Nineteen
Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its
futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book
offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a
totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find
individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of
modern life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the
language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version of
hell. Required reading for students since it was published, it ranks
among the most terrifying novels ever written.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Winston looked
round the shabby little room above Mr Charrington's shop. Beside the window the
enormous bed was made up, with ragged blankets and a coverless bolster. The
old-fashioned clock with the twelve-hour face was ticking away on the
mantelpiece. In the corner, on the gateleg table, the glass paperweight which
he had bought on his last visit gleamed softly out of the half-darkness.
In
the fender was a battered tin oilstove, a saucepan, and two cups, provided by
Mr Charrington. Winston lit the burner and set a pan of water to boil. He had
brought an envelope full of Victory Coffee and some saccharine tablets. The
clock's hands said seventeen-twenty: it was nineteen-twenty really. She was
coming at nineteen-thirty.
Folly,
folly, his heart kept saying: conscious, gratuitous, suicidal folly. Of all the
crimes that a Party member could commit, this one was the least possible to
conceal. Actually the idea had first floated into his head in the form of a
vision, of the glass paperweight mirrored by the surface of the gateleg table. As
he had foreseen, Mr Charrington had made no difficulty about letting the room.
He was obviously glad of the few dollars that it would bring him. Nor did he
seem shocked or become offensively knowing when it was made clear that Winston
wanted the room for the purpose of a love-affair. Instead he looked into the
middle distance and spoke in generalities, with so delicate an air as to give
the impression that he had become partly invisible. Privacy, he said, was a
very valuable thing. Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone
occasionally. And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in
anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself. He even, seeming
almost to fade out of existence as he did so, added that there were two entries
to the house, one of them through the back yard, which gave on an alley.
Under
the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection
of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the
sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with
brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping
to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square
white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever her mouth
was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:
It
was only an 'opeless fancy.
It
passed like an Ipril dye,
But
a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
They
'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
The
tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar
songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music
Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human
intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman
sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant
sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the
flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the
far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent,
thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Folly,
folly, folly! he thought again. It was inconceivable that they could frequent
this place for more than a few weeks without being caught. But the temptation
of having a hiding-place that was truly their own, indoors and near at hand,
had been too much for both of them. For some time after their visit to the
church belfry it had been impossible to arrange meetings. Working hours had
been drastically increased in anticipation of Hate Week. It was more than a
month distant, but the enormous, complex preparations that it entailed were
throwing extra work on to everybody. Finally both of them managed to secure a
free afternoon on the same day. They had agreed to go back to the clearing in
the wood. On the evening beforehand they met briefly in the street. As usual,
Winston hardly looked at Julia as they drifted towards one another in the
crowd, but from the short glance he gave her it seemed to him that she was
paler than usual.
'It's
all off,' she murmured as soon as she judged it safe to speak. 'Tomorrow, I
mean.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow
afternoon. I can't come.'
'Why
not?'
'Oh,
the usual reason. It's started early this time.'
For
a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the
nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been
little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of
the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair,
the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him,
or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something
that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she
could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this
moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met. She
gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire
but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular
disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such
as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that
they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were
walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and
without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the
household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be
alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.
It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that
the idea of renting Mr Charrington's room had occurred to him. When he
suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them
knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping
nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought
again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that
predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed
in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not
avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and
again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it
happened.
At
this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room.
She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes
seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in
his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was
still holding the tool-bag.
'Half
a second,' she said. 'Just let me show you what I've brought. Did you bring
some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away
again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here.'
She
fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a
screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat
paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and
yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like
stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.
'It
isn't sugar?' he said.
'Real
sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread proper white bread,
not our bloody stuff — and a little pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk — but
look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round
it, because-'
But
she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already
filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his
early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing
down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a
crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.
'It's
coffee,' he murmured, 'real coffee.'
'It's
Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here, she said.
'How
did you manage to get hold of all these things?'
'It's
all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing. But of
course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and — look, I got a little
packet of tea as well.'
Winston
had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.
'It's
real tea. Not blackberry leaves.'
'There's
been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or something,' she
said vaguely. 'But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three
minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window.
And don't turn round till I tell you.'
Winston
gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed
woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took
two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:
They
sye that time 'eals all things,
They
sye you can always forget;
But
the smiles an' the tears across the years
They
twist my 'eart-strings yet!
She
knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward
with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy
melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if
the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to
remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It
struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party
singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox,
a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when
people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing
about.
'You
can turn round now,' said Julia.
He
turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had
actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The
transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had
painted her face.
She
must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself
a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks
rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes
to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards
in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of
the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was
startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become
not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair
and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a
wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half-darkness
of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same
scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.
'Scent
too!' he said.
'Yes,
dear, scent too. And do you know what I'm going to do next? I'm going to get
hold of a real woman's frock from somewhere and wear it instead of these bloody
trousers. I'll wear silk stockings and high-heeled shoes! In this room I'm
going to be a woman, not a Party comrade.'
