Gulliver’s Travels meant more to George Orwell ‘than any other book ever written’ and was an important literary antecedent in the development of Newspeak.
From the opening sentences of his first professional article as a journalist, published in Paris during 1928, Orwell was obsessively interested in how the state endeavoured to censor language:
“The present state of affairs regarding censorship in English is as follows. In the theatre, each play, before it is staged, must be submitted for inspection by a censor nominated by the government, who can ban its performance or request alterations if he thinks it a danger to public morality. This censor is just like any other civil servant and is not selected for his literary talents.”
The apotheosis of this theme was reached in his satirical novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where the official language of Oceania, Newspeak, is designed to make heretical thought literally unthinkable:
“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in The Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell’s personal and professional experience of censorship, propaganda, imperialism and surveillance in Burma, Paris and Spain – and, later, at the BBC during World War Two – as well as his knowledge of international auxiliary languages, cablese and bureaucratic jargon were important factors in the creative process which led to the development of Newspeak.
Directly after departing the BBC, where he had been broadcasting about auxiliary languages, Orwell jotted in a literary notebook (sometime between September 1943 and early 1944) his first reference to ‘Newspeak’. The first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, provisionally titled The Last Man in Europe, was completed in November 1947 and it is notable just how many of Orwell’s most important essays about literature, language and politics – ‘Why I Write’; ‘Politics and the English language’; ‘Writers and Leviathan’; ‘Notes on Nationalism’; ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’; ‘You and the Atom Bomb’ and ‘The Prevention of Literature’ – were written during this period, foregrounding the major themes of the novel.
Another essay from this time, ‘Politics vs literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, reveals the centrality of Jonathan Swift’s satire in Orwell’s creative process for thinking about simplified languages and totalitarianism. Orwell analysed Swift’s ‘attack’ on ‘the truthfulness of recorded history’ in this essay while drafting Nineteen Eighty-Four on the remote Scottish isle of Jura:
But Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralise popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria.
Orwell, after the rise of Hitler and Stalin, felt there was ‘something queerly familiar’ about this section of the novel ‘because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious’. This concept is fundamental to the mental atmosphere evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four and how Newspeak is deployed in the service of the Party.
Orwell had been reflecting on the messages for the contemporary world in this 18th century novel for some time. On 6 November 1942, he broadcast on the BBC African Service an ‘Imaginary interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift’ positing ‘that each tribe of Yahoos had a Dictator, or Fuehrer’ and that passages in Part III of Gulliver’s Travels were not dissimilar to ‘reading an account of the Reichstag Fire trial’.
Orwell’s worsening health, after the wartime deprivations experienced in London along with his fears of atomic annihilation, impacted on the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four which is understandably viewed as a thoroughly pessimistic novel. Orwell described Gulliver’s Travels as ‘a rancorous as well as a pessimistic book’ relevant to his own era, haunted by the immutable doctrine of illiberal ideologies, secret police and sham trials. Orwell and Swift, who were both fond of apocalyptic forebodings and wrote with relish about bad tidings, have often been accused of misanthropy for the bleakness of their visions. Like Gulliver’s Travels, Orwell’s greatest fictional contribution to political thought, Nineteen Eighty-Four, attacks totalitarianism and, admired by readers across the political spectrum, quickly and enduringly shaped the broader intellectual life of the world after publication.
Swift’s satire influenced Orwell’s thinking about language, technology and literature at the very genesis of the creative process to imagine the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gulliver’s visit to the Academy of Lagado – where professors invent simplified languages, books are written by machinery and there are plans to abolish individuality altogether – influenced Orwell’s conception of ‘novel-writing machines’ and Newspeak for his novel:
“The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were Forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame; and giving them a sudden Turn, the whole Disposition of the words was entirely changed. …
Six Hours-a-Day the young Students were employed in this labour; and the professor showed me several Volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken Sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich Materials, to give the World a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences… .”
Gulliver learns that these academicians plan to replace language completely with a new scheme requiring that people express themselves with ‘things’ which had the considerable downside of requiring extra servants to lug the accumulated baggage needed to communicate:
“The first Project was, to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.
The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity.”
Orwell – who has Winston Smith, his protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, write: ‘If there was hope, it lay in the proles!’ – would have approved that the professors’ plans are disrupted by the ‘common People’:
… if the Women, in Conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate, had not threatened to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the Manner of their Forefathers; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People.
Orwell recognised that Swift – like himself (and Winston) – was in favour of ‘civilisation and the arts of civilisation’ and respects ‘the value of good manners, good conversation, and even learning of a literary and historical kind’. Smith, a bureaucrat employed in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth revising history for the state, makes the momentous decision, believing fervently in ‘human heritage’, to purchase secretly an ‘old-fashioned pen’ and keep a clandestine diary:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone – to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink – greetings!
