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To describe writing as "Orwellian" means that it expresses a pessimistic view of a dull, uniform world where every aspect of life is controlled and organized by the State. As Nineteen Eighty-Four was written when Orwell was already suffering from tuberculosis, the disease that killed him, it has often been regarded as the work of a dying man, written in disillusion with the present and despair for the future. This is misleading: the outline of Nineteen Eighty-Four (which was originally to be called The Last Man in Europe) had been planned five years earlier in 1943, before he wrote Animal Farm, the book for which he is probably best known.
Orwell had been reading Zamyatin's novel We , whose vision of an anti-Utopia was of special interest when he was planning his own, but many of the themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four were drawn from his own concerns and experiences. During the Spanish Civil War he had seen for himself evidence of the falsification of news and the invention of false news, and he later described in an essay how "I saw history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened, according to the party; this kind of thing is frightening to me. If a leader says of such-and-such an event that it never happened well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five well, two and two are five."
Another major concern was the way in which language was being twisted and corrupted for political ends. In an essay entitled "Why I Write", written in 1946, he commented: "To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox", and one of the themes running through Nineteen Eighty-Four is the way in which the State uses language to further political control over the people who speak it. His alarm and disgust at the way some political writers of his time (particularly those who supported and defended Stalin's policies and actions) distorted language in their attempts to justify what Orwell regarded as unjustifiable led him, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , to invent the next logical step for a language twisted and corrupted for political ends: Newspeak. It is based on a theory held by many writers on language at that time, that thought is dependent on the words in which it is expressed and that therefore if a language does not possess words for certain ideas it will be impossible for the people who use that language to hold those ideas. The aim of Newspeak is that all ideas which do not follow the principles of Ingsoc will be impossible to hold, and to this end all the politically undesirable words and meanings are being surgically removed from the language. The aim, as Syme makes clear in the novel, is to achieve politically sound precision of language, so that, as he expresses it," the vagueness and useless shades of meaning" of the old language will be destroyed, along with the works of the great writers of the past who used it. To Orwell, who believed that anything important could and should be expressed in words which could be understood by ordinary people, the deliberate use of complicated language was one of the greatest sins the unconscious use of complicated language was even worse, because it meant that the user had lost all contact with the truth of what he wrote about.
Many aspects of wartime life in; London are incorporated in Nineteen Eighty-Four , for example, the description of bombing attacks and bomb damage to the city itself and the news film of the boat of refugees being bombed. The Ministry of Truth building in the novel was modelled on the London University building used during World War II by the Ministry of Information, and on the BBC's main building, which also seems to have provided the inspiration for the canteen smelling of cabbage and the singing prole women in this case, BBC office cleaners. His wife's work at the wartime Ministry of Food, creating publicity to encourage the public to eat the "right" types of food, seems to have suggested the use of the short crisp slogans of Nineteen Eighty-Four .
The way in which the leaders of the nations who had won World War II met after the war to divide the world into zones of influence also finds an echo in Nineteen Eighty-Four . Orwell predicted in an essay that the world would be divided into three armed states, and although he hoped that the common people would combine to resist this he did not believe that it was likely." The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped", he wrote, and his Faith in the instincts of the common people and distrust of intellectuals is another element of Nineteen Eighty-Four . Winston not only believes that any hope for the future must lie with the proles, but goes so far as to tell Julia," The proles are human beings. We are not human."
In Eastern Europe as well as in the West, he had seen intellectuals betray the revolution by accepting the idea of a dictatorship if it would work to their advantage and give them power and privilege. His concern and anger were expressed in Animal Farm , in which he used episodes from the Russian revolution told through the story of a farm where the pigs, who have led the animals' revolution, become as determined to keep and use power for themselves as the farmer whom they drove out had been.
Throughout his writing life. Orwell worked to achieve a balance between public and private values, between creative work and necessary labour. His major concerns were public and political, yet he was equally aware of the importance of the individual's private life and the matters of everyday existence. One reason why he felt, as in Winston's comment to Julia quoted above, that the proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four remained human beings was that their private lives of emotional ties and individual concerns are their own, untouched by the controlling hand of the State. The members of the Party have privileges that the proles do not possess, but the Party influences and ultimately controls who they meet, how they spend their free time, who they marry, who they have sexual contact with, and their attitudes to all of these. Orwell believed that the State should provide a social framework for its citizens but not dictate how their private lives are to be lived; if it does, they become, in a basic sense, less than human.