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| “ | Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head! | „ |
| ~ Charrington talking to Winston through the telescreen. |
| “ | You are the dead. | „ |
| ~ Charrington's first words outside of his fake identity. |
Mr. Charrington is the secondary antagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984. His false identity is as a frail, poor, old antique shop owner in the Proletariat areas of London. He deceives the protagonist Winston Smith into renting a room above the antique shop that he claims is safe to hide in, when in reality, it is rigged with a monitoring device called a telescreen that watches Winston and his lover Julia until the Thought Police eventually decide to arrest him.
In the 1984 film adaptation, he was portrayed by the late Cyril Cusack.
Biography[]
False Identity[]
Charrington was said to have been about 60 years old when the book begins, which would place his birthyear at roughly 1924. He claims that when he was young his grandfather taught him the rhyme "Oranges and Lemons", and in an early sign of his identity being fake then claims this same grandfather was vaporized when he was eight years old. This is impossible, as The Party (also known as INGSOC) did not exist or was at least not in power until the 1960s.
He later claims that he married a woman and moved into a flat above the antique shop (which would later become Winston and Julia's hideout) and they were extremely poor even by prole standards. Importantly for Winston, he mentions that they were too poor to afford a telescreen[1] which means their apartment was completely unmonitored. His wife died an unknown amount of time after this and he moved downstairs to the kitchen to avoid the memories of her.
Winston comes to meet Charrington when he's strolling about an extremely poor part of London looking for somewhere to purchase razor blades and shoelaces, which were in short supply at the time. He thinks of the antique shop as more of just a junk shop, claiming most of the things there are broken, worthless, or not even antiques at all. The one thing that does catch Winton's attention though is an old diary displayed in the window of the shop. He purchases it and then returns home to write down all of his thoughts about the party. Later he returns and Charrington leads him upstairs to see the apartment he and his wife lived in, telling him that he could sell him some of the furniture. Winston took an interest in the room as he saw it as a good place where he and Julia could hide. Charrington offered to rent the room out to Winston for a relatively small fee, which Winston agreed to.
True Identity[]
One day when Winston and Julia are in the bedroom, an accent-less voice calls out "You are the dead" from the corner of the room. It turns out that the painting of a church was covering up a telescreen which had been listening to all of their conversation since they entered the room. The telescreen instructs them to stand out in the center of the room with their hands behind their heads. Several members of the Thought Police swarm the room and following close behind them is Charrington himself. He now looks completely different; having dark black hair, no longer having a cockney accent and not looking any older than about thirty-five. The entire time he was a member of the Thought Police and potentially the Inner Party. He quickly orders the arrest of Winston and Julia.
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- ↑ A telescreen is a device used by The Party to control the citizens of Oceania.