover from this, these wounds and he's shot in the neck, brutal and also illness. And that's when he writes Homage to Catalonia and makes his name as a reviewer and an essayist. And then in September nineteen thirty nine, as he had warned, Britain finds itself in the Second World War. And I think this is probably an overlooked part of nineteen eighty four, wouldn't you say? Like, people will think it's the Cold War and Bolshevism and all this, but the Second World War is is a massive part of the book, the atmosphere of it, the world.

• 21:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think so. I think completely. I think you mentioned earlier Tolkeen and The Lord of the Rings is kind of nineteen eighty four's great rival as the sort of formative book of the twentieth century. And I think the interesting thing about those books is they're both written against the backdrop of the Second World War. They conceived in the Second World War, they're written while it's going on. And I think there are lots of elements about nineteen eighty four that are inconceivable without the context of the Second World War. So two of them, just straight away, two small things, the shifting alliances. So basically, Oceania is always at war with one of these great superpowers against the other, but it's always changing. Eurasia, East Asia and so on. That obviously mirrors what's happened in the Second World War with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union being allies.

• 22:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then suddenly all that is rewritten in nineteen forty one when Nazi Germany attacks the Soviet Union. Suddenly the Soviet Union is our gallant ally in the West and everybody's kind of going on about Uncle Joe and all of that kind of thing.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Totally. As soon as you said that, there's this scene in the book where they're having a rally to watch the execution of Eurasian prisoners and everyone's very excited and, you know, baying for blood. And then the speaker's handed a note halfway through the rally to tell him that the alliances have shifted. And then it's kind of, it's chilling, but it's faintly comical. And then suddenly, all these people realise that the banners and the posters are all wrong, because actually, as it turns out, Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.

• 22:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The past is deleted. But another little World War II moment, they go to the cinemas to watch a newsreel, and they watch a newsreel of a refugee ship being bombed. And the audience are laughing. It's a really horrific scene, like children are being killed, and the audience are laughing and cheering. This is based on a real incident. A refugee ship called the Struma, which was carrying Jewish refugees from Romania. It was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in 1942. So Orwell clearly takes that from the headlines. But also, I think generally, the atmosphere of the book, the bomb damage, the shabbiness, the fear, the rationing. This is the atmosphere, not so much of the Cold War, although it's part of it, it's the atmosphere of Britain in 1942,

• 23:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  1943, or whenever, when he first conceives of what becomes 1984. And the final element, Orwell was a propagandist in the war with the BBC. So he worked as a producer and presenter for shows that went out in Asia. And that BBC experience, I think, is crucial. He works like Winston in an office building with a kind of dingy canteen. He handles propaganda, which Orwell called muck and filth. And when he goes to editorial meetings at Broadcasting House in London, those meetings are held in Room 101.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So remember, that's, that's the room in 1984. But then, I mean,

• 24:10Speaker 02

  How then does he go from that, the BBC, being a full-time propagandist, journalist, whatever, to actually writing 1984?

• 24:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so he quits the BBC in the end of 1943 and he writes this satirical fable attacking Stalinism, which is Animal Farm.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's not published for a couple of years because publishers are very wary about touching it because Stalin is now our gallant ally and they don't want to publish anything critical of the Russians.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Very 1984.

• 24:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very 1984. So meanwhile Orwell has been reading loads of dystopian fiction. So Aldous Huxley's, his old French teachers, Brave New World, for example, or H.G. Wells, these, all these, Jack London, all these authors.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's a recent thing, dystopian fiction, I mean, it's a product of the early 20th century. So it's born of that atmosphere.

• 24:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, it completely is. And then I think he gets the idea in about 1943 or 1944, and it's basically what will the world be like when Hitler is beaten? Orwell's thinking about what happens when we, when we've won, how, how will the world play out? And the writer Isaac Deutscher, who met him in 1945, said to, said later that Orwell had said to him, I think that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill are planning to divide the world between them, that they are consciously plotting, as indeed, in some ways, they were at conferences like Yalta, when they divide the world into spheres of influence, you know, that the world will be parceled out between the superpowers. And that gives him the idea of Oceania, East Asia and Eurasia.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then there's a sort of hiatus because he's distracted by Animal Farm, but also by his own personal life. So he and Eileen have not had children, they've adopted a baby who they call Richard Horatio Blair. But then in the spring of 1945, March, Eileen has a routine operation, she has an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic and she dies. And everybody expects Orwell to give up the baby, who's only nine months old, but he says no, he gets a succession of people in to kind of look after it. But he's very lonely and he basically spends two years proposing. If you met him, you met him for a cup of tea or something, Tabby, he would end up by proposing to you.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  He sounds excellent, I think that's how everyone should behave. And everyone should propose to me all the time.

• 26:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, don't say this personally because I think he would do it to any woman and I think Orwell does do it to any woman.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  I mean, he could definitely play a bit harder to get, bless him.

• 26:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's working like a demon. He writes a hundred and thirty essays a year, but there's a kind of starkness and a sadness to his life now. And this is what draws him to the Scottish island of Dura.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this has become such a kind of fated story. You know, it's like the the ideal of kind of the writer driven to write at all costs, you know, like a Spartan, living like a Spartan. And also, he said at the time, I mean, he was, he, it's his, his own success almost shot him in the foot because he had no time. The minute that Animal Farm was published, people were constantly trying to get him to do talks and write essays. And I think he felt a bit overwhelmed. He actually said to his friend, you don't know how I pine to be free of it all and have time to think again. So this is why he starts going up to the Scottish island of Dura, as you said. His older Tonyan friend, David Astor, finds him a rented farmhouse called Barn Hill on the North Coast.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  And this is an incredibly bleak, grim, forbidding landscape. You know, you can feel that in nineteen eighty four, actually, can't you? Like the grim grayness of it all. And he's now seriously ill himself, Orwell, with TB. He's always been a smoker. He's struggled with London smog, the cold weather, et cetera. But all this time, he's working insanely hard. And it's now that he work, he turns to nineteen eighty four.

• 27:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so two more quick things to flag up, two more influences. So one is that the Cold War is now underway. And it's Orwell who has popularized the term the Cold War. He first used it in nineteen forty five, speaking very generally. Then he used it again in March nineteen forty six, talking about having a Cold War with Russia. And that's the same month that Winston Churchill gave his speech in Fulton, Missouri, where he talks about the Iron Curtain dividing Europe. So there's a real sense at this point that something has changed. And then the other thing.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  He references it actually kind of obliquely once. So people, he never really.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Directly addressed that influence, but he actually said to his publisher about the last phase of nineteen eighty four about writing the book, that it was about, like, I quote, "It was about the possible state of affairs if this atomic war isn't conclusive."

