It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were strikingthirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in aneffort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glassdoors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent aswirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At oneend of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had beentacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more thana metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavyblack moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston madefor the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of timesit was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cutoff during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive inpreparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, andWinston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above hisright ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On eachlanding, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous facegazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are socontrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIGBROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figureswhich had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror whichformed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned aswitch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were stilldistinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called)could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it offcompletely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure,the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overallswhich were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his facenaturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and bluntrazor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the worldlooked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirlingdust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shiningand the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything,except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner.There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIGBROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the darkeyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level anotherposter, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternatelycovering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the fardistance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hoveredfor an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with acurving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’swindows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the ThoughtPolice mattered.Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was stillbabbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the NinthThree-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmittedsimultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as heremained within the field of vision which the metal plaquecommanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of courseno way of knowing whether you were being watched at any givenmoment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Policeplugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was evenconceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at anyrate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You hadto live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in theassumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, exceptin darkness, every movement scrutinized.Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer;though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometreaway the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast andwhite above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort ofvague distaste — this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itselfthe third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried tosqueeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whetherLondon had always been quite like this. Were there always thesevistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored upwith baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard andtheir roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging inall directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirledin the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble;and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch andthere had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings likechicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember:nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-littableaux occurring against no background and mostlyunintelligible. The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak Newspeakwas the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structureand etymology see Appendix.— was startlingly different from anyother object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure ofglittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possibleto read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the threeslogans of the Party:
The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand roomsabove ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.Scattered about London there were just three other buildings ofsimilar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf thesurrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansionsyou could see all four of them simultaneously. They were thehomes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatusof government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, whichconcerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the finearts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. TheMinistry of Love, which maintained law and order. And theMinistry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, andMiniplenty.The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. Therewere no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside theMinistry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a placeimpossible to enter except on official business, and then only bypenetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading upto its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in blackuniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features intothe expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wearwhen facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tinykitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he hadsacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that therewas no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured breadwhich had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took downfrom the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white labelmarked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chineserice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himselffor a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of hiseyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing itone had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with arubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his bellydied down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took acigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTESand incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out onto the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back tothe living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the leftof the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, abottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red backand a marbled cover.For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in anunusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in theend wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in thelonger wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, whenthe flats were built, had probably been intended to holdbookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back,Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, sofar as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as hestayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partlythe unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him thething that he was now about to do.But it had also been suggested by the book that he had justtaken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Itssmooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind thathad not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He couldguess, however, that the book was much older than that. He hadseen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummyquarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember)and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire topossess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinaryshops (‘dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule wasnot strictly kept, because there were various things, such asshoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold ofin any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down thestreet and then had slipped inside and bought the book for twodollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for anyparticular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase.Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. Thiswas not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer anylaws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would bepunished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forcedlabour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldomused even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively andwith some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautifulcreamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead ofbeing scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used towriting by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictateeverything into the speak-write which was of course impossible forhis present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and thenfaltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels.To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters hewrote:April 4th, 1984.He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended uponhim. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that thiswas 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly surethat his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been bornin 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin downany date within a year or two.For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was hewriting this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mindhovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, andthen fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak wordDOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he hadundertaken came home to him. How could you communicate withthe future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future wouldresemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or itwould be different from it, and his predicament would bemeaningless.For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to strident military music. It wascurious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power ofexpressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that hehad originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been makingready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind thatanything would be needed except courage. The actual writingwould be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper theinterminable restless monologue that had been running inside hishead, literally for years. At this moment, however, even themonologue had dried up. Moreover his varicose ulcer had begunitching unbearably. He dared not scratch it, because if he did so italways became inflamed. The seconds were ticking by. He wasconscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front ofhim, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of themusic, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectlyaware of what he was setting down. His small but childishhandwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first itscapital letters and finally even its full stops:April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very goodone of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in theMediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fatman trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you sawhim wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw himthrough the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and thesea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though theholes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when hesank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopterhovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have beena jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years oldin her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her andthe woman putting her arms round him and comforting himalthough she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering himup as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep thebullets of him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in amongthem terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then therewas a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up intothe air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed itup and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but awoman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kickingup a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in frontof kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until thepolice turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happenedto her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction theynever ——Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering fromcramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this streamof rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so atotally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to thepoint where he almost felt equal to writing it down. It was, he nowrealized, because of this other incident that he had suddenlydecided to come home and begin the diary today.It had happened that morning at the Ministry, if anything sonebulous could be said to happen.It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department,where Winston worked, they were dragging the chairs out of thecubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite thebig telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate. Winstonwas just taking his place in one of the middle rows when twopeople whom he knew by sight, but had never spoken to, cameunexpectedly into the room. One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knewthat she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably — since hehad sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner —she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writingmachines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, withthick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrowscarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was woundseveral times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough tobring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked herfrom the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. Itwas because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths andcommunity hikes and general clean-mindedness which shemanaged to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women,and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women,and above all the young ones, who were the most bigotedadherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateurspies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gavehim the impression of being more dangerous than most. Oncewhen they passed in the corridor she gave him a quick sidelongglance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a momenthad filled him with black terror. The idea had even crossed hismind that she might be an agent of the Thought Police. That, it wastrue, was very unlikely. Still, he continued to feel a peculiaruneasiness, which had fear mixed up in it as well as hostility,whenever she was anywhere near him.The other person was a man named O’Brien, a member of theInner Party and holder of some post so important and remote thatWinston had only a dim idea of its nature. A momentary hushpassed over the group of people round the chairs as they saw theblack overalls of an Inner Party member approaching. O’Brien was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, humorous, brutalface. In spite of his formidable appearance he had a certain charmof manner. He had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nosewhich was curiously disarming — in some indefinable way,curiously civilized. It was a gesture which, if anyone had stillthought in such terms, might have recalled an eighteenth-centurynobleman offering his snuffbox. Winston had seen O’Brienperhaps a dozen times in almost as many years. He felt deeplydrawn to him, and not solely because he was intrigued by thecontrast between O’Brien’s urbane manner and his prize-fighter’sphysique. Much more it was because of a secretly held belief — orperhaps not even a belief, merely a hope — that O’Brien’s politicalorthodoxy was not perfect. Something in his face suggested itirresistibly. And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy thatwas written in his face, but simply intelligence. But at any rate hehad the appearance of being a person that you could talk to ifsomehow you could cheat the telescreen and get him alone.Winston had never made the smallest effort to verify this guess:indeed, there was no way of doing so. At this moment O’Brienglanced at his wrist-watch, saw that it was nearly eleven hundred,and evidently decided to stay in the Records Department until theTwo Minutes Hate was over. He took a chair in the same row asWinston, a couple of places away. A small, sandy-haired womanwho worked in the next cubicle to Winston was between them. Thegirl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind.The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of somemonstrous machine running without oil, burst from the bigtelescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teethon edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hatehad started.