When is 1984 set

If the Party needs to expend the same amount of resources on every dissenter as it spent on Winston, it will never be able to completely stamp out dissent among the people. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate the terrifying degree of power and control a totalitarian regime can acquire and maintain.

Big Brother does exist as the embodiment of the Party, but he can never die. Big Brother is aptly named for his position in Oceania — a name of trust, protection, and affection — another example of doublethink. Although Big Brother has a long list of rules, there is no specific rule on alcohol.

Housemates can drink alcohol when it is provided to them although they may also have drinks confiscated. It is similar to oatmeal, but has a notably repulsive texture and taste. Despite its poor taste, slop is specially designed to contain all necessary vitamins and nutrients, so as not to leave houseguests on slop malnourished.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Essay What time period is set in? Ben Davis May 7, This is talking about mind control - like the fact that you must love Big Brother and the Thought Police. Mental cremation that shall banish Relics, philosophies and colds -- Manana-minded ten-year-olds. But really, nobody knows for sure, and we can't exactly ask the author at some point.

So while we can theorize, we won't know for sure. The year was probably chosen to sound like while still being in the future. Anthony Burgess, in his book , part novel and part commentary on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , gives the following explanation of the title:.

You have to remember what it was like in to appreciate Nineteen Eighty-Four. Somebody in told me - that was the year the book came out - that Orwell had wanted to call it Nineteen Forty-Eight.

But they wouldn't let him. He goes on to describe Nineteen Eighty-Four as " no more than a comic transcription of the London of the end of the Second World War ".

This analysis is supported by a great many comparisons drawn between various aspects of the London portrayed in Orwell's novel and similar things seen in London as it really was around I refuse to draw a moral. The moral that Orwell draws from what he saw of the British working man is terrible and excessive. I insist on looking for comedy. Yes, which is part of the comedy, comedy a bit grim at times, positively black.

And a touch of pathos. One wants to weep over Winston Smith, so recognizable as an Englishman of the forties bred out of the working class - 'a smallish, frail figure Inured to cold weather and privation, undersized through a tradition of poverty and bad feeding. He looks out on London 'with a sort of vague distaste. Were there always those vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?

This is the London of war-time or just after. It's certainly not a London of prophetic vision. Orwell wrote the novel in the year , and intended it as a satirical commentary not only on life in the Soviet Union under Stalin of which, it must be recalled, Orwell had no first-hand experience but also on contemporary life in Britain.

With this in mind, it makes sense that he originally wanted to call the novel Nineteen Forty-Eight a statement which other critics have rejected, but even its falsehood wouldn't invalidate the larger point and that in the end he chose a title which evoked the idea of the modern day "the modern day" being but was still far enough ahead to be imaginable as a possible future rather than an alternative present.

Thus, All quotes are from Anthony Burgess, , available on Google Books here ; all emphasis is mine. A variety of other possible answers have been put forth, put succinctly in a Guardian column from :.

Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel in which a political movement comes to power in , or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill", which is set in In his edition of the Collected Works 20 volumes , Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, , though there's no documentary evidence for this.

Davison also argues that the date is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, , and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in , and finally, There's no mystery about the decision to abandon "The Last Man in Europe". Orwell himself was always unsure of it. In the novel, the character Smith is never sure if he is being actively monitored through the telescreen. In the s Germany had a working videophone system in place , and television programs were already being broadcast in parts of the United States, Great Britain and France.

In , when the novel was written, Americans watched on average four and a half hours of television a day; in , almost twice that.

In , television watching was slightly down, to eight hours, more time than we spent asleep. In the U. In the year , however, there was much self-congratulatory coverage in the U. Miller argued that television in the United States teaches a different kind of conformity than that portrayed in the novel. In the novel, the telescreen is used to produce conformity to the Party.

It also promotes endless productivity, through messages regarding the meaning of success and the virtues of hard work. Many viewers conform by measuring themselves against what they see on television, such as dress, relationships and conduct.