• 28:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and of course, the shadow of the atom bomb, there are atom bombs, there's references to atom bombs throughout the book. But he's also read a book, an older book, which is a massive, massive influence on nineteen eighty four. So this is a book called We by Evgeny Zamyatin, which was published in Russian in nineteen twenty one. And it's set in the far future, it's got a one party state, it has a surveillance culture, it has a ruling figure, not the big brother, but he's called the benefactor. It has a hero who's got a number, not a name, who falls in love, has an illicit relationship, rebels, is interrogated, is tortured, is broken. So basically, it kind of is nineteen eighty four in embryo. The tone is a bit different, it's more ironic, but it's remarkably

• 29:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  similar. And actually, a top friend of yours has read this book and absolutely adores it.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, my best friend in all the world has read this book, another young man of prodigious talent. Your son, Arthur Sandbrook, is a massive fan.

• 29:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is, he loves Evgeny Zamyatin. And he said, "If you don't mention this in your podcast with Tabby, I will never forgive you." And now we have.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  But writing nineteen eighty four is a terrible slog for Orwell, isn't it? I mean, he said of writing itself, that it was a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of illness. One would not attempt it unless driven by some demon. And I think nineteen eighty four is even worse than that. It's slow, it's grueling. And the book feels like the work of a sick, tired, lonely man, sitting on his own in a farmhouse, no electricity, no hot water, this Scottish gale howling outside. And I mean, also nineteen forty six, nineteen forty seven were the coldest winters of the century in Britain. And he's out there in this freezing little cottage. And his, unsurprisingly, his health is close

• 30:27Speaker 02

  to a terminal breakdown. He's lost two stone, he's coughing uncontrollably, he has his terrible night sweats. And so eventually, he's confined to a hospital in Glasgow. And then finally, in the summer of nineteen forty eight, he's discharged. Against medical advice, he goes back to work on Jura and finishes the handwritten manuscript by November at last. This grueling process.

• 30:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  But handwritten is not good enough for the publisher. So he needs, it has to get it typed. And basically he says to the publisher, Fred Warburg, can you find me a typist? They can't find him one. And he says, fine, I'll do this myself, even though his doctors have told him not to. And he is, he's sitting in bed, chain smoking. This is very much how I see your future, Tabby. He sits in bed, chain smoking, coughing up blood and typing 4,000 words a day on his typewriter, on this little typewriter. And he's dripping with sweat while he's doing this. You know, the TB is ravaging him.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he survived on strong tea and rolled cigarettes, sitting in bed.

• 31:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So he finishes it the 4th of December, 1948, and he literally collapses straight afterwards with exhaustion. He basically leaves Dura forever and he goes off to a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, which is, which is quite a change.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It's exactly how I imagine you felt after writing The Great British Dream Factory.

• 31:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very good. Yeah, thank you. It's very similar people. So his publisher, Fred Warburg, loved it. He wrote an internal memo. He said, it's one of the most terrifying books I've ever read. But interestingly, he then said, it's worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because he saw it as a warning against socialism. Orwell himself always denied this and he wrote several times saying, this is not an anti-Labor book, it's not an anti-socialist or social democratic book, it's a book again, warning against totalitarianism. So it could be communism, it could be fascism, but it's definitely, he would, he resented the implication that he'd written an anti-socialist book.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  This is why Orwell's always the poster boy for, for both sides. His, his own politics are always so difficult to pin down.

• 32:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  I agree with you, Tabby. I agree completely. I mean, Orwell sees himself as a man of the left, but in many ways he's a small c conservative. And he often, you know, he, he comes alive often when he's actually attacking other socialists, more so than conservatives, I would say.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  The title of the book remains to be decided. He wants to call it The Last Man in Europe. His publishers say, hmm, we think a date is better. Interestingly, the date didn't have to be 1984. So there's a really nice book on 1984 by Dorian Linsky, and he points out that Orwell toyed in the final stages. When you look at the manuscripts, Orwell toyed with 1980, with 1982, and he only actually switches to 1984. Eighty four, quite late on. He's just, you know, groping around for which date seems to make, you know, seems snappiest. I mean, none of these numbers would have had any meaning in nineteen forty nine, you know, they don't have the the personality. Yet that we associate with years once they've gone by. Anyway, it's published in the summer of nineteen forty nine, June.

• 33:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  And it comes out to a torrent of praise from the critics. And I think people's ideological anxieties in the early Cold War are so raw. And the experience of the Second World War is so recent that, you know, they are primed to like a book such as this. Although that said, I mean, that sounds like I'm I'm trying to make excuses for why people liked it. They liked it. Because it's such a gripping, compelling, unputdownable read. I mean, they they basically say straight away, this is a brilliant, brilliant book.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, V S Pritchett in The New Statesman, I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing and yet. Such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation, that it is impossible to put the book down. So there you go. Whitsun Churchill also loved it. He told his doctor that he'd read it twice. I mean, obviously, on the other hand, the Soviet newspaper, The Pravda, calls it a filthy book, a work of misanthropic fantasy. Typical of the propaganda churned out by venal writers on the orders and instigation of Wall Street. Which I think speaks to how successful Orwell was in kind of conjuring his terrifying totalitarianism totalitarian regime.

• 34:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you know who wasn't, who was kind of, yeah, what about his old teacher, Tabby?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  This is so typical of kind of the spite of writers, isn't it? He said it was good, but his own was better. He kind of said that.

• 34:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  This is Aldous Huxley, we should say.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Huxley. He said that basically his vision of the future was was far more realistic. That the lust for power can would be satisfied more by suggesting people into loving servitude. Than by flogging and kicking them into obedience, because his own book in A Brave New World, people become sort of subjected or all kind of. Followers because of this drug called soma, which is euphoric and makes them kind of joyously obedient. But in the meantime, finally, Orwell is on to make some cash from nineteen eighty four. Because it's chosen by the US Book of the Month Club, and this means he'll make at least forty thousand pounds, perhaps five million pounds today.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  But alas, he'll never get to enjoy his newfound fortune because he's effectively dying by this point.

