ABSTRACT

Few books have had a greater public impact on their readers than Nineteen Eighty Four. When Frederick Warburg read it before publication, he wrote: ‘This is amongst the most terrifying books I have ever read. The savagery of Swift has passed to a successor who looks upon life and finds it becoming even more intolerable . . . It is a great book, but I pray I may be spared from reading another like it for years to come.’1 The second publisher’s reader, David Farrer, agreed: ‘In emotive power and craftsmanship this novel towers above the average. Orwell has done what Wells never did, created a fantasy world which yet is horribly real so that you mind what happens to the characters which inhabit it.’2 Warburg’s report was a long one, yet he admitted that it gave no sense of the ‘giant movement of thought’ that he believed Orwell had set in motion. Nineteen Eighty Four has generated a vast amount of critical comment, so varied in its nature that it becomes necessary to start with Orwell’s categorical statement about the book’s intention. ‘My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack upon socialism, or on the British Labor (sic) party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism.’3