Then the shopkeeper takes Winston upstairs, to another room. There the room awakens in Winston a sort of nostalgia, a kind of ancestral memory. This is due to the fact that the room is arranged in a very cozy way: there was a strip of carpet on the floor, a picture or two on the walls, and a deep, slatternly armchair drawn up to the fireplace. An old-fashioned glass clock with a twelve-hour face was ticking away on the mantelpiece. Under the window, and occupying nearly a quarter of the room, was a enormous mahogany bed with the mattress still on it. Everything gave the impression that the room was meant to be lived in. And to Winston it seemed that he knew exactly how it must feel like to sit in a room like this. He imagined that it would be very nice to sit in the armchair beside the open fire with his feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob. He would be very at easy and utterly alone, and also utterly secure because nobody would be watching him, no voice would be pursuing him. In fact, because of the absence of the television screen in the room there would be no sound at all except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
While examining the room further Winston also spots a picture in a rosewood frame of a vaguely familiar building. The recalls it being bombed somewhere in the past. Mr. Charrington tells him that it used to be a church at one time. St. Clement’s Dane its name was. Then the shop owner starts to sing a little rhyme from his childhood about churches. After a few lines he stops because his memory fails him. He desperately tries to remember it and keeps trying to finish the song. Lingering, Winston talked to Mr. Charrington some more, not wanting to leave just yet. All that time the half-remembered rhyme kept running through Winston’s head and he even got the illusion of actually hearing the bells of the churches. The bells from a London that belonged to the forgotten past. Again a sense of nostalgia came over Winston. The curious thing was that as far as Winston could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.
Winston made up his mind, he would defiantly come back to this place after a suitable interval. He would take the risk of visiting the shop again. He would look around more, find other interesting things from the mysterious past. He was even considering of renting that nice little room above the shop. And he would definitely drag the rest of that song out of Mr. Charrington’s memory. Almost cheerfully and while humming the rhyme to an improvised tune, he left the shop.
After reading through the extract I must come to the conclusion that Winston must have had a nice, if not great experience visiting the shop. The objects in the shop and especially in the living room upstairs made Winston long to the mysterious past, the very thing he desperately wants to discover more about. The atmosphere in the extract reflects this in the mysterious way that it is written by George Orwell. The reader can actually share the impression of the cozy room with its sweet fire place and go through the same emotions as Winston, due to the detailed description by the author. In this passage we deal with something that is called a time-delay. The actions in this passage are described more detailed than in the passage that comes before it. There is also a lot of thinking and reflection involved.
To make an end to this essay I would like to discuss one more thing. In this extract Mr. Charrington appears as a nice old grandfather kind of man that obviously has experienced a lot during his live and fortunately is somehow preserved from the ‘bad’ influence Big Brothers’ regime. We get the impression that Mr. Charrington could know things about the past of great value to Winston. We want to read ahead and find out if our impressions will be realized. We also want to know how Winston will develop through this obtained knowledge, what his opinion will be on the present government when he finds out the truth about the past.