---
title: "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 7 of 25
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/7/
cite: "George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, section 7. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/7/"
---

# Nineteen Eighty-Four

*George Orwell*

> * A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

> This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please
contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding.
Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

> This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under
copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your
country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT
IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

> Title: 1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]
Date of first publication: 1949
Author: Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell) (1903-1950)
Date first posted: May 17, 2012
Date last updated: June 26, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20120511

> This eBook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mary Meehan, Al Haines
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

> A NOVEL BY

> George Orwell

> SECKER & WARBURG                         LONDON

> S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS & CO. LTD.      TORONTO

> COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1949
    S. J. REGINALD SAUNDERS AND COMPANY LIMITED

> _All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
    this book or portions thereof in any form._

> _first Canadian edition_

> PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, SCRANTON, PA.

> *       *       *       *       *

> _Books by George Orwell_

> NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
    ANIMAL FARM
    DICKENS, DALI AND OTHERS
    COMING UP FOR AIR
    BURMESE DAYS
    DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
    HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
    THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER

> [The end of _1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]_ by Eric Arthur Blair (as George Orwell)]

## 7. VII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/7/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-nineteen-eighty-four-fp20120511/7/#p-N

[¶0] _If there is hope_ [wrote Winston] _it lies in the proles_.

[¶1] *       *       *       *       *

[¶2] If there was hope, it _must_ lie in the proles, because only there, in
those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the
population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be
generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies,
if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of
identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as
just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever
assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look
in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional
whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become
conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They
needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off
flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow
morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And
yet--!

[¶3] He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a
tremendous shout of hundreds of voices--women's voices--had burst from a
side street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger
and despair, a deep loud "Oh-o-o-o-oh!" that went humming on like the
reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had
thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had
reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women
crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as
though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at
this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of
individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling
tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking pots of
any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly
given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were
trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamored
round the stall, accusing the stallkeeper of favoritism and of having
more saucepans somewhere in reserve. There was a fresh outburst of
yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got
hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one
another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the
handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a
moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only
a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that
about anything that mattered?

[¶4] He wrote:

[¶5] _Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after
     they have rebelled they cannot become conscious._

[¶6] That, he reflected, might almost have been a transcription from one of
the Party textbooks. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the
proles from bondage. Before the Revolution they had been hideously
oppressed by the capitalists, they had been starved and flogged, women
had been forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the
coal mines, as a matter of fact), children had been sold into the
factories at the age of six. But simultaneously, true to the principles
of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors
who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a
few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It
was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and
breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to
themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they
had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a
sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters,
they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming
period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were
middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy
physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with
neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the
horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few
agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false
rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were
judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to
indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable
that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was
required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to
whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or
shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they
sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without
general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of
proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil
police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of
criminality in London, a whole world-within-a-world of thieves, bandits,
prostitutes, drug peddlers, and racketeers of every description; but
since it all happened among the proles themselves, it was of no
importance. In all questions of morals they were allowed to follow their
ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon
them. Promiscuity went unpunished; divorce was permitted. For that
matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles
had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath
suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: "Proles and animals are free."

[¶7] Winston reached down and cautiously scratched his varicose ulcer. It had
begun itching again. The thing you invariably came back to was the
impossibility of knowing what life before the Revolution had really been
like. He took out of the drawer a copy of a children's history textbook
which he had borrowed from Mrs. Parsons, and began copying a passage
into the diary:

[¶8] _In the old days_ [it ran], _before the glorious Revolution, London
     was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark,
     dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and
     where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their
     feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you
     are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters, who flogged
     them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing
     but stale breadcrusts and water. But in among all this terrible
     poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were
     lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look
     after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat,
     ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the
     opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat
     which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a
     stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the
     capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The
     capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was
     their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the
     factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could
     throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve
     him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had
     to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as
     "Sir." The chief of all the capitalists was called the King, and--_

[¶9] But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the
bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the
pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine-tails, the Lord
Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was
also something called the _jus primae noctis_, which would probably not
be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every
capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his
factories.

[¶10] How could you tell how much of it was lies? It _might_ be true that the
average human being was better off now than he had been before the
Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in
your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in
were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been
different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about
modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness,
its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no
resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens,
but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great
areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a
matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the
Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a
cigarette end. The ideal set up by the Party was something huge,
terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous
machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics,
marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and
shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing,
persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face. The
reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to
and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that
smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dust bins, and mixed up with
it was a picture of Mrs. Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy
hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked wastepipe.

[¶11] He reached down and scratched his ankle again. Day and night the
telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today
had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations--that
they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier,
stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of
fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The
Party claimed, for example, that today forty per cent of adult proles
were literate; before the Revolution, it was said, the number had only
been fifteen per cent. The Party claimed that the infant mortality rate
was now only a hundred and sixty per thousand, whereas before the
Revolution it had been three hundred--and so it went on. It was like a
single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally
every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted
without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew there might never
have been any such law as the _jus primae noctis_, or any such creature
as a capitalist, or any such garment as a top hat.

[¶12] Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was
forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had
possessed--_after_ the event: that was what counted--concrete,
unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between
his fingers for as long as thirty seconds. In 1973, it must have
been--at any rate, it was at about the time when he and Katharine had
parted. But the really relevant date was seven or eight years earlier.

