from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; pages v-vi (“A Note on the Text” by Peter Davison):
As a child Orwell was fascinated by H. G. Wells’s Modern Utopia. He told Jacintha Buddicom that he might one day write a similar type of book. He was introduced to Yevgeny Zamyatine's We by Gleb Struve, and he told him on 17 February 1944, ‘I am interested in that kind of book, and even keep making notes for one myself that may get written sooner or later.’ Orwell began writing his last novel in earnest at Barnhill, Jura, in the summer of 1946 and by the autumn had typed some fifty pages of which pages 25-38 (Goldstein’s Testament) survive. These form part of the draft of the novel, about 40 per cent of which still exists and has been reproduced in facsimle (ed. P. Davison, 1984). From this it can be established that Orwell completed his first draft in the early autumn of 1947 (of which ten pages survive) and revised the whole novel in the summer and autumn of 1948. He was by now very sick and in pain, but he struggled through November to retype the whole book, revising it as he did so, and he posted copies to Fredric Warburg and his agent, Leonard Moore, on 3 December 1948; a third copy was sent to New York. The draft has many points of interest, but two are particularly worth recording here.
As a result of Orwell’s novel, the year 1984 became a legend before it arrived. However, that was not the year Orwell initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness), that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984. The second interesting feature is a passage Orwell cut out from the final version. After their meeting with O’Brien, Julia and Winston depart separately. In the draft, Julia waits for Winston. This is part of the passage cut out from the conclusion to Part II, section viii (page 186):
He had gone perhaps two hundred metres, and was in the dark patch midway between two street lamps, when he was startled by something soft bumping against him. The next moment Julia’s arms were clinging tightly round him.
‘You see I’ve broken my first order,’ she whispered with her lips close against his ear. ‘But I couldn’t help it. We hadn’t fixed up about tomorrow. Listen.’ In the usual manner, she gave him instructions about their next meeting. ‘And now, good-night, my love, good-night!’
She kissed his cheek almost violently a number of times, then slipped away into the shadow of the wall and promptly disappeared. Her lips had been cold, and in the darkness it had seemed to him that her face was pale. He had a curious feeling that although the purpose for which she had waited was to arrange another meeting, the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye.
- page viii:
Orwell’s first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, and several thereafter suffered from ‘in-house censorship’. His last underwent the same fate in at least one of its many editions and translations. A Spanish version for publication in Argentina was the subject of the very last surviving letter to Orwell from his agent, Leonard Moore, dated 22 November 1949, two months before his death. Moore told Orwell that the Argentine publishers wanted cuts made of some 140 lines because ‘the Spanish language is cruder than the English’ and the authorities might be induced to ban Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘on some quite irrelevant point of morality’. That would mean the loss of a book the basic philosophy of which was ‘aimed directly against some of the most powerful movements of our time’. Among passages causing particular concern in Argentina were page 70, lines 3-23 and much of pages 131-3.