Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract

At the end of May 1947 Orwell wrote to his publisher, Fredric Warburg, apropos his new novel:

I have made a fairly good start on the book and I think I must have written nearly a third of the rough draft… Of course the rough draft is always a ghastly mess having very little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of the job. So if I do finish the rough draft by October I might get the book done fairly early in 1948, barring illnesses. I don’t like talking about books before they are written, but I will tell you now that this is a novel about the future — that is, it is in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel. That is what makes it a difficult job — of course as a book of anticipations it would be comparatively simple to write.⁸³