In the summer of 1944 a writer dug a typescript of about 30,000 words out of the rubble of his bombed flat in north-west London and sent it to a publisher. It came back. It had been refused before, and it would be refused again. No law stood in the way, and no censor had read it. It was a fable about pigs and horses on an English farm, short enough to read in an afternoon, and almost nobody in London wanted to print it. This episode follows the man who wrote it from a police post in Burma to a trench in Spain, then walks through wartime London and the publishers who turned him down, and then goes to the farm itself, where seven sentences are painted in white on a black wall at the end of a barn. Some of those sentences change during the story. One animal can read every change, and he says nothing. Underneath all four parts is one question: how does a free country fall silent when nobody has ordered it to, and is that kind of silence better or worse than being told to keep quiet?
Part 1 — A Crumpled Typescript (Saba)
The flying bomb — At the end of June 1944 a German flying bomb, a pilotless aircraft Londoners called the doodlebug, came down on Mortimer Crescent in Kilburn. It wrecked the flat of a writer and his wife. Somewhere under the plaster and broken glass was his typescript. He went back and found it, with every page still there.
Faber and Faber — On 28 June he sent it to Faber and Faber, addressed to one of its directors, the poet TS Eliot. His letter apologised that the typescript had been “blitzed” and was in a “slightly crumpled condition”, but it was “not damaged in any way.” A fortnight later it came back with a refusal.
Eric Arthur Blair — He was born in June 1903 in Motihari, in the north of British India. His father was a minor official in the government’s Opium Department. The son later called his family “lower-upper-middle class”: people with the manners of the gentry and without the money. He got into Eton by winning a scholarship. He did not go to university.
Moulmein — In 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, the armed force that kept a colonial population in order, and served five years. In his essay “Shooting an Elephant” he wrote that in Moulmein he was hated by large numbers of people. He was the man who carried out the orders face to face in the street, not the man who wrote them. In 1927 he came home on leave and did not go back. The service “did not suit” him, he wrote, and it made him hate imperialism.
Down and out — He lived in cheap rooms in Paris and worked as a dishwasher when the money ran out. Back in England he tramped with the homeless, slept in lodging houses and picked hops in Kent, and he wrote it all down.
Four names — In 1932 Victor Gollancz agreed to publish a book made from those years. Blair did not want his family embarrassed, so he sent his agent four pen names: P S Burton, Kenneth Miles, George Orwell and H Lewis Allways. The third won. George is the patron saint of England, and the Orwell is a river in Suffolk that he knew and liked. Down and Out in Paris and London appeared early in 1933. He never changed his name in law, and his headstone in an Oxfordshire churchyard carries the name he was born with.
Spain — In 1936 Orwell moved into a cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, which had once been the village shop. In June he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy. They kept hens and goats, and one of the goats was called Muriel. That July the Spanish Civil War began: General Francisco Franco’s rebels, backed by Hitler and Mussolini, against a Republic armed largely by the Soviet Union. Orwell went in December 1936. He joined, “through a series of accidents” as he later put it, the militia of a small dissident Marxist party that was bitterly critical of Stalin, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. In May 1937, near Huesca on the Aragon front, a sniper’s bullet went through his throat and missed the artery by a very small margin.
Traitors — That summer the Communists, backed by Soviet advisers, turned on his party. It was declared illegal. Its leaders were arrested, and one of them disappeared in custody. The charge was that its members were secretly working for Franco, and the Communist press called them “Trotsky-fascists”. Orwell and Eileen got out of Spain just ahead of arrest. Decades later a report prepared for a tribunal in Valencia turned up, naming them both as confirmed Trotskyists.
The second shock — In England almost nobody believed him. Left-wing editors turned him down, and Homage to Catalonia sold badly. His summary of the lesson, written ten years later in a preface for a Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm: “It taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.” He stayed a socialist. What he set out to destroy was the myth that the Soviet Union was socialism’s success.
