A Chronology of Nineteen Eighty-Four (under construction; may contain small errors)

What follows is a reconstruction of the internal chronology, by year and where possible by individual days, of the story of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The chronology focuses on explicitly identified and implicitly suggested points in the real-life historical calendars for the years in question. The novel is taken largely at face value in this respect. Despite its reiterated emphases on the haziness of memory and on the difficulties in verifying events, all dates mentioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four have been taken as reliable, including the calendar year of ‘1984’ signalled in its title. My hope is that this chronology will be of interest as an exercise in retrieving (and repicturing) the fictional reality and temporal character of Orwell’s novel, as opposed to being something that suggests the reductive ‘joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact[s]’ (p. 243).

The edition used is George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), introd. Julian Symons & ed. Peter Davison (London: Everyman, 1992). All page numbers given refer to this edition. Events listed without exact dates are incompletely dateable according to the evidence presented in the novel.

1884
- latest date of manufacture for the glass paperweight Winston purchases in Mr Charrington’s shop (p. 99; see also p. 152)
1920-1940
- the ‘final phase of capitalism’ (p. 198)
1930s
- the epoch during which the ‘main currents of political thought’ become ‘authoritarian’ (p. 213), especially those of ‘the German Nazis and the Russian Communists’ (p. 266)
1930
- construction of Victory Mansions (p. 22)
1934
- ‘cream-laid’ paper, of the kind used to make Winston’s diary, ceases production (p. 98); earlier in the novel (p. 8) it is suggested that this date might be 1944
- the year the old man in the pub identifies as the year he wore a top hat to his sister-in-law’s funeral (p. 93)
1939
- latest date at which the man—‘with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features’ (p. 3)—used in the Big Brother posters could have been born
1940s
- because one of Winston’s earliest memories is ‘of an air raid’ (p. 35), and because he was born at the earliest in 1944 (see below), this suggests various possibilities: that in Orwell’s alternative future-history-of-the-past the Second World War continued for a time beyond its actual historical end-date (the Blitz ending, in our reality, in 1941); that aerial bombardments of Great Britain continued in separate conflicts beyond this same end-date; or simply that the Second World War never ended, war being ‘literally continuous’ (p. 36) after, and maybe also during, this decade
1945
- likely birth-date of Winston (p. 9); although it is also suggested that he is born in 1944, the fact that it takes him ‘forty years’ (p. 311) to love Big Brother, coupled with the fact that the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four seems to take place over the course of a calendar year (i.e. from 1984 to 1985), makes 1945 the probable date
1949
- birth of Parsons (p. 24; see also p. 58)
- likely date of the beginning of the Revolution, given that the old man Winston encounters in the pub is ‘eighty at the least’ (i.e. born in 1904, at the latest) and ‘had already been middle-aged [i.e. at least 45] when the Revolution happened’ (p. 90) [note the alignment with the publication date for Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, too]
- birth of Thought Police agent posing as Mr Charrington (pp. 233-4), who is earlier said to be ‘a widower aged sixty-three’ (p. 103)
1950s-1960s
- the ‘revolutionary period’ (p. 214)
1950s
- decade featuring a sequence of ‘great purges’ (p. 31) of citizens, during one of which Winston’s parents are ‘swallowed up’ (p. 31); Winston is said to know roughly ‘thirty people’ (p. 47) who have disappeared in this way
- beyond the late 1950s, in Winston’s memory, ‘everything fade[s]’ (p. 34)
- lemons are common during this period (p. 153)
- Winston’s schooldays take place during this period (p. 160)
- Oceania and Eurasia materialize (pp. 192-3), following ‘a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions in all parts of the world’ (p. 213)
- an atomic war (p. 197) is waged, during which an atom bomb is dropped on Colchester (p. 35); such bombs are ‘first used on a large scale’ (p. 202) in this period
- private property is abolished (p. 214)
1954
- Mrs Parsons is born (p. 22)
- Party man with ‘strident voice’ is born (p. 56)
- an atomic bomb dropped on England (p. 134), somewhere near the spot where Winston and Julia make love in the belfry of a ruined church
1955
- first of two possible dates for the disappearance of Winston’s mother, the other being 1956 (p. 31; see also p. 168); see the subsequent reference to her death ‘nearly thirty years ago’ (p. 32); Winston’s father disappears ‘some time earlier’ (p. 168); both are perhaps sent to forced-labour camps, where they would spend ‘twenty years’ (p. 240)
1957
- Ingsoc and the surveillance state up and running [?], given that on 4th April 1984 Winston does the Physical Jerks ‘for the ten thousandth time’ (p. 36)—i.e. 10,000 days, or roughly 27 years, later; although Winston doesn’t recall hearing of Ingsoc before 1960, it is possible that ‘in its Oldspeak form—“English Socialism”, that is to say—it had been current earlier’ (p. 38)
1958
- seemingly authoritative date for birth of Julia, who is ‘twenty-six years old’ (p. 136); earlier she is said to be ‘about twenty-seven’ (p. 11)
1960s
- first point at which Winston remembers hearing of Big Brother (p. 38)
- the middle years feature ‘great purges’ (p. 78)
- Eastasia emerges (p. 193)
1960
- latest possible start-date for the first of Ingsoc’s nine ‘Three Year Plan[s]’ (p. 4) [BUT SEE p. 41]
- Winston does not remember hearing the word ‘Ingsoc’ before this calendar year (p. 38)
1963
- Midsummer’s Day (June): Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford attend a Party function in New York (p. 81); later they confess, falsely, to having been in Siberia, meeting with ‘members of the Eurasian General Staff’ (p. 81)
