Orwell completed Nineteen Eighty-Four at Barnhill, Jura, on December 4th 1948. It is often supposed that the reversal of the digits of that tubercular Hebridean year yielded the title of the book. In fact, in early drafts of the novel, Orwell had set the action in 1980. As time went on he revised the date to 1982, then finally to 1984. Even as late as October 1948 he was undecided between Nineteen Eighty-Four as a title and The Last Man in Europe. The satisfying numerology of the year-reversal (which he was certainly aware of) probably tipped him in favour of the former, but one other circumstance may have been significant: Orwell greatly admired Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (1908), about a future Fascist USA. In that book the date of the completion of the ‘wonder-city’ Asgard was – 1984.
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Friday, 6 March 2009
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
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Hello. I believe Orwell is also said to be influenced by a poem written by his wife Eileen in 1934 called 'End of the Century, 1984'. If I remember correctly, it marked the fiftieth anniversary of her school by looking forward another fifty and imagining its centenary, which would took place in 1984! There's no way of knowing whether or not this had anything to do with the title of the novel, but of all future years, Orwell would have at least heard that particular one mentioned by name.
ReplyDeleteThanks for adding that. Yes, I'd heard about this, and actually I wrote about it in my book Why Not Catch 21? I didnt put it in here because when I started posting I was restricting myself to 150 words! But it is an interesting theory, and it sounds like it may well have influenced Orwell's final decision, even though he originally set the book in 1980 and the title was essentially a product of how long it had taken him to finish the book.
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