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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
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- [01:37]
Jack Wilson
Hello. We begin with a quote. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always do not forget this, Winston. Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. End quote. That's from part three, chapter three of George Orwell's classic novel 1984. The word forever is what haunts. It's an Orwellian touch, a bit of precision that feels like something tacked on, stuck behind the em dash, like a single word on an index card attached to a bulletin board with a push pin. But when you analyze the sentence, you see how carefully it's been chosen and how finely calibrated is the effect. One of Orwell's friends, a poet, said of the early Orwell that he wrote like a cow with a musket. But through dogged determination, Orwell became a master of English prose, careful and measured, occasionally clunky, but always serviceable to his insights. These insights are what's key. He has a solid claim at being the most important and influential political writer of the 20th century. His dystopian works, Animal Farm in 1984, are still widely read in high schools and homes. And 1984, written while Orwell was dying, has landed on our list of the greatest books of all time. We'll have the story of that novel today on the history of literature.
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Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. The Forever is what haunts. Imagine a boot stamping on a human face. That's a vivid conception of the future. Or a dystopic version of the future. Now imagine that boot doing that to that face forever. There's a big difference between you'll go through a little suffering and you'll never know happiness again. Or the happiness you'll know will be that of the bully, the victor triumphing over enemies. The cruelty. That's the stunning, unrelenting vision of 1984. I'm reminded of Paul McCartney saying that while John Lennon seemed to embrace mind altering drugs, eager to experience something new and different, he himself always worried, what if you don't come back? What if you're changed forever? That's Orwell's vision too. We take so much for granted that we can go where we please and think what we want. And we're not under tight control. Our children are not spying on us and we reporting us to the authorities. We have choices. We can separate truth from propaganda. What if all that is gone? What if it's no longer available to us?
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Wouldn't take too long, would it? A few generations and suddenly everything we know now is just a memory. We've gone to the other side, like Paul feared, and we don't come back.
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What happens when governments. Because clearly governments want to take this away, don't they? They want control as much as plants want sunlight and animals want to procreate and capitalists want to generate wealth. It's far more common for a government to want to control the people than one that wants to set limits on itself. What happens if these people in power ultimately succeed at doing what they want, what they most deeply, ardently want, which is to control.
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In a way that seems nightmarish, but actually has actually been put in place, or nearly so, throughout history. Societies are full of people who have exerted this kind of control over others. Sometimes for a brief period, sometimes not so brief. What happens if that happens again? What if that will be the rest of your life and you don't see any way out? It'll be your children's life and your grandchildren's until the world you've always loved is a memory so faded no one believes it. All the instincts we value, kindness and cooperation and selfless action. What if those are just gone, no longer valued, replaced by the frenzy of hate and violence, the thrill of the communal mob, the all too human instinct to oppress and kill. Maybe this is consistent with your view now, depending on where you live and what you think of the present and the future. Aldous Huxley, himself a writer of the dystopian novel Brave New world, published in 1932, read Orwell's novel and wrote him a letter. He said that in his view, Huxley's view, he thought the oppressors would use pleasure as a means of control. He said whether in actual fact the policy of the boot on the face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power. And these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. End quote. What was in Brave New World? Well, giving people drugs, hypnotizing them, making people love their servitude, thinking it's a good deal to accept it. I get all this good stuff. I like being drugged. I like being. I like the pleasure this place is giving me. I'm willing to give up all of my individuality in favor of this pleasure. According to Huxley, that would be a lot more efficient for the government than the government clamping down on them and ruling through fear or, as he put it, flogging and kicking the people into obedience.
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I don't know why you can't have both. Sorry if that's giving would be oppressors. An idea. I don't mean to hand out a playbook here, but I don't know why you can't have both pleasure and pain. Reward those who voluntarily comply. Give them lots of pleasure, lots of treats, lots of. And punish resisters with pain. Make people afraid of you and excited about the treats you're going to give them. But in any case, there's not much pleasure in 1984. What Winston Smith, the novel's protagonist, is seeking is so limited by our standards of pleasure. He wants to keep a diary, for example. He wants to find an area where he's not being watched so he can think his own thoughts. He wants to recall the past as it actually was, not as it's being shaped by the people in charge, including the ministry he works for. That's one of his jobs. He wants Two plus two to equal four. It's a harrowing read, but a very worthy book and an important one. Reading it is an unforgettable experience, and although I wouldn't have placed it quite this high on the list, I'm not surprised that it's here at number six. So here's what we're going to do today. We will look at George Orwell's life prior to the writing of 1984. We'll look at the circumstances in which he wrote it. We'll dive into the book itself. We'll look at the early reception. How did people take this book when it came out in 1949? We'll look at some later reflections on it from the 60s and the 90s and the general legacy. But first, people, people, people. This is exciting. We have enough people signed up to make our History of Literature podcast tour through Literary England a reality. I am so excited by this. I really can't wait. It's May of 2026. We're going to be staying in some nice places and eating some nice meals and seeing things in London and Oxford and Bath that you can't experience anywhere else. Shakespeare's Globe Theater is a must do for anyone who loves Shakespeare. We will be there, and the homes of Dickens and Dr. Johnson. And I'll walk through the streets of Bloomsbury guided by local experts everywhere we go. I'm not the tour guide. Don't worry, I'll be taking the tours just like you, riding the same trains, eating at the same tables, listening and learning and guess from the show. All these Oxford professors and directors of research and authors and literary biographers, all these people we've met over the last 10 years are going to be popping in to greet us along the way. Sometimes for a formal visit, sometimes a little more informal. Popping in for a meal or a tea or a drink so we can ask our questions of people who really know this stuff. They really know and love literature. We might even have a live episode or two of the podcast that we record while we're there. We're still working that out, but I am told that there are still two slots available. Two slots. Two golden tickets. So act now. We can try to open up some more spots, but we're keeping the group small and we do have to make plans. So this isn't like some big bus tour of 60 people or anything like that. We didn't.
