1984 the novel by George Orwell

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Nineteen Eighty-Four introduces Oceania, one of the world's three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One",^[4] itself a province of Oceania that "had been called England or Britain".^[5] Posters of "Big Brother", the Party leader, with the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, dominate the city landscapes; two-way television (the telescreen) dominates the private and public spaces of the populace.

Oceania's people are in three classes — (i) the Inner Party, (ii) the Outer Party, and (iii) the Proles. This government, the Party, controls them via the Ministry of Truth (MiniTrue), where Winston Smith, the protagonist, works; he is a member of the Outer Party. His job in MiniTrue is the continual rewriting and altering of history so that the government is always right and correct: destroying evidence, amending newspaper articles, deleting the existence of people identified as unpersons.

The story begins on April 4, 1984: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."^[6] The date is questionable, because it is what Winston Smith perceives. In the story's course, he concludes it as irrelevant, because the State can arbitrarily alter it; the year 1984 and its world are transmutable.

The novel does not render the world's full history to 1984. Indeed, because the book Winston reads is given to him by a Party member, it is possible that the book itself is meant to be a deception, and the history of the world of 1984 is somewhat different. Winston's recollections, and what he reads in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, the United Kingdom fell to civil war, becoming part of Oceania. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union encompassed mainland Europe, forming Eurasia; the third super state, Eastasia, comprises the east Asian countries around China and Japan.

There was an atomic war, fought mainly in Europe, western Russia, and North America. It is unclear what occurred first: the civil war wherein the Party assumed power or the United States' annexation of the British Empire or the war during which Colchester was bombed.

During the Second World War, George Orwell repeatedly said that British democracy, as it existed before 1939, would not survive the war; the question being: Would it end via Fascist coup d'état (from above) or via Socialist revolution (from below)? During the war, Orwell admitted events proved him wrong: "What really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable' ".^[7]