O+l?

Does the oranges and lemons poem have any significant meaning? Other than when the thought police catch you, you wont make it out alive.

I think the poem shows the effectiveness of the memory hole, the way the past has been more or less eliminated. There seems to be no real shared memory anymore, even of something so simple as a nursery rhyme. It is only pieced together through the collective efforts of Winston, Julia, Charrington, and (if I remember right) O'Brien.

Even then, there is another line to the poem which is not mentioned in the book. The final verse is often: Here comes a candle to light you to bed. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Chip, chip, chop, chop the last man's dead.

Given Orwell's original title: The Last Man In Europe, I think this has some significance. First, that all the characters together don't manage to complete the poem. Second, of course, that the "last man" will, in fact, be dead. Perhaps Winston truly is the last man, as we define it, in Europe?

Hope this helps.

Sex, Violence and Concrete: The Post-war Dystopian Vision
of London in Nineteen Eighty-Four

by : LAWRENCE PHILLIPS

"The emergence of the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ as a
significant motif in the novel attests to Orwell’s complex engagement
with the materiality of the past. The significance of the rhyme is that
it points to physical locales in the fabric of London and hints at a pre-
Revolutionary usage and history. This is crucial since the Party, in
line with its policy of rewriting the historical record and the
complementary control of memory to suit its purposes, has also
attempted to appropriate the material artefacts of the city’s history to
their version of the past:

"'Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was
always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything
large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was
automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while
anything that was obviously of an earlier date was ascribed to some dim
period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to
have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from
architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Statues,
inscriptions, memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might
throw light upon the past had been systematically altered. (88)"'

It is memory rather than history that presents this challenge and gains
its power by its association with the material city."


I realize the original post was made in 2009, but if this question is still relevant, this is a reputable source found via 'Academic Search Premier,' which is used by EBSCOhost.