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The accommodations are going to be limited. We want our experience to be somewhat intimate so we can enjoy our time together and everything. Don't worry. Everything is included, meals, tickets, all the logistics, everything so you can relax and enjoy your time. All that's going to be handled by our partners at John Shores Travel. Okay, enough of the sales pitch. If you are interested in one of these remaining spots, email me@jackwilsonauthormail.com or you can email the tour coordinator, MasahiKohnshorestravel. That's M A S A H I K ohnshorestravel. I'll put the email address in the show notes. May of 2026 is going to be a month to remember. Okay, George Orwell was born as Eric Blair in what is now Bihar, India. Up there, close to Nepal. Back then it was British India and called Bengal. His great great grandfather had been a wealthy slave owning country gentleman who owned plantations in Jamaica. Since then the family had descended in status by the time Eric Blair was born. Although in some ways I might say they ascended as it's a bit weird to say that having professions like an Anglican clergyman like his grandfather is a step down from a plantation owner who owned enslaved people. It's a step up.
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To drop that side of your family. It's a step up in everything except wealth. But wealth seems to be the only scale that counts, doesn't it? Orwell's father was an opium agent. I guess that's not such a. That's not such a great profession either, overseeing the production and sale of opium to China. Orwell's mother was part French. Orwell himself learned to speak French at his posh school Eton College, where his French teacher was none other than Aldous Huxley. Imagine that. But we've jumped ahead a bit. Let's talk about Orwell's childhood. When he was one, Orwell's mother moved him and his older sister to England and he rarely saw his father afterwards until he was 11. Only saw him once in 10 years. His mother was eager for him to go to fancy schools and be educated, but the family could not afford those schools. Luckily he was clever and he got a scholarship and from the age of 10 until 15, Eric Blair George Orwell attended boarding school. He hated the school where he realized he was poorer than other the other kids there.
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He liked better other parts of his life like English pleasures such as fishing and bird watching, hiking across the countryside, going for swims on the south coast of England. He also started writing essays and poems and he earned a scholarship from that school. That's how he earned a scholarship to Eaton. He was an indifferent student, but active in the world of college magazines, unable or school Magazines, I guess I should say, because he didn't go to college at first, he was unable to afford the natural next step, which would have been Oxbridge. Coming out of Eaton, he instead joined the Imperial Police in British India, in what is now Burma. He spent about five years in various parts of India, returning to England after contracting dengue fever. Three important pieces of writing came out of his experience in Burma, the novel Burmese Days and the essays A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, all three written in the 1930s, with the latter two essays becoming what I would call classics. Certainly you find them in many anthologies. His heroes were all the usual English suspects. He was a great admirer of Shakespeare and Dickens and the like, but also the American Jack London. And this might be what gave him the idea to explore worlds that were not his own, like the poorer parts of London. His first book was down and out in Paris in London, a still very readable book. We can already see what kind of writer he is in these works from the 1930s, both in down and out and in A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant. There's a kind of I was there aspect to the prose. He's experiencing something extraordinary, reporting on it simply and plainly and telling us what he felt and what it meant. He's excellent at small, sharp observations. In the context of larger geopolitical or existential context, he can be prone to exaggeration. He exaggerates like a savage, said the author VS Pritchett, who knew Orwell, complaining about his sweeping, overly broad statements. And while we're ticking off negatives or while could occasionally be cruel, more in life than on the page, I would say. And sometimes his lesser novels can settle into, if not exactly settle for, a kind of blandness. But he was gonzo before gonzo, and in his first person accounts at their finest, he comes across as someone with decency, someone with great personal integrity, deeply devoted to the truth wherever it takes him, and who wants to address the real world when he's writing about things with real stakes. He's very good. When I say gonzo, I mean that he's a method writer, experiencing things for himself so he can write about them. Not that he's necessarily trying outlandish stunts for the sake of being unusual or flashy. He did try to get arrested so he could experience Christmas in prison. He got a job as a dishwasher at a fancy hotel in Paris. He went down coal mines in England. He worked in the hop fields.
