Winston’s Parallel Universe: On History in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

A most peculiar claim about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) can be found in the non-fictional part of a commissioned book on Orwell by his fellow novelist Anthony Burgess: “Somebody in 1949 told me [...] that Orwell had wanted to call it Nineteen Forty-Eight. But they wouldn’t let him” (Burgess and Biswell 10). One naturally tends to take this claim as merely one more indication that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a twisted satire of Orwell’s present, rather than a serious vision of a future to come. After all, one seems to be encouraged not to take the statement too seriously by Burgess’s vagueness about his source of information (“somebody told me”) and it is widely known that the novel’s working title was The Last Man in Europe, not Nineteen Forty-Eight. However, the main reason why one disregards the possibility is that it just does not seem to make much sense. Yes, England’s postwar, Labor forties might have been miserable, as Burgess shows in great detail, but they sure were nothing like the totalitarian nightmare of “Oceania” and “Ingsoc” (English Socialism) that Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith has to endure. However, an argument in support of Burgess’s strange claim can perhaps be made by employing The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, “the book” within the book that displays the political dynamics and history of Winston’s world. The attentive reader quickly notices that the history described in “the book” does not seem to match ours. Meant here are not events that happened after 1948, when Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. More importantly, events leading up to 1948 do not seem to match our timeline either. The most striking discrepancy is perhaps that the Second World War, the event that defined today’s geo-political reality like no other and should have been on Orwell’s mind like no other event when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four shortly after the war, is nowhere mentioned in “the book.” Instead, Winston learns that “by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian” (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 184). Instead of fighting a global war, the authoritarian regimes https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080521