They
flung their clothes off and climbed into the huge mahogany bed. It was the
first time that he had stripped himself naked in her presence. Until now he had
been too much ashamed of his pale and meagre body, with the varicose veins
standing out on his calves and the discoloured patch over his ankle. There were
no sheets, but the blanket they lay on was threadbare and smooth, and the size
and springiness of the bed astonished both of them. 'It's sure to be full of
bugs, but who cares?' said Julia. One never saw a double bed nowadays, except
in the homes of the proles. Winston had occasionally slept in one in his
boyhood: Julia had never been in one before, so far as she could remember.
Presently
they fell asleep for a little while. When Winston woke up the hands of the
clock had crept round to nearly nine. He did not stir, because Julia was
sleeping with her head in the crook of his arm. Most of her make-up had
transferred itself to his own face or the bolster, but a light stain of rouge
still brought out the beauty of her cheekbone. A yellow ray from the sinking
sun fell across the foot of the bed and lighted up the fireplace, where the
water in the pan was boiling fast. Down in the yard the woman had stopped
singing, but the faint shouts of children floated in from the street. He
wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience
to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman
with no clothes on, making love when
they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up,
simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could
never have been a time when that seemed ordinary? Julia woke up, rubbed her
eyes, and raised herself on her elbow to look at the oilstove.
'Half
that water's boiled away,' she said. 'I'll get up and make some coffee in
another moment. We've got an hour. What time do they cut the lights off at your
flats?'
'Twenty-three
thirty.'
'It's
twenty-three at the hostel. But you have to get in earlier than that, because —
Hi! Get out, you filthy brute!'
She
suddenly twisted herself over in the bed, seized a shoe from the floor, and
sent it hurtling into the corner with a boyish jerk of her arm, exactly as he
had seen her fling the dictionary at Goldstein, that morning during the Two
Minutes Hate.
'What
was it?' he said in surprise.
'A
rat. I saw him stick his beastly nose out of the wainscoting. There's a hole
down there. I gave him a good fright, anyway.'
'Rats!'
murmured Winston. 'In this room!'
'They're
all over the place,' said Julia indifferently as she lay down again. 'We've
even got them in the kitchen at the hostel. Some parts of London are swarming
with them. Did you know they attack children? Yes, they do. In some of these
streets a woman daren't leave a baby alone for two minutes. It's the great huge
brown ones that do it. And the nasty thing is that the brutes always-'
'Don't
go on!' said Winston, with his eyes tightly shut.
'Dearest!
You've gone quite pale. What's the matter? Do they make you feel sick?'
'Of
all horrors in the world — a rat!'
She
pressed herself against him and wound her limbs round him, as though to
reassure him with the warmth of her body. He did not reopen his eyes
immediately. For several moments he had had the feeling of being back in a
nightmare which had recurred from time to time throughout his life. It was always
very much the same. He was standing in front of a wall of darkness, and on the
other side of it there was something unendurable, something too dreadful to be
faced. In the dream his deepest feeling was always one of self-deception,
because he did in fact know what was behind the wall of darkness. With a deadly
effort, like wrenching a piece out of his own brain, he could even have dragged
the thing into the open. He always woke up without discovering what it was: but
somehow it was connected with what Julia had been saying when he cut her short.
'I'm
sorry,' he said, 'it's nothing. I don't like rats, that's all.'
'Don't
worry, dear, we're not going to have the filthy brutes in here. I'll stuff the
hole with a bit of sacking before we go. And next time we come here I'll bring
some plaster and bung it up properly.'
Already
the black instant of panic was half-forgotten. Feeling slightly ashamed of
himself, he sat up against the bedhead. Julia got out of bed, pulled on her
overalls, and made the coffee. The smell that rose from the saucepan was so
powerful and exciting that they shut the window lest anybody outside should
notice it and become inquisitive. What was even better than the taste of the
coffee was the silky texture given to it by the sugar, a thing Winston had
almost forgotten after
years of saccharine. With one hand in her pocket and a piece of bread and jam
in the other, Julia wandered about the room, glancing indifferently at the
bookcase, pointing out the best way of repairing the gateleg table, plumping
herself down in the ragged arm-chair to see if it was comfortable, and
examining the absurd twelve-hour clock with a sort of tolerant amusement. She
brought the glass paperweight over to the bed to have a look at it in a better
light. He took it out of her hand, fascinated, as always, by the soft,
rainwatery appearance of the glass.
'What
is it, do you think?' said Julia.
'I
don't think it's anything-I mean, I don't think it was ever put to any use.
That's what I like about it. It's a little chunk of history that they've
forgotten to alter. It's a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to
read it.'
'And
that picture over there' — she nodded at the engraving on the opposite
wall-'would that be a hundred years old?'
'More.
Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of
anything nowadays.'
She
went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,' she
said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. 'What is this
place? I've seen it before somewhere.'
'It's
a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement Danes its name was.' The
fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head,
and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St
Clement's!"
To
his astonishment she capped the line:
'You
owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When
will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey — '
'I
can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up,
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off
your head!"
It
was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after
'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's
memory, if he were suitably prompted.
'Who
taught you that?' he said.
'My
grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized
when I was eight — at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she
added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit
with a thick skin.'
'I
can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the fifties.
They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.'
'I
bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it down and give
it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were leaving. I must
start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face
afterwards.'
Winston
did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over
towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly
interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass
itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as
air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky,
enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he
could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany
bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the
paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was
Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the
crystal.
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