The boy and the horse — He came home from Spain with a purpose and, by his own account, no story to carry it for some time. Then one day in the village he saw a little boy, “perhaps ten years old”, driving an enormous cart-horse along a narrow path and whipping it every time it tried to turn. That was where the animals came from.
A story told through a translator — Orwell set down that origin story in English, in the Ukrainian preface. His English original is lost. What we read today was translated back into English from the Ukrainian.
Six years — The purpose came home with him from Spain in 1937. He did not write the book until the end of 1943. By then Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army had destroyed a German army at Stalingrad, and the British press was calling Stalin Uncle Joe. That November, after two years writing broadcasts for the BBC, Orwell became literary editor of Tribune, and in the same month he began a story about a farm.
Part 2 — Four Refusals (Ibsa)
A new civilisation — In October 1917 the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Russia, and in 1922 they founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1935 Sidney and Beatrice Webb published Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? When the second edition appeared two years later, the question mark was gone.
Stalin and Trotsky — Lenin died in January 1924, and the succession came down to Joseph Stalin, who controlled the party machinery, and Leon Trotsky, who had built the Red Army. Trotsky was expelled in 1927, exiled to Alma-Ata the next year and thrown out of the country the year after. In August 1940, in Mexico City, an agent of Stalin’s secret police killed him with an ice axe. From 1936 to 1938, in the Moscow show trials, famous leaders of the revolution confessed in open court to plotting with Trotsky, spying and sabotage, and were then shot.
The ally — In June 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Stalin became Britain’s ally overnight. To many decent people, criticising him in public now felt like stabbing an ally in the back.
Why a fairy story — Orwell wanted to expose the Soviet myth “in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages.” A child can follow a fable, and a pig is a pig in Ukrainian, Polish and French. The title page read Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. A year later, in “Why I Write”, he said it was his first attempt “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”
Phaedrus — Phaedrus was a Roman slave, freed in the household of the emperor Augustus, who wrote verse fables in Latin. He explained that a slave who dared not speak openly put his feelings into fables. His own fables got him into trouble with Sejanus, the minister of the emperor Tiberius. For Orwell the animals were never a disguise, because no reader in 1944 was fooled about which country the book described.
Built not to match — The episodes, Orwell wrote, “are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution”, but “their chronological order is changed” for the sake of the story’s symmetry. A hunt for exact one-to-one matches will keep failing, and he built it that way.
His own publisher — Orwell counted four refusals, and said “only one of these had any ideological motive.” The first came from Victor Gollancz, who ran the Left Book Club and had already turned down Homage to Catalonia.
The Ministry — Jonathan Cape said yes, then chose to consult the Ministry of Information, the wartime department for propaganda and press censorship, although nothing obliged him to. Afterwards he wrote that the fable followed Soviet history so closely that “it can apply only to Russia”, and suggested “it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs.” Orwell noted that the suggestion “seems to have the official ring about it.”
Peter Smollett — The Ministry’s Russian section was headed by Peter Smollett, born in Austria as Hans Peter Smolka and later made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Papers smuggled out by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin identified him as a Soviet agent recruited by Kim Philby. No document proves he was the official Cape consulted, but historians think it almost certainly was. In 1949 Smollett was on the list Orwell gave a government department of people who should not be trusted as writers of anti-communist propaganda. Early in the war, Eileen had worked in the censorship department of that same ministry.
The poet — On 13 July 1944 TS Eliot wrote back from Faber and Faber. He called the book “good writing of fundamental integrity” and objected to its “generally Trotskyite” politics. He added that the pigs were the cleverest animals and so the best qualified to run the farm, which meant that what was needed was “not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
The market — Biographers have found at least one more London house that said no. In New York the Dial Press turned the book down because animal stories were impossible to sell in America.
Secker and Warburg — Fredric Warburg’s small firm, which had published Homage to Catalonia, accepted the book in the summer of 1944. Paper was rationed and publishers had to wait their turn, so Animal Farm did not appear until 17 August 1945, the week the war with Japan ended. The first printing was 4,500 copies.
