1984 can be seen as the final distillation of a number of opinions and theories George Orwell had been building over the years of his short life. His stint with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma introduced him to the shameful activities of the British in the Far East. For a few years after his return to Europe, he spent his time investigating the lives of the urban poor, emerging with a vague distrust of machine-age capitalist society. This bloomed into a firm adherence to Socialism in 1936, when Orwell was sent by his publisher to the industrial north of England, where he encountered for the first time "ordinary working class people." Within a year, he had married and relocated to Spain to join the revolutionary Marxist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, or Worker's Party of Marxist Unification), the dissident faction of the Spanish Communist party. However, when the...