Nineteen Eighty-Four has become part of our collective mental furniture. Its phrases structure our journalism. Its ideas inform our critiques of the present and the politics it shapes. Its future has become our past, yet its account of that future determines how we talk about the present as it continually threatens to transform into something menacing, unpredictable, and strange. This chapter reflects on the implications of what this inseparability of imagined past, increasingly fictional present, and not-yet-assured future says about our attitude to the dystopian imaginary and the place of Orwell’s novel within it. The chapter also examines why we value Nineteen Eighty-Four, sometimes unthinkingly, offering a commentary on its popularity and prestige at times of creeping authoritarian politics. It discusses the relevance of Orwell’s novel to more recent debates about post-truth politics, surveillance, with gestures to theories of simulation, culturalization, and the hyperreal.

In the twentieth century, the aftermath of Wilde’s trial generates a new interest in the Dark Lady sequence as a means of heterosexualising Shakespeare and his Sonnets. Their powerful appeal as expressions of male-male desire continues, however, in the work of Wilfred Owen, and the chapter explores the nostalgia and hostility which the Sonnets aroused among soldiers in World War I. Post-war, the Sonnets become a vehicle for modernist poetics through the work of Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and their citation by William Empson makes them central to New Criticism. Whilst the biographical interpretation of the Sonnets intensifies through the Shakespeare novel, the idea of the Dark Lady, focused particularly on Sonnet 130, opens up new possibilities for women and women of colour to re-voice the Sonnets at the end of the century.