1984: The History Behind the Title
The most common theory of where George Orwell got the title Nineteen Eighty-Four is he simply reversed the numbers 1948, the year he wrote the novel.
Except…he had been writing Nineteen Eighty-Four off and on long before 1948.
Orwell had come up with the main theme of the novel back in 1944. This was when Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin conducted their Tehran Conference. During this conference, the three superpowers began talks of who would get what when the war was over. The idea of the world being run and divided up by only two or three states is at the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
By 1947 Orwell had written most of the novel already and the majority of 1948 was spent on editing and typing up the final manuscript for the publishers, despite being extremely ill with tuberculosis on the Scottish island of Jura. The final manuscript was sent in on December 4th and the book was finally published on June 8, 1949.
The original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. A couple of months before the manuscript was sent in, Orwell wrote to his publisher, Fredric Warburg, on his indecision between The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Warburg suggested the latter, as he felt it was a more commercial-friendly title.
As surviving edits and manuscripts show us, Orwell had originally set his novel in the year 1980 and then 1982 and finally in 1984 as progress of the novel slowed down due to his illness and work that had to be done around Barnhill, his house on Jura.
The year 1984 shows up in other dystopian novels other than Orwell’s. One of Orwell’s literary influences was Jack London. In 1908 London published The Iron Heel, a dystopian novel that chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States in the form of a secret manuscript that is found centuries later. One part of the book takes place in the year 1984. Having read the book, Orwell described London as having made “a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism”.
Another book that takes place in 1984 is GK Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Written in 1904, the book is pretty much stuck in Chesterton’s own time as the technology and social advancements in 1984 has not changed in any meaningful way from 1904. Orwell was not a fan of Chesterton, as can be found in his essay Notes on Nationalism:
“Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan.”
My own theory is 1984 might have been chosen because that was the year Orwell’s adopted son, Richard H. Blair, turned forty and therefore was the same age as Winston Smith. Orwell constantly threw in little auto-biographical info in his work, so I don’t think this is a stretch.
Here’s what Peter Davison suggested in his notes for George Orwell: A Life In Letters:
The facsimile of the draft shows clearly that the novel was first set in 1980; then, as time passed in the writing of the book, 1982, and finally 1984. This is particularly plain on page 23 of the facsimile, but the consequential changes occur at various points. It is arguable that, in setting the novel in, successively, 1980, 1982 and 1984, Orwell was projecting forward his own age, 36, when World War II started, from the time when he was planning or actually writing the novel. Thus, 1944 + 36 = 1980; 1946 + 36 = 1982; 1948 + 36 = 1984. It is not, perhaps, a coincidence that in 1944, when the idea for the novel might reasonably be said to be taking shape, Richard was adopted. It would be natural for Orwell to wonder at that time (as many people did) what prospects there would be for war or peace when their children grew up. By choosing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell set his novel in both present and future. Had Orwell only been writing about the present, there would have been no need for him to have advanced the year beyond 1980, and preserving the interval he did - of 36 years - must have had significance for him. Inverting the final digits of 1980 and 1982 would have been meaningless; the inversion of those for 1984 was probably coincidental.
But the most fascinating possibility comes from Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. After reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in 1934, Eileen was inspired to write a poem called End of the Century, 1984. There’s no definitive proof that Orwell read or even knew about Eileen’s poem but it’s an interesting possibility.
For those interested, here is the poem:
End of the Century, 1984
Death
Synthetic winds have blown away
Material dust, but this one room
Rebukes the constant violet ray
And dustless sheds a dusty gloom.
Wrecked on the outmoded past
Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,
Shakespeare’s bones are quiet at last,
Dead as Yeats or William Morris.
Have not the inmates earned their rest?
A hundred circles traversed they
Complaining of the classic quest
And, each inevitable day,
Illogically trying to place
A ball within an empty space.
Birth
Every loss is now a gain
For every chance must follow reason.
A crystal palace meets the rain
That falls at its appointed season.
No book disturbs the lucid line
For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought
To Telepathic Station 9
From which they know just what they ought:
The useful sciences; the arts
Of telesalesmanship and Spanish
As registered in Western parts;
Mental cremation that shall banish
Relics, philosophies and colds –
Manana-minded ten-year-olds.
The Phoenix
Worlds have died that they may live,
May plume again their fairest feathers
And in their clearest songs may give
Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.
Bacon’s colleague is called Einstein,
Huxley shares Platonic food,
Violet rays are only sunshine
Christened in the modern mood,
In this house if in no other
Past and future may agree,
Each herself, but each the other
In a curious harmony,
Finding both a proper place
In the silken gown’s embrace.
