1948. War just over. The 57 Chevy and the culture it represents, one which I consumed in Hot Wheels form as a 70s kid, did not exist yet. No society, not even America, had put in a thoroughly modern highway system (aside from the Autobahn, maybe, but...), let alone rearranged their entire society's topology around individual use of high-fuel-consumption pleasure vehicles. Even here in North America, that was being planned, but not here yet.

And Orwell was an Englishman writing in bombed-out, austerity-ridden, digging-itself-out-from-an-apocalypse England. Even today, they don't have the car culture that we have here, and I've seen a lot of pictures of horse and carts wending their way around the ruins of post-war London. I'm sure there were plenty of cars around, driven by dignitaries and princes and whatsorts, but I don't think they were used daily to get to work by your typical file clerk, or your typical village farmer, etc.

It wouldn't even have occurred to him to write about a character's relationship with their car, or their even owning a personal car that wasn't tied to their profession (milk truck, taxicab, chauffeur), anymore than he would write about their tractor if the characters were agrarians; as much as the industrial revolution was in the distant past, the age of ubiquitous personal technology and obscene consumption had yet to be born.

I am reminded of something from way deep in my brain's cellar, some sort of quasi-fascist screed by a Futurist artist or writer from the 30s about a marvelous "race-automobile" or something, but it was something completely different from the 50s-diner drive-in-movie car culture that is the background mythology we live with. More of a "let it all burn and bring the future forth!" kind of nihilist thing. I tried to google it but this was literally a class I took in high school in the 80s, sorry.

Anyways, 1984 is an incredibly pessimistic novel about the future he saw coming, so any of his characters enjoying the sort of expansive freedom that I have, where I could literally walk out my door right now and be thousands of miles from here in a couple of days with nobody saying boo about it... even if it was a story of a personal struggle against a totalitarian state, it would be a different story than one where he runs the risk of being denounced by name in front of his entire society if he doesn't work hard enough at his morning exercise under the state's watchful eye. One that it would have been fairly magically prescient on his part to be able to extrapolate from his lived experience.