George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is one of the most celebrated dystopian fictions of the 2oth century. For the second half of the century the book has supplied a powerful counter to the development of a surveillance society. The term ‘Orwellian’ could always shrink the ambitions of control-hungry politicians. Orwell always maintained that Britain had no inbuilt resistance to growth of the sort of disciplinary state system he imagined in Nineteen Eighty-four. Indeed, he felt it would be so reassuringly British we would fail to recognize it (he expected it to be symbolized by the bowler hat and brolly rather than the jackboot). It is an irony then that his London homeplace is now surrounded by the sort of equipment Big Brother himself could only have dreamed of.
It is a further irony that London authorities seek to adopt 1940s artistic genres to publicize their surveillance networks.
Above an image from a 1954 BBC dramatization, below a recently produced London poster.
