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1984
Mountaineers · 10th–12th
Winston gives up on the old man in the pub but buys the glass paperweight at once. Which of the two tells him more about the world before the Revolution?
The tension The old man “remembered a million useless things” but nothing that could settle whether life was better before the Revolution; within the hour Winston pays four dollars for a lump of glass good for nothing, and its “apparent uselessness” is what makes it “doubly attractive”.
An evening walk through the prole quarter becomes an interview in a pub and a purchase in a junk shop, and ends in fear on the way home.
Winston skips an evening at the Community Centre, a risky thing for a Party member, and wanders into the prole quarter, repeating to himself that if there is hope, it lies in the proles. A rocket bomb falls; a prole shouts a warning, and Winston throws himself down. Walking on, he finds a severed hand in the plaster dust and kicks it into the gutter. Within minutes the street goes on as though nothing had happened. He passes men quarrelling over the Lottery, the one public event the proles take seriously, though Winston knows the big prizes go to people who do not exist. Near the junk shop where he bought his diary, he sees a very old man go into a pub, and follows him, hoping that a man grown up before the Revolution can tell him whether life was better then. He buys the old man beer. The old man complains that the barman will not serve him a pint, and remembers top hats, a speaker in Hyde Park who shouted “Lackeys!”, touching his cap to the rich, and a drunk young gent who shoved him on Boat Race night. Asked outright whether life was better in 1925, he talks about being young and being old. Winston gives up: the survivors remember a million useless things but cannot compare one age with another, and soon the question will be unanswerable for good. His feet bring him back to the junk shop. The owner, Mr Charrington, a mild widower of sixty-three, sells him a heavy glass paperweight with pink coral at its heart for four dollars. He shows Winston an upstairs room with an old bed, a ticking clock and no telescreen, and Winston thinks for a moment of renting it, then drops the idea as impossible. An engraving of a ruined church, St Clement’s Dane, leads Mr Charrington to half remember a rhyme: “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s”. Winston resolves to come back in a month or so. Stepping out, humming, he sees the dark-haired girl from the Fiction Department, who looks him in the face and walks on. He decides she must be spying on him, and thinks of following her and killing her with a cobblestone, but his body will not act. At home he drinks gin, takes out the diary, and thinks of what the Thought Police will do to him. He tries to think of O’Brien, but Big Brother’s face comes into his mind instead. He looks at it on a coin, and the Party’s three slogans come back to him.
Before reading, remind the student that Winston wrote in his diary that if there is hope, it lies in the proles, and ask what he might hope to find among them. Then read the chapter in four stretches: the street, from the coffee to the Lottery; the pub, from the old man at the bar to “It was no use going on”; the shop, from the three metal balls to the step out onto the pavement; and the way home, from the girl in the street to the coin. In each stretch, mark where Winston thinks he has found a piece of the old world, and what it gives him. Leave open what the chapter leaves open: whether life was better before the Revolution, and whether the girl is really spying on Winston, which is his reading in a panic and not something the chapter shows.
Retell The student retells the evening as a walk with stops: the smell of coffee, the rocket bomb and the hand, the Lottery quarrel, the old man in the pub, the junk shop and the room upstairs, the rhyme, the girl in the street, and the night at home with the diary and the coin. Look for the order of the stops, and for the turn from the shop’s warmth back to fear.
Imitate the author After copying, the student writes two short passages of their own. The first passes judgment on a kind of memory: a list of four remembered things that grows gentler as it goes, a colon, and a “but” that dismisses them all, then a short simile, then one long sentence that restates its opening clause after a dash. The second describes a place where they could feel safe: a thought that passes through the mind, with its condition held to the end; then drop the idea and keep a feeling, joined by a semicolon and “but”; then one long sentence that moves from “I” to “you” and ends, after a colon, on a list of what is absent and the one or two sounds that are left.
Debate Take sides on the last written question. One side argues that the old man tells Winston more, and gathers the cap he “had to” touch, the shove on Boat Race night, the hired top hat and the beer at fourpence a pint. The other argues for the paperweight, and gathers “belonging to an age quite different from the present one”, the “rain-watery glass” unlike any he had seen, the coral at its heart and its “apparent uselessness”. Each side must answer the other’s best line. Neither may say whether life was better before the Revolution, or that the girl is a spy.
