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Chapter 1
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It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
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Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the
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vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions,
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though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering
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along with him.
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The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a
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coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall.
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It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a
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man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome
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features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even
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at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric
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current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive
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in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston,
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who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went
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slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the
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lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was
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one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about
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when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
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Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had
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something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an
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oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface
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of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank
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somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument
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(the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of
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shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail
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figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls
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which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face
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naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
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blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
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Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in
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the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into
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spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there
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seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
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everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding
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corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER
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IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into
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Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner,
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flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the
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single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between
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the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again
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with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's
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windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police
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mattered.
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Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away
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about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The
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telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
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made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
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moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
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plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
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no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
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often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
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wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
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the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
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to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
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assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
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darkness, every movement scrutinized.
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Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he
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well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of
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Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape.
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This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste--this was London, chief
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city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of
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Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him
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whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these
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vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with
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baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs
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with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?
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And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the
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willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the
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bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies
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of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not
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remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit
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tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
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The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official
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language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see
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Appendix.]--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It
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was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring
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up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston
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stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in
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elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
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WAR IS PEACE
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FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
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IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
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The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above
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ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London
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there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So
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completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof
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of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They
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were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus
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