Winston buys a diary

On a day he could never afterwards pin down, in a slummy quarter of London whose location he could not even remember, Winston Smith slipped into a frowzy little junk-shop and bought, for two dollars fifty, the thick quarto-sized blank book that would become his diary. The transaction reads as an errand, but it is the first concrete act of rebellion in the novel: a Party member consciously breaking the rule against 'dealing on the free market', acquiring an object whose smooth creamy paper had not been manufactured for at least forty years, and carrying it guiltily home in a briefcase as a 'compromising possession' before a single word had been written in it.

The Object and the Purchase

The book that drew Winston had been lying in the shop window, and the sight of it had stricken him immediately with an overwhelming desire to possess it. It was not new: the smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past, and Winston guessed the volume was much older still. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He gave a quick glance up and down the street, slipped inside, and bought it for two dollars fifty, then carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, he recognised it as a compromising possession.

A Forbidden Transaction

The purchase was technically a breach of Party discipline, since Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops at all. The rule against 'dealing on the free market' was not strictly kept, however, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. What made Winston's visit different was that he had no such practical excuse. The need that drove him was an inexplicable desire for the object itself, and he knew that the guilty secrecy of the errand, not the price of two dollars fifty, was what made the book dangerous from the moment it entered his possession.

A Relic of the Abolished Past

Winston's book belongs to the same category of forbidden objects as the glass paperweight he later buys from the same shop: a piece of the past that the Party's machinery has not yet managed to alter. The Ministry of Truth, his place of work, exists to rewrite history continuously, applying its process of alteration to newspapers, books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, films and photographs so that every prediction of the Party can be shown to have been correct and no inconvenient record can survive. The blank book, however, has no content for the Ministry to falsify; its paper itself is the record, a survival from a vanished age. Like the paperweight, which Winston will describe as 'a little chunk of history that they've forgotten to alter', the empty pages are an object that the revision of the past has simply overlooked.

Memory Against Doublethink

The diary that grew out of this purchase was an attempt to set a private record against the Party's control of memory. Winston knew that the past existed only in records and human memories, and that the Party slogan ran 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'. To possess a book that the state had not manufactured, and then to fill it with his own words, was to try to create a record outside that system — a reality control of his own to set against the 'reality control' the Party called doublethink.

A Counter-Document in the Age of Newspeak

The book's very paper belonged to a world the Party was trying to make unthinkable. Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, and although in 1984 no one yet used it as a sole means of communication, the leading articles of the Times were already written in it, and it was expected that Newspeak would finally supersede Oldspeak by about the year 2050. The blank book, by its physical nature, predates Newspeak; it offers a surface on which Oldspeak could still be written. The purchase of paper made before the Revolution, and the decision to keep it hidden, thus constituted a small act of linguistic as well as political defiance.

Significance

Looked at in isolation, the purchase is a minor commercial transaction; looked at in the structure of the novel, it is the hinge on which everything turns. The act of buying the book was already a transgression that the Party would read as the outward sign of thoughtcrime, and it is the necessary precondition for the diary and for the rebellion that follows. Winston's memory of where the shop stood failed him almost at once, yet the object itself survived, a beautiful, useless, compromising thing hidden in a drawer. The book that had seemed merely beautiful became the diary; the diary became the crime; and the crime was already contained in the moment he paid over the two dollars fifty and carried it home.