It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
In the wildest and most exhilarating way, time is out of joint, and everyday life is stripped of comfort; even as a child, George Orwell had been fascinated by the futuristic imagination of HG Wells (and later, Aldous Huxley). Finally, at the end of his short life, he fulfilled his dream to write an imagined future.
Today, Nineteen Eighty-Four is arguably the most famous English novel of the 20th century; a zeitgeist book, completed after an apocalyptic war, bearing witness to the Holocaust, the downfall of the Third Reich, and the atomic bomb. Orwell’s dystopian vision was rooted in its author’s political instincts, but also in its time: the post-war experience of Western Europe. Its themes (the threat of the totalitarian state, censorship and the manipulation of language) continue to reverberate, with prophetic menace, like distant gunfire, into the present, while setting the highest bar.
The dystopian plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four is one thing; its ideas of what could threaten freedom of expression represent something else: a political imagination of genius. In the 77 years since publication, “Big Brother is watching you”, “newspeak”, “doublethink”, “prole”, “thoughtcrime”, “unperson”, “reality control”, and “the Two Minute Hate” have become inseparable from the English language; and Orwell himself a kind of secular saint, an icon of the unfettered literary mind.
The mystery of literature, and its relationship to independent thought, crucially depends on context but begins with three timeless gifts: imagination, character and a mastery of tone, a quality sometimes described as the writer’s “voice”. The backstory of Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, illustrates a lost world of creative authenticity that’s within living memory.
From a 2026 perspective, the circumstances in which Orwell completed his manuscript make for grim reading. His wife had just died during a botched operation; he was suffering from tuberculosis, and he was raising his baby son, as well as picking up the shattered pieces of his life following the publication of Animal Farm. Throughout a career of gritty self-determination, he had always been – in the words of one critic – “the wintry conscience of his generation”.
Orwell was addicted to extremes. In the winter of 1946-47, one of the coldest of the century, he decamped to a farmhouse on the island of Jura in search of “time to think again”. He’d already anticipated this battle in his Why I Write: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”
Until his death in January 1950, Orwell re-enacted every detail of this everyday struggle in the darkest possible way. The torturous circumstances of his first draft are unimaginable now. Stoic and aloof, he never requested help, as might be routine today. Secker, his publisher, indeed, seems actually to have added to his distress by imposing an urgent delivery deadline. There had been talk of “stenographers”. In the end, through poor communication with Jura, Orwell faced the “grisly job” of retyping his “unbelievably bad” manuscript on his own. In the absence of cash or other resources from London, he sustained himself with roll-up cigarettes, pots of strong tea, and the comfort of a paraffin heater.
Eventually, when the final draft reached London, on time, in December 1947, his publisher, oblivious of the extremes to which his author had been reduced, saluted “one of the most terrifying books I ever ever read”, and raced to get it to the marketplace on 8 June 1949.
Nineteen Eighty-Four established Orwell as an all-time iconic writer, but his advance (against royalties) was never more than modest. Orwell himself calmly predicted earnings of about £500 from the first edition. He died within a year of publication, aged 46. His crystal spirit remains a beacon: dedicated, uncompromising, fearless and visionary, a role that’s still vacant.
In 1949, Orwell was writing in a society oppressed by rationing, disease, poverty and brutal winters. Today, in the West, the human condition is infinitely superior. We are warmer, fitter, richer, cleaner and safer. Writers are awarded huge advances; they are big names treated as celebrities, but does this help or hinder the creative process? In any debate about free thinking, context is all – but does comfort really create the conditions required for true independent thought?
If you had asked Orwell about independent thinking and the novel, he might have referred to a traditional notion that the free range of the imagination is the only departure lounge for the flight of the mind. He might have developed this thought, with an ironic reference to his “Fairy Story” Animal Farm, to insist that no matter what the writer is doing, it is the reader, inalienably, who is the freer agent. This is where freedom really lies. The joy of reading, an act of freedom itself, is solitary and mostly private. An act that should be unpoliced.
It goes without saying that as an author Orwell never did a bookshop signing session, or an American book promotion, and certainly never attended a literary festival. In ways that cast an eerie light on 21st-century creativity, many post-war writers endured a gruelling rite of passage before reaching the upper slopes of Parnassus by the skin of their teeth.
