The animals behind Animal Farm

George Orwell may have intended his seminal novel, published 75 years ago, to be an allegory on the Russian Revolution, but his extensive farming knowledge informed his animal portraits, making them powerful and, in part, believable, finds Julie Harding

- Julie Harding

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.