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History and title

George Orwell "encapsulate[d] the thesis at the heart of his novel" in 1944, then wrote most of it on the island of Jura, Scotland, during the 1947–48 period, despite being critically tubercular.^[2] On 4 December 1948, he sent the final manuscript to the Secker and Warburg editorial house who published Nineteen Eighty-Four on June 8th 1949; ^[3][4] by the year 1989, it had been translated to more than 65 languages, the greatest number for any novel.^[5] The title of the novel, its terms, its Newspeak language, and the author's surname are contemporary bywords for personal privacy lost to the state, and the adjective Orwellian connotes totalitarian thought and action in controlling and subjugating people. Newspeak language says the opposite of what it means by misnomer; hence the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) deals with war, and the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) deals with law and order.

The Last Man in Europe was one of the original titles for the novel, but, in a 22 October 1948, letter to publisher Frederic Warburg, eight months before publication, Orwell wrote him about hesitating between The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four;^[6] yet Warburg suggested changing the Man title to one more commercial.^[7] Speculation about the writer's choice of title includes perhaps an allusion to the 1884 founding centenary of the socialist Fabian Society,^[8] or to the novels The Iron Heel (1908), by Jack London, or to The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), by G. K. Chesterton, both occur in 1984,^[9] or to the poem "End of the Century, 1984", by Eileen O'Shaughnessy, his first wife.

Moreover, in the novel 1985 (1978), Anthony Burgess proposes that Orwell, disillusioned by the Cold War's onset, intended to title the book 1948. The introduction to the Penguin Books Modern Classics edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, reports that Orwell originally set 1980 as the story's time, but the extended writing led to re-titling the novel, first, to 1982, then to 1984, an inversion of the 1948 composition year.^[10] Like most dystopias, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been, throughout its history, either banned or legally challenged as intellectually dangerous to the public, just like Brave New World (1932), by Aldous Huxley, We (1924), by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Kallocain (1940), by Karin Boye, and Fahrenheit 451 (1951), by Ray Bradbury.^[11] In 2005, Time magazine included it to its list of one hundred best English-language novels since 1923.^[12]

Popular misconceptions and copyright

In the essay "Why I Write" (1946), Orwell described himself as a Democratic Socialist, ^[13] thus, his 16 June 1949 letter to Francis A. Henson, of the United Automobile Workers, about the excerpts published in Life (25 July 1949) magazine and the The New York Times Book Review (31 July 1949), Orwell said:

My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

—Collected Essays ^[14]

Nineteen Eighty-Four will not enter the US public domain until 2044, ^[15] and in the European Union until 2020, although it is in the public domain in Canada,^[16] Russia,^[17] and Australia.^[18]