1984

1984
George Orwell 1949

Chapter 1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston
Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an eort to escape the vile wind, slipped
quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough
to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It
depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of
about forty-ve, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.
Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best
of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut o
during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate
Week. The
at was seven
ights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had
a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the
way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face
gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that
the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU, the caption beneath it ran. Inside the
at a fruity voice was reading out a list of gures which had
something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the
right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though
the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was
called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it o completely. He
moved over to the window: a smallish, frail gure, the meagreness of his body
merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party.
His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse
soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down
in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals,
and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be
no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The
black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was
one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING
YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own.
Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner,
apped tfully in the
wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far
distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant
1

like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving
ight. It was the police
patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however.
Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
about pig-iron and the overfullment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The tele-
screen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made,
above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long
as he remained within the eld of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he
could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether
you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system,
the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was
even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live | did
live, from habit that became instinct | in the assumption that every sound you
made was overheard, and, except in 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 kilometre away the Ministry of
Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste | this was London, chief city
of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether
London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of
rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber,
their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron,
their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where
the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of
rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had
sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no
use, he could not