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Part One

Chapter 1

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 fro with him

The hallway s e for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a edly handso the lift Even at the best of ti, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours It was part of the econohts up, and Winston, as thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several ti, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enorazed from the wall It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had so-iron The voice ca metal plaque like a dulled ht-hand wall Winston turned a switch and the voice sank souishable The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be di it off coure, the reness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended

Outside, even through the shut -pane, the world looked cold Down in the street little eddies of hirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there see, except the posters that were plastered everywhere The black corner There was one on the house-front immediately opposite BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight It was the police patrol, snooping into people's s The patrols did not ht Police mattered

Behind Winston's back the voice fro-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very lohisper, would be picked up by it,as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard There was of course no way of knohether you were being watched at any given ed in on any individual as guesswork It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the ti in your henever they wanted to You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the griue distaste - this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their s patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the -herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bo up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not re reht-lit tableaux occurring against no background and ible

The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different froht It was an enor up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand roo ramifications below Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size So co architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously They were the homes of the four Ministries bethich the entire apparatus of government was divided The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself ar The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one There were no s in it at all Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a leun nests Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roauards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons

Winston turned round abruptly He had set his features into the expression of quiet opti the telescreen He crossed the roo the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he are that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow's breakfast He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label ave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese ricespirit Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved hiulped it down like a dose of medicine

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes The stuff was like nitric acid, andhit on the back of the head with a rubber club The nextin his belly died down and the world began to look arette from a crumpled packet ht, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor With the next he was -room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover

For so-roo placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could coer wall, opposite theTo one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to reht went He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen It was partly the unusual geography of the roo that he was now about to do

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer It was a peculiarly beautiful book Its se, was of a kind that had not been uess, however, that the book wasin theof a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now re desire to possess it Partyon the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was iiven a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty At the ti it for any particular purpose He had carried it guiltily ho written in it, it was a co possession