• 35:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so before he dies, there's one little ironic thing that happens, which is an old friend from the Foreign Office called Celia Kirman comes to visit him in the sanatorium, and he gives her a list. I mean, he's just written a book about people being informed upon, and he gives her a list of people who he says, these are the, these are bad people, you should watch them. Basically, you can't rely on them because they're too close to communism. And there are writers, there are, you know, people like the historian E. H. Carr, the playwright J. B. Priestley, some Labour MPs, like the future Labour leader Michael Foot, and Orwell basically says, these are, these are bad eggs. You know, these are, these are sort of the reds under the beds, as it were. And this, when it came out, was very controversial, and lots of people who didn't like Orwell said, oh, look at this,

• 36:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Orwell's a complete hypocrite. He's actually informing on all these people, some of whom were his, were his friends. Although Orwell himself, of course, would have said, you know, communism is the great evil, and actually I'm doing the right thing for my country by, you know, basically, listeners can make up their own minds. Anyway, he finally, one of his proposals is finally accepted by a publishing assistant called Sonia Brownall, who becomes his second wife. By this point, he has been moved to University College Hospital in London. He's obviously dying. He's visited by his old Etonian mates, sort of day after day, but on the 21st of January 1950, he has a, an artery burst in his lung. His lungs

• 37:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  had been left absolutely ravaged by T. B., and he dies immediately. And he's actually only 46 years old. So plausibly, you know, Orwell would have had 20, 25 years more books in him. But it was, it was not to be. I mean, such a terrible cliche to say Orwell, man of contradictions. But, you know, what a contradictory end. He had, he'd been an atheist all his life, knew not being a joiner, but he wants a Church of England funeral, and he wants to be buried in the Church of England graveyard. And his old Etonian pal, David Astor, the guy who'd sorted out the Scottish farmhouse for him, he says, I'll take charge of this. And he basically gets Orwell a grave in Sutton Courtney in Oxfordshire, where Orwell has no connections, but it's next to the Astor estate. And so that's where Orwell

• 37:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  rests to this day.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  And he's actually buried, interestingly, next to British Prime Minister, former British Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith.

• 37:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow, two great men, Tebby.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, both with dubious records with women.

• 38:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  You wouldn't want to be buried next to either of them that have ghostly hands wandering over to your coffin.

• 38:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was about to say, there's definitely wandering hands in that graveyard. So the book's success, a word on the book's success before we go into the break. It is an even more instant hit than The Lord of the Rings. So in America, within 10 years, the paperback sold a million copies, I think. And in total by now, estimates are that it sold 40 to 50 million copies, which is a lot for a book that is as stark and bleak and kind of grim as 1984. But the ultimate, I always think the ultimate tribute to his achievements is that it was banned in the Soviet Union and the Soviet satellites until the 1980s. And illicit copies, samizdat, would circulate among dissidents. And the Polish Nobel laureate, anti-communist exile poet called Czesław Miłosz,

• 38:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  wrote that, he said, "People in the Eastern Bloc just could not believe that somebody who had never lived there could know so, you know, with such insight, exactly what it was like to live under such a regime." And then in the 1980s, the historian Timothy Garton Ash, also columnist for The Guardian, he went, he spent lots of time in Eastern Europe and he, he reported afterwards, he said, "People would come up to him with these kind of dog-eared copies of 1984, you know, Czechs, Poles, whatever. And they would say, how on earth could he know? How did he know exactly what it's like?"

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, almost as though he were a prophet. But the question is, does 1984 still have the same power today? Was it a prophecy? Does it really foretell the surveillance culture and kind of post-truth politics of the 21st century? And Dominic, will you finally justify your comparison between Orwell and my beloved J R R Tolkien? Find out after the break.

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• 41:29Speaker 02

  Welcome back to the book club. So, we've talked about George Orwell and how he wrote 1984, haven't we, Dominic? But now, let's talk about the book itself. Orwell very neatly constructs it into three parts. So you have Winston and his world. You have his affair with Julia and their rebellion, and that's probably kind of the warmest, brightest portion of the book. It's more colorful. And then you have the bleakest portion, which is Winston's imprisonment and his torture by O'Brien. And given that this is such a neat format, why don't we follow this line ourselves? So first of all, Winston Smith and his world. Because he's not your typical hero.

• 42:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's not at all. He's a very 20th century hero, I think. Flawed, weak, fragile. He's very unglamorous. You know, you did that reading at the beginning, his varicose ulcer. He has to pause when he's going upstairs because he's out of breath.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's got five false teeth. He's got a terrible cough, rather like Orwell's TB. He's

• 42:34Speaker 02

  John Hurt is actually, looks just right for him, I think, who plays him in the movie.

• 42:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think in many ways, actually, John Hurt is quite striking. And the point about Winston Smith is he is

• 42:45Speaker 02

  An everyman.

• 42:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's so mundane. Yeah, and that's the point of him. I mean, the name, obviously Winston, you know, you'd assume a little nod to Winston Churchill and Smith, the most ordinary of of English surnames. So the Englishness, I think, is massively important to Orwell. I mean, Orwell is obsessed with England and Englishness. But Winston's weakness is partly because he's had such a terrible life. So when he's thinking about his boyhood, which would have been in the 1950s, sort of an imaginary 1950s. It's all air raids and rubble and people firing machine guns and, you know, these sort of confused impressions that he has of a country under attack in an atomic war, but also fawning apart because of a civil war and revolution.

• 43:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  His father disappeared, you know, is one of so many people who've disappeared when he was a small boy. And he has this dreadful memory of his mother. So basically, when he was a little boy, he stole some chocolate from his sister because they had, you know, only very limited supplies. Yeah, rationing. He stole this chocolate. His mother was upset. He ran away. And when he came back, both his mother and his sister were gone and he never saw them again. They had been disappeared.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, his recollections of that are horrible. And I actually think probably in quite an unemotional book, the most emotional portions. But as you say, he's definitely not perfect. I mean, I don't think he's even admirable, really. For example, and strikingly, he's sexist, I'd say, to the point of misogyny. So for instance, he's been married to this woman called Catherine, but he absolutely loathes her. She had, without exception, the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he's ever encountered. What it really boils down to for him is sex. Because, he says, as soon as he touched her, she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her,

• 44:39Speaker 02

  he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  You know, I think in part, maybe you could say this is fair because it's not about her gender. It's not about her being a woman. It's about her being kind of the representation of, you know, a party person through and through, a person that has lost their identity to the party. Because the party doesn't believe in lust and love and sex. It believes that sex is for procreation alone. And so basically, it's a duty. So she sees it as doing her duty. But on the other hand, you know, that in itself is a bit of a sexist stereotype. The frigid, sexually repressed woman who is blindly obedient. So that definitely is a little bit of a window into a broader issue in the book that we'll touch on a bit later when we get to Julia, Winston's love interest.

