60 Fun Facts About Nineteen Eighty-Four

In which year was Nineteen Eighty-Four published?

It was Orwell's ninth and last completed book; he died seven months after it appeared.

What is the name of the novel's protagonist?

He is 39, a phlegmatic everyman in the Outer Party who has vague memories of the time before the Revolution.

What has Great Britain been renamed in the novel?

It is a province of one of three totalitarian superstates locked in perpetual war.

Which superstate does the protagonist live in?

The other two superstates alternate as its enemy; when the enemy switches mid-week the past is rewritten to say it was always so.

What is the name of the Party's ruling ideology?

It is a contraction of 'English Socialism', which Orwell saw as a perversion of the socialist ideals he actually held.

Where does the protagonist work, rewriting old newspaper records?

It is a 300-metre white concrete pyramid with over 3,000 rooms, modelled on London's Senate House where the wartime Ministry of Information sat.

Which government department, despite its name, actually runs the state's armed forces?

Its abbreviated name is Minipax; each ministry's name is the opposite of what it does, a deliberate exercise in doublethink.

What word completes the third Party slogan: 'WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS ...'?

The three slogans are cut into the outside wall of the white pyramid where the protagonist works.

What are the two-way devices that watch Party members in their homes called?

Middle-class members can turn them down but never off; only the Inner Party can switch theirs off entirely.

What are the ducts called into which inconvenient documents are dropped for burning?

They lead to a huge furnace, and Orwell based the practice on Soviet airbrushing of purged officials out of photographs.

What is the term for someone the Party has erased from all records after falling from favour?

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia once told subscribers to cut out the article on Beria and paste in extra pages on the Bering Sea instead.

Which shopkeeper sells the protagonist his diary and later rents him a room?

The kindly antiques dealer turns out to be an undercover Thought Police officer, and a telescreen is hidden behind a picture in the room.

What is the name of the young woman with whom the protagonist begins a secret affair?

She maintains the novel-writing machines at the ministry and publicly wears the sash of a fanatical Party youth organisation.

Which fanatical organisation does the protagonist's lover publicly belong to?

She enjoys small private rebellions but has no interest in overthrowing the regime.

What is the name of the protagonist's estranged wife?

They separated because they could not conceive; divorce is banned, and he regrets not pushing her over a quarry edge when he had the chance.

Which Inner Party official pretends to recruit the protagonist into the resistance?

He is really Thought Police, and later tells his prisoner that the Party seeks power purely for its own sake.

What is the name of the supposed underground resistance movement?

The protagonist is told he will never know whether it really exists.

Who is the reviled enemy of the state whose face is screened during the daily hate ritual?

With his small goatee beard he evokes Trotsky, and the film of him turning into a bleating sheep echoes a Soviet propaganda reel that turned Trotsky into a goat.

What is the title of the forbidden book supposedly written by the enemy of the state?

The protagonist is later told it was written collaboratively by the Party itself.

What is the daily ritual in which Party members scream at a film of the state's enemy?

Orwell modelled it on the short pep-talk rallies workers were given before shifts in the Stalinist period; the week-long version is Hate Week.

During Hate Week, the state's enemy abruptly switches from Eurasia to which power?

Orwell was thinking of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, after which criticism of Germany vanished from the Soviet press overnight.

What is the Party's artificial, shrinking language called?

Its aim is to make unorthodox thought literally unthinkable; the novel's appendix suggests it never fully caught on.

Which colleague of the protagonist is compiling a new edition of the Party's dictionary?

The protagonist predicts, correctly, that Syme is 'too intelligent' and will be vaporised.

Why is the poet Ampleforth arrested?

He could not find another rhyme for 'rod'; the protagonist meets him again in the cells.

Who denounces the loyal Party man Tom Parsons for talking against the Party in his sleep?

Both Parsons children belong to the Spies, a youth group that trains children to inform; even in prison Parsons says he could do 'good work' in a labour camp.

What is the name of the youth organisation the Parsons children belong to?

They fire catapults at grown-ups and dream of the day they can report their parents.

What is the protagonist's worst fear, used against him in the torture chamber?

A wire cage shaped to fit over the face is fitted to him, and he breaks by begging that it be done to his lover instead.

What is the number of the room that contains each prisoner's worst nightmare?

Orwell named it after a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House where he sat through tedious meetings.

Which real building was the architectural model for the protagonist's ministry building?

It housed the real Ministry of Information during the war; Orwell's wife Eileen worked there in the censorship department.

The Party's equation '2 + 2 = 5' was originally a slogan of which regime?

It urged workers to finish the second five-year plan in four years, and was displayed in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts.

Where does the freed protagonist spend his time in the closing pages?

He had once seen three broken-nosed traitors drinking there; a news flash of a triumph in Africa completes his surrender.

Under what brand name are the Party's oily gin and loosely packed cigarettes sold?