Purpose Close on the chapter’s shape. It opens on two seconds of real coffee and ends on a coin. In the shop Winston looked into the heart of a round glass and found coral. At home he looks at Big Brother’s face on a coin and asks “what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?” Ask why Orwell ends the evening of the paperweight on that second small, round thing, and on the slogans that come back “Like a leaden knell”.
Easier Read aloud the hand in the plaster, the old man’s answers about the cap and the shove, the paragraphs about the paperweight, the room upstairs, and the girl in the street. Make two lists: what the old man gives Winston, and what the shop gives him. Talk through the first, third and fifth discussion questions, then answer the last written question aloud before writing it.
On level Talk through all five discussion questions in order, then write both written questions as a thesis, the strongest objection and a revised thesis, each with lines from the chapter.
Harder Ask for one argued essay on the ant. Winston thinks the survivors of the old world are “like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.” Soon after, he is holding a small object in the lamplight. Does the image condemn the old man, or does it fit Winston as well? The essay should meet the objection that the glass gives Winston no facts at all, so it cannot be judged as the old man’s memories are.
1. After the rocket bomb, Winston finds a human hand in a little pile of plaster. It is so white it looks like “a plaster cast.” He kicks it into the gutter and walks on. What do you think he is doing when he kicks it?Character
What it asks It asks the student to read one gesture. A prole shouts “Steamer!”, Winston throws himself down, and the bomb demolishes “a group of houses two hundred metres up the street”. In a little pile of plaster he sees “a bright red streak”, and then the hand: “Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.” The next sentence gives him no thought at all, only the act: “He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right.” The student says what the kick is. The card must not pass over the hand as background: with the street that goes on “as though nothing had happened”, it is the chapter’s first picture of prole life.
Getting it out of his sight. The page gives Winston no feeling here, and that silence can be read as a man refusing to feel. He kicks the hand away and turns from the crowd in the same sentence. Whatever he cannot look at, he puts in the gutter and leaves behind.
He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right.
When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist
Doing what the street does. The hand already looks like a made thing, white as plaster, and the narrator calls it “the thing”. Winston treats it as rubbish, and within minutes the whole quarter does the same. The kick is not his own coldness so much as the habit of a city where bombs fall and life goes on.
Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.
Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.
A strong answer A strong response says what the kick is and argues from the two sentences around it. One reader says Winston is getting it out of his sight: the page gives him no thought, and he kicks the hand away and turns from the crowd in one breath. Another says he is doing what the street does: the hand already looks like “a plaster cast”, the narrator calls it “the thing”, and within minutes life goes on “as though nothing had happened”. The best answers notice that the chapter gives no feeling here at all, and argue from the gesture rather than inventing one.
2. One of the men quarrelling over the Lottery has kept two years of winning numbers “wrote down on a piece of paper.” Winston knows the big prizes go to “non-existent persons.” What is that careful record worth?Inference
What it asks It asks the student to weigh the one written record a prole keeps in this chapter. The man says, “Back ’ome I got the ’ole lot of ’em for over two years wrote down on a piece of paper. I takes ’em down reg’lar as the clock.” The other man argues from memory: “I could pretty near tell you the bleeding number.” Meanwhile Winston knows “that the prizes were largely imaginary”, the big winners being people who do not exist. The student decides what the record is worth. The card must not pass over the Lottery as comic background: it shows prole life going on, and it is a quarrel about whether paper or memory is right.
Nothing. His paper copies down what the Ministry of Plenty announces, so it can be no truer than the Ministry, and the big prizes are false. It is a small picture of the chapter’s larger point: written records can be falsified at the source, and then there is nothing left to test them against.
Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.
In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.
Something. It is the one written record a prole keeps in this chapter, kept for his own reasons, “reg’lar as the clock”, and it shows that the proles can remember with great care when they care. Even people who “could barely read and write”, the chapter says, manage “intricate calculations” here. What the record cannot do is reach the fraud itself, because no winner he could ask is real.
Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
I got it all down in black and white.
A strong answer A strong response weighs the record and argues from the quarrel and what Winston knows. One reader says it is worth nothing: the prizes are “largely imaginary”, the big winners are “non-existent persons”, and a careful record of a fraud only copies it. Another says it is worth something: it is the one record a prole keeps in the chapter, kept for himself, and the proles show “staggering feats of memory” for what they care about. The best answers hear the quarrel as paper against memory, “black and white” against “pretty near”, and do not claim the record exposes the fraud.
