1984
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1984
By George Orwell
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1984�
Part One
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Chapter 1
It was a
ight cold day in April, and the clocks were strik-ing thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his
east 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 enter-
ing along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled ca
age and old rag mats. At
one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display,
had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enor-
mous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of
about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and rugged-
ly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was
no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was sel-
dom working, and at present the electric cu
ent 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.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of fig-
19844
ures which had something to do with the production of
pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like
a dulled mi
or which formed part of the surface of the
ight-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice
sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguish-
able. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be
dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off complete-
ly. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,
the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue
overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was
very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by
coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the win-
ter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world
looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were
whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the
sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed
to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were
plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed
down from every commanding corner. There was one on
the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS
WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes
looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level an-
other poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind,
alternately covering and uncovering the single word IN-
GSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down
etween the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle,
and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the po-
lice patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did
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not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was
still ba
ling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment
of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and
transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by
it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vi-
sion which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen
as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing
whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable
that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You
had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard,
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.
A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work,
towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This,
he thought with a sort of vague distaste—this was London,
chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous
of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some
childhood memory that should tell him whether London
had always been quite like this. Were there always these vis-
tas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored
up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with card-
oard and their roofs with co
ugated iron, their crazy
1984�
garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed
sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the wil-
low-he
straggled over the heaps of ru
le; and the places
where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chick-
en-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:
nothing remained of his childhood except a series of
ight-
lit tableaux occu
ing against no background and mostly
unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak [New-
speak was the official language of Oceania. For an account
of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]—was star-
tlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an
enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white con-
crete, soaring up, te
ace after te
ace, 300 metres into the
air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read,
picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three
slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three
thousand rooms above ground level, and co
esponding
amifications below. Scattered about London there were
just three other buildings of similar appearance and size.
So completely did they dwarf the su
ounding architec-
ture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see
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all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of
the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which
concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and
the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself
with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and
order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible
for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue,
Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one.
There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been
inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it.
It was a place impossible to enter except on official business,
and then only by penetrating through a maze of ba
ed-
wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun
nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer ba
iers were
oamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed
with jointed truncheons.
Winston turned round a
uptly. He had set his features
into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advis-
able to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the
oom into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this
time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and
he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except
a hunk of dark-coloured
ead which had got to be saved
for tomo
ow’s
eakfast. He took down from the shelf a
ottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked
VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese
ice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved
19848
himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medi-
cine.
Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out
of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in
swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back
of the head with a ru
er club. The next moment, however,
the burning in his belly died down and the world began to
look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled
packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously
held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the
floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back
to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood
to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took
out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized
lank book with a red back and a ma
led cover.
For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in
an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal,
in the end wall, where it could command the whole room,
it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side
of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now
sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably
een intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove,
and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside
the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could
e heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present
position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual ge-
ography of the