[¶13] The story really began in the middle Sixties, the period of the great
purges in which the original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out
once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother
himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and
counter-revolutionaries. Goldstein had fled and was hiding, no one knew
where, and of the others, a few had simply disappeared, while the
majority had been executed after spectacular public trials at which they
made confession of their crimes. Among the last survivors were three men
named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. It must have been in 1965 that
these three had been arrested. As often happened, they had vanished for
a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or
dead, and then had suddenly been brought forth to incriminate themselves
in the usual way. They had confessed to intelligence with the enemy (at
that date, too, the enemy was Eurasia), embezzlement of public funds,
the murder of various trusted Party members, intrigues against the
leadership of Big Brother which had started long before the Revolution
happened, and acts of sabotage causing the death of hundreds of
thousands of people. After confessing to these things they had been
pardoned, reinstated in the Party, and given posts which were in fact
sinecures but which sounded important. All three had written long,
abject articles in the _Times_, analyzing the reasons for their
defection and promising to make amends.

[¶14] Some time after their release Winston had actually seen all three of
them in the Chestnut Tree Café. He remembered the sort of terrified
fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye.
They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world,
almost the last great figures left over from the heroic early days of
the Party. The glamor of the underground struggle and the civil war
still faintly clung to them. He had the feeling, though already at that
time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names
years earlier than he had known that of Big Brother. But also they were
out-laws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to
extinction within a year or two. No one who had once fallen into the
hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end. They were corpses
waiting to be sent back to the grave.

[¶15] There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise
even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people. They were sitting in
silence before glasses of the gin flavored with cloves which was the
speciality of the café. Of the three, it was Rutherford whose appearance
had most impressed Winston. Rutherford had once been a famous
caricaturist, whose brutal cartoons had helped to inflame popular
opinion before and during the Revolution. Even now, at long intervals,
his cartoons were appearing in the _Times_. They were simply an
imitation of his earlier manner, and curiously lifeless and
unconvincing. Always they were a rehashing of the ancient themes--slum
tenements, starving children, street battles, capitalists in top
hats--even on the barricades the capitalists still seemed to cling to
their top hats--an endless, hopeless effort to get back into the past.
He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face
pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips. At one time he must have
been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping,
bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up
before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

[¶16] It was the lonely hour of fifteen. Winston could not now remember how he
had come to be in the café at such a time. The place was almost empty. A
tinny music was trickling from the telescreens. The three men sat in
their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter
brought fresh glasses of gin. There was a chessboard on the table beside
them, with the pieces set out, but no game started. And then, for
perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The
tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed
too. There came into it--but it was something hard to describe. It was a
peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note; in his mind Winston called it
a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:

[¶17] "_Under the spreading chestnut tree_
    _I sold you and you sold me:_
    _There lie they, and here lie we_
    _Under the spreading chestnut tree._"

[¶18] The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at
Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And
for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet
not knowing _at what_ he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford
had broken noses.

[¶19] A little later all three were rearrested. It appeared that they had
engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. At
their second trial they confessed to all their old crimes over again,
with a whole string of new ones. They were executed, and their fate was
recorded in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five
years after this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents
which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube onto his desk when he
came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among
the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he
saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of the _Times_ of
about ten years earlier--the top half of the page, so that it included
the date--and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party
function in New York. Prominent in the middle of the group were Jones,
Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was no mistaking them; in any case their
names were in the caption at the bottom.

[¶20] The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on
that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret
airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had
conferred with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had
betrayed important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's
memory because it chanced to be Midsummer Day; but the whole story must
be on record in countless other places as well. There was only one
possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.

[¶21] Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston
had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had
actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was
concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a
fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a
geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some
way it could have been published to the world and its significance made
known.

[¶22] He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph
was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of
paper. Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the
point of view of the telescreen.

[¶23] He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair, so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort; but you could not control the beating of
your heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up.
He let what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while
by the fear that some accident--a sudden draught blowing across his
desk, for instance--would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again,
he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other
waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled
into ashes.

[¶24] That was ten--eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept that
photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his
fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph
itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the
Party's hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of
evidence which existed no longer _had once_ existed?

[¶25] But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its
ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time
when he made his discovery, Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia,
and it must have been to the agents of Eastasia that the three dead men
had betrayed their country. Since then there had been other
changes--two, three, he could not remember how many. Very likely the
confessions had been rewritten and rewritten until the original facts
and dates no longer had the smallest significance. The past not only
changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the
sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood _why_ the
huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying
the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He took
up his pen again and wrote:

[¶26] _I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY._

[¶27] He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself
was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one
time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round
the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be
_alone_ in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the
thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was
that he might also be wrong.

[¶28] He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of
Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into
his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon
you--something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your
brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to
deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce
that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was
inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic
of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience,
but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their
philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was
terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but
that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and
two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is
unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the
mind, and if the mind itself is controllable--what then?

[¶29] But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The
face of O'Brien, not called up by any obvious association, had floated
into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than before, that O'Brien
was on his side. He was writing the diary for O'Brien--_to_ O'Brien; it
was like an interminable letter which no one would ever read, but which
was addressed to a particular person and took its color from that fact.

[¶30] The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was
their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the
enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party
intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which
he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in
the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and
the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The
solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is
wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center. With the
feeling that he was speaking to O'Brien, and also that he was setting
forth an important axiom, he wrote:

[¶31] _Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that
     is granted, all else follows._