I SAW a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them.’
When George Orwell wrote this passage in his preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm in 1947, explaining the genesis of his allegorical novella, the book had already been read in Britain and beyond for almost two years, which makes 2020 the 75th anniversary of its launch.
Animal Farm would become Orwell’s first commercial success and the one that would begin to cement his reputation as a literary giant. He would follow it with his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel he wrote when isolated from the rest of the world on the Hebridean island of Jura, dying of tuberculosis.
Animal Farm’s path to the bookshops was strewn with obstacles. Several publishing houses shied away from the scathing satire on the Soviet Union, Britain’s wartime ally—a political ‘potato’ that was way too hot to handle as the author pulled the last sheet of manuscript paper from his typewriter in 1944, with VE Day and the erection of the Iron Curtain just around the corner. However, when Fredric Warburg ran with it, the public purchased in their droves, the first edition of 4,500 copies apparently selling out within days.
This public was beguiled by Animal Farm’s moral fable—with echoes of Aesop and political-allegory parallels to Gulliver’s Travels—in which a bunch of animals, led by a pig (Old Major), stages a peaceful coup, overthrowing Farmer Jones, but subsequently living far from happily ever after as another pig (Napoleon), who takes control of the farm republic, becomes ever more nefarious and merciless in his exploitation of the other livestock.
Denne historien er fra June 10, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra June 10, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
