19841984198419841984198419841984
1984
George Orwell
1949
Chapter 1
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 to 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 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 s everal 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 figures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank s ome what, though
the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was
called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. 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 winter 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
black-moustachio’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 streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the
wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far
distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant
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like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police
patrol, sno oping into people’s windows. The patrols did not m atter, however.
Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The tele-
screen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, s o long
as he remained within the field of vision which the me tal 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 vas t 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 s queeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether
London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of
rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber,
their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron,
their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where
the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of
rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no
use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series
of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak* — was startlingly different
from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of
glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the
air. From where Winston stood it was just p oss ible 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 corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London
there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So com-
pletely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory
Mansions you could see 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, entertain-
ment, 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
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