39 true-not-alternative facts about George Orwell's 1984
| Posted: September 6, 2019 6:13 PM | Last Updated: September 6, 2019
George Orwell's 1984 was a critical and commercial hit when it was first published 70 years ago. Its depiction of a corrupt society — where a person's every move is monitored and the news is rewritten to suit those in power — remains terrifyingly relevant to the world today.
British author and journalist Dorian Lynskey explores this influential text, and the man who wrote it, in his new book The Ministry of Truth. He will be interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio's Writers & Company on Sunday (Sept. 8) as the new season premieres.
Below, we've gathered some interesting facts about 1984 from Lynskey's book and few other online sources.
1. George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in India.
2. At Eton College — a boys' private school Orwell attended on a full scholarship from 1917-1921 — Orwell was taught briefly by Aldous Huxley. About a decade later, Huxley published the classic sci-fi novel Brave New World.
3. Orwell's first published work was a short story in Eton College's magazine called A Peep into the Future, inspired by the fiction of H. G. Wells.
4. Orwell didn't begin writing seriously until he was nearly 30.
5. The pseudonym George Orwell appeared when he published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1934.
6. The name Orwell was taken from the River Orwell in Suffolk.
7. Kenneth Miles, P.S. Burton and H. Lewis Allways were other pen names Orwell considered adopting.
8. Orwell never officially changed his name. His gravestone in Oxfordshire, England has the words, "Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair."
9. From 1941-1943, with Britain at war, Orwell worked for BBC Radio as an "Empire Talks Assistant," part of the Indian Section of the BBC's Eastern Service. Apparently, Orwell's voice was so unpleasant to listen to, no recordings exist today.
10. Orwell's supervisor at the BBC was Guy Burgess, who was part of the Soviet spy ring known as the Cambridge Five.
11. During the Second World War, Orwell and his wife Eileen were almost killed in the final hours of The Blitz.
12. Orwell was the first person to use the term "Cold War" — initially in the early months of the Second World War, and again in 1945, in his essay, You and the Atomic Bomb.
13. Animal Farm, published in 1945, was a break out book for Orwell, who was not well-known internationally at the time. Animal Farm was a sensation in the United States and spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
14. Animal Farm was initially rejected by many publishers. Orwell considered self-publishing it, until Secker & Warburg stepped in.
15. Orwell's life was transformed by the unexpected success of Animal Farm. The financial freedom allowed him to write 1984.
16. Orwell wrote the manuscript for 1984 over a span of about 18 months — June 1947 to December 1948 — on the island of Jura, in the Scottish Hebrides, between periods of hospitalization for tuberculosis.
17. When a typist could not be found to execute the final draft, Orwell typed it himself at a rate of about 4,000 words per day, seven days a week. Friends and relatives have suggested that he jeopardized his health for the sake of completing the novel.
18. The title is often thought to be an inversion of 1948 (the year Orwell finished writing the manuscript), but there is no evidence to support this. The outline for the novel features other dates, including 1980 and 1982. In the outline, the title of the novel was The Last Man in Europe.
19. When George Orwell's novel 1984 was published in June 1949, the book was an immediate success. It sold more than a quarter of a million copies in the U.K. and the U.S. in the first six months. In the U.S., the novel remained on the the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks and, in its first five years, went on to sell 170,000 in hardback, 190,000 through Book-of-the-Month Club, 596,000 in a Reader's Digest Condensed Books edition and 1.2 million as a New American Library paperback.
20. The first film version of 1984 was released in 1956, made with funding from the U.S. government (United States Information Agency). It was intended to be "the most devastating anti-Communist film of all time." It was directed by Michael Anderson with an adapted screenplay by William Templeton. They shot two different endings — one for the American audience that was more loyal to the novel and an alternative ending for the British audience.
21. But the very first adaptation of 1984 was the 1949 radio drama produced by NBC University Theater, starring David Niven. It aired on August 27, 1949, just months after the publication of the novel (June 8, 1949) and before the death of George Orwell (Jan. 21, 1950).