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He actually adopted the pseudonym George Orwell because he wanted to stop embarrassing the Blair family by his exploits as a tramp. As restless as all this might suggest, he also loves homey English things, simple comforts. He hated the upper middle class, it seems, but many of their preferences are deeply ingrained within him. The pub, the garden, painting landscapes and seascapes and rural scenes, orchids, English poetry, the English language. He wrote essays called Things Like A Nice cup of Tea, and he has an essay, the Moon Underwater, in which he describes what makes for a good pub. He liked roast beef and kippers, and he wrote this. We are a nation of flower lovers, but also a nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, crossword puzzle fans, all. The culture that is most truly native centers around things which, even when they are communal, are not. The pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the nice cup of tea. The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the 19th century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you. From above, end quote. You can see what I'm talking about there, right? You see all the. You see the rugged, sturdy prose, but also you see how he is looking at.
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People around him, at things around him, identifying them, but quickly moving to something a little bit grander. Something. The context of it, the stakes, the consequences, what it means. He goes from this list of items that people, People follow to a very easy sentence about the liberty of the individual who still believed in. Of course, this is what Versus Pritchett says, right? He can exaggerate sometimes, he overstates the case, but it's always interesting. It's always interesting to see a list like that and to. Here's someone's argument of what it means.
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But he did love those.
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Quiet, simple pleasures. As Timothy Garton Ash said, if Orwell had a God, it was Kipling's God of things as they are. Even his pen name, George Orwell. He said he liked George Orwell, liked the pen name George Orwell because it was a good, round English name.
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I would defer to the English on this, but to my American ears, Eric Blair sounds a bit posh, a bit Tony, a bit tonier than he wanted, I think. And George Orwell sounds a bit less so. George Orwell, sturdy. If that's true, if I'm right about that, I think George Orwell is probably the name that Eric Blair rather wished he'd been born with. And the person writing under that name is probably more like the person that Eric Blair wished he actually was. In 1935, Orwell met a woman named Eileen Maud O', Shaughnessy, who was a lively and literate person. She went to college and she wrote poetry and journalism. She proofread and edited scientific papers and books.
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She was, said Orwell to a friend after meeting her, the type of woman I would marry. And a year later, she was the person he did marry. They lived in a small, damp cottage in Hertfordshire, a town of about 75 people then about 40 miles north of London. Their marriage was open. It seems letters by Orwell. We know they both had affairs, and letters by Orwell suggest that this was sort of by mutual consent. And he. He pursued a couple of their friends, and she appears to have had a romantic interest in at least one connection of Orwell's. They wanted children, but it didn't happen. And later they learned that Orwell could not have children. His family warned her about him. That's kind of interesting. He's impossible to live with, they said. They told her, fair warning. This son of ours you're about to marry is impossible to live with. But she said that they didn't understand that I'm the same.
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To this point. Up to this point, Orwell's chief subjects were his experiences in Burma and now the Great Depression and its effects on England. But a few months after his marriage, he found a new experience that would be crucial to his personal development and to his later political views. The Spanish Civil War. He was planning to side with the Republicans, the advocates of democracy who were fighting against Franco. On his way to Spain, he had dinner in Paris with Henry Miller, who told him he was nuts fighting in the civil war of another country out of a sense of obligation or guilt, said Miller, was sheer stupidity. End quote. And he thought. Miller said he thought Orwell's ideas about combating fascism or defending democracy, etc. Etc. As Miller put it, were all baloney. But Orwell was determined, and he left his wife in England to finish up the handling of his latest book, steer that through publication before she herself joined him in Spain. Orwell's experience as a soldier was eventful. He was courageous, one might say even heroic. But it's also hard not to view. View him as kind of a naive interloper. Maybe the Spanish Civil War was so disorganized and chaotic that one could only appear that way. I suppose opinions will differ both on the Spanish Civil War and Orwell's presence in it. After arriving among what he called a kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, he was shocked by how little supplies they had. Somehow he managed to poison his hand and he was in a field Hospital for 10 days while it was lanced and put in a sling. Then he went to Barcelona, where he spent much of his time on a roof reading novels. But then after that he returned to the front where he was soon shot in the neck. He had been warned that his height put him at risk of snipers, but he stood up in the trench anyway and he was lucky to escape alive. Blood poured from his mouth and he couldn't speak. The sniper's bullet had just barely missed his main artery could easily have died. Orwell, he could no longer fight in the war. He and his wife now had to sneak out of Spain, but not before both Orwell and his wife were accused of high treason and brought to a tribunal for their rabid Trotskyism.
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That was the allegation, rabid Trotskyism.
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Orwell said, we're a byproduct of lies and flagrant absurdities in the communist press. At this point he began an uneasy political relationship with the communists in these fraught times, although his sympathies were with the left and the people, the working people. There was a review in the Daily Worker that took a phrase of Orwell's out of context and says he wrote, the working class glasses smell.