• 45:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and I do think this issue about Orwell and women and Winston and women is worth exploring.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 45:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we'll come back to it. But I would say that what grabs your attention when you start the book, the reason that you keep reading is not because of Winston, it's because of the world.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's that Orwell is a very good physical writer.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the world, you know, you get a sense of the physicality of it. The dinginess, the damp, the rot, nothing working. It reminds me a lot, Orwell had, among his, the non-fiction books that had made his name, books like Down and Out in Paris and London, or The Road to Wigan Pier in the late 1930s. One of the things that had really made those books come alive for readers was how vividly Orwell captured the experience, the sights and the smells and the sensations

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  of life at the bottom, of life in the gutter, as it were. And there are lots of scenes in 1984 that are very reminiscent to those books. So a classic one, he's reflecting on how dingy and and shabby and rubbishy and decaying the cities are. And he says, you know, at this point about that everything smelling of cabbage, he mentions it again. And of leaking toilets and stuff. And he has this vision of London, the city of a million dustbins, a brilliant image. And he has this picture of one of his neighbours, Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste pipe. And that image comes directly from his book, The Road to Wigan Pier,

• 46:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  which was reportage, where he remembered seeing a slum girl kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste pipe with the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. And this image, he's a very empathetic writer for people who don't share his privilege. And he has this, you know, in Road to Wigan Pier, again and again, he looks at the faces of people who are ground down by poverty and despair and whatnot. And you see that reflected, I think, in 1984. And that makes it different, I think, from other dystopias.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Definitely, because other dystopias, they're set in the future or in kind of remote islands or fantasy locations, for instance, Brave New World, or When the Sleep Awakes. But 1984 is drenched in these physical details, as you say, of contemporary London. The bomb craters, the crumbling houses, the terrible food, the rationing, you know, the description of the gin that he drinks, victory gin, and the harsh sensation of swallowing it. I think that is actually one of Orwell's crowning achievements in this, is that, the raw physicality of it. I think it's just superb. And I like the way that he's unafraid to look kind of into the gutters.

• 48:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So everything, I think to those first readers, the physicality of it is precisely what makes it so familiar. And even that's true of his, where he works, the Ministry of Truth. So the Ministry of Truth, which is, I mean, is very famous. Passage in the novel, this enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete soaring up terrace after terrace and on it are written the three slogans of the party in gigantic lettering, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. But that building is clearly, you know, anyone in London would know that that building is Senate House. It's the sort of the office block of the University of London and in

• 48:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  the war it had been the Ministry of Information and that is where Orwell's wife Eileen had worked. So he's drawing inspiration directly from a real building. And actually, you know, talking about the relationships in 1984 and all those previous works, when you go into that building and when Winston goes in, it is full of people who basically have appeared in Orwell's previous books of non-fiction because they're the precise of the people that he most despises.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, because he famously hated fruit juice drinkers, nudists, vegetarians, pacifists, feminists, and just essentially kind of earnest people with progressive opinions and weird hobbies.

• 49:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  So two of them, I mean, there's a guy called Parsons.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  These are terrible people.

• 49:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Parsons, basically Orwell always pictures him dressed in the uniform of the Boy Scouts or the spies as they have become. So he talks about his, he says, I always, even though Parsons is dressed perfectly normally, Orwell pictures him or Winston pictures him with dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. What about the next one, Tabby? Comrade Ogilvy. He was a total abstainer and a non-smoker and had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium and he had taken a vow of celibacy.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  So goody-goody two shoes, just, just opt out.

• 50:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So Winston's job in the Ministry of, I was about to say the Ministry of Information, it's the Ministry of Truth, is to rewrite history in the pages of The Times. So, quote, "Day by day and almost minute by minute, the past was brought up to date." So history, he is scraping it clean, to use another expression. So basically, they're rewriting history so the party was always right and what the party wanted to have happened. Happened. And this is crucial to the totalitarian project because the party's slogan is who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. And of course, Winston knows that this is, he knows what he's doing. And this is where double think

• 50:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  comes in. You can know that something happened, i.e. you can know that there were aeroplanes before the party came along, but you have to convince yourself that the reality is otherwise. So you have to somehow compartmentalize your mind, your brain.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that the truth is buried. You know, the truth is there, but you bury it deep down and you almost come to believe the lie that you yourself are propagating.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, you live a different truth, I guess. There's no such thing as objective truth.

• 51:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  See, this is the chilling thing, isn't it, that the inside that Orwell has? Because it's not just newspapers that are being rewritten.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is everything. It is leaflets, posters, soundtracks, cartoons, photographs. There's a huge list of all these things that are basically being altered so that the past is exactly as the party wanted it to be.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  There's even a woman whose job it is to erase the names of people who've been vaporized. So i.e. they're cancelled, they never ever existed. She, and she even kind of has to erase her husband, her own husband's existence, and has to do it willingly and almost zealously because otherwise you're not a member of the party and you're in big trouble.

• 52:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there you have an example of the double think. Like, she must know that her husband existed.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 52:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But she's in charge of suppressing every last vestige of his, of the fact that he was ever there. And it's not just rewriting articles or even books or whatever, but it's basically every relic of the world before the party has to be erased. The past itself has to be, has to be cancelled. And I think this speaks to Orwell's traditionalism and his small c conservatism. He loves Britain's past. He loves traditions, even though he's in many ways, you know, he's a radical. Cultural traditions really speak to something in Orwell. It's like his love of the right way to make a cup of tea or something, or the English breakfast. And I think that's something, which again, we'll come back to, that he has in common with his contemporary J R R Tolkien.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, because also the the book's full of kind of little little jokes, like they use a 24 hour clock. The the metric system, dollars and kilometres, not pounds and miles, you know, and you definitely, I mean, just just the sort of wittisms that we can all expect to enjoy in your own journalism, Dominic. But it's kind of, you know, you you have people today. I mean, I think I say it sometimes, you're like, you just said sidewalk, not pavement. That's American, you know? So it's like a little, a little joke.

• 53:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I would say to somebody. Yeah, I don't, yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 53:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I like the old words, precisely so. And actually, there's a scene in the book when an old man goes into a pub and he asks for a pint and the barman doesn't know what it is. He says, I don't even know what the word means, because basically they serve beer in litres. And the the use of the metric system, you know, is a massive red flag for George Orwell. Basically, somebody who uses dollars and kilometres or whatever is the worst possible person, because Orwell really believes in the old quirky, traditional kind of ways.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I mean, this this scene with the pint is really the real tragedy at the heart of 1984.

• 53:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it is. It is absolutely. And Orwell's, sorry, I say Orwell, I'm confusing Orwell and Winston, which I guess is is speaks volumes, because in many ways, yeah, it is very telling, because Winston and Orwell are very similar. Winston's whole project really is to try to recover the past, to bring the past alive. That's why you mentioned him buying the antique journal, keeping the diary, or he has this fascination with a nursery rhyme, doesn't he? Which kind of recurs in a slightly sort of ghostly way throughout the book. Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  I think this is one of the kind of the most evocative sort of strains or or threads in the book for me. Because it's that kind of idea, a nursery rhyme is always used in horror movies. You know, the sweet, kind of innocent, contorted into something horrific. But then also, it's kind of, it's faintly kind of moving because it's like a breath of this old world and everyone remembers it in their heads, but, and they remember little, little bits of it. So it's like being an adult and then suddenly you'll smell something, it'll take you back to a memory from your childhood. It's really, really effectively done, I think.