The name parodies the low-quality Indian-made Victory cigarettes British soldiers smoked in the Second World War.

What was the novel's early working title, which Orwell dropped shortly before finishing?

His publisher Fredric Warburg pushed for the year as the title; early drafts had tried 1980 and 1982 first.

Which British publisher issued the novel in June 1949?

Orwell rejected their proposed blurb calling it 'a thriller mixed up with a love story'.

Which American organisation's offer did Orwell refuse because it wanted to cut the appendix and Goldstein's treatise?

His publisher reckoned the refusal cost about £40,000 in sales; the American edition then broke through anyway.

Which 1924 Russian dystopian novel did Orwell read in 1944 that spurred him to write his own?

Gleb Struve introduced him to Zamyatin's book; Orwell reviewed it in 1946 and noted its similarities to Brave New World.

Which 1943 Allied summit did Orwell cite as the spark for a book on dividing the world into zones?

He also toured Austria in 1945 and saw the manoeuvring that would produce separate Soviet and Allied occupation zones.

What illness was Orwell diagnosed with after finishing the first draft in November 1947?

He retyped the whole second draft himself at 4,000 words a day through fevers and coughing fits, because nobody else could read his manuscript.

Roughly how many words a day did a feverish Orwell retype when no typist could be found?

He sent the finished manuscript off on 4 December 1948 and left the island for good a month later.

What did Orwell's widow sell the only surviving manuscript for at a 1952 charity auction?

It is the only literary manuscript of Orwell's known to survive and now sits in a university library in Rhode Island.

Which American institution holds the only surviving manuscript?

The John Hay Library in Providence, Rhode Island acquired it after the 1952 auction.

Which actor played the protagonist in the 1984 film adaptation?

The film was shot in and around London in April-June 1984, the very weeks in which the novel is set.

Which actor gave his final screen performance as the Inner Party interrogator in the 1984 film?

The disused Battersea Power Station stood in for the facade of the protagonist's block of flats.

Which future Hammer horror star played the protagonist in the BBC's 1954 television version?

Seven million watched Nigel Kneale's adaptation, which The Telegraph called British TV's first watercooler moment.

Which David Bowie album is thought to be loosely based on the novel?

Bowie had wanted to stage a musical of the book, but Orwell's widow refused the rights, so the songs went on the album instead.

Which company's Super Bowl commercial in January 1984 promised that '1984 won't be like 1984'?

Ridley Scott directed the ad launching the Macintosh; the Orwell estate sent a cease-and-desist letter and it never aired again.

Which band's 2003 single '2 + 2 = 5' takes its title from the novel?

Thom Yorke said the album Hail to the Thief grew out of Orwellian euphemisms he jotted down while listening to Radio 4.

Sales of the novel jumped in 2017 after which phrase was used by a White House adviser?

The book had already surged sevenfold in a week after the 2013 revelations about NSA surveillance.

What was the first print run of the British edition in June 1949?

Orwell expected to earn about £500 from it; by 1970 the book had sold over eight million copies in the United States alone.

Which world-famous reality TV format takes its name from the novel's all-seeing leader?

Contestants live isolated in a house under constant camera surveillance, an idea the novel treats as a nightmare rather than entertainment.

The song 'I sold you, and you sold me' in the novel adapts an old English song recorded in 1939 by which bandleader?

It was a 1920s camp song with actions: touching your chest on 'chest' and your head on 'nut'.

Where did the novel place in the BBC's 2003 Big Read survey?

It also made Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923 and the Modern Library's top 100.

Which New Statesman critic said he had never read 'a novel more frightening and depressing'?

C. S. Lewis, by contrast, thought the love affair lacked credibility and the setting was 'odious rather than tragic'.

On what date does the story open, according to the first diary entry?

The protagonist himself is not sure the date is right, since the Party controls all records of time.

What did the novel's language borrow from British wartime bureaucratic abbreviations such as 'Miniform'?

Orwell also drew on the Soviet press, whose ideological phrasing was built so that public statements could not be questioned.

On which Scottish island did Orwell draft and finish the novel, at a farmhouse called Barnhill?

David Astor recommended the remote house, which had no electricity or hot water, after Orwell arrived in May 1946.

Which author wrote to Orwell in 1949 arguing rulers would control people through pleasure, not force?

He was defending the softer dystopia of his own Brave New World, published 17 years earlier.

Until which year was the novel banned in the Soviet Union?

A secret Russian edition had been printed for senior Communist Party officers as early as 1959.

Which film star featured in the one-hour NBC radio adaptation aired in 1949?

It was part of the NBC University Theatre series; the first TV version followed on CBS's Studio One in 1953.

The telescreen slogan 'Our new, happy life' evokes a 1935 statement by which leader?

His line that life had become 'better' and 'more cheerful' was turned into an official Communist Party slogan.