Despite the pessimism and gloom most readers find in the novel, it becomes evident that in this future Winston addresses, thought is free. The Appendix indicates that the attempt by the Party to enforce ideological conformity has been vanquished; ‘Oldspeak’ has survived.
FUTHER REFLECTION
He assured me, that this Invention had employed all his Thoughts from his Youth; that he had emptied the whole Vocabulary into his Frame, and made the strictest Computation of the general Proportion there is in Books between the Numbers of Particles, Nouns, and Verbs, and other Parts of Speech.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Orwell claimed to have stolen the first copy of Gulliver’s Travels he ever owned. This was a more than a little hyperbolic; he purloined the copy to be gifted for his eighth birthday, carefully unwrapped, read and returned it undetected. Regardless, he was profoundly influenced by the satirical genius of Jonathan Swift and writing with the urgency of a seriously ill man, imaginatively poured the sum of his experiences, thoughts and beliefs into Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even though he was greatly concerned about never-ending war, totalitarianism, loss of intellectual freedom and the misuse of language for ideological purposes, this novel – although grim – is not as deeply pessimistic as generally portrayed.
Along with Swift’s work, the influence of Basic English, a backronym standing for British American Scientific International and Commercial, on his thinking is well known but the significance of Esperanto – an infinitely more subtle, nuanced and ideologically conceptualised international auxiliary language – has largely been ignored. Ironically, neither Esperanto nor Basic are languages of oppression and were never intended, like Newspeak, for malevolent purposes. Linguistic comparison of Basic English and Esperanto with Newspeak reveals the former to be more closely aligned with Orwell’s parodic language. However, Basic was designed to facilitate a transition to full English for the international community and Orwell understood it was not at all conducive to obfuscation, writing in a 1944 Tribune column that:
“… you cannot make a meaningless statement without its being apparent that it is meaningless—which is quite enough to explain why so many schoolmasters, editors, politicians and literary critics object to it.”
The significance of the Appendix (and Newspeak) for understanding the message – demonstrated by Orwell’s refusal to grant a request from the American Book-of-the-Month Club that the Appendix, as well as Emmanuel Goldstein’s manifesto, ‘The theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism’ be cut from the novel – cannot be exaggerated. Like Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, Orwell parodies the idea that a simplified language such as Newspeak can effectively replace Standard English. The Appendix, by signalling hope from a future age where Big Brother has been defeated, demonstrates the Party’s ultimate failure at censoring thought. The victory attributable not to a resistance group – but language itself. The British linguist, Roger Fowler, summarises this perceptively:
Newspeak is a fallacy, and Orwell knows it. There is a myth about Nineteen Eighty-Four to the effect that Orwell predicts a future in which thought can be controlled by an artificial language. Although, as we have seen, Orwell does understand that there are vital relationships between language and thought, and he does believe that clear thought can be helped or hindered by language choices, he does not suggest that orthodoxy can be imposed by a government-controlled invented language. In fact, the tone of the Newspeak Appendix – which I suspect is rarely read carefully, or not in the context of the other styles of the novel – is quite clearly satirical, more reminiscent of Swift than anything else in the book. Newspeak seems rather to be presented as the implausible fantasy of an overconfident regime.
Newspeak was designed to replace Standard English for Party members in Oceania. The vocabulary – developed by eliminating undesirable words, inventing new ones and stripping others of their unorthodox meanings – was designed to permit ‘exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express’ and as such, is nuanced, like Esperanto. Orwell, with his patriotic love of England, the English language and literature, could never have sanctioned such a plan. He could though, devise his own parody of the language to serve the ideological needs of Ingsoc and Big Brother for his Swiftian satire.
REFERENCES
Bowker, Gordon (2004 [2003]) George Orwell, London: Abacus
Crick, Bernard (1992) George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, second edition
Damrosch, Leo (2013) Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kindle Edition
Fowler, Roger (1995) The Language of George Orwell, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd
Orwell, George; Crick, Bernard (ed.) (1984) Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 9, Secker & Warburg, 1997
Orwell, George (1998 [1903-1936]) A Kind of Compulsion: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. X, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg
Orwell, George, All Propaganda Is Lies: 1941–1942, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 13, Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean: 1942–1943, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 14, Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, I Belong to the Left: 1945, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 17, Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, Smothered Under Journalism: 1946, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 18, Secker & Warburg, 1998
Orwell, George, It Is What I Think: 1947–1948, The Complete Works of George Orwell – Volume 19, Secker & Warburg, 1998
Swift, Jonathan (2022 [1726]) Gulliver’s Travels: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Young, John Wesley (1991) Totalitarian Language: Orwell’s Newspeak and its Nazi and Communist Antecedents, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia
FEATURED IMAGE: Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas (1710) Public Domain