• 55:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I agree. But getting rid of such rhymes is exactly what the party's about because they don't want just to raise Britain's history, but they want to change its culture and its language. So in the Ministry of Truth, Winston has a colleague called Syme, and Syme is working on a dictionary, the 11th edition of Newspeak. And Syme, at one point, you know, Syme basically explains the whole thing to Winston. And he says, "We are destroying words, scores of them, hundreds of them every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The aim of Newspeak," says Syme, "is to narrow the range of thought. In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there'll be no words in which to

• 55:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  express it. Every year, fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."

• 55:52Speaker 02

  So, I mean, they'll also therefore just destroy literature itself. So he says, "By 2050, earlier probably, all real knowledge of Old Speak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be." And that, that also is kind of classic of totalitarian regimes, you know, taking a text and then distorting it to suit your ends. The Nazis did it, for instance. Yeah.

• 56:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, this is what you, you, to get to, this is the defining characteristic of 20th century

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  regimes, that they, they don't just want to have a kind of overt public ideological conformity. They want to get into your head and to change the way you think. And the way they do that is by book burnings, by, you know, changing the curriculum in schools, by doing all this kind of thing. And basically, if something in the past doesn't fit, you change it. And that's obviously why so many people in the 21st century get agitated about rewriting texts from the past or whatever, and they say it's Orwellian, because it kind of is, because that's precisely what Syme and his colleagues want to do.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Because it's also the things that are very familiar to you that are changing. It's like changing the texture of the ground on which you walk, the texture of your most familiar touchstones. But the thing is that Winston recognises that Syme being able to say this and point it out, like he sees too much, he's too perceptive and he speaks too plainly. And sure enough, later in the book, Syme ceases to exist. He had never existed.

• 57:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Syme's too honest about the project and so he has to go. And actually, that threat of cancellation, I mean, it sounds like a 21st century word, but this is absolutely the threat that hangs over Winston from the first page of the book. To quote, "Your name was removed from the registers. Every record of everything you'd ever done was wiped out. Your existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated, vaporised was the usual word." It's not just that you'll be killed. I mean, in a weird way, being killed is not so frightening. I mean, everybody dies. It's the fact that you would never have existed that is, I think, is so scary and gets under your skin.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  We said towards the beginning of the episode, this is a world of surveillance and there are informers everywhere, particularly children. You know, even your own children can't be trusted. And so it says, "They adored the party and everything connected with it. It was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children, which is deeply, deeply disturbing." And for instance, at one point, Winston sees Parsons' children playing at being spies and the son shouts, "You're a traitor, you're a thought criminal, you're a Eurasian spy, I'll shoot you, I'll vaporise you, I'll send you to the salt mines." Which obviously calls to mind the Hitler Youth.

• 58:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Hitler Youth, of course, but also, I mean, there's a real story from the Soviet Union, a guy called Pavlik Morozov. Orwell would have known about this story because it was very widely reported. Morozov was a 13-year-old boy who was said to have denounced his own father. And in nineteen thirty two, he was murdered by his other relatives. So Morozov became a hero in Stalin's Soviet Union. People said, this boy, this heroic boy, he denounced his father, who was a criminal, but then his relatives murdered him. And actually, historians now think this is pretty much a legend that was concocted by Stalinists, that Morozov, that insofar as he existed at all, the real story was completely different.

• 59:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  But yeah, so the Morozov thing absolutely hangs over the book because this guy Parsons that Winston works with, he ends up being denounced by his own seven year old daughter for thought crime. So it turns out that he was in his sleep, was muttering down with Big Brother. And she was listening at the keyhole and she reported him to the authorities. And when Parsons tells Winston about this, Parsons is actually still proud of her.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He says, you know, I was guilty. And I'm going to thank the tribunal when they convict me. You know, he's so indoctrinated.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  That he believes, as people appeared to in the Stalin show trials, that he is guilty and deserves to be punished.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  But he's also kind of looking around him like, did you hear that? Did you hear me say that I'm proud of her, that I think she did a great job?

• 1:00:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it's a really, really horrible bit. Anyway, we're slightly getting ahead of ourselves there because we need to get to the second third of the book now. And the character with whom Winston becomes involved, and this is Julia. And we first meet Julia at the Ministry of Truth, where Winston works. And Winston really isn't a big fan.

• 1:00:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, he's not at all.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  Not at all. He disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her because the atmosphere of hockey fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean mindedness, which he had managed to carry about with her. He disliked, you can definitely hear the echoes of Orwell there, you know, kind of earnest people who have weird hobbies. He disliked nearly all women and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women and above all, the young ones who were the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and noses out of unorthodoxy. And Winston is especially repelled by her membership of the junior anti-sex league. So.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  You know, you can see that sex is a big issue for Winston, or rather the not having it of women. And he heard one of his first assumptions is that she might be an agent of the thought police, and she well might be. But you can see from that reading that there's an, as I said, there's an aggressively sexual dimension to all this. So during the two-minute hate directed at this kind of Trotsky-esque figure, Emmanuel Goldstein, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face of the screen to the dark-haired girl behind him. Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  to go to bed with her and would never do so, because round her sweet, supple waist, which seemed to ask you to encircle it with your arm, there was only the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. So, I mean, that's, that's the sash of the junior anti-sex league. And so right there, I mean, that reading, it screams incel, you know, men that would hate women. It does though, men that would hate women and be violent because, I mean, fundamentally, they feel rejected by women. And again, I mean, people, this has led people to wonder whether this is Orwell subconscious, you know. Some biographers have even gone so far as to accuse him of being a predator, you know, or is this too

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  reductive? And equally, as we mentioned earlier, they've accused his vision in 1984 of being really, really misogynistic, very, very sexist, and Julia, the character herself, of being a caricature. So, I mean, to the first thing, was George Orwell a predator? No, I think that's massively reductive. He is voicing the thoughts of a character in a book. We've got to remember that. These aren't necessarily his thoughts. But it doesn't mean he ever acted on these things. You know, people have accused him of mistreating his wife and, and controlling her and being cruel, and I think he probably was all those things. But there's zero evidence to suggest that George Orwell was ever a predator in his

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  real life. And that's an important distinction to make. And ditto, his problematic representation of women in the novel is not the same as Being culpable to kind of personal sexual abuse, that's a massive, massive accusation. And you've got to be careful not to judge a character in his novel on the lines of kind of moral, the moral frameworks of today, and especially as well, this is something that's kind of blown up on social media in recent years, you know, cancelling George Orwell. I don't think that's fair either.

• 1:03:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  So there's a couple of things. So there's one is there were women who said later, I don't know, that he'd lunged at them or he'd made advances to them and whatnot, which I guess, you know, you never know the truth of these things. So this is going back to the 1930s or whatever. But then the cancelling him because Julia is too much of a caricature because she's because it seems that Orwell is endorsing Winstons, you know, he wants to tie her to a stake and fire arrows at her or whatever.