The preface nobody read — Orwell wrote a preface called “The Freedom of the Press”, and his proofs left room for it at the front of the first edition. Nobody knows exactly why it was not printed. It was found in the early 1970s and first published in the Times Literary Supplement in September 1972. It is about British censorship, not Soviet: the sinister fact about literary censorship in England, he wrote, “is that it is largely voluntary.”
Two examples — The BBC marked the 25th anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky, the man who built it. And the British rights to John Reed’s eyewitness account Ten Days that Shook the World, which had an introduction by Lenin, passed to the British Communist Party. Orwell wrote that the party destroyed the original edition “as completely as they could” and issued a new version with Trotsky’s name taken out and Lenin’s introduction dropped. As for protest, Orwell wrote, “there was little or no protest.”
Tehran — From 28 November to 1 December 1943, Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met for the first time, in Tehran. Orwell began the book that same November, “immediately after the Teheran Conference”, when everybody thought the Soviet Union and the West had become the best of friends. By everybody he did not mean himself.
Part 3 — Seven Sentences on a Wall (Abeba)
The farm lies near a market town called Willingdon. At the end of its big barn is a wall tarred black, and early in the story seven sentences are painted on it in large white letters. Abeba walks through the book by that wall.
The Wall Is Painted
Old Major’s dream — On Manor Farm, Jones goes to bed drunk. The animals gather in the big barn to hear old Major, the twelve-year-old prize boar. He tells them their lives are “miserable, laborious, and short”, and that man “is the only creature that consumes without producing.” He teaches them a song, “Beasts of England”. Three nights later he dies in his sleep.
The animals — Among them are the cart-horses Boxer, huge and not very clever, and Clover, a motherly mare who shelters a brood of lost ducklings behind her foreleg. There is Muriel the white goat, and Benjamin the donkey, the oldest animal on the farm, who almost never laughs. And there is Mollie, the pretty white mare who pulls Jones’s trap, chewing sugar and showing off her ribbons.
Animalism — Over the next three months the pigs turn Major’s speech into a system of thought. Two of them lead the work: Snowball, quick and inventive, and Napoleon, large, fierce-looking and quiet. A third, Squealer, is so persuasive that the others say he could turn black into white.
The rebellion — On Midsummer’s Eve Jones gets drunk in Willingdon and nobody feeds the animals. A cow breaks into the store-shed, and when Jones and his four men come with whips, the animals drive them off the farm. They burn the whips and throw the knives down the well. They decide to keep the farmhouse as a museum where no animal will ever live.
The Seven Commandments — Snowball paints ANIMAL FARM on the gate and writes the commandments on the barn wall:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
The slower animals get a single maxim instead: “Four legs good, two legs bad.”
Five buckets of milk — The same day, the pigs milk the cows. When someone asks what will happen to the milk, Napoleon stands in front of the buckets: “Never mind the milk, comrades!” By evening the milk has disappeared. Later the windfall apples are sent to the pigs as well, and every pig agrees to it, even Snowball and Napoleon. Squealer explains that it has been “proved by Science” that pigs need milk and apples, and asks whether there is anyone “who wants to see Jones come back?” Nobody does, and the matter is settled.
Who Can Read the Wall
The first harvest — It is the best the farm has ever had. Boxer’s answer to every setback is “I will work harder!” Benjamin works as he always has. Asked whether he is happier now that Jones is gone, he says: “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.”
The reading classes — The pigs read perfectly. The dogs read, but only the commandments. Muriel reads better than the dogs. Benjamin can read as well as any pig, but never does, because he says nothing is worth reading. Clover learns the alphabet but cannot make words. Boxer never gets past D. Mollie learns only the six letters of her name.
Mollie — She is caught with hidden sugar and ribbons, and soon she is gone. The pigeons later see her pulling a smart cart outside a pub, with a scarlet ribbon round her forelock.
Moses — Jones’s pet raven talks about Sugarcandy Mountain, where animals go when they die. The pigs work hard to convince the animals that no such place exists.