3. “It isn’t very important about the top hats,” Winston says. But the old man has just said he wore one himself, hired for his sister-in-law’s funeral. Does that story back up the history book, or quarrel with it?Inference
What it asks It asks the student to test a detail Winston throws away. Reciting the history book, Winston says the capitalists “drank champagne, they wore top hats –”, and the old man brightens: “The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral.” He adds, “Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion, you understand.” Winston answers “patiently” that the top hats are not important and goes back to the lords of the earth. The student decides whether the hired hat supports the book’s picture or complicates it. The card must not play the old man only for comedy, and must not say whether life was better before the Revolution.
It backs the book up. He did not own a top hat. He hired one, for one day, for a funeral. Later the hat comes back on the rich: the young gent who shoved him on Boat Race night wore “dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat”. The hat stands where the book puts it, above him.
Of course it was only ’ired for the occasion, you understand.
Quite the gent, ’e was – dress shirt, top ’at, black overcoat.
It quarrels with the book. In Winston’s version the top hat belongs to a few thousand capitalists. In the old man’s life it was something an ordinary family could put on to bury their dead. The book has a hat for a class; the old man has a hat for a day of mourning. That is a world with more in it than lords and slaves.
The last time I wore one was at my sister-in-law’s funeral.
And at the same time there were a very few people, only a few thousands – the capitalists, they were called – who were rich and powerful.
A strong answer A strong response decides what the hired hat does to the book and argues from the old man’s words. One reader says it backs the book up: he only hired one for a day, and the gent who shoved him wore one, so the hat stands above him as the book says. Another says it quarrels with the book: a hat the book gives to a few thousand capitalists was worn by an ordinary family to bury its dead. The best answers notice that Winston throws the detail away “patiently”, and leave the larger question, better or worse, where the chapter leaves it.
4. The first thing the old man does in the pub is argue for a pint. He knows just what one is: “a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon.” The young barman has “Never heard of ’em,” and the room laughs at the old man. Later Winston decides there is no “standard” left to test the Party against. Where in the pub does the pint stop being a standard?Inference
What it asks It asks the student to find the moment an old measure stops working. Before Winston says a word to him, the old man is quarrelling at the bar: “You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?” He explains it exactly, and the young barman answers, “Never heard of ’em,” and points him to the litres and half-litres on the shelf. A page later, walking out, Winston decides that once memory fails and records are falsified there is no “standard against which it could be tested”. The student places the moment in the pub when the pint stops being a standard, or argues that it never quite does. The card must not play the old man only for comedy: he is the failed test of Winston’s hope for “a truthful account” of the old days. Nor should it say whether life was better.
At the bar, when no one else knows it. The old man has the measure exactly. But the barman has never heard of it, and his joke about the treetops turns the old man’s past into a laugh. A standard that only one man keeps cannot test anything. The room relaxes at the very moment the old world is made a joke.
‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly.
There was a shout of laughter, and the uneasiness caused by Winston’s entry seemed to disappear.
At the table, when the old man gives it up himself. He keeps the pint through his first glass: a half-litre is not enough and a whole litre is too much. Then Winston brings two more half-litres, and the old man drinks the full litre without a word. Nobody takes the standard from him. He drinks his way past it, on Winston’s beer.
A ’alf-litre ain’t enough.
The old man appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre.
A strong answer A strong response names a moment in the pub and argues from it. One reader puts it at the bar: the old man has the measure exactly, but the barman has “Never heard of ’em”, the room laughs, and a standard one man keeps alone tests nothing. Another puts it at the table: he grumbles that a half-litre “ain’t enough”, then, two glasses on, “appeared to have forgotten his prejudice against drinking a full litre”, so he gives it up himself, on Winston’s beer. The best answers hear that the old man does compare then and now, in pints and pennies, and leave open whether life was better.
5. Winston is sure the dark-haired girl followed him. It was “not credible,” he thinks, that she came up the same backstreet by pure chance. But that evening his own feet brought him there “of their own accord.” What does that do to his argument?Inference
What it asks It asks the student to test Winston’s reasoning with his own evening. Leaving the shop, he sees the girl from the Fiction Department, who “looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.” He concludes: “There was no doubting any longer that the girl was spying on him.” His proof is that it was “too great a coincidence” for her to be in the same obscure street. Yet he came on impulse, “hardly bothering in which direction he was going”, and found the shop when “his feet had brought him back here of their own accord.” The student weighs the argument. The card must not say that she is spying on him: that is his reading in a panic, not a fact the chapter confirms.
