8 June: 1984

On this date in 1949, 1984, George Orwell's vision of a world ruled by Big Brother, was published.

1. 1984 was the ninth and final book written by George Orwell. He wrote it while suffering from tuberculosis. The disease killed him seven months after the book was published.
2. At the time he was writing it he was under government surveillance himself for holding socialist opinions. He was on a watch list for over 12 years. The report on him included the observation: “Dresses in a Bohemian fashion.”
3. While he was writing it, he nearly drowned in a boating accident. Orwell did a lot of his writing in Jura, Scotland, and one day decided to take a break and go boating with his son, niece and nephew. None of them were wearing life jackets when their dinghy capsized. Luckily, all four of them survived.
4. 1984 wasn’t Orwell’s first choice of title. He considered calling it 1980, 1982 or The Last Man in Europe.
5. The opening sentence is, “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
6. The book has been translated into 65 languages. One Italian translator is said to have translated the first line to the clocks striking “uno” because “Italian clocks don’t go up to thirteen,” not realising Orwell had purposely mentioned an hour that didn’t usually exist on analogue clocks.
7. Room 101 was named after a conference room in BBC Broadcasting House, and it in turn lent its name to a TV show in which celebrities describe things they hate and would like to send there. The original Room 101 was the venue for a series of tedious meetings Orwell had to attend when he worked for the Ministry of Information. The original Room 101 has been demolished, but before it went, an artist named Rachel Whiteread made a plaster cast of it.
8. Some of the slogans and expressions used in the book weren’t actually coined by Orwell, but borrowed from actual propaganda from around the world. “2 + 2 = 5” was a Russian slogan coined by the Communist regime so that people would believe it was possible to achieve a five year plan within four years. In Japan during WWII there were secret police who arrested people for having “unpatriotic thoughts” – “Thought Police”.
9. The character Julia, Winston Smith’s love interest, was based on Orwell’s second wife, Sonia Bronwell.
10. There’s also a novel called 1985, which was written in 1978 by Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange.

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