![]() From that moment on, his life would be a steady descent from sanatorium to hospital to a deathbed marriage to Sonia Brownell, to death a few weeks later in January 1950. That ‘typing orgy’ worsened Orwell’s condition. ![]() Taylor puts it in this excellent biography, ‘the past is only useful, or even tolerated, if it does the present’s bidding’. This is the novel that would give the world Big Brother, doublespeak and Room 101, and which foresaw with incredible clarity the totalitarian surveillance societies of the future. Propped up in bed with a typewriter on his lap in his rain-lashed cottage seven miles up aĭirt track on the Hebridean island of Jura, coughing up blood, hacking his lungs out, chain-smoking and breathing the fumes of a defective paraffin heater, he bashed out a finished copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Then, suddenly, with death looming, a frenzy took hold of him to get the book finished. ![]() Severely ill with TB in the winter of 1947, the skeletal 44-year-old author told his publisher Fred Warburg that, in the event of his death, he must destroy the unfinished manuscript without showing it to anyone. ![]() George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four came within a whisker of never seeing the light of day. ![]()
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