Orwell's Unmediated Hand: The Compositional Stages of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a hallmark example of the first, great cautionary sociological and political dystopias of the postwar era. Over the last sixty years, literary critics have thoroughly studied the plot, setting, characters, themes, scenes, subliminal meanings, and overt meanings of this text. However, very few critics have utilized one of the most precious resources available for analysis of Orwell’s creative process – the surviving, but fragmented, stages of early composition. In order to understand the full significance of these pages, it is necessary to illuminate the presubmission history of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point at which George Orwell began composition to the date of press submission – a span of roughly twenty-nine months, from the summer of 1946 to November 1948, when Orwell’s British publisher, Secker and Warburg, received the typesetting copy. Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final work, is also the sole Orwell novel where manuscript stages are known to survive. The submitted typescript survives in the Orwell Archives at University College in London, and its underlayer reflects the fullest development of Nineteen Eighty-Four under Orwell’s unmediated hand. Although the 1947 manuscript is a conglomeration of hand written pages, typed pages, hand corrected pages, and type corrected pages, it is vital that literary and textual criticism focus on what the manuscript reveals about Orwell’s development of the narrative structure and text.