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By the time World War II broke out, Orwell was a well established writer. He volunteered for war service, was declared unfit because of the injury, and he served instead as part of the Home Guard. He considered himself a socialist, an early anti Stalinist who was nevertheless disgusted by the necessary evil of being on Stalin's side in order to fight Hitler during World War II. One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time. He said, this disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side.
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He wrote for journals and gave radio addresses on the BBC. He had a spat with HG Wells. He worked on his novels. His parents died. Eventually. He wrote Animal Farm, an allegory about the Soviet Union, which was rejected by several publishing houses, including Faber and Faber, where T.S. eliot was in charge of acquisitions. They rejected it because it was clearly attack on Stalin and the Soviet Union, which were then an ally. The book didn't get published until the end of the war, but when it finally was published, the post war era was ready for it, with Stalin being no longer an ally and suddenly a potential enemy. And then an actual enemy in the Cold War. And the book was well timed and it made. It was a big success. It made Orwell famous. Before we get to the novel 1984, let's wrap up the life. We haven't talked about Orwell physically, but here's one description again by VS Pritchett, writing a review of a 1966 biography of Orwell by George Woodcock.
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Orwell looked, as Mr. Woodcock says, like Don Quixote and was haunted by his Sancho Panza, better still, like a frayed sahib in shabby jacket and corduroy and betraying his class by his insouciance. Tall and bony, the face lined by pain, eyes that stared out of their caves, he looked far away, over one's head, as if seeking more discomfort and new indignations. He had a thin lipped, hard mouth. His general bleakness was relieved by sudden smiles and by a vigorous shock of wiry hair. On bros which I had to look up. That means cut in a bristly style. The voice had the lazy, almost spiritless Cockney drawl, but had something like a rusty edge to it that suggested trouble and had been used to authority. He seemed more at home than we were in the bleak no man's land that war creates in the mind and in life in general. Among my encounters with him, three stand out. I once went back to a half empty flat he had taken on the top floor of a high and once expensive block of flats in St John's Wood. He pointed out that the building was half empty because of the Blitz the rents had dropped low and that it was lucky to be able to live close to the roof because you could get out quickly to deal with the firebombs. He seemed to want to live as near to a bomb as possible. Another time we stood for a long time in a doorway off Piccadilly while he told me about the advantage of keeping goats in the country with full details of cost and yield, for he was a born small holder and liked manual work at the BBC. He spent his evenings in a part time job making small parts for aircraft. He tried to get me to bring my family and join him in the disastrous migration to the island of Jura. The attraction of the island seemed to be that it was out of touch with the mainland for long periods because of storms, that one would be scrabbling along the rocks and shores for food and fuel and would be free of the competition of modern totalitarianism. We were eating and drinking expensively and well in Percy street at the time For a genial Sancho Panza would unexpectedly take over from the gaunt Quixote. One of the things that made him hate industrial capitalism was that it fed its people so badly on the ersatz and had so demoralized them that they could not cook. But at the same time, he would stuff his pipe with cheap shag bought at miserable little shops and drink strong tea out of its saucer in the romantic belief that this was what the decent British workmen did and point out the moral advantages of dossing down in working class discomfort. End quote.
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It's quite a portrait of Orwell. Kind of gives you a sense of how he was viewed. Bit of a betrayer of his class, someone who didn't quite escape it. Some people call that a champagne socialist. Some people call it a limousine liberal. His mother's last name, in fact, was Limousine her maiden name. But of course, it's as a writer that we care most about Orwell. And as a political writer, or at least one who is absolutely committed to. To the truth, to the use of true, accurate words. In 1946, he wrote a very famous essay, politics and the English Language, which I was teaching 50 years later, and no doubt if I taught again in 2046, let's say a hundred years after it was first written, I would no doubt have it on my syllabus. It's so good at describing the consequences of vagueness and cliche, how those lazy habits can foster propaganda. It's a contagion, he said, spreading among those who don't realize how they are complicit in hiding the truth. It conceals a writer's thoughts from himself and others and is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
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The issues, those issues on his mind are close to the themes of 1984. Let's take a quick break and come back with the writing of that classic novel.