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  I think the main thing is, yeah, you can't just reduce him to a label on the basis of of that and the basis of the book. I still don't think he was a sexual predator in real life. I think he probably, yeah, he was had dodgy dealings with women for sure. By the standards of today, we wouldn't perceive his treatment of women as acceptable, particularly kind of this treatment of his wife. But I don't think you can, you should label him on the basis of 1984. But having said that, this is not all to say that I don't think his portrayal of Julia and general attitude to women in the book isn't sexist, because I do, I do think it's sexist. The women in 1984, you know, you heard it in the reading there, they're the least likely to resist. They are the most controllable, they're noisy,

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  they're nosey, they're bigoted. They are constantly stereotyped throughout the book and filtered through Winston's kind of hate-filled male gaze. And all the main female characters in the book are kind of female stereotypes and they serve as symbols rather than being kind of real people in and of themselves. So Catherine, as we said, is this frigid, frigid obedient wife. She's symbolic of party indoctrination. Then you have the prowl woman who sings outside Winston's window, and she's kind of the maternal figure and she's all about fertility and she has broad hips and she does domestic chores. And then you have Julia, who is, I think, a massive Of caricature. She is the sexually available maidenly youth, thoughtless, mindless rebellion.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  You know, there's nothing very cerebral about her. She's constantly defined in terms of her body and her young supple hips and whatever it is. Her rebellion is all about promiscuity. She's in it to further her own kind of sexual ends. She seems ignorant. She even falls asleep when Winston is kind of articulating the ideology of the party to her and he's reading from this book.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  And even O'Brien uses her as kind of a symbol to finally break Winston. She has no interior life and kind of no individuality. In two thousand and twenty three, Sandra Newman wrote a book called Julia, and in this she reframed the whole of nineteen eighty four, so that it's from her perspective. And in the book, Julia is thoughtful, she's complex, she has a deep understanding of the party. She sees the world from a female perspective, so the forced reproduction is terrifying. You know, women being punished differently to men is terrifying. So it's a much more Handmaid's Tale-esque vision of this world. And I think that's really, really interesting.

• 1:06:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  You can see The Handmaid's Tale, which we did an episode about when we were doing this within the aegis of the Rest is History Club. When we're doing these books, episodes, we did The Handmaid's Tale. And you can see that as a kind of female equivalent to nineteen eighty four, can't you? I mean, obviously the two books are very, very similar in the ways in which you see the world unfold through a single character who then rebels, but is not really, you know, rebels in a slightly cautious and half-hearted way, as June does in The Handmaid's Tale and as Winston does in nineteen eighty four. Just going back to what you were saying. You know, you were describing the women are all perceived in terms of, you know, their physicality or their relations with men. Julia has no interior life.

• 1:07:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, the way that Winston talks about her and other women is very, you know, he objectifies them, he despises them, all of these kinds of things. All of these things are completely true. I can't, you know, no one can can argue with any of those things. But there is a difference between the writer and the character. You might be, you might, I suppose the complexity of it is that we know that deep down that Orwell probably agrees with Winston. Like, or there's not much distance between author and protagonist, I wouldn't say.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  And we know how he treated women in his own life as well. I'm not saying that he was abusive, you know, sexually abusive or physically abusive. But, you know, he, he was quite cruel to his wife. I don't think he took it that seriously. I think he wanted her to kind of take care of him. He did mourn her deeply when she died. But I wonder how much of that was because he needed a kind of a carer.

• 1:08:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think he likes to be mothered. He likes women to mother him. That's why he's approaching all those women when Eileen dies, because basically he wants, and he would say to them, do you think you could look? His way of proposing, by the way, Tabby, when we were talking about how he would propose to you within moments of meeting you, but he would say to you, do you think you could take care of me? And I don't feel that that's.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  That's pathetic.

• 1:08:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, harsh.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  That's lost me so much respect. So anyway, yeah, I would, I would say that the 1984 is quite a sexist book. And I would say that there, that's one of many reasons why it probably wouldn't go down as well with women as men. But then the other thing is, take that out of it. I'm not sure their affair, Winston and Julia's affair, is entirely convincing. And C.S. Lewis thought this, didn't he?

• 1:09:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think C.S. Lewis did say he didn't believe in the affair between Julia and Winston. And actually, the thing is, it's purely, it's really purely physical. There's no meeting of minds or meeting of souls there. And when they do have this sort of transcendent moments, I mean, the most obvious one is when they go out to the country and they have this kind of rural idyll. Winston has this dream of a place called the Golden Country out in the countryside, which he associates, I think, with his mother. So he's, he has it first when he's just been thinking about his mother. And then he decides he'll take Julia out to the countryside and they're out there and the sun is shining and there's lovely leaves and trees and all this kind of thing. It's pure wish fulfillment, slightly chocolate box, countryside painting.

• 1:09:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and, you know, all his mates said of him, he would always have this ideal of an idyllic rural England to which he could escape, a kind of escape from the pressures of modernity and all this kind of thing. And he attributes this to Winston in the book. But is it real? You know, does it feel like a proper relationship and uh or is it just all a bit of a fantasy? It does feel to me like a bit of a fantasy, I think.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  But maybe that's partly the point, you know, of course, this isn't ever going to be a reality. I don't think either of them really believe it's going to be a reality. You know, it's like a, it's like a dream. It's like a daydream because there is this sense of inevitability that hangs over nineteen eighty four. They even have this refrain with this mantra that they say to each other, Julia and Winston, we are the dead. And this runs through the book because they know even in the middle of their kind of their rebellion, their affair, their moments of happiness, or whatever it is that you'd call it, that they are eventually going to be doomed. And so then they kind of throw it all to hell and they take this crucial step. They go to see O'Brien because they believe that he's connected to this mysterious brotherhood who are rebelling against the party. But

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  even then you get a massive sense of foreboding because when Winston first talks to O'Brien, he had a, he had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him. And this leads to kind of the terrifying, I guess, kind of climax of the book, which is the inevitable moment of arrest. And this is a terrifying scene. It's really, it's genuinely terrifying.

• 1:11:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So they've been at this flat that they're, that he's basically, he's taking this room above the antique shop, Mr. Charrington's antique shop. And it's a very sort of sleepy, lazy atmosphere. They've been in bed and he's reading this book that O'Brien has lent him, which is a kind of manifesto by the party's great enemy, the Trotsky of the party, Emmanuel Goldstein. And they say to each other, we are the dead, you know, which is their kind of mantra, that everything, you know, one day they're going to catch up with us. And then, "You are the dead," said an iron voice behind them. And you realise, somebody is watching them and is speaking to them. And then they're terrified. And then Mr. Charrington,

• 1:12:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  the guy from the antique shop, comes in and he is completely changed. He looks younger, his hair is different, his appearance is different, his face, previously benign, is alert and cold. And Winston realises that in looking on Mr. Charrington.