The Battle of the Cowshed — In October, Jones comes back with his men and men from the neighbouring farms. Snowball, who has read about Julius Caesar’s campaigns, leads the defence. He is wounded by Jones’s gun, and a sheep is killed. Boxer strikes a stable-lad down and weeps over him, thinking him dead. Snowball tells him: “No sentimentality, comrade! War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.” The lad was only stunned. Snowball and Boxer are both made “Animal Hero, First Class”.
The windmill and the dogs — Snowball draws plans for a windmill on the knoll. Napoleon urinates on them. The farm splits between “Vote for Snowball and the three-day week” and “Vote for Napoleon and the full manger.” At the deciding meeting, nine huge dogs chase Snowball off the farm through a hole in the hedge. They are puppies Napoleon took from their mothers and raised in secret. He abolishes the Sunday Meetings. Four young pigs protest, the dogs growl, and the sheep drown them out. Three weeks later the windmill is back on, and Squealer explains it was Napoleon’s plan all along: “Tactics, comrades, tactics!” Boxer adds a second motto: “Napoleon is always right.”
The Wall Changes
Sheets — The pigs move into the farmhouse and sleep in the beds. Clover asks Muriel to read the Fourth Commandment, and Muriel reads out: “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.” Clover does not remember the sheets, but there they are on the wall.
The November gale — A gale destroys the half-built windmill. Napoleon announces that Snowball did it and sentences him to death. From then on, everything that goes wrong on the farm is blamed on Snowball.
The hens — Napoleon deals with the outside world through Whymper, a solicitor from Willingdon, and agrees to sell 400 eggs a week. The hens resist, and their rations are stopped. After five days they give in. Nine hens have died, and it is given out that they died of coccidiosis.
The confessions — Squealer announces that Snowball was Jones’s agent from the beginning. Boxer objects: “I do not believe that,” because he saw Snowball fight. Four days later the dogs drag four pigs to Napoleon’s feet. They are the four who protested. Three dogs go for Boxer, and he pins one under his hoof and looks to Napoleon, who orders him to let it go. The pigs confess to plotting with Snowball and are killed. Hens, a goose and sheep confess next, and are killed as well.
The knoll — The survivors lie together on the knoll. Boxer says, “It must be due to some fault in ourselves”, and goes to the quarry to haul stone. Clover looks down at the farm, and Orwell writes out what she would have said: “But still, it was not for this that she and all the other animals had hoped and toiled.” Then: “Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.” She begins to sing “Beasts of England”, and Squealer arrives to announce that the song is abolished. Minimus, a pig with a gift for verse, writes a new one.
Without cause — Clover asks Benjamin to read the sixth commandment. He refuses, so Muriel reads it: “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.”
The forged banknotes — Napoleon sells the timber to Frederick of Pinchfield and is paid in forged notes. Frederick attacks and blows up the rebuilt windmill, and Pilkington of Foxwood replies to Napoleon’s plea for help with “Serves you right.” The men are driven off, and a gun fires to celebrate. Boxer, bleeding: “Then we have won back what we had before”. Squealer: “That is our victory”.
The ladder — The pigs find whisky. One night the animals find Squealer sprawled at the foot of the wall beside a broken ladder, a lantern, a brush and a pot of white paint. Only Benjamin seems to understand, and he says nothing. Days later Muriel reads: “No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.”
Boxer
The retiring age — Horses and pigs were to retire at 12, cows at 14, dogs at 9, sheep at 7, hens and geese at 5. No animal has ever retired. The paddock meant for old animals is sown with barley, and all barley goes to the pigs. In April the farm becomes a Republic. There is one candidate for President, Napoleon, and he is elected unanimously. Boxer plans to spend his retirement learning the other 22 letters of the alphabet.
The van — Boxer collapses hauling stone: “It is my lung”. Squealer promises to send him to the vet at Willingdon. Two days later Benjamin gallops across the fields for the first time anyone can remember and reads the side of the van aloud: “Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon.” Boxer tries to kick his way out, but his strength is gone. Three days later Squealer reports that he died in hospital and explains the lettering: the vet had bought the knacker’s old van and had not yet repainted it. Soon after, a crate arrives for the pigs, and word goes round that they have found the money for another case of whisky.