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- [35:23]
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- [36:10]
Jack Wilson
1984 was Orwell's final book, and it was a race against time for him to complete it. Unusually for Orwell, who tended to write quickly, usually taking less than a year to complete a book, start to finish, this one was several years in the making. His experiences in the Spanish Civil War had set some of the wheels in motion, in particular that tribunal he faced at the end, which gave him a horror of lies and false accusations. An even more decisive Moment came in 1943 when he read reports of the Tehran Conference, a strategy meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, where the future division of the world was discussed. In 1984, the novel, a futuristic Great Britain belongs to Oceania, one of three superstates perpetually at war against either of the other two, and sometimes both at once. But even from that point when Orwell started referring to the book in letters and so on, there would be another five and a half years before the book was finished. He had written a few pages by the end of 1945. A completed first draft didn't come until two years later, and then a second draft was an entire year after that. In the meantime, he and Eileen adopted a three week old boy, a joyous event that soon gave way to tragedy. When Eileen died a year later on the operating table, Orwell's own health started to fail. Eventually he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was hospitalized several times during the writing of 1984. All this took Orwell away from the composition of the book. That was always on his mind. Well, that's true. The lengthier period of gestation also allowed for some additional influences to creep in. He encountered Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel we, for example, which was influential, and things like news reports of rat attacks on local children, which he drafted into the novel. Even beyond the politics, 1984 clearly feels like a book of post war Britain. The distinct desire for good tobacco and chocolate and coffee seemed to express the longing of someone who was experiencing a society going through this deprivation status. To finish his novel, he finally went to the Hebrides, where he lived on the island of Jura that we heard about from VS Pritchett. He was out there remotely battling against disease. He would do things like take a boat, take boats out onto the water where he almost died in a whirlpool. And he spent the last seven months of his life heroically and painstakingly finishing his novel at his typewriter. Partway into this stint, he got married for a second time. But by the time he got married, he only had three months to live. 1984 is often thought to take its novel from a reversal of the digits in the year 1948, when Orwell was finishing up his novel. But this has been disputed. In any case, the novel is set in a fictional future at a time when Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is like the rest of Oceania, under the command of Big Brother, a dictatorial leader whose mustached face is familiar to all through giant posters. A cult of personality has been imposed on the people and is carefully tended by the ruling political party called the party in the novel and its chief enforcement arm, the dreaded thought police. People are under constant surveillance and barraged with propaganda to stamp out any shreds of individual, individual, sorry, individuality and nonconformity. Words no longer have the meaning they once did. They're now defined by Newspeak, which the Party carefully controls. The book's protagonist is Winston Smith, who works in London at the Ministry of Truth, where he writes historical records to conform with the Party's current needs, dropping the old version of the articles into one of several memory holes which lead to a giant furnace that incinerates the past. Winston has a memory that, while he doesn't always trust it, forces him to confront questions like we were once at war with Eurasia and allied with East Asia, and everything Eurasia did was good and everything East Asia did was bad. Now we're at war with East Asia and allied with Eurasia, and it's not just a reversal of who's good and who's bad, but who's always been good and always been bad.
- [41:12]
We have to go in and eradicate all past evidence of ever being at war with our current ally, and vice versa. This is referred to in the novel as Doublethink, where an individual has to live with these contradictions, just accept them. But Winston Smith can't help longing for rebellion and change, for the lies to be exposed and the truth to out. He knows that thoughts like these make him a thought criminal, and one day he's likely to be caught and dealt with harshly. It's a certainty, in fact, but he can't help himself. There are so many phrases and concepts from the conceit of the novel that have passed into our lexicon that it's hard to count them. Big Brother, for one. And Doublethink and thought crime and unpersons, which is the word for people who cross the Party and are subsequently disappeared and erased from the records. There had already been examples of that coming out of the Soviet Union. Of course, the word Orwellian might be the most famous of all the popularized words. This stands for the whole mood of the book. It's a complete and utter nightmare. Orwell is wise enough to stay out of the way, describing the world and Winston's struggles carefully until you feel as oppressed as Winston. I found myself on the latest read, gasping for air and longing for sunlight. One of the hardest things to read in the book are the small victories that Winston achieves. It's so daring for him to keep a diary when he has the chance to have an affair. You feel the extreme risk he's taking and the sense of doom, knowing that he's now living on borrowed time. His affair partner is someone else. Who works at the Ministry of Truth, tending the novel writing machines. Originally, he suspects that she's a spy, and when he catches her following him, he has a wild vision of bashing her head in. Then she passes him a love note and the two of them start an illicit affair full of almost unimaginable measures that they're forced to take to keep this as secret as they can. I won't spoil the rest of the book. If you haven't read it, you should. It was immediately recognized as a book for the times as well as the ages, both in Britain and America. The New York Times said, quote, it is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fullness. 1984 appears at first glance to fall into that long established tradition of satirical fiction, set either in future times or in imagined places, or both, that contains works so diverse as Gulliver's Travels itself, Butler's Erewhon, and Huxley's Brave New World. Yet before one is finished reading the nearly bemused first page, it is evident that this is fiction of another order, and presently one makes the distinctly unpleasant discovery that it is not to be satire at all. In the excesses of satire, one may take a certain comfort. They provide a distance from the human condition as we meet it in our daily life that preserves our habitual referee, our habitual refuge in sloth or blindness or self righteousness. Mr. Orwell's earlier book, Animal Farm, is such a work. Its characters are animals, and its content is therefore fabulous, and its horror, shading into comedy, remains in the generalized realm of intellect from which our feelings need fear no onslaught. But 1984 is a work of pure horror, and its horror is crushingly immediate. End quote.
