It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

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Rules of the game? Click here.

This issue is tentatively subtitled: ‘read like you’ve never read it before.’

You don’t need to know me that well to understand how strong my connection to Nineteen Eighty-Four is. 

So the challenge to avoid spoilers or privileged information isn’t just necessary to make this issue honest. It’s a fantastic opportunity to make Orwell’s classic fresh again, and I’m going to enjoy it!

‘What larks’, as Joe from Great Expectations might say.

Great expectations indeed. Let’s crack on.

First Impressions

It’s England, but not as we know it. And I don’t much like what they’ve done with the place.

Close Reading

When the first sentence of a novel becomes a pub quiz question, it’s tempting to swerve it, and frankly, we’re not short of quotable material in this novel. But swerving would be missing the point for the tribe of close-readers I’m hoping you’ll join. I choose not to swerve. Never to swerve.

Let’s explore, instead.  

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Isn’t ‘thirteen’ a nasty little trick at the end of a sentence we feel comfortable with? 

With my first-time close-reader hat on, I’m just settling myself, and then ‘thirteen’ knocks me off balance, like someone trying to cross a stream only to find one stepping stone unexpectedly slippery.

Wait, what? Thirteen?

So – let’s check in with the rules: we don’t bring prior knowledge of the novel into the reading. 

That doesn’t stop me bringing in everything else I know. 

Thirteen is conventionally unlucky.

With my Catholic upbringing I associate it with the Last Supper. 

More recently, it’s the way the computers and the military works – thirteen hundred hours – to mark, name, control time.

It’s also a baker’s dozen.

But that doesn’t seem useful here. Nothing in the sentence supports the cosy bonus of an extra loaf or cake, so onto the reject pile it goes.

Students: this matters. Close reading isn’t about finding an association and forcing it to work. Invite everything you know to the table. Then use your judgment and common sense to decide who deserves to stay for dinner.

A quick detour – I promise this is relevant, important, even. Not just for today’s issue, but for close reading in general. 

Increasingly over the last year, I’ve found myself reaching for a quotation from my favourite poem which has really changed meaning for me.

I am a part of all that I have met.¹

I used to believe Tennyson was channeling Ulysses’ hubris, but increasingly, I read it as an acknowledgement (not without some pride, perhaps) that every experience has changed the wandering hero. We don’t actually jump into ships and travel the seas, but in a very real sense, readers do just that.

As a close reader, you must bring your intellectual kitbag to the table. How else can you satisfy exam board demands that your interpretations are personal, original, and creative?

It’ll be a recurring theme of the series.

Back to it!

So today I might be cosplaying a first-time Orwell reader, but I can still ask why he chose ‘thirteen’, or ’April’, and what April already means to me.

My birthday? Almost certainly useless here – Orwell died before I was born. Reject.

If, like me, you live in the UK, your lived experience of April is worth investigating. It’s a liminal period, sitting between seasons and marks in the calendar which often suggest a transition to hope and rebirth. But live in England long enough and it’s often about disappointment. Poor weather, poor temperatures, and evenings disappointingly short. We need to wait for June.

Aside from our lived experience, we bring our reading experience to every new text. Now TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) is muscling its way to the table like Banquo’s ghost.² To Eliot, in another pub quiz favourite, April is ‘the cruellest month.’ It fits my lived experience, and gives helps me look at the juxtaposition between the positives of ‘bright’ and the emotionless negatives of ‘cold’. Only a few words later, the wind is described as ‘vile’. These aren’t the April showers Bambi had to endure, kids …

Let’s move beyond that opener, before we run out of words.

So, Winston Smith.

I’m going to very quickly flick back to Issue one, Rebecca. There, I suggested du Maurier wanted to privilege and create a strong, intimate relationship with the narrator – even though we didn’t know her name. 

Here, both the names Orwell gives us suggest we could only be in England, but again, there’s an awkwardness which is almost oxymoronic. ‘Winston’ inevitably brings Churchill to my British mind: singular, historically enormous, anything but anonymous. ‘Smith’, meanwhile, couldn’t be more ordinary.

Does Smith diminish Winston, or does Winston elevate Smith?

A heroic everyman? I’ll wait and see …

Winston can move ‘quickly’, but can’t outrun the ‘gritty dust’. Like reality, it can’t be left behind …

I want to talk about visibility. It’s a ‘bright’ day, which sounds great. You knew there would be a -but- and here it is. I want to link it to the glass door of Victory Mansions. Why glass? Glass lets light through, certainly. But it also lets people see through it. Winston entering and leaving the building is potentially visible.

Close reading doesn’t require me to prove that Winston is under surveillance. It allows me to notice that hiding is difficult in this world. And personally, this speaks a little louder after recent trips to former-Soviet countries like Romania and Hungary. 

Who would have thought you could write so much about just 100 words? Let’s speed up a bit.

The poster. That poster.

This is one of those delicious occasions when our strict 100-word cut-off denies us information. It’s a bit like sitting in an exam with an extract the board has chosen for you, knowing that the killer phrase you want is five lines further down and unusable.

As we approach the end of the close reading, let’s focus on de-familiarisation.

We can tell the time. But it’s thirteen o’clock.

Winston. But Smith.

He lives in Victory Mansions. But England smells of defeat.

And we have this huge poster. 

Orwell deliberately tells us that it’s ‘too large for indoor display’. And yet, here it is in the hallway. Out of place. Dominating. Demanding we ask questions – although already I am wondering if I need to be careful about who to ask, and how.

Where does this leave us?

Honestly, fighting for mental balance. So much is familiar. So much is distorted.

Close reading Nineteen Eighty-Four’s opening for the first time feels like experiencing an earthquake. What do we trust? What are the solid foundations? If we need to run, in what direction?

As you read on, look out for …

How playful and twisty Orwell is with language.  Is ‘Victory Mansions’ an outlier, or part of a larger pattern?

Our relationship with Smith, and other major characters. How easy does Orwell make the empathy that du Maurier encouraged?

Signals that everything is ‘sub-optimal’. The world Orwell presents seems a little bit crappier than ours. How does he achieve that?

How Orwell uses Nature. There’s more of it in the first 100 word than we immediately appreciate. Does that continue?

Does Orwell enjoy knocking us off balance? Is the de-familiarisation we’ve spotted here an enduring part of his style throughout the novel?

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Close reading lies at the heart of successful A-Level Literature studies. 

The ability to analyse language, structure, and narrative choices with precision underpins the highest marks across all major exam boards. If you’d like to develop those skills with one-to-one support, you can find out more about tuition here.

1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, at The Poetry Foundation ↩︎
2. TS Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, at The Poetry Foundation ↩︎

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