4 Myths Worth Busting About George Orwell and '1984'

Let’s open our eyes to a few common myths and misconceptions about George Orwell and 1984. 

This is the third part in our three part series exploring the facts and myths about George Orwell and 1984. In part one, we learned “19 Facts Worth Knowing About George Orwell.” In part two, we found out more about the story behind the story with “8 Facts Worth Knowing About 1984.”

In part three, we’ll bust four myths and misconceptions about George Orwell and 1984. 

1: It’s no secret that the novel is dark. But there is a popular myth about why it’s dark. 

Orwell wrote much of 1984 at a friend’s remote, rustic cottage on the island of Jura, in the Scottish Hebrides, while suffering from tuberculosis. “Jura is where the myth of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes hold,” writes Damien Lynskey. “The compelling image of a sad, sick man who incarcerated himself on a godforsaken rock in a shivering sea and, in a state of agonising despair about his future and the world’s, wrote the book that killed him.”

Even Orwell’s own publisher, Fredric Warburg, bought into this faulty assumption. “I cannot but think that this book could have been written only by a man who himself, however temporarily, had lost hope,” he said.

But this wasn’t the case. First, the dark world of 1984 began taking shape in Orwell’s notes years earlier around 1943 or 1944. Second, Orwell had wanted to venture to the countryside for some time after the war. He was looking for an idyllic place where he could think and write, not shut himself off from the world. Third, he invited a number of friends to visit and they did. Fourth, his day-to-day life as recorded in his journals doesn’t support this. 

“His domestic notes as he writes the novel are in fact full of hope and expectation, such as are always involved in planting a garden, making a life from the barest essentials, and looking after a small child,” writes Sally Minogue. 

Bonus fact: The cottage Orwell lived in while writing 1984 is still owned by the Fletchers, the same family who rented it to him. You can even stay there, and they’ve kept it just as primitive as when Orwell was there in the late 1940s. “You have to bring your own supplies if you want to stay here,” Damaris Fletcher told Rob Crossan for The Guardian. “It’s deliberate that we haven’t changed much. If you stay here, you’re really treading in Orwell’s footsteps. He would recognise the place instantly if he were to step through the door today.” 

2: Another myth about 1984 is that Orwell was repudiating socialism and criticizing the British Labour party. Neither were true. In response to these claims, Orwell wrote:

3: Perhaps the most common misconception: Either Orwell would have been on your political team, or he represents the worst of your political opponents. 

For example, the USSR banned the book for being anti-communist, while Jackson County, Florida, in 1981, banned the book for being pro-communist. In the 1984 presidential campaign, “Democrats and Republicans alike cited Nineteen-Eighty Four in fundraising letters.” And there’s no shortage of “Orwellian” claims by today’s politicians, left, right, and center. 

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock that a political novel which details the way people distort the truth for their own political ends would have its own meaning distorted by people for their own political ends. Indeed, one of the main reasons we selected 1984 for this summer’s book club is so we’d all get better at interpreting the self-serving and contradictory rhetoric surrounding Orwell and 1984. 

4: You might be surprised to learn that Orwell referred to 1984 as a “utopia.” In a letter to author Julian Symons, he writes:

1984, a utopia!?

Now, it’s not that Orwell thought he was describing a paradise. It’s that Orwell understood and used the term utopia differently than you and I would today. 

“He made a distinction between ‘favourable’ and ‘pessimistic’ utopias because it would not have occurred to him to call the latter dystopias,” Lynskey explains. “Even though the word dystopia (literally ‘the not-good place’) was used by John Stuart Mill in 1868, it lay dormant for close to a century, eclipsed by Jeremy Bentham’s cacotopia (‘the bad place’) or by anti-utopia, until it was revived in 1962 by the poet and scholar Chad Walsh.”

What I find especially interesting: “Orwell’s novel has become synonymous with a word he never used.”

References

The following references correspond to each numbered fact. When a source is hyperlinked above, I’ve not included it here for brevity’s sake.

1:“Jura is where…”: Lynskey, D. The Ministry of Truth (TMOT), p, 150; “I cannot…”: TMOT, p. 169; Notes in 1943, 1944: TMOT, p. 100; Wanted to go to the countryside, invited friends: TMOT, p, 150-151; ‘“His domestic notes…”: Minogue, S. Introduction to 1984, Wordsworth Classic, 2021, p. xxxvi. — 2: ““My novel…”: The Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters Of George Orwell Volume IV (Vol. IV), p. 502. — 3: Presidential campaign, TMOT, p. 244. — 4. “My new book…”: Vol. IV, p. 475; “He made a distinction…”: TMOT, p. 26.