Indeed, Orwell himself stated that although the novel was ‘in a sense a fantasy’, it is written in the form of the naturalistic novel, with its themes and ideas having been already ‘partly realised in Communism and fascism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in Meyer’s words, ‘realistic rather than fantastic’. His talent lay not in original imaginative thinking but in clear-headed critical analysis of things as they are: his essays are a prime example of this. In his analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four in his study of Orwell, George Orwell (Reader’s Guides), Jeffrey Meyers argues convincingly that, rather than being a nightmare vision of the future, a prophetic or speculative work, Orwell’s novel is actually a ‘realistic synthesis and rearrangement of familiar materials’ – indeed, as much of Orwell’s best work is. As Orwell put it in his essay ‘ Why I Write’, all of his serious work written since 1936 was written ‘ against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism’. In the case of Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this means the novel reflects the London of the 1940s.īy the time he came to write the novel, Orwell already had a long-standing interest in using his writing to highlight the horrors of totalitarianism around the world, especially following his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that most dystopian novels, whilst nominally set in an imagined future, are really using their future setting to reflect on what are already firmly established social or political ideas.

They are not mere speculation, but are grounded in the circumstances in which they were written. However, books set in the future are rarely simply about the future. The novel is often analysed as a warning about the dangers of allowing a creeping totalitarianism into Britain, after the horrors of such regimes in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere had been witnessed.īecause of this quality of the book, it is often called ‘prophetic’ and a ‘nightmare vision of the future’, among other things. Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most famous novel about totalitarianism, and about the dangers of allowing a one-party state where democracy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought are all outlawed.

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