As his widow, Sonia, later remarked, Orwell ‘was not a very good manuscript keeper’. On a visit to Jura, shortly after his death, she discovered a pile of corrected typescript and handwritten pieces of paper in the bedroom where he had written the bulk of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not unreasonably, she assumed that this was the manuscript from which he had typed up the finished version of the novel sent to Secker & Warburg at the end of 1948. The material was donated by her to a charity auction held in June 1952 and purchased by Scribner’s of New York for the sum of £50 ($140). Scribner’s subsequently resold it to a collector in Kansas for $275 (£98). In 1969 it was bought by Daniel G. Siegel for $5,000 (£2,093). The manuscript is now at Brown University.
Investigation showed the manuscript to be incomplete. In fact, only 40 per cent of the finished novel had survived. What remains can be divided into four sections: thirteen pages of the draft that Orwell worked on in the summer of 1946; nine pages from the 1947 redraft; a solitary page from the version typed up by Mrs Christen; and the remainder (by far the largest part) from Orwell’s final rewrite in 1948. Much of the rewriting is extensive. As Siegel put it, ‘The pages were nondescript, typed and handwritten in ink with pages and corrections in ink, with a great deal of over-writing on the typed pages’.
Most of the corrections show Orwell tightening up his prose, removing superfluous phrases, and taking out redundant expressions, but there are three more substantial passages that failed to appear in the finished version. One is a horrifying scene in the propaganda reel that Winston watches at the prole cinema involving the lynching of a negro woman and the desecration of her aborted child. Another is a description of the journey to O’Brien’s apartment. Most interesting of all, in terms of the novel’s denouement, is a scene in which Winston and Julia reencounter each other after leaving O’Brien. Here Winston experiences ‘a curious feeling that although the purpose for which she had waited was to arrange another meeting, the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye’.
There are also several pieces of self-censorship. Thus ‘an old fat Jew’ trying to swim away from a pursuing helicopter in the propaganda film becomes ‘a huge great fat man’. Similarly, the draft of Winston’s interrogation at the Ministry of Love, where he is shown photographs of Julia and himself, is turned up a notch or two to include evidence ‘of Julia & himself in the act of making love’. For further information, see Peter Davison, ed., George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile of the Extant Manuscript: With a Preface by Daniel G. Siegel (1984).