On this day 75 years ago George Orwell's dystopian classic‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ was published. Many aspects of the English writer and journalist's foreboding tale have passed into everyday language and the book's central message still bears chilling relevance. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
” So goes the famous opening of English writer seminal dystopian classic ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Right from the offset, something is askew with Orwell’s world, yet the tone suggests it is treated as completely normal. It wasn’t a bright cold day in April at all when the first editions of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ hit shops.
In fact, it was on this day, 8 June 1949. Having finished writing the book in 1948, it has been long suggested that Orwell simply flipped the last two digits of the year in order to come up with the novel’s title. This has never been proven though and other theories for how Orwell came up with the book’s date range from literary allusions to just random chance.
Inspired by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 novel ‘We’ and Aldous Huxley’s similarly dystopian classic ‘Brave New World’ in 1931, Orwell wanted to create his own vision of how everything might go wrong. It was a logical step after the success of his previous project, the novella ‘Animal Farm’, published in 1945, which satirised the USSR and the rise of totalitarianism amid communist revolutionaries. {{image align="center" size=".