One Sentence
Years pass — Muriel is dead. Jones is dead. Snowball and Boxer are forgotten. The windmill is finished but mills corn at a profit, and the talk of electric light and a three-day week is gone. Benjamin alone claims to remember everything, and says hunger, hardship and disappointment are the unalterable law of life.
Two legs — Clover’s terrified neighing brings the animals out. Squealer is walking on his hind legs, then a file of pigs, then Napoleon, carrying a whip. The animals are about to speak when the sheep burst out: “Four legs good, two legs better!”
What the wall says — Clover leads Benjamin to the barn and asks: “Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?” For once he reads it to her. Only one commandment is left: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
The card game — Neighbouring farmers dine with the pigs. Pilkington praises the farm for working its animals hard on little food, and makes a joke: “If you have your lower animals to contend with, we have our lower classes!” Napoleon announces that “Comrade” is abolished, that Major’s skull has been buried and that the flag is now plain green, and he restores the old name with a toast: “To the prosperity of The Manor Farm!” The animals creep away. Shouting brings them back to the window, where Napoleon and Pilkington have each played an ace of spades. The animals look from pig to man and back. “But already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Where Everyone Ends
Major’s skull is dug up and set on a post, then buried again. Mollie was last seen outside a pub. Snowball is never seen again, except as the name for everything that goes wrong. Moses returns and is allowed to stay, with a gill of beer a day. Whymper buys a cart of his own. Frederick never comes back. Pilkington is at Napoleon’s table holding an ace of spades. Napoleon is President of a farm called, once more, the Manor Farm. Benjamin is a little greyer and, since Boxer’s death, more morose than before.
Three Questions (Abeba’s readings)
Abeba gives these as her own answers.
When does it go wrong? — In December 1946, answering the American critic Dwight Macdonald, Orwell wrote: “The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves.” In the same letter he added one word in brackets, Kronstadt: the naval base near Petrograd whose sailors, once heroes of the revolution, rose against the Bolsheviks in March 1921 and were crushed by the Red Army. When Orwell adapted the book for BBC radio on the Third Programme in January 1947, he wrote in a new exchange in which other animals ask whether it is fair for the pigs to keep the apples. The producer, Rayner Heppenstall, cut it. Abeba thinks Orwell was right, and that his turning point is almost impossible to feel on a first reading, because Squealer’s question is so hard to answer with anything but no.
Why does Benjamin keep quiet? — He can read as well as any pig, and he understood the broken ladder. His own reason is that nothing ever gets much better or much worse. Abeba calls this only half an answer. He broke his silence three times, at the windmill, at the van and at the wall, and every time it was too late to change anything. Whether that is cowardice or honesty about what one donkey can do, she leaves for Dawit and Tigist.
Does it end in reconciliation? — In the Ukrainian preface Orwell said the book does not end in “the complete reconciliation of the pigs and the humans”. He wrote: “on the contrary I meant it to end on a loud note of discord.” Abeba points out that the toast is not the last scene. The last scene is a pig and a man each playing an ace of spades, though a pack has only one, and Orwell never says which of them cheated. Her reading is that it is a quarrel between two parties who have become too alike to tell apart from outside the window.
Part 4 — Discussion (Dawit & Tigist)
Two walls — Dawit sees a second wall in the book: Clover’s foreleg round the ducklings, which holds, while the painted wall keeps being rewritten. Tigist replies that the leg held for one night. On the knoll, after the killings, her leg is folded under her.
A feeling without a name — Dawit reads the line about Clover lacking the words as the heart of it: a feeling without a name can’t be brought to a meeting. Tigist disagrees. Clover has thought it through: Jones must not come back, so she will obey. Clover is caught between two things she has every right to believe: what we won must not be thrown away, and this is not what we won it for.