Take, for example, an obscure Salisbury schoolteacher (known to his pupils as “Scruff”) who in September 1953, submitted the coffee-stained typescript of his first novel Strangers from Within to Faber & Faber. Scruff’s novel had already been rejected by at least seven publishers. The Faber reader’s verdict was “Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.” The omens seemed poor. But there was a reprieve. A new editor, with an open mind and sensibility of his own, Charles Monteith (later, Faber’s chair) chanced to delve more deeply into this dog-eared typescript. In November 1953, he wrote to “Mr Golding” that he “should very much like to have a talk with you about it”.
This invitation became a commitment from the author to revise the book, retitled “A Cry of Children”, from start to finish. Slowly, his “pointless” draft would pupate into the literary chrysalis we know as Lord of the Flies. Once terms were agreed, with no intervention from any literary agent, Faber acquired world rights for an advance of £60, payable 50/50, half on signature, the balance on publication. By March 1954 – a schedule unheard of today – the final draft was in production with a “nice jungly jacket”.
The rest is history: the slow launch of a modern classic by word of mouth; Lord of the Flies became a cult book with teenage readers, and also a set text. When Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize in 1980 we can see how, in hindsight, Golding’s success inaugurated two decades of acclaim for new fiction in the English language.
As a grand old man of letters, he became the head of a profession that included Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Jeannette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, Julian Barnes, and eventually Zadie Smith. Whatever the metropolitan acclaim, Golding continued to live in the West Country, far from the bonfire of the vanities in literary London, unencumbered by PRs or BookTok. A generation after his death, Lord of the Flies is still in print. Who knows if we will be able to say the same of many of the authors treated as celebrities today?
My own guess is that, as visionary free-thinkers, these two great British authors would both have been diverted, even entertained, by many contemporary innovations in the world of books. The human animal, with its stone-age brain, remains a storytelling species. Conversely, the rhetoric of free-thinking always depends on a compelling argument. As EM Forster put it in Aspects of the Novel. “Yes – oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story.”
No question, in the age of Netflix, our storytelling brains have become baffled, distracted and confused by a multiplicity of alternative scenarios and tech’s threat to “attention” complexifies every social instinct. If our digital revolution seems like a golden age of global communication, especially in the English language, it has also scrambled clear-thinking and can create timidity around pursuing unpopular ideas, with some notable exceptions. Sally Rooney’s stand today against “anti-terrorist” legislation is a welcome demonstration of Orwellian courage.
But despite the naysayers and doom-merchants, we need not, I think, surrender to lasting panic or despair. We live during a “Great Transition”, the biggest paradigm shift since the Renaissance, possibly the biggest in Western civilisation. As a result, in an unfamiliar creative milieu, literature and original thought today are afflicted by seven deadly sins: Vanity, Plagiarism, Self-censorship, Monetisation, Media, Pornography and AI.
AI is not so much a sin as a technological Hydra, a multi-headed beast with many sinister manifestations. Some are horrifying, replete with dread; others are fundamentally benign, as befits a magic tool. To medicine, law, administration, and much of industry, AI will be a blessing, doubtless with dystopian features.
Orwell and Golding, both remorselessly original, wrote passionately in service of dystopian visions that live after them. The world they knew, of gentlemen’s clubs, second-hand bookshops, bobbies on bicycles, pipe-smoking booksellers, saloon bars, the BBC canteen, and “old maids” pedalling to communion in the morning mist, has long disappeared – as it should.
More telling, the writing that underpinned their world – the canon of our literature – is now being revised and monetised by a booming English language readership exhausted by “AI slop”, and machine-generated ideas. Books By People, a brilliant new start-up, verifies “organic” prose. The clocks, meanwhile, are not yet striking 13. Despite modern-day distractions and tensions, literary life is still operating within the old nexus of solitude, integrity and transgression.
The demands of Make it New (Ezra Pound’s injunction) still drive the telling of stories that have not been told, and always have. In many ways, social media inspires our storytelling instincts. Nevertheless, with so many diversions in the digital marketplace, the next generation of writers will have to be more vigilant than ever.
Our ancient human brain has its limits, but look at its record: an astounding library of free and original thought. “Good prose is like a window pane,” wrote Orwell. Glass is fragile, but our appetite for that new perspective never dies.
The Independent and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) have launched a new film festival as part of The Independent’s 40th anniversary celebrations.
Celebrating Free Thinkers will mark the occasion with a series of specially curated events and screenings. Independent Members get 20 per cent off all tickets. For more information, visit https://www.ica.art/films/the-independent