• 1:12:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's looking at a member of the thought police and that they have caught up with him.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we realised this along with him. We thought he was an ally, the reader, but no, you see, no one can be trusted. And then this takes us to the final third of the book, which is, it's grim reading, I would say, because this is Winston and the Ministry of Love and the mounting terror of the prospect of room 101.

• 1:12:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so they interrogate him, they beat him, they torture him. He confesses to loads of mad things that he hasn't done, to assassinations, to embezzlements. He confesses that he's been a spy for the East Asian government. He confesses that he was a religious believer and admirer of capitalism and a sexual pervert. He confesses to murdering his wife, even though both he and the interrogators know that his wife is still alive. And then, after all this, he has this confrontation, very, very celebrated scene with O'Brien. And O'Brien basically says to him, I want you. We're going to make you realise there is no such thing as the past and ever existed. And there is no such thing as reality, that reality exists in the human mind and nowhere

• 1:13:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  else. And the supreme symbol of this, of course, is some maths.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Even I can can see that this math doesn't make sense, because basically, O'Brien says to Winston that whatever the party holds to be truth is truth, i.e. reality is whatever the party decrees that it be. So what you think to be true is only true if the party believes so too, if the party has told you to believe it. And he kind of outlines the whole goal of this totalitarian project. And that is not to tell you that two plus two equals five. That's not me just being a dimwit, by the way. It's to make you believe it. So even though you know that two plus two equals four, I actually think this is the most affecting scene in the whole book. Because it's

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  so scary to have everything that you believe, everything that you think to be true, to be told that actually, no, it's subjective, it's not objective. So and it's not enough for you to tell yourself that you believe that two plus two equals five. The party's goal is to make you truly, truly believe it in the same way as maybe once you believed that two plus two equals four.

• 1:14:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  O'Brien's threat to Winston is absolutely terrifying. So he says, "Things will happen to you from which you could not recover. If you lived a thousand years, never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." So that's almost like, it's like, it's almost sexual. It's almost like raping his mind.

• 1:14:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Then I, I think these really, really haunting lines when O'Brien says to him, "You should stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Of course, this is what rebels and martyrs always think. You know, in the long run, I will be remembered and history will absolve me. Posterity will never hear of you. You'll be lifted clean out of the stream of history. You'll be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed." And again, I think that's so frightening. It's not that you won't exist. I mean, we all, when, once we reach, you know, a certain age, we reconcile ourselves to the fact that one day we won't exist. But the thought that we might never have existed, somehow I, I find that really kind of gets under my skin, the idea that you were never there and no one will ever know that you were there.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Brutally futile.

• 1:15:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And then O'Brien explains what the party's all about. And actually, again, the chilling thing with the party, it's not like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union or the Nazi Party in the Third Reich, which had ideals, however twisted they might have been. O'Brien says, "We have no ideals. Our only ideal is power. Power, the object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Power over human beings. We're interested not in power as a means to something else, not in money, not in happiness, not in long life, but only power, pure power. That's all that this is." And he goes on to say, "The progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.

• 1:16:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  We will destroy every emotion except hatred. We will destroy all love. We will cut all the relations between friends, between, you know, parents and child, between husband and wife and whatnot. There'll be no love except the love of Big Brother. There'll be no laughter. There'll be no art. There'll be no literature, no science." And then this great line, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever."

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so grim. I mean, and there's also something quite Tolkien about that, isn't there? I mean, you mentioned earlier a possible comparison, but you know, Tolkien and Orwell were both born only nine years apart, and they both had this kind of similar horror of modernity and and and authority. And you know, Winston's ideal of the party, as you said, is huge, terrible and glittering, a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons, a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching, again, the boot thing, forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans. I mean, that is so an army of orcs serving Saruman and Sauron, isn't it? You know, even think about the, you know, before the walls of Helm's Deep, and the trudge, trudge, trudge.

• 1:17:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  The huge, terrible and glittering, the modernity, all of that does feel very Tolkien. I think they're reacting against the same thing, which is modern totalitarian dictatorships and stuff, and power, the worship of power, obviously. But they have the same things that they like. I mean, they're such different characters, but they have the same sense of nostalgia, the love of ordinariness and smallness, the love of England and Englishness. There's a point where Winston says in 1984, "The obvious, the silly and the true have got to be defended." And that sounds like a kind of, kind of thing Gandalf might say to the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, the obvious and silly and true.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Anyway, away from hope and to the harsh cold reality of Winston Smith. So back to the Ministry of Love, and specifically now, we're finally here to Room 101. So, you know, he asks O'Brien, what's in it? And O'Brien says, "The worst thing in the world." So whatever a person most fears, you will find in Room 101. And for Winston Smith, this is rats. And I think for people who haven't even read 1984, don't even have a particularly good idea of what it's about, so many people know about the rat scene. Because it's Winston Smith's greatest fear, and this is foreshadowed earlier in the book, there's something terribly intimate and personal about it. Actually, interestingly, Orwell hated rats himself,

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  and it's a fixture in his writing. But basically, what this entails is strapping a metal mask to Winston's face, and there's a little door, and then on the other side are hungry rats. And if you lift up the door, the rats will.

• 1:19:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Eat your face, yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Eat your face, yeah. Yeah, and this is what finally breaks him, unsurprisingly. And the manifestation of his being broken is to say, do it to Julia, do it to Julia, tear her face off, strip her to the bones. So I, I mentioned earlier how O'Brien uses Julia to, as like, a representation of Winston's broken spirit. And there it is, you know, he turns entirely on the woman he purports to love. And then you have this very depressing final scene, don't you?

• 1:19:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  The final scene is in this chestnut tree cafe. He doodles on the, the dust on the table, two plus two equals five. You know, he's come to believe it. There's news on the telescreen, they've won a victory, a fake victory, obviously over Eurasia. And he looks up at the picture of Big Brother. And this, this, these very celebrated lines, he gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's tears going down, gin centred tears coming down Winston's face.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Brilliant detail.

