4 The publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell suffered from poor health throughout his life and was already seriously ill (with an incurable form of tuberculosis) when he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The cultural and political impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four was immediate. It was published in June 1949 – against the backdrop of the beginning of the Cold War and amid increasing anti-communist hysteria on both sides of the Atlantic. Orwell’s critique of totalitarian and monolithic party systems and dominant ideologies was eagerly adopted by opponents of communism (and by those who were suspicious of ‘the left’ more generally).
McCarthyism
While there was a tendency in Britain to fear ‘reds under the beds’, communists (and alleged communists or sympathisers) were rooted out far more systematically in the US during the early 1950s in what became known as ‘McCarthyism’.
Senator Joseph McCarthy led a series of investigations of those suspected of coming under communist influence. McCarthy’s targets were mainly people working in US government departments and the film and entertainment industry. Many of McCarthy’s charges were unsubstantiated and little real evidence was offered. Since then, the term ‘McCarthyism’ has been used for a politically motivated witch hunt.
In the US and Britain, those on the political right seized upon the novel as a thinly veiled criticism of the ‘statism’ of the Labour government. This distressed Orwell. In July 1949, a month after the novel was published, he issued a statement making it clear that the novel was neither an attack on the Labour Party in Britain nor on democratic socialism. It was an attack on the dangers posed by both communism and fascism – and the strength of his argument in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it could apply to a range of totalitarian systems.
Orwell died in January 1950, just seven months after the novel was published. He did not live long enough to engage with the various interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four or the significance of its ‘Appendix’ (which takes the form of a ‘scholarly’ article written at an unspecified time well into the future). Clearly though (whatever else he may have had in mind), Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four as a satirical warning against a descent into totalitarianism.