Not now — Squealer ends every argument by asking whether anyone wants Jones back, and the threat is real. Dawit moves it to a small food-bank charity where a volunteer finds the treasurer paying himself the week before the big appeal. Tigist: “The more true the warning, the better it works as a gag.” And in the book, there is never a good week.
Benjamin: clear eyes or the worst? — To Dawit, Benjamin is the one animal who is never fooled. To Tigist, he is the worst animal among the ones who could have acted. He could read every change on the wall, and his silence comes from philosophy, not fear. Boxer is fooled. Benjamin is never fooled, and watches anyway. Dawit points to the van. Tigist answers that he galloped for his friend, not for the nine hens or the four pigs.
The wall beats memory — Muriel reads the changed commandments aloud three times and nothing happens, because whenever the wall and memory disagree, the wall wins. Dawit brings in Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer’s 1974 experiment. People asked how fast cars “smashed” into each other gave higher speeds than people asked about cars that “hit” each other, and a week later more of them remembered broken glass that was never in the film.
Reading is power — Tigist’s example is a tenant signing an agreement in a language they can’t read, with only the landlord’s nephew to translate. The nephew’s power comes from the gap, not from any wickedness in him. Squealer tells Boxer the proof is in Snowball’s handwriting: “I could show you this in his own writing, if you were able to read it.” Tigist’s verdict: for the animals who can’t read, the wall is “a rumour with paint on it.”
“I will work harder” — Tigist finds Boxer’s first motto more frightening than his second. She compares him to the colleague who never takes the leave he’s owed. His pension was promised in writing, and the paddock went to barley, the barley to beer, and his price to whisky. Dawit refuses to see him only as a victim. On the knoll, the one night a real question could have been asked, Boxer filled the silence with work. Tigist adds the pinned dog: for a moment Boxer held the balance of power under one hoof, and he asked Napoleon’s permission.
No date for leaving — The first laws put an end date on every working life, pigs included. Then came a President with no end date at all. Dawit: the animals didn’t lose elections, they lost departures. Tigist offers the Roman Republic as a counter-example. Consuls served one year and a dictator six months, and it worked for centuries until Sulla, and then Julius Caesar, named dictator for life in 44 BC and stabbed in the Senate within weeks. Napoleon has nine dogs.
The milk: betrayal or no check at all — Dawit reads the book as a real dream that the pigs stole. Tigist points to when the theft happens: the third chapter, before any dogs or killings, with every pig agreeing, even Snowball. To her the rot is in the arrangement, and what would have stopped it was one animal asking where the milk went. Dawit calls in TS Eliot’s “public-spirited pigs” as the strongest version of his own reading. Tigist replies that Snowball was the public-spirited pig, and he took the milk. They do not agree.
Two aces — There is only one ace of spades in a pack, so at least one of them is cheating, and the book never says which. To Dawit that is the likeness: method, not friendship, and “Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike.” Readers remember the toast because the animals are outside the glass. Tigist adds that two months after the book came out, in an essay for Tribune about the atomic bomb, Orwell described the world ahead as a permanent “cold war”, one of the first uses of the phrase for the stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West.
Things Nobody Tells You
The pigeons. In Orwell’s typescript the pigeons drop dung on Jones’s men during the Battle of the Cowshed. The first edition of 1945 says they “muted” on them, an old hunting word. In a book with a pile of corpses at Napoleon’s feet, the pigeons are what got softened.
Cesar and URSA. In French, Napoleon became Cesar. Orwell suggested a French title, Union des Republiques Socialistes Animales, whose initials spell URSA, Latin for “bear”, the old emblem of Russia.
A Fairy Story. The American edition dropped the subtitle from the start, and other translations turned it into a satire. According to Peter Davison, editor of Orwell’s complete works, only one translation made in Orwell’s lifetime kept it: the one into Telugu, a language of southern India.
Fifteen hundred copies. In 1947 a young Ukrainian scholar, Ihor Shevchenko, translated the book for Ukrainian refugees in the displaced-persons camps of post-war Germany. In September Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler that the American authorities in Munich had seized 1,500 copies and handed them to Soviet repatriation officials. About 2,000, he said, had already got through.
