George Orwell’s Last Draft

Orwell’s scribbled corrections.

In 1946, George Orwell moved to the remote island of Jura, in the Hebrides, Scotland. There he was to work on a novel and take some fresh air for a troublesome chest. By December, 1948, having been diagnosed with tuberculosis, he had sent the manuscript to his agent in London unsure whether to call it Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Last Man in Europe. By the spring of 1949, Orwell was spitting blood. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June, 1949 and was hailed as a masterpiece. On January 21, 1950, Geroge Orwell suffered a massive haemorrhage and died in hospital, alone. He was forty-six years old.

The photograph shows Orwell’ s annotations on an earlier draft. Below is the opening to the published version; there are some notable changes which made for more economical and precise prose. If you look at the draft, the first sentence originally featured ‘a million radios striking thirteen’ – so much more succinct to say: ‘the clocks were striking thirteen.’ On the older draft, Winston Smith ‘pressed the button of the lift’, then he ‘pressed a second time’. In the final, it simply says: ‘It was no use trying the lift’ – this just feels so much more bleak. The ‘aged prole who acted as porter’ is summarily removed so that, instead, our attention is focused on the large poster on the wall featuring an enormous face. We will find out that the face had a caption beneath it which ran: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Published Version:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort 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 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-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four