Animal Farm and 1984

Animal Farm and 1984

George Orwell

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

...

Copyright

Introduction

Animal Farm

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

1984

One

Two

Three

APPENDIX

Footnotes

HARCOURT, INC.

Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

Introduction copyright © 2003 by Christopher Hitchens

"Animal Farm" copyright 1945 by Harcourt, Inc.
and renewed 1973 by Sonia Orwell
"1984" copyright 1949 by Harcourt, Inc.
and renewed 1977 by Sonia Brownell Orwell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orwell, George, 1903-1950.
Animal farm; 1984/George Orwell.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-15-101026-4
1. Domestic animals—Fiction. 2. Totalitarianism—Fiction.
I. Orwell, George, 1903–1950. Nineteen eighty-four. II. Orwell,
George, 1903–1950. Animal farm. III. Title: 1984. IV. Title.
PR6029.R8A63 2003
823'.912—dc21 2003004969

Designed by Cathy Riggs
Text set in Garamond MT
Printed in the United States of America
First edition

DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15

Introduction

THE TWO NOVELS THAT you now hold in your hands have become "modern classics" in every sense of both those terms. They are taught in many schools as examples of moral weight and political prescience, and they are still read for pleasure, excitement and instruction even by young people who have not been subject to adult inculcation. They contain several terms and expressions—"Thought Police," "Doublethink," "Newspeak," "Some animals are more equal than others"—that have entered our discourse as surely as "Catch 22." (Tina Turner's album "Private Dancer" even included a song written by David Bowie entitled 1984, replete with menacing references to mind-control and cruelty, which conveyed the vague but frightening premonition of a frigidly-controlled future, as apprehended by those to whom 1984 is a date in the remote but recent past.)

In the less distant past, these books used to be banned in every country under Communist rule, and are still occasionally suppressed in the remaining single-party despotisms that disfigure the globe as I write, while Animal Farm is sometimes forbidden reading in the Islamic world—because of its focus on pigs. Even as I began to write this introduction, a stage version of Animal Farm was being produced by a bold theater group in Beijing, where the novel itself is still officially unobtainable.

So wide and so secure is Orwell's reputation, in other words, that it can be shocking to realise that both of his masterpieces were very nearly aborted or strangled at birth. Animal Farm was almost denied publication, and 1984 had to be finished in a terrible, desperate burst of energy on the part of a man who knew that he was dying. Probably nothing would have surprised their author more than the near-orthodox esteem in which his last two novels are now held: he never in his life expected to be "required reading" in respectable schools. The continuing censorship would have surprised him much less.

Animal Farm was written during the Second World War, at a time when London was being bombed by the Nazis and Churchill's Britain was an official friend of Stalin's Russia. Orwell despised Hitler and fascism and had fought and been wounded as a volunteer soldier for the Spanish Republic, but he chose this unpropitious moment to write a deadly satire on the illusion of Soviet Communism. The original manuscript had to be dug out, in a somewhat scorched and crumpled state, from the ruins of Orwell's blitzed North London home. In this condition, it was sent to T. S. Eliot, the author of The Waste Land, who occupied the extremely influential position of editor at Faber and Faber. Eliot was a political and cultural conservative of the determined Right, and might have been presumed sympathetic to an anti-Stalinist project. But he turned the book down in a letter of extreme condescension which described it as "generally Trotskyite."

This was, bizarrely enough, the same objection that had been made by Orwell's leftist opponents. A senior official in the British Ministry of Information named Peter Smollett made it his business to warn publishers against accepting the book. His ostensible rationale was that Josef Stalin was an ally of Great Britain, and that it would be tactless to publish a satire upon him.