The film. The first film, a British cartoon of 1954, was paid for in part, secretly, by the CIA. Howard Hunt, later imprisoned for his part in the Watergate break-in, described the operation in a 1974 memoir. Agents had bought the rights from Orwell’s widow. In the film the animals rise a second time and overthrow Napoleon.
The numbers. By the time Orwell died, in January 1950, the book London publishers had turned down had been issued in about 25,500 copies in Britain and about 590,000 in the United States.
Except Napoleon. In March 1945, in Paris, Orwell met Jozef Czapski, a Polish painter and officer who had been held in a Soviet prison camp and was one of the very few from that camp to survive the Katyn massacre. Soon afterwards Orwell asked his publisher to change one line. When the windmill is blown up, all the animals, “including Napoleon”, fling themselves flat, and he wanted it to read “except Napoleon.” The change, he wrote, “would be fair to Stalin, as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.”
Closing
Dawit asks what Benjamin’s memory is worth. Tigist says it is worth nothing to the farm, because the wall went on changing while he watched. What it is worth to Benjamin himself she cannot say. Is a farm where one old donkey remembers the truth and keeps it to himself better off than a farm where nobody remembers it at all, or worse, because the truth was there all along? Dawit sets the typescript Orwell dug out of the rubble against Benjamin’s silence. Tigist reminds him that the book waited over a year to be printed, and that its preface waited in a drawer until long after Orwell was dead. Neither of them can settle it.
Key Quotations
“It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them.”
— Orwell, in the preface for the Ukrainian translation“Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill.”
— Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press”“not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
— TS Eliot, refusing the book for Faber and Faber“Never mind the milk, comrades!”
— Napoleon“Such were her thoughts, though she lacked the words to express them.”
— Animal Farm, on Clover“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
— The barn wall, at the end“The more true the warning, the better it works as a gag.”
— Tigist“For the animals who can’t read, the wall is not a law at all. It’s a rumour with paint on it.”
— Tigist
Names and Terms
People
George Orwell (1903–1950) — pen name of Eric Arthur Blair; born in Motihari, British India
Eileen O’Shaughnessy — Orwell’s wife; worked in the censorship department of the Ministry of Information early in the war
Victor Gollancz — publisher of Down and Out in Paris and London; ran the Left Book Club; turned down Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm
Jonathan Cape — publisher who accepted the book, consulted the Ministry of Information, then drew back
TS Eliot — poet and director of Faber and Faber; refused the book on 13 July 1944
Fredric Warburg — of Secker and Warburg, who published the book in 1945
Peter Smollett — born Hans Peter Smolka; head of the Ministry of Information’s Russian section; identified in the Mitrokhin papers as a Soviet agent
Vasili Mitrokhin — defecting KGB archivist whose smuggled papers named Smollett
Kim Philby — British double agent who, according to those papers, recruited Smollett
Francisco Franco — general who led the rebels in the Spanish Civil War
Vladimir Lenin — led the Bolsheviks to power in 1917; died January 1924
Joseph Stalin — won the succession after Lenin; Britain’s ally from 1941
Leon Trotsky — built the Red Army; expelled, exiled, and killed in Mexico City in 1940
Sidney and Beatrice Webb — British social reformers; authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?
Phaedrus — freed Roman slave who wrote verse fables in Latin in the first century
John Reed — American journalist; author of Ten Days that Shook the World
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill — met Stalin at Tehran in 1943
Dwight Macdonald — American critic to whom Orwell named the story’s turning point
Rayner Heppenstall — BBC producer who cut Orwell’s new radio scene
Peter Davison — editor of Orwell’s complete works
Ihor Shevchenko — translator of the 1947 Ukrainian edition
Arthur Koestler — novelist and friend to whom Orwell reported the Munich seizure
Howard Hunt — CIA officer who described the 1954 film operation in a memoir
Jozef Czapski — Polish painter and officer, a survivor of the Katyn massacre
Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer — psychologists behind the 1974 car-crash memory experiment
Sulla and Julius Caesar — Roman dictators without a fixed term, cited by Tigist
Characters
Old Major — the prize boar whose dream starts it all; shown as Willingdon Beauty
Napoleon — large, quiet boar who takes control of the farm and its dogs
Snowball — quick, inventive pig; designs the windmill; chased off the farm
Squealer — small fat pig who does the explaining
Minimus — pig poet who writes the replacement song
Boxer — enormous cart-horse; “I will work harder!”
