Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile of the Extant Manuscript

by George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (Editor), Daniel G. Siegel (Preface)

The very survival of this manuscript is itself remarkable. As Sonia Orwell wrote, "George was obviously not a very great manuscript keeper as there are none around of any of the books except this." Incomplete as it is, the facsimile and the transcript display not only the birth-pangs of a masterpiece, but the intense effort that underlies the simplicity for which Orwell's prose is justly admired.

The facsimile pages are throughout reproduced to the same size as the original: Peter Davison's transcript is reproduced on facing pages to a scale which allows for line-for-line reference to the facsimile, and his introduction and notes, analysing the sequence of composition, lay the essential foundations for critical assessment.

Davison's scholarly approach deliberately avoids speculative readings, but identifies the levels of drafting and locates the equivalent printed pages in current editions. The presentation makes visible the operation of the process of continuing refinement over a period of years. The facsimile pages are both revealing and moving: it is impossible to examine them without a poignant sense of the driving urgency that propelled the revisions, of the relentless discipline with which Orwell strove to ensure that the final draft met the very highest standards of modern English prose: his own.

--From the dust jacket.

Genres: Fiction

381 pages, Hardcover

First published July 2, 1984

About the author

Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.

Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture.

Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.

Reviews

[Sarah (Presto agitato) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an unusual book, sort of a House of Leaves for Orwell nerds. The backstory is that George Orwell’s widow found a partial draft manuscript of 1984 and donated it to a charity auction where it sold for £50 in 1952. Years later, Peter Davison, the editor of The Complete Works of George Orwell, obtained access to it and went through the document with painstaking care, publishing it as this book in 1984.

On the odd-numbered pages, there are facsimiles of the actual manuscript pages. Some of it is type-written, some handwritten, and much of it a confusing mess of both, with lots of crossing-out and writing between lines and in the margins in different colors of ink. The manuscript pages are shown in their actual sizes, which varied as Orwell used several different types and sizes of paper. (I kept expecting to see something scrawled on a napkin or the back of a train ticket, but there was nothing that extreme). On the facing pages, Davison has transcribed the whole thing meticulously, including everything underneath the scribbles, making sense out of it for those whose eyesight isn’t up to the challenge.


The first page of the manuscript - It was a bright, cold day in April and millions of clocks and/or radios were striking thirteen.


Orwell's handwriting on the right with Davison's transcription on the left.

This book gives an insight into Orwell’s writing process for the book he said would have been better if it hadn’t been written “under the influence of TB.” He was very ill for most of the time he was writing it, and even typing was physically difficult for him. There aren’t any big surprises in the actual text, certainly no secret Hollywood happy endings. Orwell changed the year in which the novel is set more than once (1980 crossed out, then 1982, then 1984). There are a few scenes that didn’t make it into the final version, in some cases mercifully, like a bizarre and gruesome lynching that Winston describes when writing about newsreels in his diary. As one would expect with Orwell, many of the edits involve clarifying and simplifying the prose. Some passages that seem relatively straightforward are rewritten five or six times, just in this draft.

This had to be an expensive book to publish. It’s a heavy, oversized hardcover book with different colors of ink and numerous page layouts. The target audience would presumably be small. Still, it’s rare to get a glimpse of a work in progress, since most writers don’t keep multiple manuscript drafts after a book is published (or at least don’t let them be made public). There are no existing manuscripts of Orwell’s other books, and he instructed his literary executor to destroy any drafts of Nineteen Eighty-Four if he died before he finished it. This book would be more of a curiosity to most people, but the effort and scholarship that went into producing it are impressive.

[Carlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could never imagine to write a review about "Nineteen Eighty-four", a book I read for the first time around Christmas 1981 and that became my all-times favourite book, "The book", to use an expression of the novel ("The book" is the book allegedly written by Goldstein).

But I would like to make at least one comment about this Facsimile edition. In the draft of the book there was a very interesting fragment, which has been cut out from the definitive edition. I have been always puzzled to understand why it has been removed.
This passage takes place right after Winston and Julia meet O’Brien.

In the definitive edition, after the meeting with O’Brien, when they "join" the resistance, Winston and Julia depart from his home separately and meet again only about a week later, when they are arrested.

In the draft, there is one more fragment, a sad and distressing one. Julia waits for Winston in the street, apparently to arrange another meeting on the next day. She is somewhat disturbed and upset, and Winston has the feeling that her embrace is actually a good-bye. Why? Perhaps, she is upset because entering the Brotherhood means a further step towards the grave, it is “like being a little less alive”, but maybe the author wanted to express that Julia has in some way realised that O’Brien is a member of the Thought Police, and that they are doomed, they could get arrested at any moment so she wants to say good-bye to Winston.

After all, unlike Winston, she is the one good at detecting signs of unorthodoxy: “I'm good at spotting people who don't belong”, she says in another chapter of the novel. On the contrary, in the first chapters of the novel, Winston thinks she is a spy, a sort of amateur spy, a hero woman who spots heterodoxy and denounce traitors, whereas O’Brien is a friend, he reckons. Julia, perhaps, has immediately realised that O’Brien, indeed, "does belong".

However, here is that passage from the facsimile:

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.