• 1:20:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Uh, but it was all right. Everything was all right. The struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. And that's the end of the book? Big Brother has won. Well, actually has Big Brother won. So Fred Warburg, Orwell's publisher, said, it felt like a book written by somebody who had lost hope. Somebody on that island of Jura who's dying of tuberculosis, whose personal life has been very haunted by tragedy. And, you know, it's incredibly cold, it's pouring with rain, he's in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. No wonder he feels so miserable. But there could be a couple of flickers of hope. So one is that there's an appendix written that purports

• 1:20:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  to be written in the far future, looking back at the principles of Newspeak. So in other words, there is a world when the party and Big Brother are dead and gone. And that's a device that Margaret Atwood uses in The Handmaid's Tale, the same thing. There's an academic paper at the end of the book, which is a little kind of nod to 1984. But also, throughout the book, Winston has said again and again, if there is hope, it lies in the proles, i.e. the working class masses. They don't care about the party, they're just interested in football and gambling. They don't take any notice of the politics. And Winston basically says to Julia, That they are immortal. In the end, their awakening would come, which is the argument that Orwell had always made about the English people. He'd made it in The Lion

• 1:21:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  and the Unicorn, his great essay during the early years of the Second World War. He had said, one day, the ordinary people of England who are asleep, they will wake up. And when they wake up, they will discover their power and they will overthrow fascism, which of course they do in the Second World War. So I guess you could say, whether you find the book hopeful or not, it depends on whether you believe Winston and you believe Orwell, whether you and whether you believe in the English or the British people. So Tabby, the question for you, do you or do you actually hate Britain and you don't think they will ever wake up?

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Well, I think according to this this premise, then I guess I do hate Britain because I don't believe that. I don't think this is a book with hope. I think that's sort of unusually for Orwell. I think that's kind of vaguely patronizing, you know, to attribute a mass of people with kind of such basic attributes, you know, they like heavy physical work, the care of the home and children. It's so reductive. And also, in the vision of the future presented by O'Brien to Winston Smith when he's interrogating him, there is no possibility to think beyond the bounds of the party. And according to the the world

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  of 1984, like we have to accept that the party wins here. There's no alternative to their winning. So why should we believe that they won't win in the future? And also, this is a world that exiles pleasure, you know, so film, football, beer, that doesn't exist in the world of 1984. So what is it to keep the Prawls happy but bar love of party?

• 1:23:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you don't believe. See, the argument would be there are all these people who are not political at all, who are not interested, who don't care what's going on. They're just listening to what Winston describes as their terrible music, the sort of pop music that's produced for them. And one day, they will. Find their voices and they will rise up. But I guess if you believe what O'Brien's saying, he's saying we're going to create an environment in which that's never possible. Final question you asked at the beginning. So Tabby, do you think it's a period piece? Or do you think it's a warning for the 21st century?

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  I think it's both. I think it probably started as a period piece. And then as Orwell wrote it, kind of locked away in this little corner of the world in Scotland, living day and night with this terrible vision of the world, maybe increasingly came to seem like a vision of the future for him, like a prophecy. And he said, I read out what he wrote to his publisher about the final portion of the book. So I think it's both. What about you?

• 1:24:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I think the stuff that's dated is the stuff about communism and Stalin and whatnot. I don't think that quite has the resonance that it did.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I think the stuff about rewriting the past, changing language, erasing what doesn't seem convenient, cancelling people, you know, I mean, literally rewriting texts.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  So it's hard to read the stuff about where the sign is saying, we will rewrite Shakespeare and Byron so that they will say what we want them to say, and their meaning will be different. It's hard to read that now and not to think, I mean, I don't want this to turn into kind of a rant in Britain's best loved mid-market newspaper. However, you know, it's hard to read that and then think about people who are like, I don't know, they're doing rewriting Roald Dahl or all the sort of mad stuff they're doing.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that it says what we would like Roald Dahl to have said. I mean, that does feel, I hate to use the sort of jargon, but that does feel to me quite Orwellian. I mean, let stuff in the past say what people in the past wanted it to say. Don't change it for our own sensibilities. So I think if Orwell, I mean, no question, if Orwell was alive now, I mean, this is such a sort of columnist bingo.

• 1:25:24Speaker 02

  Hackneyed.

• 1:25:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. Thanks. It is hackneyed. But if he were alive now, he would be looking at that stuff and saying, this is insane, you know, and incredibly dangerous, you know, that you have to allow things to have their own independent existence and independent value. And you might not like them, but that's how they were. And you should respect that rather than try to to smooth and streamline everything so that it conforms to the dictates, the political dictates of your moment.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  I agree with that. And I think two other things slightly jumped out at me like. We live in an age of technology and AI. And whether you're on the internet or whatever, you're constantly being driven to look at something that something external is kind of driving you towards, whether that's ads or Instagram or whatever, you know, AI is famously obsequious. It tells you what you want to hear. So our curiosity is constantly being shaped by something else. And I think curiosity informs learning a lot of the time, you know, what we know and what interests us. But also, it is interesting and it's easy to forget that we actually, once upon a time, not that long ago, there was no such thing as my truth and your truth. There was truth and there was true and not true.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  And we do live in a world now, I think, where truth has become something that's slightly more subjective. To be hackneyed myself, there is something quite Orwellian about that, too.

• 1:26:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, brilliant that you've been the magnet, Sammy, after accusing me of-

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  I know, you pulled me down with you into the gutter. So what are we, using our very sophisticated rating system, what are we going to rate 1984 out of?

• 1:26:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  I thought about this and I thought what George Orwell would enjoy is if we rated it in metric litres of sour proletarian beer. I'm giving it 10 out of 10.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Seriously, wow.

• 1:27:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's a great book. It's an absolutely canonical book and it's a great read. I can see why some female readers say this is very much a man's book, but I mean, I am a man. It's the most influential political book of the last century, no question. It has absolutely shaped the way we think about politics and the way we think about some of the, you know, our anxieties, about surveillance, about control, about the way we view the past, about the way we use language. On top of that, it is a, it is a, it is a rollicking read. I mean, it's a scary read and a bleak read, but it's a real page turner. I think it's one of those books that really, if you haven't read it, you kind of should have read it. And actually, weirdly, if you haven't read it, you probably know about it already because it's so embedded in the imagination.

• 1:27:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I have to give it 10, really, and, and that's what it gets. And what are you going to give it? You're going to give it two?

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  I'm actually going to give it eight.

• 1:27:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ah, surprising.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  I'm going to have to deduct points for the fact that Julia is a female stereotype and that the vision of the book is often quite sexist. And I'm going to have to deduct a point for Orwell's sort of constantly asking women to marry him and being a bit handsy, which we don't accept on this show.

• 1:28:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're deducting a point for off-screen activities, that's poor.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to, I'm sorry, you have to. And also, I mean, and tied in with that is the fact that I didn't really enjoy reading it. But you can't overlook.

• 1:28:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  You're really selling it.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  I know, but, but, but having said all that, this is one of the great books, isn't it? I mean, the physicality of his language, this, the peeling walls of this world, the, all of that, it's just, I just think it's, it's superb. It's superb. I can't help but think this is a masterful and very important book.

• 1:28:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  An important book. That's the kind of thing that I thought we'd never end up saying on this show. This was a long podcast. This will surely be our longest ever. We'll have to discipline ourselves. And actually, the terrible thing is the version that you're hearing is massively cut down on that bombshell. Goodbye.

• 1:29:15Speaker 06

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