"Nineteen Eighty-Four" Was Almost Called Something Very Different

How the novel's working title proves itself wrong.

The novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was almost known as something completely different. Its title at the conception of the project was The Last Man in Europe, presumably implying that its protagonist, Winston Smith, was the last human being in a crumbling society, the lone possessor of a free-thinking consciousness.

Somewhere between the first and second drafts, George Orwell changed the title to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was possibly a suggestion from his publisher, urging him to choose a more ‘commercial’ title. It was also a tribute to his wife, Eileen, who had died just a year or so earlier. In 1934, the year before she had met Orwell, she had written a touching poem, “End of the Century, 1984,” which tackled themes similar to those which would end up in his final and most famous novel.

In 2017, Dennis Glover wrote a novel about Orwell’s last days. He titled it The Last Man in Europe, as a reference to the novel’s working title. I haven’t yet read the book, but I imagine the title refers to Orwell himself. In a sense, he was ‘the last man in Europe.’ He was a rebel in a society of ideologues, he defied the Right and the Left alike, he saw through the propaganda and the lies which saturated his nation and, in a climate where the truth seemed unknowable, scrounged together a worldview that feels current to this day.

Orwell’s publisher was probably right to reject the title. Nineteen Eighty-Four is iconic. I doubt The Last Man in Europe would have had the same staying power. However, it would have had some staying power. There’s something compelling about the mental image of a lone intellectual survivor, the last old soul in a dying world.

I can’t be the only person who projects themselves onto such a figure. I often put on the Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Only Living Boy in New York,” hum along to the lyrics
“half of the time we’re gone
but we don’t know where
and we don’t know where”
and I imagine that the whole thing was crafted just for me—that I am alone in a city full of zombies, misunderstood save for the writer of the song.

This isn’t true, of course. If I were the lone survivor, the song wouldn’t exist, or if it did, it would have faded into obscurity well before I ever discovered it. If Paul Simon were “The Only Living Boy in New York,” no one would connect with his music. If George Orwell were “The Last Man in Europe,” his name wouldn’t have become an adjective. Sure, there’s a lot of emptiness in the world. A lot of vapid, unfathomable stupidity. But there is also consciousness. In a sense, this proves one of the key messages of Nineteen Eighty-Four totally wrong.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is by far the most pessimistic of Orwell’s works. The novel seems to suggest that it is possible for a government to suppress the thought of its citizens completely. This image is fine—perhaps even inspiring—in the abstract. However, history—and the reception of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, has proved Orwell wrong.

The novel is banned in countries, but citizens get their hands on it, anyway. The greedy eternal warfare that Orwell references in the book has decimated entire regions of the world. Still, the light of humanity has not gone out, even in those places.

The novel is a warning:

“Look, this is what people are going to try to do to you.”

As a warning, it is true. Evil exists, and people will try. Perhaps readers need to believe that such total annihilation is possible in order to fight against it.

However, it will never happen completely. In fact, the worse things get, the more people turn to this type of book. Orwell should’ve known this. His novel Animal Farm became a clandestine sensation in Ukraine, a country which had witnesed such events happening firsthand.

Perhaps Orwell only ever meant Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a painted picture of a nightmare—a worst-case scenario so horrible that, for all intents and purposes, it is impossible. This is the kind of imagined scene that inspires people. It is what gets them talking.

And is the purpose of fiction to capture the world as it truly is, or to caricature it? Perhaps ideals and big, scary villains are more useful to the reader of fiction.

It is a testament to humanity that so many people love this book. It is a reassurance that no matter how bad things get—and I am not denying that they can get bad—one thing that cannot be destroyed is the human mind. We are all bound by the same thing.

Why, then, do we all feel so disconnected?
Why do we all still strive for a connection?

Orwell was great at analyzing these questions from a political angle, but would readily admit himself that he struggled to attack them from an emotional one. For much of his career, he relied heavily on his wife, who was his typist and in some sense his advisor, and who unfortunately did not live to assist him with Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Many of his books bear her mark, but for this one, we only have her poem, which, like the great novel that it inspired, is just as true today as it was when it was published in her school newspaper in 1934, exactly fifty years before the famous year referenced in Orwell’s famous title.

End of the Century, 1984
by Eileen O'Shaughnessy

Death 
Synthetic winds have blown away
Material dust, but this one room
Rebukes the constant violet ray
And dustless sheds a dusty doom.
Wrecked on the outmoded past
Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,
Shakespeare’s bones are quiet at last.
Dead as Yeats or William Morris.
Have not the inmates earned their rest?
A hundred circles traversed they
Complaining of the classic quest
And, each inevitable day,
Illogically trying to place
A ball within an empty space.

Birth 
Every loss is now a gain
For every chance must follow reason.
A crystal palace meets the rain
That falls at its appointed season.
No book disturbs the lucid line
For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought
To Telepathic Station 9
From which they know just what they ought:
The useful sciences; the arts
Of telesalesmanship and Spanish
As registered in Western parts;
Mental cremation that shall banish
Relics, philosophies and colds – 
Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.

The Phoenix 
Worlds have died that they may live,
May plume again their fairest feathers
And in their clearest songs may give
Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.
Bacon’s colleague is called Einstein,
Huxley shares Platonic food,
Violet rays are only sunshine
Christened in the modern mood.
In this house if in no other
Past and future may agree,
Each herself, but each the other
In a curious harmony,
Finding both a proper place
In the silken gown’s embrace. 

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I’m actually writing a book about George Orwell (albeit slowly). You can read the first chapter here.