Summary
Summary 1984 Context Notes
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- OCR
Book: 1984 by George Orwell Contextual notes that are vital for meeting AO3 objectives Grade: A*
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1984 Context• Described his family as “lower upper-middle class”
• Felt oppressed by dictatorial control that schools exercised
• Serviced in the British Imperial Police in Burma- hated his duties- required to enforce
strict laws of a political regime he despised
• 1936 he travelled to Spain to report the Spanish Civil War- first hand witness of a fascist
regime- at the same time as Stalin’s purges
• Rise of Nazism and Communism mounted his hatred for totalitarianism and political
authority
• 1984 is a powerful warning to the dangers of a totalitarian society
• Like Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932), 1984 explores the perils of such a
society
• The reading of 1984 is enhanced by the political regiments Orwell had witnessed and
experienced in Europe, particularly Spain.
• ‘The Party’ is a satirical take on the British Labour party
• Orwell’s letter as to why he wrote 1984 in 1944- “Horrors of emotional nationalism and a
tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth…have to fit in with the words
and prophecies of some infallible Fuhrer”
• “Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official
history”
• “The sort of world I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which
are unable to conquer one another, two and two could make five if the Fuhrer wished it”
• “Intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people”
• “most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic
falsification of history etc so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side”
• The statement “2+2 makes five” was a Communist Party slogan from the second five
year plan which encouraged the fulfilment of the five year plan in four years.
• Torture in the Ministry of Love evoke procedures used by the NKVD (People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs) -used truncheons, forbidden to put hands in pockets,
remain in brightly lit rooms for days, provoked rodents and victims being shown a mirror
after physical collapse.
• Thought Criminals- Rutherford, Aaronson and Jones are based on 1930s show trials of
Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev
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