Brave New World characters

First appears in chapter 3

An Alpha-Plus specialist who works in psychology and sleep-teaching, and who feels out of place among his caste. Shorter and slighter than a typical Alpha, he is self-conscious about his body and resentful of the confident, conventional people around him. He dislikes the casual promiscuity and constant distraction that his society treats as normal, preferring solitude and unsettling conversation, and he is drawn to Lenina Crowne. His discontent is more personal grievance than principled rebellion, and his outsider status leaves him bitter and hungry for the recognition he feels he is denied.

First appears in chapter 3

A young Beta who works in the Central London Hatchery, where she gives immunizations to bottled embryos. Attractive and popular, she follows her conditioning contentedly, enjoying the drug soma, casual relationships, and the approved pleasures of the World State. Her friend Fanny gently scolds her for spending too long with one partner, since exclusivity is discouraged. Curious and good-natured rather than reflective, she agrees to travel with Bernard Marx to the Savage Reservation, though she finds his moods and his taste for privacy strange.

First appears in chapter 3

One of the ten World Controllers, the resident Controller for Western Europe. Appearing before students, he speaks candidly about the vanished past that the World State has abolished: families, mothers and fathers, lasting love, religion, and history, all of which he presents as sources of instability and suffering. Unusually, he knows the forbidden old world in detail, including books ordinary citizens are never allowed to read. He defends the present order as the price of universal contentment and stability.

Also known as Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, D.H.C.

Appears from the start

The Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a senior official who leads new students on a tour of the facility. He explains with pride how human beings are mass-produced in bottles, sorted into castes, and shaped from infancy through conditioning and sleep-teaching to accept their assigned places. Confident and orthodox, he embodies the authority of the World State and its faith in stability and control.

Appears from the start

A brisk, competent worker at the Central London Hatchery who helps explain its processes to visiting students. He is one of Lenina Crowne's companions and speaks about relationships and pleasure in the offhand, interchangeable way his society encourages. He represents the well-adjusted, unquestioning citizen who accepts the World State's values without strain.

First appears in chapter 4

An Alpha-Plus lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering, where he writes slogans, rhymes, and propaganda for the World State. Exceptionally gifted in mind and body, he is admired and successful, yet he feels a restless sense of unused power and a vague dissatisfaction with the shallow work he does. A friend of Bernard Marx, he shares Bernard's feeling of being different, though his discontent springs from a longing to create something real rather than from personal grievance.

First appears in chapter 3

A young worker at the Hatchery and a friend of Lenina Crowne, with whom she shares a surname by coincidence. Conventional and well-conditioned, she advises Lenina to behave as their society expects, taking many partners rather than favoring one. She serves as a voice of ordinary World State opinion.

Also known as The Savage

First appears in chapter 7

A young man living at the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, the son of Linda, a woman from the World State who was stranded there years earlier. Raised outside civilization but taught to read by his mother, he has shaped himself on an old volume of Shakespeare and on the Reservation's harsh traditions, belonging fully to neither world. Pale-skinned among the Reservation people, he has been excluded and mistreated, and he meets the visitors from London with intense curiosity and emotion.

First appears in chapter 7

A woman originally from the World State, born a Beta, who came to the Savage Reservation on a visit long ago, was lost, and could not return. There she discovered she was pregnant, something shameful and unthinkable in her world, and gave birth to a son, John. Years of life on the Reservation have aged her and left her an outcast, scorned by the local people for her strange civilized habits and her many relationships. She clings to memories of the comforts and conditioning of the world she lost.