The first conceptual seeds of George Orwell's novel 1984 can be traced back to his essay "London Letter", written in 1944, in which he expressed fears about the potential rise of totalitarian regimes and the increasing surveillance capabilities of modern governments.
Today, 80 years after this essay and 40 years after the setting of the novel, a part of Orwell's dystopian vision has become a factual reality in modern Britain. Thought crime, the act of thinking something that contradicts the government's official doctrine, now exists.