1965
- seizure of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (p. 78); O’Brien participates in one or more of their interrogations (p. 268)
- Oceania is at war with Eurasia (p. 79)
1966
- Julia’s grandfather disappears (p. 136; see also p. 153)
1966/67
- release of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford after ‘a year or more’ (p. 78)
- Winston encounters Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford in the Chestnut Tree Cafe (p. 79)
1968
- second trial and execution of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford (p. 81); see also p. 48, where it’s mentioned that those who are arrested are ‘released and allowed to remain at liberty for as much as a year or two years before being executed’ (p. 48)
1970
- all ‘original leaders of the Revolution’, except for Big Brother, are ‘wiped out’ (p. 78)
1973
- earliest date at which Winston and his wife, Katharine, are said to have separated: ‘It must be nine, ten—nearly eleven years since they had parted’ (p. 69; see also p. 78); they have been married for ‘three or four months’ by this point (p. 140)
- during a community hiking trip, Winston and Katharine find themselves lost in a quarry (p. 141)
- Winston encounters the ‘half-page torn out of the Times’ (p. 81; see also pp. 82, 259, 270) proving that the confessions of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were lies
- Oceania is at war with Eastasia (pp. 82-3)
1974
- Julia has her first love-affair, aged 16, with ‘a Party member of sixty’ (p. 137)
1975
- birth of the Parsonses’ son (p. 25)
- date of composition [?] of Goldstein’s book, given that in Chapter III, ‘War is Peace’, it is stated that the three super-states—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—have been ‘permanently at war’ for ‘the past twenty-five years’ (p. 193); that is, the period of ‘literally continuous’ war (p. 36) mentioned earlier in the novel
1977
- birth of the Parsonses’ daughter (p. 25; see also pp. 60, 245)
- Winston first dreams of a voice telling him ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness’ (p. 27)
- start of O’Brien’s / the Thought Police’s seven-year surveillance of Winston (pp. 256, 281, 289), before his arrest in 1984
1979
- Winston ‘consorts’ (p. 68) with a prostitute
1980
- Parsons starts putting in appearances at the Community Centre (p. 24)
- as Winston remembers it, Oceania is ‘at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia’ (p. 36; see also pp. 37, 120, 161)
1981
- Winston’s encounter with the prostitute who has ‘a young face, painted very thick’ (p. 66)
1982
- vaporization of the husband of the ‘little woman with sandy hair’ (p. 44) who works in the cubicle adjacent to Winston’s
1983
- 3rd December: Big Brother’s Order for the Day, as reported in the Times, refers to persons who are later identified as ‘non-existent’ (p. 47), prompting Winston
- 19th December: the Times publishes ‘official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which [is] also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan’ (p. 41)
1984
- doubt cast on the year at multiple points (see pp. 9, 36, 44)
- a new Ingsoc-sponsored Floating Fortress is ‘anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands’ (p. 26)
- according to Ingsoc propaganda, Oceania is ‘at war with Eurasia and in alliane with Eastasia’ (p. 36)
- shortage of razor blades ongoing for ‘months’ (p. 51)
- 14th February: the Ministry of Plenty issues ‘a promise […] that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984’ (p. 42)—compare with reduction described on p. 28
- March: dissolution of the FFCC (p. 47)
- 16th March: Big Brother is said to have given a speech, later selected for ‘rectifying’, about ‘a Eurasian offensive’ in North Africa (p. 41)
- 4th April (Wednesday): Winston writes his first diary entry (p. 9); Eurasian prisoners hanged (pp. 25-6)
- 4th April (Wednesday): announcement to the effect that the chocolate ration is to be reduced ‘from thirty grammes to twenty’ as of 9th April (p. 28; see also p. 42)
- 5th April (Thursday): Winston wakes up at 07:15 with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips (p. 33)
- 5th April (Thursday): Winston meets Syme and Parsons in the Miniplenty canteen (pp. 51-66)
- 5th April (Thursday): announcement to the effect that the chocolate ration is to be increased ‘to twenty grammes a week’ (p. 61)
- 6th April (Friday): start of new razor blade ration (p. 61)
- 2nd May (Wednesday): Winston meets and sleeps with Julia in the countryside (p. 133)
- later in May: second occasion on which Winston and Julia meet and make love (p. 134)
- June: Winston has known Julia for a month (p. 145) by this point, and they meet during June seven times (p. 157); Winston and Julia look down on the prole washerwoman (p. 144)
- July: Hate Week (p. 145); on the sixth day of Hate Week, Winston notices, in real time, the enemy of Ingsoc changing from Eurasia to Eastasia (pp. 187-8), thereby rendering obsolete much ‘of the political literature’ of the preceding ‘five years’ (pp. 189-90)
- Winston is kept in the Ministry of Love for ‘months’ (p. 265); his interrogations with O’Brien, aside from the other instances of torture and beatings, etc., stretch out over ‘weeks’ (p. 273); immediately before being taken to Room 101, it is said that Winston has been in captivity for ‘weeks or months’ (p. 287)
1985
- Oceania once again at war with Eurasia (p. 301)
- March: Winston and Julia meet for the last time, in a park (p. 304)
2050
- projected date by which words not in the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary will have become obsolete (p. 54; see also p. 55)

[still to do: Three-Year-Plan alignments; see p. 302 for mention of the tenth one]

My chronology differs in certain respects from some of the others that are available (see, for example, Tom Miller’s, here, and another, here). A chronology of the composition and publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself can be found in J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 113-14.