Great Britain’s Royal Mint is honoring George Orwell – also worth celebrating today on the anniversary of his birthday June 25, 1903 – with a new coin, 75 years after his death in 1950.
Best known for his Prometheus-winning classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, the British novelist and essayist will be celebrated with a new £2 coin.
In the Orwellian spirit of the well-known Nineteen Eighty-Four catch phrase that “Big Brother is watching you,” coin artist Henry Gray created a coin design that appears to be an eye, but at its center is actually a camera lens surrounded 360 degrees by the famous phrase.
Underneath the image is the name “George Orwell,” while an inscription on the coin’s edge quotes from Orwell’s dystopian novel: “There was truth and there was untruth.”
“The works of George Orwell have influenced generations, and his most famous works are still being studied today – decades on from their first publication,” said Rebecca Morgan, the Royal Mint’s director of commemorative coin.
“I am delighted to share this unique design with collectors and fans of Orwell’s work, paying tribute to one of the most world-renowned authors of the 20th century,” Morgan said.
According to a File 770 news report about the honor, the coin is designed as a tribute to “Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel 1984, centred around the character of Winston Smith, who lives in a society restricted by totalitarian rule and mass surveillance.”
ORWELL’S ENDURING PROMETHEUS THEMES
Orwell, the pen name for author and journalist Eric Blair, highlighted the dangers of totalitarianism and other forms of authoritarian government and wrote about a wide variety of social injustices.
Orwell has been recognized twice by the Prometheus Awards.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was inducted first into our Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction – and fittingly, in 1984.
LFS members inducted Orwell’s fable Animal Farm into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2011.
To better understand why each novel has become an enduring and bestselling classic, and how each work reflects the core libertarian and anti-authoritarian themes recognized by the Prometheus Awards, read our review-essay Appreciations of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.
(Also worth reading is Orwell’s seminal essay on “Politics and the English language,” posted online in full thanks to the Orwell Foundation. An independent charity, the Orwell Foundation “uses the work of George Orwell to shine a light on brave writing, uncovering hidden lives and uncomfortable truths” and sponsors the Orwell Prizes, the Orwell Youth Prize and the Orwell Festival.)
HOW ORWELL MIGHT HAVE REACTED TODAY
While it’s nice to see Orwell remembered and celebrated in his home country, it’s also ironic – given recent authoritarian trends in the United Kingdom that Orwell himself almost certainly would have challenged and consistently opposed.
Among the widely reported UK incidents and trends: increasingly invasive and paternalistic government surveillance of public opinion; the censorship and destruction of “bad” words; and the alternation of previously published books and documents to suppress words and phrases by throwing them “down the memory hole.”
Shockingly, these days in Britain, police show up at the doors of people’s private homes to interrogate and/or arrest them for dissident opinions that they’ve published on social media. (Opinions, one must add, that no one could reasonably interpret as either supporting racism or advocating Nazism. Of course, it also should be noted that those with ulterior motives or strong partisan biases can and do misinterpret almost any statement in the worst possible way, especially if it’s expressed by those demonized people over there in that other rival faction, the latest target of Orwell’s deftly described “two-minute hate.”)
Orwell proverbially must be rolling over in his grave at such authoritarian State practices in his own beloved England.
If he was somehow alive in the 21st century and had the power to make an either-or choice between accepting recognition via a Royal Mint coin or seeing an end to such illiberal, reactionary/progressive and authoritarian abuses of State power, Orwell no doubt would choose the latter.
Still, it’s nice to see the Royal Mint at least paying lip service to Orwell’s continued relevance and enduring stature.
Who knows? Perhaps the coin will make more visible the inherent contradictions in such recognition in his native country as it’s carrying out such illiberal policies.
ROYAL MINT COMMEMORATIONS
Other literary figures who have been commemorated on the Royal Mint’s £2 coins include William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and JRR Tolkien (the latter also a Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee for his critique of the temptations of power and corruptions of absolute power in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.)
The Orwell coin, which displays an image of King Charles on its obverse side, is now available to buy from the Royal Mint, according to the Manchester Evening News, where Orwell worked as a book reviewer and columnist during World War II.
The George Orwell commemorative £2 coin is available to buy in brilliant uncirculated, gold proof and silver proof versions from the Royal Mint’s website. Prices start at £17.50 (about $22.65.)
ABOUT THE LFS AND PROMETHEUS AWARDS:
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters. We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international|magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
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