Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: the bedtime book that gave us Big Brother and Newspeak

Let’s be honest up front: this is not a cozy bedtime book. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the darkest and the most important novel on our list, and you shouldn’t read it in one gulp before sleep. But everyone should read it — because half the words we use today to describe power and surveillance came from here: ‘Big Brother is watching you’, ‘Newspeak’, ‘thoughtcrime’, ‘doublethink’. Orwell wrote a dystopia about a future London and described a mechanism that is recognisable in far too much. One chapter an evening — and you’ll have plenty to think about.

An extract

One of the most famous openings in literature:

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“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

One line, and you know the world is out of joint: the clocks strike thirteen, the time is wrong. And on the face of the Ministry of Truth are carved the Party’s three slogans: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In the UK the text is in the public domain. The full English text is free online (link below).

Why it is worth reading tonight

Because it is a book not about the future but about language and truth: about rewriting the past, narrowing the dictionary so that forbidden thoughts can’t be thought, and how two plus two becomes five when ordered. It reads heavily and quickly at once — not for entertainment but as an inoculation. Start with the first chapter, where the hero begins a forbidden diary; if it grips you, you won’t stop.

About the author

George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950). Much of the novel grew out of his own London life: in 1941–1943 he worked at the BBC, and the torture ‘Room 101’ is widely said to be named after a real conference room where Orwell sat through dull meetings. The model for the Ministry of Truth is said to be Senate House of the University of London. Orwell finished the novel while gravely ill, on the Scottish island of Jura; it was published in June 1949, a few months before his death.

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Where to go

The whole route is in central London and free.

Senate House (Malet Street, Bloomsbury) — the huge white 1930s building said to be the model for the Ministry of Truth. Free to view from outside.

The Orwell statue at the BBC. Outside Broadcasting House (Portland Place), a bronze Orwell by Martin Jennings was unveiled in 2017. On the wall behind it are his words: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” It is a public pavement, free to see any time.

Canonbury Square, Islington. At No. 27b a blue plaque marks where Orwell lived in the late 1940s.

Where to get it

Free and legal. In the UK the novel is in the public domain; the full English text is freely available online. To find it in a library near you, use the Library Hub Discover catalogue. Links below.

To buy. An English edition is in every bookshop in Britain. For a Russian translation (there are several) try the Russian-language bookshops — Notre Locus. Check stock and price on the shop’s own site.