- [45:07]
Lionel Trilling, writing in the New Yorker in 1949, said this of Orwell. Quote. George Orwell's new novel, 1984, confirms its author in the special honorable place he holds in our intellectual life. Orwell's native gifts are perhaps not of a transcendent kind. They have their roots in a quality of mind that ought to be as frequent as it is modest. This quality may be described as a sort of moral centrality, a directness of relation to moral and political fact. And it is so far from being frequent in our time that Orwell's possession of it seems nearly unique. Orwell is an intellectual to his fingertips, but he is far removed from both the continental and the American type of intellectual. The turn of his mind is what used to be thought of as peculiarly English. He is indifferent to the allurements of elaborate theory and of extreme sensibility. The medium of his thought is common sense, and his commitment to intellect is fortified by an old fashioned faith that the truth can be got at, that we can, if we actually want to see the object as it really is. This faith and the power of mind rests in part on Orwell's willingness, rare among contemporary intellectuals, to admit his connection with his own cultural past. He no longer identifies himself with the British upper middle class in which he was reared. Yet it is interesting to see how often his sense of fact derives from some ideal of that class, how he finds his way through a problem by means of an unabashed certainty of the worth of some old, simple, belittled virtue. Fairness, decency and responsibility do not make up a shining or comprehensive morality. But in a disordered world, they serve Orwell as an invaluable base of intellectual operations. End quote. Trilling also notes that while the book is clearly an attack on Stalin's Soviet Union, Orwell is moving beyond simply an attack on communism. This was important as the Cold War was being forged. It was important for the left to try to figure out where exactly they stood in terms of communism. And with the example of Stalin's Soviet Union, you could err on both sides, right? You could be so in favor of communism that you were blind to what Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union, or you could be so against.
- [47:47]
Stalin's Soviet Union that you failed to see, to separate it from communism. So here's what Trilling says about Orwell's novel. By now it must be clear that 1984 is in large part an attack on Soviet Communism. Yet to read it as this and as nothing else would be to misunderstand the book's aim. The settled and reasoned opposition to communism that Orwell expresses is not to be minimized. But he is not undertaking to give us the delusive comfort of moral superiority to an antagonist. He does not separate Russia from the general tendency of the world today. He is saying, indeed something no less comprehensive than that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future, and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture. End quote. That was the response two of the more thoughtful responses in the New York Times and the New Yorker in 1949. Let's take our last break and see how 1984 has been treated in the decades since.
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Jack Wilson
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Jack Wilson
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Jack Wilson
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- [50:48]
Jack Wilson
I can remember the year 1984. I was a child in middle school then, and we were given weekly readers with essays about Orwell's novel and whether it came true. And I think it was on the verge. It was probably in 1983 that we got that. What's 1984 going to be like? Is it going to be like this novel of Orwell's? Just like we all rocked to Princes 1999 on New Year's Eve. As 1998 turned into what had once seemed like a year that was impossibly far away or like that small. This is much smaller scale, but the moment we all shared when Paul McCartney actually turned 64, that you oh, look at that, how far we've come. Remember when that seemed like he would never be 64? Well, he is now by then. By the year 1984, the general conception was that Orwell's world that he had depicted seemed naturally at home in the Soviet Union. We were getting reports out of the Soviet Union that sounded somewhat similar. Soviet Union then was part of the evil empire, while we in America were comfortable that we represented freedom and liberty and individualism, as exemplified by President Reagan chopping wood and Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comedian, joking about America having unopened mail. Our system had its problems, to be sure, but it produced Michael Jackson and Eddie Murphy and the like. Los Angeles Olympics. 1984 was the year of Indiana Jones and karate, the Karate Kid, Footloose and Ghostbusters, Terminator and Beverly Hills Cop. Maybe the Greatest pop culture year ever. More to the point, we didn't have Newspeak or Doublethink or cameras everywhere reporting on us. We didn't have Big Brother. I remember essays that ended with things like, no. Orwell's prediction of what the world would look like in 1984 has not come true, but perhaps that's because he warned us and so we were able to avoid it. But this is insane or lazy in a way that Orwell would have hated. Orwell was not saying that literally this was going to happen in the year 1984. He wasn't Nostradamus providing a specific prediction in the book. Winston is not even sure that the year 1984 is the actual year. He thinks this could easily be yet another distortion by the Party and the thought police to make us all think it's 1984 when it's not. What essays like that, though, do get right is that Orwell called his book a warning. More than a satire, it's a warning of what could happen, of what's likely to happen, what might. Unlike Y2K, where the danger was directly tied to a very specific period of time for a specific reason.
- [54:02]
It was plausible enough that I found myself on the morning of the year 2000, January 1st, draining my bathtub and cracking open one of the hundreds of cans I had stockpiled food when it turned out the electrical grid did not actually melt down because the computers couldn't handle the date change to the year 2000.