Clover — motherly cart-mare who shelters the ducklings
Benjamin — the donkey; the oldest animal on the farm; reads as well as any pig
Muriel — the white goat who reads the wall aloud
Mollie — the white mare who wanted sugar and ribbons
Moses — Jones’s tame raven, preacher of Sugarcandy Mountain
Jones — the drunken owner of Manor Farm
Pilkington — easy-going gentleman farmer of Foxwood
Frederick — tough, shrewd farmer of Pinchfield; pays in forged notes
Whymper — solicitor from Willingdon, the farm’s go-between
Alfred Simmonds — the name on the side of the van
Places
Motihari — Orwell’s birthplace, in the north of British India
Moulmein — town in lower Burma where Orwell served as a police officer
Wallington — Hertfordshire village where the Orwells kept the old village shop
Huesca — town on the Aragon front where Orwell was shot
Valencia — seat of the tribunal whose report named Orwell and Eileen
Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn — the north-west London street where the flying bomb fell
Tehran — where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in 1943
Kronstadt — naval base near Petrograd; the sailors’ rising of March 1921
Willingdon — market town near the farm in the book
Manor Farm / Animal Farm — the farm, named twice
Foxwood and Pinchfield — the two neighbouring farms
The knoll — the small hill where the windmill stands
Sugarcandy Mountain — the country above the clouds in Moses’s stories
Terms and Concepts
Animalism — the pigs’ system of thought, built from Major’s speech
The Seven Commandments — the laws painted on the barn wall
“Beasts of England” — Major’s song; abolished after the confessions
Flying bomb (doodlebug) — pilotless German aircraft that fell on London in 1944
Ministry of Information — Britain’s wartime department for propaganda and press censorship
Voluntary censorship — Orwell’s term, in his unprinted preface, for what is simply not said
“The Freedom of the Press” — Orwell’s preface to the book; first printed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1972
Show trials — the Moscow trials of 1936–1938
Tribune — the left-wing weekly where Orwell was literary editor
Knacker — a man who buys worn-out horses and slaughters them for glue, hides and bone-meal
Cold war — Orwell’s phrase, in a Tribune essay on the atomic bomb, for the world ahead
Discussion Questions
The milk or the dogs. Dawit reads the book as a story of betrayal: the dream was real, the work was real, and the pigs stole both. Tigist says the theft came in the third chapter, before any dog or any killing, with every pig agreeing to it, so the rot was in the arrangement from the start. Where would you put the turning point, and does your answer change how you read the later chapters?
The one who remembers. Benjamin can read every change on the wall, and he speaks only when it can no longer change anything. Dawit calls him the one clear pair of eyes on the farm. Tigist calls him the worst of the animals who could have acted. Is a community that has someone who remembers, and who stays silent, better or worse off than one where nobody remembers at all?
Not now. Clover believes two things at once: what we won must not be thrown away, and this is not what we won it for. Squealer’s warning about Jones is never a lie. If you saw something wrong inside an institution you cared about and were told it wasn’t the right time, how would you tell a true warning from a gag?
Censorship nobody ordered. No law stopped Animal Farm. A publisher consulted a ministry he did not have to consult, and a poet objected to the pigs. Orwell called the result voluntary censorship. Is silence that nobody ordered better or worse than silence that is ordered?
A date for leaving. Dawit says the animals didn’t lose elections, they lost departures. Tigist answers that Rome had fixed terms for centuries and a man with an army ignored them anyway. Would a date on the barn wall have lasted longer than the other seven sentences?