It weakens it. Winston’s whole evening is a chain of chances: he turned away from the bus-stop “On impulse”, wandered, and found himself, without meaning to, outside the shop. If his own feet could bring him to this street without a plan, someone else’s could. He reaches his verdict just after he was “too paralysed to move”, while walking the wrong way without noticing, and fear is doing his reasoning.
On impulse he had turned away from the bus-stop and wandered off into the labyrinth of London, first south, then east, then north again, losing himself among unknown streets and hardly bothering in which direction he was going.
And yet the instant that he allowed his thoughts to wander, his feet had brought him back here of their own accord.
It does not touch it. His own coming is not the coincidence; hers is. The street is “kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived”, and blue overalls “could not be a common sight in a street like this”, so two Party members meeting there is rare. And she does something strange: she looks straight at him and then acts as if she had not seen him.
She must have followed him here, because it was not credible that by pure chance she should have happened to be walking on the same evening up the same obscure backstreet, kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived.
She looked him straight in the face, then walked quickly on as though she had not seen him.
A strong answer A strong response tests Winston’s argument against his own evening. One reader says it is weakened: he came “On impulse”, wandering, and his feet brought him to the shop “of their own accord”, so a chance meeting is not impossible, and he reasons moments after he was “too paralysed to move”, walking the wrong way. Another says it stands: the street is “kilometres distant from any quarter where Party members lived”, blue overalls are rare there, and she looks straight at him and then acts as if she had not. The best answers notice how fear runs ahead of the reasoning, to the cobblestone and the glass, and do not say what the girl is really doing.
1. Winston thinks that when danger comes, “the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe.” Test that on his own night at home, with the gin, the fear and the ache in his belly. By the end of the chapter, what has he forgotten, and what has he kept?
What it asks It asks the student to test Winston’s own rule on the last pages of the chapter. At home he swallows “nearly a teacupful of Victory Gin”, and still “the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.” He sets out the rule: on the battlefield or in the torture chamber, the body “swells up until it fills the universe”, and what you are fighting for is forgotten. Then the night goes on. He opens the diary because “It was important to write something down”, tries to think of O’Brien, “for whom, or to whom, the diary was written”, and thinks instead of what the Thought Police would do to him. He calls up O’Brien “with a little more success than before”, but Big Brother’s face pushes him out, and the slogans come back “Like a leaden knell”. The student builds a thesis on what the night takes from Winston and what it leaves him, meets the strongest objection, and revises. The card must not say that the girl is spying on him, that the Thought Police will come, or what O’Brien’s words about “the place where there is no darkness” will come to mean.
The body wins. He opens the diary, but the chapter never shows him write in it. The ache makes thought “impossible”, the telescreen’s song sticks in his brain “like jagged splinters of glass”, and when he reaches for O’Brien, Big Brother’s face takes his place. The last words of the chapter are not Winston’s but the Party’s.
Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible.
The face of Big Brother swam into his mind, displacing that of O’Brien.
He keeps more than his rule allows. He still opens the diary, because writing something down matters. He still reaches for O’Brien, and does better the second time. And with Big Brother’s face in front of him on the coin, he asks a question of it. A man who had forgotten what he was fighting for would not ask what that smile hides.
He tried with a little more success than before to summon up the image of O’Brien.
The face gazed up at him, heavy, calm, protecting: but what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache?
A strong answer A strong response states what the night takes from Winston and what it leaves him, meets the strongest objection, and revises. One thesis says the body wins: the ache makes “consecutive thought impossible”, the page never shows him write in the diary, Big Brother’s face displaces O’Brien’s, and the chapter ends on the Party’s slogans. The strongest objection is that he keeps reaching: he opens the diary because “It was important to write something down”, summons O’Brien “with a little more success than before”, and asks what smile is hidden “beneath the dark moustache”. A good revision might hold that the body crowds out his thinking for a time without wiping out what he is fighting for, and notice that he reasons his way to the rule in the very pain he says stops thought.
