Tom Parsons
Winston's neighbour at Victory Mansions and colleague at the Ministry: thirty-five, tubby, froglike, permanently sweating, and full of imbecile enthusiasms. Winston's verdict is that the Party depends on men like him more than on the Thought Police.
To be useful, and to be seen being useful. He is treasurer of the house-by-house Hate Week fund, boasts that Victory Mansions will show four hundred metres of bunting, and organises squads of volunteers on the roofs in the evenings, happy as a lark.
The book
At a glance
- Winston's neighbour at Victory Mansions and colleague at the Ministry of Truth
- Thirty-five
- Tubby and middle-sized, fair-haired, with a pink froglike face
- The regulation blue overalls of the Outer Party; shorts whenever a hike gives him the excuse
- Sports Committee, hikes, demonstrations, savings campaigns, Hate Week treasurer
- His wife and two children, both in the Spies
- Community Centre every evening for four years
- Part One, Chapters 2 and 5; the Hate Week preparations; Part Three, Chapter 1
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeTom Parsons is a fattish but active man with fair hair and a froglike face, already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline at thirty-five, with brisk boyish movements and an overpowering smell of sweat that arrives before he does and stays after he leaves. He wears the regulation overalls but reverts to shorts at any excuse. At the Community Centre you can tell he has been playing table tennis by the dampness of the bat handle.
He holds a subordinate post at the Ministry of Truth for which intelligence is not required, and a leading role on the Sports Committee and every other committee organising community hikes, spontaneous demonstrations, savings campaigns and voluntary activities in general. He was unwillingly evicted from the Youth League at thirty-five and had managed to stay in the Spies a year past the statutory age before that. He informs people between whiffs of his pipe, with quiet pride, that he has been to the Community Centre every evening for four years.
His two children are in the Spies, in blue shorts and red neckerchiefs, and they are the most frightening thing in the flat. The boy of nine points a toy pistol at Winston and calls him a traitor, a thought-criminal and a Eurasian spy, and hits him in the back of the neck with a catapult on the way out. Parsons hears about it and says it shows the right spirit. His seven-year-old daughter slipped away from a troop hike, followed a stranger for two hours because his shoes looked foreign, and handed him over to the patrols in Amersham; asked what became of the man, Parsons mimes a rifle and clicks his tongue.
Winston, watching him swallow a rise in the chocolate ration announced the day after the ration was cut, concludes that Parsons will never be vaporized. He is one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom the stability of the Party depends more even than on the Thought Police, and his stupidity is described as an animal's.
How the book draws them
- A little boy grown largeOrwell's summary of the whole effect, and it holds down to the details: dimpled knees, sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms, and a man who, although he is wearing the regulation overalls, is almost impossible to picture out of the blue shorts, grey shirt and red neckerchief of the Spies.
- The sweatBeads of moisture stand out all over his pink face; the flat smells of it before he gets home. Orwell calls it an unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life.
- The two dollarsHe chases Winston across the canteen for a subscription to the Hate Week fund and enters the two creased notes in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.
- The story about his childrenHe tells it as a joke: the two of them sneaked up behind an old market woman who was wrapping sausages in a poster of Big Brother and set fire to her skirt with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, he believes. Little beggars, but keen as mustard.
- The ear trumpetsThe latest thing issued to the Spies, for listening through keyholes. His daughter tried one on the sitting-room door and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Only a toy, mind you, he says. Still, gives them the right idea.
- "What I mean to say, there is a war on"His whole political vocabulary, produced at intervals. He cannot follow the Ministry of Plenty's figures but sits listening to them with a sort of edified boredom, aware that they are in some way a cause for satisfaction.
- Hate WeekThe heat and the manual work give him an excuse for shorts and an open shirt, and he is everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering and jollying everyone along. Winston notes that he is in his native element.