Image to come: the remote island of Jura, where Orwell finished the novel.
The Last Man in Europe
“Why is the book called 1984?”
An outline in one of George Orwell’s notebooks from 1944 sketches a novel called The Last Man in Europe. The title fits the story’s hero, Winston Smith, who seems to be the last person left who thinks for himself.
Orwell wrote most of the book in a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, while seriously ill with tuberculosis. In October 1948, writing to his publisher Fredric Warburg, he said he still had not decided between Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Last Man in Europe. Warburg favoured the date, which he thought would sell better.
The novel was published in June 1949 as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell died the following January.
Nobody knows for certain why Orwell picked that particular year. A popular theory says he swapped the last two digits of 1948, the year he finished the book, but this has never been confirmed, so treat it as a guess.
Look closer: Orwell finished his final draft by typing it himself, exhausting work for a very sick man. The typewriter has its own gallery.