2. Winston gives up on the old man in the pub but buys the glass paperweight at once. Which of the two tells him more about the world before the Revolution?
What it asks It asks the student to weigh two witnesses to the old world. The old man in the pub was already middle-aged when the Revolution happened, one of “the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism”, and Winston gives up on him: “It was no use going on.” Within the hour he pays four dollars for a lump of glass with coral at its heart, and what draws him “was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.” The student builds a thesis on which of the two tells Winston more, meets the strongest objection, and revises. The card must not say whether life before the Revolution was better or worse; Winston calls the question “unanswerable even now”. Nor should it name the paperweight a symbol for the student.
The old man. He gives Winston real facts, if Winston would take them: beer at fourpence a pint, the cap he “had to” touch to the rich, a gent in a top hat who nearly shoved him under a bus. He is a living man who was there. The glass tells nothing at all; it can only make Winston feel that the past was different, and a feeling is what the Party can most easily argue away.
They liked you to touch your cap to ’em.
’e puts ’is ’and on my chest and gives me a shove as pretty near sent me under the wheels of a bus.
The paperweight. It cannot be talked round, cannot misremember, and cannot be falsified, because it makes no claim. Its glass is “not like any glass that he had ever seen”, and someone once set coral inside it, from the Indian Ocean as Mr Charrington guesses, for no use at all. That is a fact about the old world no history book can rewrite: it had time and care for beautiful, useless things.
The soft, rain-watery glass was not like any glass that he had ever seen.
The thing was doubly attractive because of its apparent uselessness, though he could guess that it must once have been intended as a paperweight.
A strong answer A strong response states which witness tells Winston more, meets the strongest objection, and revises. One thesis says the old man: he gives facts Winston does not hear, beer at fourpence a pint, the cap he “had to” touch, the gent who shoved him, while the glass only makes Winston feel the past was different. The strongest objection is that the glass cannot be falsified because it claims nothing, and its “rain-watery glass” with coral at its heart shows a world that made beautiful, useless things. A good revision might hold that they tell different kinds of things, facts without comparison and a sense of difference without facts, and that neither answers the question Winston calls “unanswerable even now”.
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.So plain it can almost be touched; obvious to anyone (Latin palpare, to touch gently). Winston calls his hope in the proles both “a mystical truth” and “a palpable absurdity”. The first is believed without being seen; the second can be seen at once. The chapter sets them side by side and does not choose between them.
It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant.Something that dulls pain without curing its cause; a painkiller, and so anything that soothes (Greek anodynos, without pain). The Lottery is the proles’ anodyne: it eases a hard life without changing it, and the big prizes it promises go to people who do not exist.
And when memory failed and written records were falsified – when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.Changed so as to say what is not true (Latin falsus, false). In this chapter not only records are falsified: statues, inscriptions and “the names of streets” have been “systematically altered”. Once memory fails as well, Winston thinks, nothing is left to test the Party’s claims against.
At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.Twisted and folded in on itself, coiled; of an argument, hard to follow (Latin convolvere, to roll together). Winston cannot name the thing in the glass at first. The word gives its shape, like a rose or a sea anemone, before Mr Charrington gives its name: coral.
The thought flitted through Winston’s mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk.Moved lightly and quickly, without settling (from flit). The thought of renting the room only flits through Winston’s mind and is called at once “a wild, impossible notion”. Yet it does not stay gone: as he leaves, the same project “flashed momentarily through his mind again”.
He got away from Mr Charrington and went down the stairs alone, so as not to let the old man see him reconnoitring the street before stepping out of the door.Looking over a place with care before going into it, as a scout does before an army moves (French reconnaître, to recognise). Winston goes down alone so that no one will see him reconnoitring the street. Then, in a few seconds of joy, he forgets to, and steps out “without so much as a preliminary glance through the window”.
A deadly lassitude had taken hold of him.A heavy weariness of body and mind, when even wanting to act takes too much (Latin lassus, weary). After the girl passes, a “deadly lassitude” takes hold of Winston, and all he wants is to get home. The word names the body that, in his own theory, fails a man at the moment he most needs it.
Like a leaden knell the words came back at him:The slow, single stroke of a bell rung for a death or a funeral. The chapter’s bells begin in an old dance rhyme that Winston hears only in his head. It ends with the Party’s three slogans coming back to him “Like a leaden knell”: heavy as lead, and tolling.