22. In 1954, the BBC produced a teleplay adaptation of 1984, starring Peter Cushing, which was watched by more than 7 million people. Hundreds complained to the BBC about violence and sexuality.
23. One of the hallmarks of 1984 is its wordplay — Orwell's inventive neologisms that have passed into everyday use. They started appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1950, beginning with "Newspeak," and followed by "Big Brother" and "doublethink" in 1953 and "Thoughtcrime and "unperson" in 1954.
24. In the early 1970s, Bowie planned to produce a rock musical adaptation of 1984. However Sonia Orwell (Bromnell), Orwell's widow and co-executor of his estate, refused permission for the rock musical.
25. Bowie ended up turning his eighth studio album, initially titled We Are the Dead, into a concept album to make use of the songs he'd already written for the musical. Diamond Dogs was released in 1974 and includes the songs 1984, We Are the Dead, Big Brother and Rebel Rebel.
26. But Bowie is far from the only musician to take inspiration from 1984. An entire musical subgenre known as "Orwave" has formed around the novel and includes artists like John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine.
27. The term "Orwellian" was coined by the American novelist and critic Mary McCarthy in a 1950 essay about Flair magazine: "[Flair] is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contest of point of view beyond its proclamation of itself."
28. In the year 1984, Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was 39 years old — the same age as Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984.
29. There was a surge in sales for 1984 between 1983 and 1984. It sold 4 million copies in 62 languages.
30. Apple's big-budget TV ad for the very first MacIntosh computer was directed by Ridley Scott and aired during the 1984 Super Bowl to 96 million Americans. The concept was based on 1984, starring discus thrower Anya Major and David Graham as Big Brother. It immediately became a news story, and was the first Super Bowl ad to get people talking about a commercial instead of the game.
31. American Democrats and Republicans both cited 1984 in their fundraising letter during the 1984 presidential election campaign. The leaders of Britain's three main political parties all mentioned the book in their New Year's Eve messages.
32. A film adaptation of 1984 was released in 1984. Directed by Michael Radford, the film stars John Hurt as Winston Smith, Suzanna Hamilton as Julia and Richard Burton as the character O'Brien. Richard Burton came out of retirement to play the role; it was his final performance before his death of a stroke in August 1984. Apparently, Burton found the lines of O'Brien — the authoritative Party member who tortures Winston — to be "unnervingly seductive…"
33. Orwell's 1984 was influenced by the Russian dissident and author Yevgeny Zamyatin. Critics have drawn parallels between 1984 and Zamyatin's novel We written in the early 1920s.
34. In the spring of 1984, Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin. As a teenager, she was interested in dystopias and WWII, and identified with Winston Smith, the central character in 1984. The appendix in The Handmaid's Tale is a reference to 1984, as is Offred's diary.
35. During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, a meme was shared on social media that attributed a quotation to Orwell: "The people will believe what the media tells them they believe — George Orwell." Orwell never wrote or said these words. The quotation was fabricated by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian media company.
36. When U.S. President Donald Trump's adviser Kellyanne Conway first used the phrase "alternative facts" on January 22, 2017, U.S. sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent.
37. When 1984 was first published, it was compared to an earthquake, a bundle of dynamite and the label on a bottle of poison.
38. A few prominent reviews include E. M. Forster, who said it was "too terrible a novel to be read straight through," Arthur Koestler, who called it "a glorious book," Aldous Huxley who described it as "profoundly important," Margaret Storm Jameson, who referred to it as "the novel which should stand for our age," and, finally, Lawrence Durrell, who observed that "reading it in a Communist country is really an experience because one can see it all around one."
39. Despite the positive reviews, Orwell felt 1984 was largely misinterpreted by readers and critics. He released two statements about the novel's message from his hospital bed, making clear that it was not an attack on socialism or on the British Labour Party (which he supported), but a warning that "totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."