- [54:31]
Unlike that, there was no reason why Orwell's warning should have expired in 1984. The forces that could create Big Brother as viewed from 1948, are the same forces that could create our version of a Big Brother today. They're human forces. They're what people with power want to do. And those forces would have better technical, technological tools at their disposal today than they did in 1948 or in 1984.
- [55:05]
Right? Think about surveillance. Would you rather try to surveil somebody or a whole society in 1948 or 1984 or now? I think you know the answer to that. We're already being surveilled. Read a book sometime. Read, like, a detective novel or a watch a film noir from the 1940s and see how someone can disappear themselves. They just go to another town, change their name, start working.
- [55:41]
Could live a whole life as another person. You could be a hundred miles away from where you murdered that wife of yours and just live there hoping, you know, as long as you're not recognized. But you're in Some small town. Chances might be low. Try that today. Well, don't try it, but you know what I'm saying.
- [56:04]
Hard to get off the grid today. Hard to be out of the reach of cameras and photographs and.
- [56:13]
Eyewitnesses.
- [56:17]
But even though we had this sort of false idea, well, we made it past 1984.
- [56:23]
Jeff Umbro
Phew.
- [56:24]
Jack Wilson
Guess we're safe. Our triumphalism continued. By 1998, after the Wall fell and light and truth seemed well established all over the world, Orwell was viewed as a hero, the one who saved us all with his pen. His entire works were published to broad acclaim. Orwell is the writer we needed, maybe the writer we don't even deserve. People focused less on his politics than on his.
- [56:55]
Prose. He was sort of a saint of English literature. Not a saint in his personal life, but a kind of high priest of clear sightedness, commitment to avoiding cliches, and that dogged determination to tell the truth in plain, accurate prose. Cracks in his personal life had been revealed. He'd been crueler than we knew and more anti Semitic and less loyal. Nevertheless, his entire collected works were published in a handsome edition. Timothy Garton Ash reviewed all this and said, why? Why Orwell? In the New York Review of Books, he wrote, quote, even if you are, as I am, a passionate Orwellian, the question you have to ask of this vast, beautifully produced, stupendously annotated literary monument is why Orwell? Why should he, of all writers, have his maudlin teenage love poems edited as if they were lost sonnets by Milton? What is the lasting value of all his hundreds of book reviews and columns? How can you justify three fat volumes of his radio talks, humdrum correspondence as a producer for other people's talks, and even the internal talks, booking forms from two years at the Indian section of the BBC? When Dr. Peter Davison says complete works, he means complete, every line treated like Shakespeare. Yet Orwell was no Shakespeare. He was not a universal genius, nor was he a natural master of the English language. Much of his early writing is painfully bad. He later himself dismissed two of his published novels, A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, both meticulously reprinted here as thoroughly bad books. When he was dying, he gave instructions that they should not his capitals the word not be reprinted. Even his final masterpiece, 1984, is marred by patches of melodrama and weak writing. Only Animal Farm is perfectly composed. One can immediately think of half a dozen 20th century authors who, line for line, page for page, were consistently better writers. Conrad, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Auden Waugh. So why don't they get this treatment? Why Orwell? Well, Ash goes on to answer the question. First he points to Orwell's biography, which is truly eventful and fascinating and does hit that that sweet spot of World War II and the Cold War and this era that is important to us. Asch notes that he was a very Englishy Englishman. He described Orwell described his family as lower upper middle class, sort of a famous quote of his. It's a perfect encapsulation of not only where his family stood in society, but how finely the gradations of class were in Orwell's England. Orwell hated snobbery and pretension, but he was suffused in them too. They would seep out sometimes when he was discussing things he loved about his country and its inhabitants. But also, says Asch, it's the politics. No one in the 20th century is a more politically important writer, Asch argues. And while Orwell's journalism sometimes errs in making overstatements or excessive moralizing, as Vs Pritchett had pointed out, his fiction, at least the best of it, makes use of his journalistic instincts. Fictive techniques like being inside Winston Smith's head and knowing his thoughts and hopes and desires blur into reportage descriptions of how the World in 1984 works and exactly what Winston is facing. It reads like Orwell is a journalist reporting. Back on that Orwell projected himself into his writing, especially the non fiction essays and books, but also the fiction. So much of it is about him and what he's seen and felt. He hated rats, for example. He dreamed of having sex in a forest. And into the novel those things go. But while his penchant for talking about himself can lapse into dullness, in some of his early works, when he takes off into a world of invention, of fabulousness, of fabulation, as he does in animal farm in 1984, the effect is intoxicating. This feels like a fully created world that he's merely reporting from, or reporting out or reporting out from. As I originally had it before the autocorrect, God's bullied me into self doubt. But damn it, that's the right phrase. The experience of reading 1984 is like reading a deeply researched book, not an invented one, set in a world that Orwell is not so much inventing as reporting out from. There's that phrase I don't care, there's a couple of prepositions in it. He's reporting out from it as if he's a wartime journalist behind Enemy lines. Or a long form reporter visiting an undiscovered island society, spending a lot of time there and then writing the definitive article about that place. Here's Ash again. Quote, now look what happens in animal farm in 1984. The impact of these books comes precisely from the fact that they are so closely based on real events, details and trends over the three decades after 1917. Just how closely is shown by a letter to his publisher asking that in the scene when the humans blow up the windmill in Animal Farm, the line all the animals, including Napoleon, flung themselves on their faces, should be changed to all the animals except Napoleon, because, quote the alteration would be fair to JS Joseph Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance. If Russians and East Europeans had this uncanny sense of recognizing their own reality in 1984, it's because the starting point was their own reality, with some of Nazism and a dash of 1940s London thrown in. But this closely observed reality is then blown up as on a giant projection screen, by a lover of the savage. Darkly humorous overstatement. What mars the journalism makes the masterpiece. First the small, perfectly formed Swiftian satirical fable, then the larger, less perfectly formed, but ultimately much more powerful dystopia. End quote. By 1998, it seemed like Orwell was part of history. Cold War was over, but it was agreed that one could not understand the 20th century without reading Orwell and understanding his position in it. We view him differently now. 1984 sales skyrocketed when certain individuals became president. And it seems like we'll be living in our own world of Newspeak, where 2/2 equals 5 might be established and 2 +2 equals 4 is dismissed as fake news. War is peace, freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength was the mantra of Big Brother and his party. One might toss vaccines, don't save, they kill into the mix. The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their first, final, most essential command.
