1949

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four is published in London

London booksellers received the novel while its author lay in a Gloucestershire tuberculosis sanatorium, too ill to be there.

8 June 1949, Secker & Warburg

The listing gives only the year; the British first edition appeared on 8 June 1949, published in London by Secker & Warburg.

Its imprint identifies the firm and states 'First published 1949.' The 312-page volume was printed in Great Britain by the Alcuin Press in Welwyn Garden City and bound in London by Key & Whiting Ltd.

Orwell had sent the final typescript to Fredric Warburg on 4 December 1948.

The author was not in London

London was the place of publication, not the author's location. Orwell — the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair — was hospitalized at Cotswold Sanatorium in Gloucestershire with worsening tuberculosis.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was his final completed novel. Calling it his ninth book depends on how collections and pamphlets are counted.

A publishing executive reportedly said that if the firm could not sell fifteen to twenty thousand copies, its staff deserved to be shot.

Five days to New York

The separate U.S. edition followed on 13 June through Harcourt Brace, with a first printing of 20,000 copies.

The novel was selected for the U.S. Book-of-the-Month Club in July 1949.

The appendix's full title is 'The Principles of Newspeak.'

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date corrected

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1949-06-08.