- [64:59]
Says 1984. My crowd size is the biggest ever. Pay no attention to those photographs, those estimates by experts, the eyewitness accounts. I'm telling you, it was the biggest ever.
- [65:17]
And look around to see who it is, who's willing to back up my statement.
- [65:22]
And who is brave enough to contradict it. We know, too, that the technology has changed. We smile at Orwell's telescreens with its gee whiz horror. Wow, look at television. But what if the television could watch you? And now we live in a world where cameras are everywhere and so is tracking technology. Our homes are filled with them and we carry them around in our pockets. Maybe that's Huxley's pleasure. We submit to the surveillance because we like.
- [65:59]
A few of the benefits of having more convenient maps available to us and so on. AI technology, something that would have been an impossible science fiction reach in Orwell's time is here. You wouldn't need thousands and thousands of people to be watching the cameras and listening to the citizens and keeping track of them all. You can imagine the party today doing it through big data. Big Brother isn't the stuff of far off dreams. It's the stuff of a looming nightmare. But we're closer to it. Our heads are on the pillow, our eyes struggling not to shut. So yes, read Orwell, experience the world of 1984 and hope that others are doing the same. Because Orwell is a reminder of just how horrible this can be once we give up freedom and commitment to the truth and love for pleasures like being angry or falling in love or thinking one's own thoughts. Here's Ash again. Quote as Orwell himself wrote of Dickens, behind the pages of his work you see the face of a man who is generously angry. This is the great Orwell. We need him still because Orwell's work is never done.
- [67:31]
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back soon to look at a beloved author who emerges from 41 carefully chosen objects. Can you guess who the author is? Her name rhymes with rain. Boston. See if you can guess that one. We have a few holiday episodes in the works too. Remember, there are two slots left on our History of Literature tour of England. Of literary England. Email me@jackwilsonauthormail.com to make sure you don't miss out. Or contact us through our website@historyofliterature.com and we will put you in touch with the right people. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [68:29]
Sam.
- [68:54]
Foreign.
- [69:01]
Jeff Umbro
You might be curious what it takes from equipment to general know how to make a podcast like this come to life. Maybe you're interested in making your own series as your New Year's resolution. Which is why you should check out my show Podcast Perspectives. The award winning series hosted by me, Jeff Umbro and produced by the Poglomerate. Recently named the best podcast production and marketing agency by PR Daily, Podcast Perspectives explores the audio industry through conversations with the experts behind the podcast you love. From the Washington post, iHeart, Pushkin, La Manada and beyond. We discuss everything from how to produce the best series to how to monetize and grow your shows to reach more audiences. If you're looking for a place to start, check out our recent Podcast Predictions episode, where we bring on podcast leaders like Lemonada's Jessica Cordova, Kramer Pushkin's Greta Cohn, Bumper's Dan Misner, NHPR's Rebecca Lavoy, and NASA's Katie Konance to share inspiring takeaways for 2026. Podcast Perspectives is designed to be approachable and actionable for anyone, regardless of podcasting experience. So follow Podcast Perspectives with Jeff Umbro on your favorite podcast app today.
- [70:08]
Reese Gorman
Hi, it's Reese Gorman, congressional reporter and host of the brand new podcast On Notice. This is the new podcast from Notice, the nonpartisan newsroom covering politics and policy in Washington, dc. Each week I'll bring you real conversations with members of Congress and those who make the Hill run. And it's packed into just 30 minutes so you can learn a lot without taking too much time out of your busy day. Join me for On Notice. That's Notice spelled N o t u s available every Monday wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube.