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Animal Farm: George Orwell and Animal Farm Background | SparkNotes

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Important information about George Orwell's background, historical events that influenced Animal Farm, and the main ideas within the work.

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A tame raven and Mr. Jones's special pet. The animals dislike him because he doesn't work, but many of them do believe his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain, a wonderful place where animals go when they die. Moses represents organized religion, and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church.

The solicitor whom Napoleon hires to represent Animal Farm to the outside world. He's shrewd and calculating, and by the end of the novel, has done well for himself. Mr. Whymper represents the capitalists who got rich doing business with the USSR.

A pig who writes propaganda poems and songs praising Napoleon and Animal Farm. Minimus represents the takeover of art by propaganda in a totalitarian state that aims to control what its citizens think.

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A tame raven and Mr. Jones's special pet. The animals dislike him because he doesn't work, but many of them do believe his stories about Sugarcandy Mountain, a wonderful place where animals go when they die. Moses represents organized religion, and specifically the Russian Orthodox Church.

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I. What is a Fairy Tale?

A fairy tale is a story, often intended for children, that features fanciful and wondrous characters such as elves, goblins, wizards, and even, but not necessarily, fairies. The term "fairy" tale seems to refer more to the fantastic and magical setting or magical influences within a story, rather than the presence of the character of a fairy within that story. Fairy tales are often traditional; many were passed down from story- teller to story-teller before being recorded in books.

II. Examples of Fairy Tale

Fairy tales, in the literary sense, are easy to find. Look at your bookshelf or your DVD collection.You may see titles likes these:

They are all fairy tales. They belong to no one and have been adapted and retold countless times.

Fairy tales do not need to be written down to be legitimate. Many tales that your parents or grandparents may have told you off the top of their heads are also fairy tales. For example, stories of the tooth fairy, the boogeyman, leprechauns and pots of gold or even Santa Claus.

If a story takes place in a magical land, with fantastical creatures who perform wondrous tasks, it is very likely a fairy tale.

III. Types of Fairy Tales

There are no rules that define fairy tales. Therefore, they are categorized by their elements, types, or motifs.

Here are some of those types and examples of stories that fit those types:

Supernatural Adversaries: Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood

Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives: Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast

Supernatural Helpers: Cinderella, Puss In Boots

Magic Objects: The Magic Ring, Aladdin

Supernatural Power or Knowledge: The White Snake, Ali Baba

Religious Tales: The Three Green Twigs, The Flower of Lily-Lo

Realistic Tales: The Falsely Accused Wife, Ariadne

Tales of Fate: The Robber Bridegroom, Oedipus (Aarne-Thompson)

IV. The Importance of using Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are important because they spark the imagination. They give us an outlet for experiencing things in our minds before we experience them in the real world. It is where the troubles of the real world can meet the supernatural and mix things up. In a fairy tale anything can happen and any kind of creature can exist, and when anything can happen, we can find solutions to things in our real lives. Through imagination, we learn about our world. We can explore outcomes and possibilities.

V. Examples of Fairy Tales in Literature

Fairy tales exist in every culture in the world and there are elements of the fairy tale going back for as long as people have been telling stories. In Western culture, there are a few authors who were particularly important in the formal recording of fairy tales.

Hans Christian Anderson

Hans Christian Anderson was a Danish author who published his fairy tales in the late 1800s. Here are a few of his titles:

The Tinder-Box, The Princess and the Pea, Thumbelina, The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Staunch Tin Soldier, Willie Winkie, The Nightingale, The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen. (Larsen)

Brothers Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were German brothers who published their stories in the early 1800s. Here are a few of their titles:

The Good Bargain, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, The Bremen Town Musicians, The Robber Bridegroom, The Juniper Tree, Little Brier-Rose, and Little Snow-White. (Ashliman)

More recently, the fairy tale has undergone a resurgence and a reinvention. Many popluar authors have set out to write fairy tales that are more in line with our time. Neil Gaiman is one of these authors. With books like Stardust and Coraline, he takes the fairy tale to a new place. Kate DiCamillo is another, with The Tale of Despereaux. Those are only 3 examples, but the list is long!

VI. Examples of Fairy Tales in Popular Culture

We can find fairy tales in every element of our culture. They are, in many ways, given life through popular culture. They appear in books, movies, music, and art. As the fairy tale is such a creative art-form, itself, it is understandable that it would appear in all creative mediums. With each new interpretation or retelling of a fairy tale, we learn a little bit about the story-teller, the audience, the culture and the time in which it is told.

Probably the most recognizable producer of fairy tales in our culture is Walt Disney. Disney has turned the fairy tale into an industry, producing movies, books, toys, clothing, and just about anything else you can think of and branding them with fairy tale characters.

The television show Once Upon A Time is based upon the idea of the fairy tale and uses classic stories in some unique and surprising ways.

Recently there have been several movies made that tell more gruesome and dark versions of well-known fairy tales. Snow White and the Huntsman, Maleficent and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters are a few of these.

In art, we also find images of fairy tale characters everywhere. Children's picture books are an abundant source for these works. Picture books make the fairy tales come alive with their images.

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Fairy Tale: Definition and Examples | Literary Terms

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Clear definition and examples of Fairy Tale. This article will show you the importance of a Fairy Tale. Fairy Tale is a story, often intended for children, that features fanciful and wondrous characters such as elves, goblins, wizards, and even, but not necessarily, fairies.

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"Animal Farm" is a curious text to study for figurative language because you first have to separate the figurative representation of the plot -- the events on the farm with their counterparts in the Russian Revolution -- before you can examine any given passage for language that is figurative outside of its symbolic context. Once you make this separation, however, you will find Orwell's prose to be rich in both concrete description and florid expression.

The Allegory

The entire story of "Animal Farm" can be interpreted as an event of figurative language because the tale is an allegory, or a metaphor that is applied to the story as a whole. "Animal Farm" tells the story of the Russian Revolution, except that Orwell uses animals on a farm as characters instead of actual historical figures. For example, the well-spoken boar named Napoleon represents Stalin, while another young boar, named Snowball, represents Trotsky. In fact, each animal on the farm represents at least one major character in the actual Russian Revolution. The pig, Major, who delivers the opening speech that inspires the rebellion, represents both Marx and Lenin.

Specific Symbolism

In addition to the fact that the animals represent specific people involved in the revolution, the types of animals that represent certain characters or parties are themselves rich in symbolism. For example, the sheep represent the Russian people who, you might say, have had the wool pulled over their eyes. Puns aside, sheep are conventionally referenced as animals that follow blindly -- even to their own demise, and so it makes sense that Orwell takes advantage of this cultural meme, and applies the symbolic attribution.

Figurative Description

Once you look past the overarching, symbolic premise of the novel, you can more easily focus on conventional forms of figurative language, such as expressive descriptions, similes and metaphors. Orwell provides examples on nearly every page of the text, though they are sometimes so common that they can be difficult to identify. For example, early in Chapter II the narrator says that Mr. Jones "had been a capable farmer, but of late he had fallen on evil days. He had become much disheartened after losing money in a lawsuit, and had taken to drinking more than was good for him." Taken as concrete language, the phrase "had fallen on evil days" would mean that on evil days, Mr. Jones fell down, which is not at all what the narrator implies.

Other Personification

Orwell also employs a more common form of figurative language throughout the entirety of the text, namely stock metaphors of personification. You can find an example of this in the opening paragraph of the text. The second sentence of the novel reads: "With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard ..." While the phrase is so common you might not consider it overly expressive, to say that the light danced is figurative. It did not dance. It might have flickered or flashed, but to say it danced is to personify the light, as only living things can dance.

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Examples of Figurative Language in "Animal Farm"

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Examples of Figurative Language in Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a curious text to study for figurative language because you first have to separate the figurative representation of the plot -- the events on the farm with their counterparts in the Russian Revolution -- before you can examine any given passage for ...

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Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell was a novelist, journalist, essayist and critic, best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Where and when was Orwell born?

Orwell was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, in 1903, to a family which he described in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) as 'lower-upper middle class': 'upper-middle class without money'.

He worked hard and won a place at Eton but while there dedicated himself more to reading widely than passing exams. Rather than going on to University, he took the Indian Civil Service exams and became a policeman in Burma in 1921 - he was probably the first and only old Etonian to attend the Burmese police training academy. His experiences inspired his first novel, Burmese Days, which was published in New York in 1934 (British publishers feared libel cases).

What was Orwell's real name?

George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, Orwell used a pseudonym 'partly to avoid embarrassing his parents, partly as a hedge against failure, and partly because he disliked the name Eric, which reminded him of a prig in a Victorian boys' story'.

What did Orwell write?

Orwell's first book was the non-fictional Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and was based on his experiences after he left the police. The critic Bernard Crick tells us that during this time, he took to making journeys among tramps, and spent time living amongst the poor and homeless in London and around the hop fields of Kent, writing that he wanted to see if the English poor were treated in their country in the same way as the Burmese were in theirs.

Orwell then moved to Paris in 1928, where in his own words, he 'lived for about a year and a half in Paris, writing novels and short stories which no one would publish. After my money came to an end I had several years of fairly severe poverty during which I was, among other things, a dishwasher, a private tutor and a teacher in cheap private schools.'

How did Orwell's political views inform his writing?

In his essay 'Why I write' (1946), he explained that 'what I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art'. His political convictions, which have been described as democratic socialism, inform books such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a documentary account of poverty in Britain. Its second half, critical of Socialist intellectuals who supported Stalin, was enormously controversial, as was his account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which criticises leftist infighting in the context of a broader struggle against Fascism.

Key novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

His novel Animal Farm (1945) also expresses his hatred of totalitarianism, satirising the developments of the Russian revolution in the style of a fable based on the eponymous farm.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) deals with similar subject matter by describing a dystopian future overseen by the all-powerful Big Brother. Both books have been translated all around the world, and were read differently by conflicting parties during the Cold War.

Having adopted a son, Orwell died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

Find out more

Further information about the life of George Orwell can be found via the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Find out more about George Orwell's life and works at the British Library.

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George Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Arthur Blair, is one of the most important writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and his essays and novels have continued to influence many journalists and writers since his death. The term 'Orwellian' has entered the dictionary, and many terms he coined or popularised - from 'Cold War' to ' thoughtcrime ' and 'thought police' - have become well-known.

But what are George Orwell's best works - that is, best novels, essays, and works of non-fiction? Below we select ten of his greatest works from across his career.

This was George Orwell's first published book-length work, in 1933. It's a memoir of Orwell's time spent living and sleeping rough in London (spending much time amongst vagrants and people on the fringes of society) as well as washing dishes and living a life of near-destitution in Paris. The book was designed to reveal the hidden squalor of working-class (and even lower-class) life to middle-class readers, much as Elizabeth Gaskell's novels in the nineteenth century had done.

George Orwell also wrote well about petty poverty, the writer's life (see his ' Confessions of a Book Reviewer', also from 1946), and the English obsession with money, usually with having too little of it. And he did all of these in his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which focuses on Gordon Comstock, a struggling poet, who has dreams of making it big in the literary world.

Certainly, he spends his days surrounded by books, quite literally: he works in a small bookshop in London. Gordon had had a well-paid job as an advertising copywriter, but he'd thrown it up in favour of a more modest job so he would be free to write poetry. However, he finds it difficult to get inspired and writes virtually no poetry while working at the bookshop. A long-suffering 'girlfriend' of Gordon's, Rosemary, and his friend, the upper-class Ravelston (a sort of champagne socialist), are the other chief characters in the novel, as we follow Gordon's journey through rejection, writer's block, inspiration, selling a poem, celebrating by splashing out and spending all the money he's earned, and ending up ... well, it would be churlish to offer spoilers now, wouldn't it?

We discuss this novel in more detail here.
3. 'Shooting an Elephant'.
This is an early Orwell essay, from 1936. In it, he recalls his experiences as a police officer in Burma, when he had to shoot an elephant that had got out of hand. Orwell extrapolates from this one event (which may well have been fictional), seeing it as a microcosm of imperialism, wherein the coloniser loses his humanity and freedom through oppressing others.

We have analysed this essay here.

Does Wigan have a pier? Many people think Orwell's title for this 1937 book - a work of journalism documenting his time spent among working-class people in the industrial north of England - is ironic, because the north-west town of Wigan is inland. But there was a 'pier' there: Orwell's title refers to the coal-loading staithe where wagons from the local colliery were unloaded. Like Down and Out in Paris and London, the book is an important book detailing poverty in the 1930s, and shows Orwell's commitment to journalistic integrity and first-hand research.

When civil war between the Republicans and Nationalists broke out in Spain in 1936, Orwell travelled out there, like many left-wing intellectuals (the poet W. H. Auden was another). But once he was amongst the fighting, Orwell considered it his duty to join the left-leaning Republicans in their fight against Franco's fascists, and he ended up enlisting as a soldier. He was shot in the throat and was lucky to survive - and wrote this memoir of his time in Spain during this particularly bloody period of its history.

Another early, lighter novel, Coming up for Air was published in June 1939, just three months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The novel follows middle-aged George Bowling as he revisits his boyhood town and discovers how much everything has changed. Although it's a lighter work, this nostalgic novel still addresses some important social and political themes, notably the effects that capitalism and speculative building were having on rural and semi-rural Britain.
7. 'The Lion and the Unicorn'.
Subtitled 'Socialism and the English Genius', this is an essay Orwell wrote about Britain in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War. Published in 1941, this essay takes its title from the heraldic symbols for England (the lion) and Scotland (the unicorn). Orwell argues that some sort of socialist revolution is needed to wrest Britain out of its outmoded ways and an overhaul of the British class system will help Britain to defeat the Nazis.

The long essay contains a section, 'England Your England', which is often reprinted as a standalone essay, written as the German bomber planes were whizzing overhead during the Blitz of 1941. This part of the essay is a critique of blind English patriotism during wartime and an attempt to pin down 'English' values at a time when England itself was under threat from Nazi invasion.

Animal Farm is, after Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's most famous book. Published in 1945, the novella (at under 100 pages, it's too short to be called a full-blown 'novel') tells the story of how a group of animals on a farm overthrow the farmer who puts them to work, and set up an equal society where all animals work and share the fruits of their labours. However, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the society the animals have constructed is not equal at all. It's well-known that the novella is an allegory for Communist Russia under Josef Stalin, who was leader of the Soviet Union when Orwell wrote the book.

Curiously, the book very nearly didn't make it into print at all. First, not long after Orwell completed the first draft in February 1944, his flat on Mortimer Crescent in London was bombed in June, and he feared the typescript had been destroyed. Orwell later found it in the rubble. Then, Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher. T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, rejected it (you can read Eliot's letter to Orwell here). The novella was eventually published the following year, in 1945, and its relevance - as political satire, as animal fable, and as one of Orwell's two great works of fiction - shows no signs of abating.

We have analysed Animal Farm here.
9. 'Politics and the English Language'.
The English language is 'in a bad way', Orwell argues in this famous essay from 1946. As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern political discourse as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together. Orwell concludes with six rules or guidelines for political writers and essayists, which include: never use a long word when a short one will do, or a specialist or foreign term when a simpler English one should suffice.

We have analysed this essay here.

This novel often tops the list of 'books people lie about having read', with an estimated two-fifths of Brits pretending they've read Orwell's classic dystopian vision in order to look smart. The term 'Orwellian', now in common use, shows the influence of this novel, which was initially going to be called The Last Man in Europe.

Focusing on Winston Smith who works for the Ministry of Truth (loosely based on the BBC, where Orwell worked during the Second World War), and featuring Room 101 (based on a room at the BBC where Orwell had to sit through tedious meetings!), and newspeak (thoughtcrime, sexcrime, doubleplusgood, etc.), this novel remains the novel about state surveillance and totalitarianism, and although many people lie about having read it, thousands if not millions are still reading it every year.

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Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle George Orwell (1903-50), born Eric Arthur Blair, is one of the most important writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and his essays and novels have continued to influence many journalists and writers since his death. The term 'Orwellian' has entered the dictionary, and many terms he coined...

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BIOGRAPHIE GEORGE ORWELL - Célèbre auteur de "1984", dans lequel un système totalitaire et oligarchique a écrasé toute liberté individuelle. Écrivain visionnaire, George Orwell est à l'origine de la figure du Big Brother.

Biographie courte de George Orwell - De son vrai nom Eric Arthur Blair, George Orwell naît au Bengale (Inde) le 25 juin 1903, mais effectue toute sa scolarité en Grande-Bretagne. Il s'engage dans l'armée britannique en 1922 et devient sergent en Birmanie. Il démissionne en 1927 et retourne à Londres, décidant alors de ne se consacrer qu'à l'écriture. C'est de cette expérience qu'il tire son dégoût de l'impérialisme. Il vit quelques mois à Paris en 1928, et écrit beaucoup. Il publie en 1933 un premier roman, "Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres", et choisit le pseudonyme de George Orwell. En 1936, il réalise un reportage sur les conditions de travail des mineurs dans le nord du pays. Ses premiers écrits témoignent de cette misère sociale. Cette même année, il rejoint en Espagne les milices républicaines qui se battent contre Franco. Blessé, l'écrivain rentre à Londres en 1937. Il écrit alors "Hommage à la Catalogne" pour dénoncer la répression du mouvement par les communistes. En 1945, il est chroniqueur politique en France et en Allemagne. C'est à cette période qu'il commence vraiment à se consacrer à l'écriture. George Orwell décède le 21 janvier 1950 à Londres de la tuberculose.

En 1943, George Orwell quitte son emploi à la BBC pour écrire "La Ferme des animaux", apologue publié en 1945. Son titre original est Animal Farm. A Fairy Story. Le roman est court, seulement une dizaine de chapitres, mais c'est une satire brillante du stalinisme et des régimes autoritaires. Le récit rend compte de la révolte des animaux d'une ferme qui prennent le pouvoir et chassent les hommes. Fable animalière, c'est aussi une dystopie, où le principe de contre-utopie est très présent. Ce roman est en fait la critique de la Révolution russe de 1917 et du régime soviétique qui s'est installé à sa suite. George Orwell en profite pour fustiger tous les totalitarismes autoritaires. Il dresse un système tellement proche de la réalité que certains intellectuels vivant le régime de Staline témoignent de la justesse de cette fable.

George Orwell rentre à Londres en 1945 et commence à rédiger son œuvre majeure, "1984". Cet ouvrage d'anticipation, qui décrit une société omnipotente où toute liberté d'expression est interdite, est publié quelques mois avant sa mort. Il connaît un succès retentissant. En effet, considéré comme une référence dans ce domaine de la science-fiction, 1984 a même été classé par le magazine Times comme dans la liste des 100 meilleurs romans de langue anglaise de 1923 à nos jours (2005). L'auteur retranscrit dans "1984" l'atmosphère de la Grande-Bretagne après une supposée guerre nucléaire entre l'Est et l'Ouest survenue dans les années 1950. Orwell s'inspire des régimes totalitaires fascistes et communistes, en particulier le stalinisme dont il est témoin, pour créer le régime absolu de son roman. La liberté d'expression a disparu, les pensées sont surveillées, l'amour est proscrit et le Parti règne en maître sur la population, avec à sa tête le Big Brother. Allégorie du Parti et du régime policier et totalitaire, il représente la répression et la constante surveillance de cette société avec d'immenses affiches placardées dans les rues "Big Brother is watching you".

La figure que George Orwell crée dans le roman, Big Brother, est rentrée dans la culture populaire dès les années 1950. "Grand Frère" en français, l'expression est cependant utilisée sans traduction. Dans le roman, Big Brother est le chef du Parti, donc de l'État d'Océania, et l'allégorie du régime, faisant l'objet d'un véritable culte de la personnalité. L'expression signifie depuis l'œuvre de George Orwell une atteinte aux libertés fondamentales et à la vie privée des populations et des individus par des institutions ou des pratiques. "Big Brother is watching you" est notamment utilisé pour dénoncer les systèmes de vidéosurveillance.

Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres : Down and Out in London and Paris, 1933

Une histoire birmane : Burmese Days, 1935

Une fille de pasteur : A Clergyman's Daughter, 1935

Et vive l'Aspidistra ! : Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936

Le Quai de Wigan : The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937

Hommage à la Catalogne : Homage to Catalonia, 1938

Un peu d'air frais : Coming Up for Air, 1939

La Ferme des animaux : Animal Farm, 1945

1984 : Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

George Orwell : dates clés

25 juin 1903 : Naissance de George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, mieux connu sous le nom de George Orwell, naît à Motihari en Inde britannique, le 25 juin 1903. Issu de la moyenne bourgeoisie anglaise, il grandit en Angleterre et se lance dans la littérature en 1927. Il ne connaîtra véritablement le succès qu'après sa mort, le 21 janvier 1950. On lui doit " La ferme des animaux " en 1944, et le roman d'anticipation " 1984 " en 1948.

8 juin 1949 : George Orwell publie "1984"

Quelques mois avant sa mort précoce, l'écrivain britannique George Orwell assiste à la publication de son livre "1984". Cet ouvrage de science-fiction politique s'impose immédiatement comme un best-seller mondial. 400 000 exemplaires seront vendus dans l'année en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis. Conspué par les communistes, récupéré par les Américains, il deviendra en pleine guerre froide l'enjeu d'une bataille idéologique. Orwell voulait avant tout faire une satire des idées totalitaires.

21 janvier 1950 : Décès de l'écrivain anglais George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, plus connu sous le nom de George Orwell, est né le 25 juin 1903 aux Indes. C'est un auteur anglais bien connu pour son engagement contre l'injustice sociale. Après ses études en Angleterre, il s'engage dans la police impériale en Birmanie. En 1927, il démissionne pour se consacrer à l'écriture. Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il travaille pour la BBC, et collabore au journal " London Tribune " tout en écrivant des romans, dont le célèbre " La Ferme des animaux ". George Orwell, atteint de tuberculose, décède le 21 janvier 1950.

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George Orwell : biographie de l'auteur de 1984 et la Ferme aux animaux

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BIOGRAPHIE GEORGE ORWELL - Célèbre auteur de "1984", dans lequel un système totalitaire et oligarchique a écrasé toute liberté individuelle. Écrivain visionnaire, George Orwell est à l'origine de la figure du Big Brother. Biographie courte de George Orwell - De son vrai nom Eric Arthur Blair, George Orwell naît au Bengale (Inde) le 25 juin 1903, mais effectue toute sa scolarité en Grande-Bretagne.

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Credit:

Von Branch of the National Union of Journalists[1]

This milestone explores the experiences and historical events that inspired George Orwell to compose his most famous work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In doing so, this milestone details several major events in George Orwell's life that contributed in substantial ways to the political beliefs and worldviews behind Nineteen Eighty-Four. This background is then used as inspiration for a piece of creative writing that draws on the major themes of Orwell's masterpiece.

This milestone articulates the major influences behind three of the themes found in George Orwell's novel, 1984: The error of hierarchical class systems; The horror of politically-induced warfare; And the need for a free, unbiased media. This research is timely, given the recent surge in the novel's popularity. In 2013, only twenty-four hours after Edward Snowden released information on the NSA, sales of 1984 on Amazon.com rose by 6,021%. More recently, after the 2016 Presidential election, 1984 became the #1 best-selling book on Amazon.com. As more and more people read this novel, it is important to understand where it came from and what its message means. Although a large group of information exists on how Orwell's 1984 can be interpreted, less attention has been given to how this work came to be from the psychological perspective of its author. This milestone aims to help fill this gap.

In a sense, this project represents a continuation of all my previous experience of analyzing literature and researching the historical background of well-known cultural icons. However, the deliverable aspect of this milestone, consisting of a piece of creative writing inspired by the themes of 1984, is new to me. I've done plenty of creative writing in the past, but have never been constrained by theme requirements. This represents a new challenge.

The following chapters in George Orwell's life have been selected for exploration because of their clear connections with themes in 1984. Furthermore, each of these events was written about by George Orwell himself, either in essays, novels, or letters. These first-person accounts give an important and undiluted perspective on George Orwell's thought process as a political satirist.

Childhood at Crossgates

Eric Blair, who adopted the pen name George Orwell in 1933, was born in 1903 in Bihar, India, to a family with multiple generations of imperialist background. His great-great grandfather was a plantation owner in Jamaica, his grandfather was a Church of England minister in India and Tasmania, and his father was a sub-deputy agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair moved with his mother to England when he was one year old. Though he was very young at the time, this process of moving from a country where his family had a function and authority to a country where they had neither would have a lasting impact on Blair's sense of class. Blair would not see his father again until he was eight years old. By then Blair had lost all affection for his father, whom he saw "as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying 'Don't'."

At eight years old, Blair received a scholarship to study at a prep school named Crossgates, where, by his own description, he learned little of practical value. At age ten, Blair was moved into the scholarship class, a group of boys specially trained to win scholarships at desirable public schools. Blair later described the experience in an essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys:"

Over a period of two or three years the scholarship boys were crammed with learning as cynically as a goose is crammed for Christmas. And with what learning! ...Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else. Subjects which lacked examination-value, such as geography, were almost completely neglected, mathematics was also neglected if you were a "classical," science was not taught in any form - indeed it was so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged - and the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were chosen with one eye on the "English Paper."

While at Crossgates, Blair was constantly reminded of his status as one of the less-well-off students. Not only was a caste-like structure perpetuated by the other students at Crossgates, many if whom came from "millionaire" families, but clear favoritism for the monied students was also clear amongst the administration. Blair described how students from aristocratic or millionaire backgrounds were far less likely to receive beatings than the poorer students, and were given far greater lenience when it came to laziness and low quality of work. Blair was disgusted by this favoritism, realizing early on that many of the ideals that he was supposed to strive for, "to be at once a Christian and a social success," were unattainable because they depended "not only on what you did but on what you were." This sense would fuel many of Blair's later feelings of class and may have contributed to his socialist political views.

The Spanish Civil War

From Crossgates, Blair earned a scholarship to the well-regarded public school Eton, but, once there, his performance proved "disappointing". This assessment cost Blair an opportunity to study at Oxford or Cambridge, and he instead joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Here Blair became one of just ninety police officers tasked with managing a city with "a population which was equal to that of a medium-sized European city." As revolutionary nationalism escalated in burma in the 1920s, though, Blair because uncomfortable with his position. Blair later reflected that as a police officer, he was "hated by a large number of people." Blair resigned from his post after five years, moving to Paris, London, and other locations in Southern England.

In December of 1936, Blair enlisted in a Socialist militia in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences are documented in his novel, "Homage to Catalonia," in which he explains that he had first traveled to Spain "with the notion of writing newspaper articles, but.. joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do." Blair received "the briefest and most ineffectual" training before being sent to the front lines in early January. Blair recounted in Homage to Catalonia the rifle given to him shortly before he was sent to the front lines:

It was a German Mauser dated 1896 - more than forty years old! It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden barrel-guard was split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded and past praying for. Most of the rifles were equally bad, some of them even worse. ...The sergeant gave us five minutes' 'instruction', which consisted in explaining how you loaded a rifle and how you took the bolt to pieces. ...Cartridges were handed out, fifty to a man, and then the ranks were formed and we strapped our kits on our backs and set out for the front line, about three miles away."

On the front lines, Blair entered into trench warfare, which he described as an almost surreal experience. Blair wrote that in trench warfare during the winter, the five most important things, in order, are firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. Out at the front, Blair began to "marvel at the futility of it all," of a war that moved nowhere. Blair returned to Barcelona on April 26th, but spent most of his time on leave fighting in the streets for the Socialists. He returned to the front lines on May 10th, and on May 20th was shot by an enemy sniper through the throat. Blair describes the experience as "very interesting" and like being "struck by lightning." He spent the next month recovering in a number of hospitals, where Blair recounts that he was told repeatedly "that a man who is hit through the neck and survives... is the luckiest creature alive." Blair could not help thinking, however, that "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." Blair was discharged from the military. Quickly, however, Blair learned that his militia-party had been outlawed and that its members were being arrested and executed. Pursued by police, Blair was barely able to escape to France on June 23rd.

World War II and BBC Propaganda

Blair is best known today for his strong critique of totalitarianism, but he also dedicated much of his talent to the opposition of British imperialism. This view was formed early in Blair's career as a writer, influenced by his experiences of class, oppression, and his time in Burma. However, with the outbreak of World War II, Blair felt compelled to support Britain in the war effort. Blair later wrote, "I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Blair joined the BBC in August of 1941, taking a position with the Indian Section of the BBC's Easter Service. Blair worked for the BBC until 1943, first as a Talks Assistant, and later as Talks Producer. His task was to create propaganda in the form of weekly news reviews and cultural programs intended to send a "strong antifascist signal to India while at the same time attempting to strengthen Idia's loyal support of the British war effort."

Frequently, the message that Blair broadcast to India was in direct conflict with his own anti-imperialist stance. Though Blair worked hard to perform his task within the required guidelines, he was regularly censored by the Ministry of Information. Often, the work of censorship was delegated to Blair's colleagues within the BBC. As an example, Blair was prevented from inviting H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw to present on the radio because they were considered "loose cannons," critical of the war.

Working as a propagandist created a moral conflict for Blair. In 1938, Blair had written in Homage to Catalonia that "one of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all of the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." Blair justified his work at the BBC by creating a distinction between "honest and dishonest propaganda," and by working to keep "our propaganda slightly less disgusting that it might otherwise have been. However, Blair was hesitant to put pen name, George Orwell, on many of his broadcasts. These were instead produced under the name Eric Blair. In April 1942, he wrote the following in his diary:

You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth.... I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

Blair left the BBC in 1943. The official reason for his resignation, though, is different from what may have been expected. The following is an excerpt from a letter Blair sent to LF Rushbrook Williams, the Eastern Service Director

I am tendering my resignation because for some time past I have been conscious that I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result. I believe that in the present political situation the broadcasting of British propaganda to India is an almost hopeless task. Whether these broadcasts should be continued at all is for others to judge, but I myself prefer not to spend my time on them when I could be occupying myself with journalism which does produce some measurable effect. I feel that by going back to my normal work of writing and journalism I could be more useful than I am at present.

Whether or not this was the real reason for Blair's departure cannot be determined. While it is likely that Blair felt himself wasted as a propagandist, it is probable that the main reason for his resignation was his ongoing moral disagreement with the work at hand.

Soon after leaving the BBC, Blair began writing Animal Farm in November of 1943. Blair was inspired to compose this novel by a desire to expose Stalin's regime as "inscrutable" and "a savage kind of state-capitalism." Animal Farm was repeatedly rejected by publishers as "impossible to sell," until its eventual acceptance in October 1944. In the ten months before Animal Farm was published, Blair began work on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Though it would take Blair several years to complete this work, the main thesis behind it was solidly formed from the start. Blair wrote the following in a letter in 1944:

Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere... seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer... and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means.... With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist.... Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can't say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible

In the last three years of his life, Blair moved in and out of hospitals with pneumonia and tuberculosis. Blair struggled to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in June of 1949, before his death on January of 1950. Eric Blair was forty-six years old.

Many of the influences behind George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four came more or less directly from his own life experiences. The analysis conducted here will focus on three influences, each contributing to a major theme in Orwell's work.

First, Orwell developed a strong aversion to class distinctions during his time at Crossgates, and from his work in Burma's police force. This hatred for anything approaching a caste system appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a scalding critique of the party system. In Oceania, society is divided into three classes: The proles, the Outer Party, and the Inner Party. In this system, as at Crossgates, what you were able to achieve and how highly you were regarded depended "not only on what you did but on what you were." For instance, members of the Inner Party, similar to the "millionaire" children at Crossgates, are allowed far more indulgent behavior than the proles. Members of the Inner Party enjoy good food, comfortable living conditions, and the ability to turn off their telescreens, luxuries that are unattainable for anyone else. As with Orwell's more general Democratic Socialist political beliefs, these issues of injustice can be seen as direct consequences of his experiences as a child and young adult.

From his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell gained a lasting sense of the futility and horror of armed conflicts in which neither army can - or is willing to - defeat the other. Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in a world divided into three superstates. These powers are constantly at war with one another, but none can defeat the others, and, more to the point, none are willing to try. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, power is maintained through constant conflict and the threat that if citizens overthrow their governments, they will be crushed by the other world powers. Orwell was first inspired to write about such a world by the 1943 Tehran Conference, in which Marshal Stalin, President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill met to discuss how the world should function after the end of the Second World War. Orwell saw this as the beginnings of a "carve-up" of the globe into superpowers. This view was further entrenched by the use of the atomic bomb in 1945, which Orwell believed would lead the way to a world in which complete destruction was a constant threat. It is likely, though, that if Orwell did not have personal experience with war he would not have been so concerned by his observations.

A second powerful connection between Orwell's experience in Spain and the militaristic strategy in Nineteen Eighty-Four comes from the betrayal that Orwell's militia faced in 1937. Here, the militia to which Orwell belonged was abruptly and unjustly labeled traitorous. Its members were rounded up, jailed, and, in many cases, killed. The reason for this betrayal was purely strategic. The militia had served its purpose on the front lines, and now posed a potential threat to the political leaders. Eliminating the militia helped the leaders solidify their claims to power. This reality is mirrored in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the superstates are constantly creating and breaking alliances with each other, always for individual gain.

Finally, Orwell's time at the Ministry of Information during World War II directly influenced his depiction of Oceana's Ministry of Truth. Working for the BBC and the MOI give Orwell direct experience with the creation of propaganda and the control of thought. Here, he experienced a kind of Thought Police: Colleagues at the BBC were often tasked with censoring each other, reviewing and blocking each others works. It's hard to imagine that this kind of self-policing was not a direct ancestor to the infamous enforcers of Oceana.

Furthermore, the central character of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston, works at the Ministry of Truth, just as Orwell worked for the Ministry of Information. As if this were not enough, the Eastern Service Committee for which Orwell worked held its meetings in Room 101, the same room in which Winston is tortured and broken, "taught" to love the Party and Big Brother. The parallel made by Orwell between the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Truth could not be more obvious. In his mind, both agencies seek to control the thoughts of the public by distorting facts and presenting only those truths which are convenient for the political leaders.

Through these strong connections between major events in Orwell's life and central themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it can be clearly seen that Orwell took a great deal of his inspiration from events surrounding him. Nineteen Eighty-Four, then, can be seen as a kind of directed autobiography, in which George Orwell told the story of his life in such a way as to prove his political points and rail against totalitarianism.

The deliverable for this milestone consists of a piece of creative writing that explores major themes from George Orwell's novel, 1984. As I was writing this piece, I based its world around certain concepts. First, just as Orwell divides his world into three superstates, I decided to separate my world into two governmental systems. However, I did not want to explore a conflict in medias res. I wanted to examine the origins of such a conflict, and the impacts that its development would have on society. But I do not believe that two superstates could exist together for any period of time without breaking into conflict, and I also did not want to look into the simultaneous formation of two superstates. I decided to solve this issue by separating the superstates by a vast distance and allowing them to discover each other after they were both fully established. But what distance could be vast enough for an all-powerful government to be oblivious of its neighbor? My answer was outer space, an idea which brought me to a world where inter-galactic travel was possible. This world also freed me to create a society that existed by Orwellian principles without having to seem like a descendant of human society. This society could be non-human, erasing a reader's preexisting beliefs as to how a society should be run. It also allowed me to examine a class structure that might never develop amongst humans, one in which an individual's rank depends largely on genetically engineered traits given before birth.

Finally, in exploring the application of Orwell's themes, I created thematic aspects that contrast with Orwell's novel. First, the government in my piece controls society largely through appeasement practices, creating beautiful cities, comfortable living conditions, and free genetic alteration services that combine to make its citizens unwilling to overthrow the government and readily accept the totalitarian control over their lives. I created this system because I believe it to be more realistic than Orwell's sadistic Big Brother. Beating society with a stick may temporarily make it follow your will, but it is my personal belief that leading society with a carrot is a more sustainable long-term approach. Second, in contrast to Orwell's Winston, who starts 1984 hating Big Brother but is eventually "taught" to love the regime, I decided to write for a character that begins with total belief in the political system and only slowly begins to lose her faith in her government's desire to protect and care for her. I made this decision for the sake of variety, and for the interesting experience of writing from the point of view of a character with beliefs that are entirely different from my own.

When reading my work, I believe that it is important to keep in mind that much of it, like 1984, is either metaphorical or satirical. I hope you enjoy.

The Void Between - Draft Two

This milestone found that many of the major events in George Orwell's life ended up influencing his writing and political beliefs in major ways, as shown in his landmark novel, 1984. Orwell derived his hatred of hierarchical class systems from his experiences as a child at school and as a young adult in the Burmese police force. His distrust for political and useless wars can be seen as a direct consequence of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and his revulsion to propaganda and governmental efforts to control thought were almost certainly heightened by his experience as a radio propagandist for the BBC during the Second World War. All of these themes show prominently in 1984.

In a further effort to understand the meaning of these themes, a piece of creative writing was composed that explores the workings of a class-based society with tight governmental control over the media and its engagement in a politically-induced war. This piece is linked to above.

George Orwell's 1984 remains one of the most influential novels of the 20th century. Further research should focus on how 1984 is interpreted today, almost seventy years after it was written, and what it means in today's social-political environment.

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Credit: Von Branch of the National Union of Journalists[1] This milestone explores the experiences and historical events that inspired George Orwell to compose his most famous work, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In doing so, this milestone details several major events in George Orwell's life that contributed in substantial ways to the political beliefs and worldviews behind Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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Animal Farm by George Orwell - Book Analysis

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‘Animal Farm’ projects how the people of Russia fall prey to a totalitarian regime when they were dreaming of a more free country of equality for all.

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Use of language in Animal Farm - Form, structure and language - Edexcel - GCSE English Literature Revision - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize

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Revise and learn about the form, structure and language of George Orwell's Animal Farm with BBC Bitesize GCSE English Literature (Edexcel).

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Animal Farm | Political Satire, Allegory & Fable

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Animal Farm, anti-utopian satire by George Orwell, published in 1945. One of Orwell’s finest works, it is a political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off

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At the behest of the Duchess of Atholl, George Orwell (1903-1950) spoke at the League for European Freedom, a neo-conservative forum with whom the celebrated author shared a distinct disdain for Communism. There, the similarities ended however. In a brutal reminder of his political pedigree Orwell decried the League for its implied duplicity in attempting to defend European democracy on one hand yet say nothing about British imperialism on the other.

The year was 1945: the end of the war was but a breath away, Churchill was about to be steamrolled and British India was still four years from partition.

Orwell concluded: "I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country" (Orwell 1945, quoted in Woodcock, 1967, p. v). The sentence's sentiment goes to the very intent of how the novel he'd been thinking seriously about writing came into being.

Leaving aside any literary evaluation, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four tells us more about Orwell's England than it does about Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany. Readers at the time read the novel and immediately (and erroneously) saw the Soviet regime writ large. The author was instead painting a much broader condemnation of totalitarianism, but one firmly wedged in the pre- and post-war England of his own experiences. Drabness, commodity shortages, personal deprivations, propaganda and an excessive bureaucracy were just some of the similarities Orwell's own England and the novel shared.

Of course, the same can be said to a certain degree of the Soviet Union and Germany, but Orwell's warning - which Nineteen Eighty-Four is often seen as - is more a diatribe highlighting the perversions to which a centralised ideology/economy is liable to adopt. In addition, the novel is an attempt to expose the increasing Communist-appeasing tendencies and associated 'poisonous influences' gestating within England's increasingly elitist and hierarchical Left during the 1940s.

To better appreciate the extent of Orwell's preferred polity and the increasing disenchantment he felt towards it ever being realised, one must go to Spain. Here, he endured the perils of centralised authoritarianism first hand while fighting alongside anarchist separatists in Spain's 1936-39 civil war. Appalled at the 'poisonous influence' inflicted on the Spanish insurrectionists by Moscow-led communists from afar, Orwell later detected similar ideological tendencies and influences taking hold within Britain's state socialism. Nineteen Eighty-Four was his documented warning as such; an extrapolation - to the point of satire - of the evils of totalitarianism: Stalinism (and Nazism to a lesser degree) were more timely, albeit contributing sources to the authors' mindset, than the novel's actual subject.

Orwell's civil war experiences in Spain - recounted in Homage to Catalonia (1938) - instilled an enormous hostility towards and disillusionment with orthodox Communism. Fighting for the Republican insurrectionists - themselves a motley and diverse collection of anti-Fascists and politicised trade unions - Orwell's semi-autobiographical account describes the internecine dissent between supposed Republican and Communists allies, including deplorable examples of Communist deceit in backing the war, as well as intellectual dishonesty in reporting the war. " Homage - written on his return to England in 1937 - is an attempt to set the record straight, to record the 'political truth' of the war as he saw it" (Coles, 1981, p. 66-67).

Describing himself as a soldier of a revolutionary army defending democracy against Fascism, Orwell got down to business in 'setting the record straight'. He was scathing of the "scandalous distortion of news from Spain in favour of the Stalinists by the liberal English press" (Woodcock, 1967, p. xii). Or as the author so succinctly put it himself: "the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time" (1970, p. 289). His conclusion was that intellectuals in general, and Britain's socialist movement in particular, were being seduced by totalitarian ideas and models.

Orwell later wrote an essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War, recounting with horror (and with hindsight) the depths to which the truth suffered in wartime reportage within the British press: "I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed" (Orwell, 1970, p. 294).Any ensuing novel or writing on the subject naturally becomes immediate and personal and says as much, if not more, about the prevailing social climate, and in Orwell's mind, an extrapolation of ideological tendencies at the time. Such candour did not endear him at all to many of his democratic socialist colleagues. In fact, Stapleton states (1983, p. 658) that "Orwell was vilified by the fashionable and sentimental Left in England who knew nothing of the truth and had no desire to be told it". In this context, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its assault on truthful language and the rewriting of history, can arguably be seen as saying more about the author's home than it does about the Soviet Union or Germany.

In fact, language and its manipulation for political ends, is a dominating thread running through the totalitarian tapestry that is Nineteen Eight-Four. Again, England can be seen as the prime source in much of Orwell's critique, derived particularly from his 1941-43 wartime employment as a Talks Producer with the BBC. This broadcasting experience, combined with the intimate knowledge of the machinations of the Ministry of Information he had access to, left Orwell with enormous misgivings about the morality of propaganda, whatever the motives. While acknowledging that all governments exercise a degree of 'misinformation' especially in times of war, Orwell's reasonably close encounters of England's efforts in this regard, nonetheless fuelled much of his attack on the distortion of truth and the abuse of language. These include the linguistic horror of Newspeak, Winston's role within the Outer Party, and the suitably titled 'Rewrite Squad'. According to Brown (1990, p. 09), Orwell "felt that any connection with propaganda corrupted those who used it". And as Syme - Winston's comrade - rather sarcastically says (Orwell, 1949 (1989), p. 54): "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well."

This is not to say however, that echoes of Nazi Germany cannot be heard in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notorious book burning episodes and Nazism's fabricated denunciations of European Jewry serve as just two horrific reminders of totalitarian attempts to alter history. In fact, Orwell's contempt for Germanic nationalism and Hitler's tyrannical megalomania occasionally surfaced in some of his journalistic pursuits. Reviewing Mein Kampf in 1940 for the New English Weekly (Orwell, 1970, p. 28), he referred to Hitler's plans for a continuous Aryan state with plenty of"living room" as a "horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder". It is fair to say that similar notions of warfare in perpetuity - with Oceania and its two adversaries in a continuous state of conflict - permeate Nineteen Eighty-Four to a significant degree.

References to Hitler's Aryan supremacists - a driving tenet within the Reich - also appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four. At one stage Winston looks around the canteen imagining "the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal - tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree ..." (1949, (1989), p.63).

Likewise, parallels with the Soviet Union may well be identified too, but Nineteen Eighty-Four cannot be said to specifically satirise Stalinism or Nazism, individually or as an amalgam, though many commentators - including Hammond (1984) and Wilding (1980) - seem to suggest as much. Orwell had already 'dumped on' revolutionary Russia with his 1945 beastly allegorical fable, Animal Farm. But elements of classic totalitarian Stalinism inhabit Nineteen Eighty-Four in that people simply disappeared in both the Soviet Union and Oceania. Consider the vanishing of Winston's father, mother and sister and the fact that the only person Julia "had ever known who talked frequently of the days before the Revolution was a grandfather who had disappeared when she was eight". Such fear of state abduction was meant to breed absolute ideological obedience. And Stalin practiced this with widespread precision, as did Big Brother: "Syme had vanished," says Orwell's narrator. On investigation Winston noticed a list of:

members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before - nothing had been crossed out - but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme [as had countless Russians] had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

Given then the environment of a world war that saw bombs reign down on his homeland delivered by Fascists from afar, the disillusionment he felt for Britain's traditional Left and its degenerative role as an apologist for Russian foreign policy, combined with numerous written nuances, perhaps best summarised by his assertion (Orwell 1940, quoted in Woodcock, 1967, p. xii) "that the future must be catastrophic", Nineteen Eight-Four can arguably be seen, not so much as an attack on Stalinism per se, but rather, a polemic on "credulous or self-serving people who call themselves socialists, and on some of their illusions" (Pimlott, 1989, p. xv). Ingsoc - the Party's ideology - is thus presented as a perversion of English socialism. Hammond (1984, p. 173) rightly refers to one element of this perversion - and one of the novel's central theses - as "the insidious effects of concentrating power in the hands of an unscrupulous elite".

There is the additional argument - supporting the case that the novel is more about England and less about the Soviet Union and Germany - suggesting that Ingsoc might also be seen as a thinly disguised indictment of England's pre- and postwar governments in general, and the British Labour party in particular. Excerpts of Orwell's journalistic endeavours tend to support this view. Newsinger contends (1999, p. 124) that while "he continued to be an opponent of capitalism [Orwell nonetheless] remained dissatisfied with the Labour Government's restraint and moderation". Taking this one step further, Newsinger (like Pimlott above) says "Ingsoc can be better seen as deriving from a British National Socialism or British Nazism". Either way, England is again the source.

Orwell's most profound insight, according to Coles (1981, p. 159), "envisions an absolute totalitarianism which precludes individuality in society". While Nineteen Eighty-Four is imbued with a lifetime of ideas unleashed by its author, it is fair to say the novel was physically conceived in the bombed out ruins of war-torn England. Orwell: "The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately [immune from, or] better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere" (Orwell 1949, quoted in Hammond, 1984, p. 173).

The dystopia Orwell described would be instantly recognisable to inhabitants of 1940s London. And given the similarities between the author's homeland and Oceania - overzealous bureaucracy, personal depravity, drabness, commodity shortages and the insidiousness of propaganda, apart from the poisonous 'apologetic' influences infecting British socialism - Nineteen Eighty-Four can legitimately be claimed as telling us more about Orwell's England, than about Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany.

Does the novel also offer insights into Australian politics now? Very little. Fifty years after publication (and almost two decades later than the ominous year in question), Nineteen Eighty-Four is showing its age somewhat. At the time of writing (late 1940s), totalitarianism was a real stalking fear that consequently has not stood the test of time. While the second half of the 20 th century has had its share of authoritarian regimes, they have tended to operate in isolated pockets with minimal impact on the global scheme of things. The cessation of the Cold War 'duopoly' has only diminished (but not discredited) Orwell's prophetic plight. Today, transnational NGOs like the United Nations (via peace-keeping envoys and trade sanctions) and the World Bank (by withholding loans or credit) play a considerable part in restricting totalitarian-like tendencies. And the internationalisation of trade also inhibits such provincial and dictatorial insularity. Since the symbolic fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, there is no longer an ideological trade bloc that might facilitate a semblance of totalitarian rule. Romania's deposed dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu, is a case in point.

The question begs: How long can a story about a future that is past continue to alarm, at least in an Australian context? Our own political Zeitgeist circa 2000 can draw little from Nineteen Eight-Four, at least in terms of heeding Orwell's dire warning, mainly because the totalitarian threat that framed the consciousness of Western governments in the late 1940s, has lessened considerably, if not completely, a half century later. But this is not to dismiss some of Orwell's concurrent themes altogether. Issues like the concentration of state power and governmental deceit, individual freedoms, the imposing of politically correct language, as well as occupational health and safety concerns are as relevant today as they were to Orwell's protagonists. As a novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four is first and foremost, a work of fiction. But as Pimlott asserts (1989, p. xvi), "it can also be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them". And that summation is as timely now as it was in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or even 1940s England.
Bibliography
Brown, G., 1990, Notes on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pan Books, London.

Coles Editorial Board, 1981, George Orwell's Works, Coles Publishing, Canada.

Hammond , J.R., 1984, A George Orwell Companion, Macmillan Press, New York.

Hunter, Lynette, 1984, George Orwell - The Search for a Voice, Open University Press, England.

Newsinger, John, 1999, Orwell's Politics, St Martin's Press, New York.

Orwell, George, 1949 (1989), Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, England.

Orwell, George, 1970, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: Volume 2, Penguin, England.

Pimlott, Ben, 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four - (Introduction), Penguin, England.

Stapleton, M., 1983, The Cambridge Guide to English Literature, CUP, Cambridge.

Wilding, Michael, 1980, Political Fictions, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Woodcock, George, 1967, The Crystal Spirit, Fourth Estate, London.

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Orwell and totalitarianism - Digital Done Write

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At the behest of the Duchess of Atholl, George Orwell (1903-1950) spoke at the League for European Freedom, a neo-conservative forum with whom the celebrated author shared a distinct disdain for Communism. There, the similarities ended however. In a brutal reminder of his political pedigree Orwell decried the League for its implied duplicity in attempting [...]

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Animal Farm - Characters overview - Characters - Edexcel - GCSE English Literature Revision - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize

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Revise and learn about the characters in George Orwell's Animal Farm with BBC Bitesize GCSE English Literature (Edexcel).

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Table of Contents

Nineteen Eighty-four, also published as 1984, novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism. The chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and his ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. The book's title and many of its concepts, such as Big Brother and the Thought Police, are instantly recognized and understood, often as bywords for modern social and political abuses.

Summary

The book is set in 1984 in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring totalitarian states (the other two are Eurasia and Eastasia). Oceania is governed by the all-controlling Party, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother. The Party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, which is designed to limit free thought and promote the Party's doctrines. Its words include doublethink (belief in contradictory ideas simultaneously), which is reflected in the Party's slogans: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength." The Party maintains control through the Thought Police and continual surveillance.

The book's hero, Winston Smith, is a minor party functionary living in a London that is still shattered by a nuclear war that took place not long after World War II. He belongs to the Outer Party, and his job is to rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, bringing it in line with current political thinking. However, Winston's longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government. He embarks on a forbidden affair with Julia, a like-minded woman, and they rent a room in a neighbourhood populated by Proles (short for proletariats). Winston also becomes increasingly interested in the Brotherhood, a group of dissenters. Unbeknownst to Winston and Julia, however, they are being watched closely (ubiquitous posters throughout the city warn residents that "Big Brother is watching you.").

When Winston is approached by O'Brien-an official of the Inner Party who appears to be a secret member of the Brotherhood-the trap is set. O'Brien is actually a spy for the Party, on the lookout for "thought-criminals," and Winston and Julia are eventually caught and sent to the Ministry of Love for a violent reeducation. The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Winston are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independence and destroy his dignity and humanity. In Room 101, where prisoners are forced into submission by exposure to their worst nightmares, Winston panics as a cage of rats is attached to his head. He yells out for his tormentors to "Do it to Julia!" and states that he does not care what happens to her. With this betrayal, Winston is released. He later encounters Julia, and neither is interested in the other. Instead Winston loves Big Brother.

Analysis

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. Its depiction of a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought is a sobering reminder of the evils of unaccountable governments. Winston is the symbol of the values of civilized life, and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all-powerful states.
Cathy Lowne The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Nineteen Eighty-four | Summary, Characters, Analysis, & Facts

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Nineteen Eighty-four, novel by George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism. His chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and his ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. Concepts such as Big Brother and the Thought Police are instantly recognized.

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A fairy tale is a children's story about magical and imaginary people and places. Fairy tales may have characters such as princesses, princes, elves, and witches, but not necessarily fairies.

Fairy Tale Definition

Fairy tales are short stories often intended for children, and include magical creatures, people, and places. As with other types of stories, fairy tales include a beginning, middle, and end, protagonists and antagonists, some type of conflict and resolution. However, fairy tales have magical elements such as talking animals or objects and an enchanted setting such as a kingdom far away or a forest. Fairy tales often start with the phrase, "Once upon a time", and have happy endings. The good characters always triumph over the evil characters, there are lessons taught, and there is always the promise of a happily ever after. Fairy tales differ from fantasy fiction in that they assume that the magical aspect is just the way things are, and not an explicit part of the story. Also, fairy tales often have morals, whereas fantasy stories may or may not.

The term "Fairy Tale" was first used by French writer, Madame d'Aulnoy in the late 1600s. She called her work, conte de fẻe, which is French for "fairy tale". Some fairy tales, such as "Beauty and the Beast" and "Rumpelstiltskin", are thought to be over four thousand years old, and have been passed on by word of mouth long before they were written down. Many of today's fairy tales have evolved over time and are told in many variations around the world. It is difficult to trace the exact history of the fairy tale, as much of this genre depended on oral tradition in earlier times.

Today, fairy tales are still in oral form, but are more commonly in published works and even made into movies. They are often used to teach lessons and entertain people of all ages. The fairy tale genre is often studied in school, and can be used to teach point of view in writing, where students are asked to rewrite a popular tale from another character's point of view, often changing the story dramatically. Since fairy tales have distinct settings, characters, and plots, they are often studied in reading classes as well. Fairy tales are still written today, but many of the stories that we know and love have been around for many, many years.

Examples of Fairy Tales

Beauty and the Beast

Bluebeard

Cinderella

The Frog Prince

Hansel and Gretel

The Juniper Tree

Little Red Riding Hood

Puss in Boots

Rapunzel

Rumpelstiltskin

The Singing Tortoise

Sleeping Beauty

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

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Fairy Tale Genre | Fairy Tale Definition | Storyboard That

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A fairy tale is a children's story about magical and imaginary people and places. Fairy tales may have characters such as princesses, princes, elves, and witches, but not necessarily fairies. Fairy tales are short stories often intended for children, and include magical creatures, people, and places.

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Animal Farm: Historical Context Essay: George Orwell’s Politics | SparkNotes

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Explanation of how real-world social and political events influenced George Orwell and shaped the ideas and characters in Animal Farm.

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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

British literary critic V. S. Pritchett could have been speaking for many in his review for the New Statesman:

"I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing;" wrote Pritchett after Nineteen Eighty-Four's publication; "and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down."

More than 70 years after its 1948 publication, Orwell's masterpiece routinely tops Amazon's list of overall best selling books. (In January 2017, Penguin Random House ordered 75,000 new copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four following a 9,500% spike in sales, according to The New York Times.)

Today it's not unusual to find influencers on both the right and the left invoke Orwell's book to decry the actions taken against them or to attack political opponents. In 2021, conservative US Senator Josh Hawely said Simon & Schuster's decision to cancel his book deal "could not be more Orwellian," while left-leaning media consistently claimed that former President Donald Trump was Big Brother personified.

Some parallels to Nineteen Eighty-Four we see today are downright chilling, while others seem silly. The question is, how does one separate breathless hyperbole from genuine threats?

To answer this, it's helpful to look at the inspirations for Orwell's book, a terrifying allegory detailing one man's attempt to stay sane in a totalitarian state that tortures the truth-and people-to control society.

Here are three real-life inspirations for Orwell's dystopian novel.

1. Communism

Many people know Orwell was a socialist for many years. Fewer know that Orwell became skeptical of collectivism, which he came to see as "not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of."

This is why there is general agreement that Orwell "modelled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany," two collectivist states hostile to private property and economic freedom.

While some may quibble over to which degree these states were communist/socialist/fascist, what's important to understand is that Orwell was modeling his dystopia on socialist states, particularly communist ones.

Orwell himself makes this perfectly clear in a letter he wrote to Sidney Sheldon, the man who purchased the stage rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"[ Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism," Orwell replied to Mr. Sheldon, "but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."

2. WE, a Novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Few people likely have heard of WE, a piece of dystopian fiction that never gained the traction of Nineteen-Eighty Four. But it's clear the book influenced Orwell who reviewed the work after the death of its author, Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Born in Lebedyan, Russia in 1884, Zamyatin was an enthusiastic socialist who became a member of the Bolshevik Party and participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Following the October Revolution, which he witnessed firsthand after returning from England, Zamyatin "threw himself headlong into party work, sitting on the boards of literary organizations and offering lectures on the craft of fiction," writes Russian literary scholar Jennifer Wilson in The New York Times.

In 1920-21, Zamyatin wrote WE, a dystopian novel set 1,000 years in the future, which explores the pressure to conform in an authoritarian society that has become fully bureaucratized.

WE struck a nerve in the Soviet Union, and not in a good way.

The book quickly fell under the eye of literary censors, who banned the novel prior to publication-despite Zamyatin's Party enthusiasm-making it "the first novel officially banned in the Soviet Union," according to Wilson. The book was not published until 1924, when the book house E. P. Dutton published an English translation, and Orwell would not review it until more than 20 years later.

The extent to which WE influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four is debatable, but The Guardian points out many of the similarities between the books.

The characters in We are numbered rather than named: its Winston Smith is D-503, and its Julia I-330. Its Big Brother is known as the Benefactor, a more human figure than Orwell's almost mythical dictator, who at one point phones D-503 ("D-503? Ah ... You're speaking to the Benefactor. Report to me immediately!"). Where Orwell's apartments come complete with an all-seeing "telescreen", Zamyatin's buildings are simply made of glass, allowing each of the residents - and the "Guardians" who police them - to see in whenever they want. We's Airstrip One, or Oceania, is called OneState. Instead of puzzling over 2+2=5, its lead character is disturbed by the square root of -1.

Readers can determine for themselves how much they think WE influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four. What's clear is that Orwell read the book, was influenced by it, and would see his own dystopian novel published just two years after he reviewed Zamyatin's work.

3. The Spanish Civil War's Propaganda

Perhaps the single greatest theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the idea of totalitarians attempting to control speech to shape reality.

Throughout his life and career, Orwell was motivated by a desire to remain attached to truth, and his experience in the Spanish Civil War shook him deeply. During that conflict-a war involving fascists against communists-Orwell witnessed war propaganda and its corrosive impact on the truth in English newspapers.

In his work George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943, Orwell described how much this frightened him.

"...I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened."

Orwell's brush with totalitarianism, war, and state propaganda left him terrified that "the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world."

This would be a terrifying prospect any time, but it was particularly so during the period when Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the world stage seemed set for a perpetual (cold) war.

***

Few today are likely to dismiss Orwell's book as a mere figment of dystopian literature.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is, after all, largely a story about one man's attempt to maintain a grip on truth and reality in the face of state power and endless propaganda. In 2022, surely that's a story we can all relate to.
This article originally appeared in The Epoch Times.
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3 Real-Life Inspirations for George Orwell's 1984 | Jon Miltimore

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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. British literary critic V. S.

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Animal Farm: Metaphors and Similes | SparkNotes

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A list of the metaphors and similes in Animal Farm

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Animal Farm (1945) is a novella by George Orwell. Originally sub-titled A Fairy Story, it is a commentary on the development of Russian communism under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) delivered in allegorical form. The thoroughgoing allegory compares the inequalities of brutal, socially unequal pre-Revolutionary Russia with a cruelly run farm on which the humans represent the capitalists and aristocrats, and the animals represent the people. The Old Major - a prize boar who dies relatively early in the action - represents the Marxist-Leninist principles behind the Revolution through which the animals take power. In the short term, conditions are improved, but gradually corruption creeps in, and Napoleon - another boar, who represents Stalin - betrays the principles of the Revolution. Notably, he deceitfully sends the horse Boxer, who has been a noble, hardworking servant of the original principles of the Revolution, to the knacker's yard to fund the increasingly human-like luxuries indulged in by the pigs who have assumed control of the farm.

The final perversion of the original principles of the revolution is expressed in the line 'all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others', a phrase which has passed into the public consciousness.

Like Nineteen Eighty-Four after it, the book was misread as being critical of all forms of socialism, rather than specifically Stalinist communism, and the American Central Intelligence Agency funded a cartoon version in 1955. Because of its illegality, many in Soviet-controlled territory first read it in pirated, 'samizdat' form.

In the essay 'Why I Write' (1946), Orwell described Animal Farm as 'the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole'. In the clarity of its story and structure, it reflects Orwell's commitment - in that essay and elsewhere - to expressing political ideas in what is now celebrated as a 'plain style', in particular contrast to what he saw as the worst jargonistic excesses of Marxist philosophy.

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Animal Farm (1945) is a novella by George Orwell. Originally sub-titled A Fairy Story, it is a commentary on the development of Russian communism under Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) delivered in allegorical form. The thoroughgoing allegory compares the inequalities of brutal, socially unequal pre-Revolutionary Russia with a cruelly run farm on which the humans represent the capitalists and aristocrats, and the animals represent the people.

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https://www.britannica.com/search?query=Animal+Farm

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Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images from experts.

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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903. Over the course of his short life (he died in 1950, aged 46) he wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction. In this section, you can find out more about the books Orwell wrote.

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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903. Over the course of his short life (he died in 1950, aged 46) he wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction. In this section, you can find out more about the books Orwell wrote.

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Animal Farm: Character List | SparkNotes

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A list of all the characters in Animal Farm. Animal Farm characters include: Napoleon, Snowball, Boxer, Squealer, Old Major, Mr. Pilkington, Benjamin, Clover, Mollie, Moses, Mr. Frederick, Mr. Jones, The Dogs, The Hens, The Sheep.

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II’s failure to solve his country’s economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan .

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II’s failure to solve his country’s economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan .

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice.

Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally. Having spent much of his time with the working-class people of England, along with his experience of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell believed that socialism is the key to fight against capitalism. Thus, he writes "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" in his essay "Why I Write."

History behind Animal Farm

Orwell conceived the idea of 'Animal Farm' when he was thinking of a way to best communicate his opinions on socialism and Stalin. The concept of Socialism is examined in many nonfiction works of George Orwell. On contrary, in this allegorical novel, he satires the false notion or belief the Russian Revolution of 1917 created among the people. They believed that Russia was stepping towards socialism for millions of poor and oppressed Russians, but he felt that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards the opposite: the totalitarianism.

The novel presents subtly, how a group of Animals (citizens) of a farm (nation), eventually led into a terrible life ruled by a totalitarian regime, when they had the promise for freedom and equality. He has given a model for a "socialism gone wrong" for the animals in the novel reflect different kinds of humans and their struggles for freedom and power.

Initially, in 1917, it looked as if Karl Marx's dreams have become a reality. For, after a politically complicated civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, was forced to give up his throne and Vladimir Lenin, a Russian intellectual revolutionary, seized power in the name of the Communist Party (Snowball being on top after Mr Jones was overthrown). The new regime brought the land and industry controlled by the private under government supervision.

As a first step in restoring Russia to prosperity and to modernize the nation's primitive infrastructure, electricity was brought to the countryside (Snowball's idea of building the windmill). After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, gained power and banished Trotsky. He accumulated power by exercising brutality on his perceived political enemies and overseeing the purge of approximately twenty million Soviet citizens. Gradually, his desire for power turned him into a dictator than a communist leader, as depicted through the character Napoleon in the novel.

Publication - Earlier Rejection

In the beginning, Orwell faced a lot of issues getting the manuscript published. Mainly, it was because of the fear that the book might upset the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Since the book was written towards the end of the Second World War, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch that includes his regular publisher Gollancz.

Four publishers refused to publish ' Animal Farm' before it was published by Secker and Warburg in 1945. Finally, on August 17, 1945, ' Animal Farm ' was published in England, followed by a year later in the United States by the Harcourt Brace & Company.

Frederic Warburg also faced pressures against publication, even from people in his own office and from his wife Pamela, who felt that it was not the moment for ingratitude towards Stalin and the heroic Red Army, which had played a major part in defeating Adolf Hitler. When Orwell submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where T. S. Eliot was the director, he rejected stating that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint "which I take to be generally Trotskyite". Though Eliot praised the book to be of "good writing" he declared that he found the view "not convincing."

Preface to Animal Farm

In his "The Freedom of the Press," proposed preface to ' Animal Farm,' Orwell indicates that despite the number of published books in the U.K. was quite low due to the war, and people were yearning for more books, his book was still rejected by publishers. He describes how the British press was controlled by wealthy men and the government. "I can see now ....Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable." By expressing his concerns, he asserts that writers and novelists have the right to defend themselves and their Ideals, just as Russia has the right to defend its own belief in communism.

Illustrated Editions of Animal Farm

Following the first edition, in 1945, Orwell wrote to Frederic Warburg expressing his interest in pursuing the possibility of the political cartoonist David Low illustrating ' Animal Farm.' In spite of David Low declaring the book to be "an excellent bit of satire ... it would illustrate perfectly," nothing came out of this. Also, a trial issue produced by Secker & Warburg in 1956 illustrated by John Driver was abandoned. In 1984, the Folio Society published an edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. Following this, in 1995, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of ' Animal Farm ', an edition illustrated by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman was published by Secker & Warburg.

Lasting Legacy

George Orwell is often recognized as a leading exponent of twentieth-century English prose and one of the most influential satiric writers. Even after decades, wide ranges of his works are within the reach of the general reader, and they are read and analyzed by scholars and critics from different approaches. One of the reasons for the lasting appeal of his work lies in the qualities of its prose. Though he is recognized more as a political writer, his mastery of style cannot be denied, for they testify for his excellent quality.

Despite all the odds, George Orwell faced before publishing ' Animal Farm,' it still remains one of the best political tales of all time. Since its publication in 1945, the novel retains its freshness in the realm of time which can be read generation after generation. In 2005, Time magazine chose it as one of the 100 best English-language novels. Also, the book ranks at 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th Century Novels.

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Animal Farm Historical Context | Book Analysis

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice. Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally.

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Who was George Orwell?

George Orwell was a novelist, journalist, essayist and critic, best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Where and when was Orwell born?

Orwell was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, in 1903, to a family which he described in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) as 'lower-upper middle class': 'upper-middle class without money'.

He worked hard and won a place at Eton but while there dedicated himself more to reading widely than passing exams. Rather than going on to University, he took the Indian Civil Service exams and became a policeman in Burma in 1921 - he was probably the first and only old Etonian to attend the Burmese police training academy. His experiences inspired his first novel, Burmese Days, which was published in New York in 1934 (British publishers feared libel cases).

What was Orwell's real name?

George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, Orwell used a pseudonym 'partly to avoid embarrassing his parents, partly as a hedge against failure, and partly because he disliked the name Eric, which reminded him of a prig in a Victorian boys' story'.

What did Orwell write?

Orwell's first book was the non-fictional Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and was based on his experiences after he left the police. The critic Bernard Crick tells us that during this time, he took to making journeys among tramps, and spent time living amongst the poor and homeless in London and around the hop fields of Kent, writing that he wanted to see if the English poor were treated in their country in the same way as the Burmese were in theirs.

Orwell then moved to Paris in 1928, where in his own words, he 'lived for about a year and a half in Paris, writing novels and short stories which no one would publish. After my money came to an end I had several years of fairly severe poverty during which I was, among other things, a dishwasher, a private tutor and a teacher in cheap private schools.'

How did Orwell's political views inform his writing?

In his essay 'Why I write' (1946), he explained that 'what I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art'. His political convictions, which have been described as democratic socialism, inform books such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a documentary account of poverty in Britain. Its second half, critical of Socialist intellectuals who supported Stalin, was enormously controversial, as was his account of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which criticises leftist infighting in the context of a broader struggle against Fascism.

Key novels: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

His novel Animal Farm (1945) also expresses his hatred of totalitarianism, satirising the developments of the Russian revolution in the style of a fable based on the eponymous farm.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) deals with similar subject matter by describing a dystopian future overseen by the all-powerful Big Brother. Both books have been translated all around the world, and were read differently by conflicting parties during the Cold War.

Having adopted a son, Orwell died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

Find out more

Further information about the life of George Orwell can be found via the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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Find out more about George Orwell's life and works at the British Library.

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George Orwell’s 1945 novel ‘Animal Farm,’ is a political fable that satire’s on communism that turned out to be a dictatorship. The novel is based on the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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George Orwell’s 1945 novel ‘Animal Farm,’ is a political fable that satire’s on communism that turned out to be a dictatorship. The novel is based on the Russian Revolution of 1917.

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice.

Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally. Having spent much of his time with the working-class people of England, along with his experience of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell believed that socialism is the key to fight against capitalism. Thus, he writes "Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" in his essay "Why I Write."

History behind Animal Farm

Orwell conceived the idea of 'Animal Farm' when he was thinking of a way to best communicate his opinions on socialism and Stalin. The concept of Socialism is examined in many nonfiction works of George Orwell. On contrary, in this allegorical novel, he satires the false notion or belief the Russian Revolution of 1917 created among the people. They believed that Russia was stepping towards socialism for millions of poor and oppressed Russians, but he felt that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards the opposite: the totalitarianism.

The novel presents subtly, how a group of Animals (citizens) of a farm (nation), eventually led into a terrible life ruled by a totalitarian regime, when they had the promise for freedom and equality. He has given a model for a "socialism gone wrong" for the animals in the novel reflect different kinds of humans and their struggles for freedom and power.

Initially, in 1917, it looked as if Karl Marx's dreams have become a reality. For, after a politically complicated civil war, Tsar Nicholas II, the monarch of Russia, was forced to give up his throne and Vladimir Lenin, a Russian intellectual revolutionary, seized power in the name of the Communist Party (Snowball being on top after Mr Jones was overthrown). The new regime brought the land and industry controlled by the private under government supervision.

As a first step in restoring Russia to prosperity and to modernize the nation's primitive infrastructure, electricity was brought to the countryside (Snowball's idea of building the windmill). After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, gained power and banished Trotsky. He accumulated power by exercising brutality on his perceived political enemies and overseeing the purge of approximately twenty million Soviet citizens. Gradually, his desire for power turned him into a dictator than a communist leader, as depicted through the character Napoleon in the novel.

Publication - Earlier Rejection

In the beginning, Orwell faced a lot of issues getting the manuscript published. Mainly, it was because of the fear that the book might upset the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Since the book was written towards the end of the Second World War, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch that includes his regular publisher Gollancz.

Four publishers refused to publish ' Animal Farm' before it was published by Secker and Warburg in 1945. Finally, on August 17, 1945, ' Animal Farm ' was published in England, followed by a year later in the United States by the Harcourt Brace & Company.

Frederic Warburg also faced pressures against publication, even from people in his own office and from his wife Pamela, who felt that it was not the moment for ingratitude towards Stalin and the heroic Red Army, which had played a major part in defeating Adolf Hitler. When Orwell submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where T. S. Eliot was the director, he rejected stating that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint "which I take to be generally Trotskyite". Though Eliot praised the book to be of "good writing" he declared that he found the view "not convincing."

Preface to Animal Farm

In his "The Freedom of the Press," proposed preface to ' Animal Farm,' Orwell indicates that despite the number of published books in the U.K. was quite low due to the war, and people were yearning for more books, his book was still rejected by publishers. He describes how the British press was controlled by wealthy men and the government. "I can see now ....Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable." By expressing his concerns, he asserts that writers and novelists have the right to defend themselves and their Ideals, just as Russia has the right to defend its own belief in communism.

Illustrated Editions of Animal Farm

Following the first edition, in 1945, Orwell wrote to Frederic Warburg expressing his interest in pursuing the possibility of the political cartoonist David Low illustrating ' Animal Farm.' In spite of David Low declaring the book to be "an excellent bit of satire ... it would illustrate perfectly," nothing came out of this. Also, a trial issue produced by Secker & Warburg in 1956 illustrated by John Driver was abandoned. In 1984, the Folio Society published an edition illustrated by Quentin Blake. Following this, in 1995, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of ' Animal Farm ', an edition illustrated by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman was published by Secker & Warburg.

Lasting Legacy

George Orwell is often recognized as a leading exponent of twentieth-century English prose and one of the most influential satiric writers. Even after decades, wide ranges of his works are within the reach of the general reader, and they are read and analyzed by scholars and critics from different approaches. One of the reasons for the lasting appeal of his work lies in the qualities of its prose. Though he is recognized more as a political writer, his mastery of style cannot be denied, for they testify for his excellent quality.

Despite all the odds, George Orwell faced before publishing ' Animal Farm,' it still remains one of the best political tales of all time. Since its publication in 1945, the novel retains its freshness in the realm of time which can be read generation after generation. In 2005, Time magazine chose it as one of the 100 best English-language novels. Also, the book ranks at 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th Century Novels.

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Animal Farm Historical Context | Book Analysis

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The major cause for the revolution lies in Czar Nicholas II's failure to solve his country's economic suffering caused by his mismanagement and decision to go to war with Japan and communism's promise to do justice. Orwell, being a socialist himself, believed that for the well-being of the people the government should be on top of everything and ensure that everyone is provided equally.

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George Orwell, (born June 25, 1903, Motihari, Bengal, India-died January 21, 1950, London, England), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell's lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.

Early life

He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma ( Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the "landless gentry," as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).

Orwell won scholarships to two of England's leading schools, Wellington and Eton, and briefly attended the former before continuing his studies at the latter, where he stayed from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of matriculating at a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, "Shooting an Elephant" and "A Hanging," classics of expository prose.

Against imperialism

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields.

Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book's publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment. The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell's next novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller's assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves.

Orwell's revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist, though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step-so common in the period-of declaring himself a communist.

From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II

Orwell's first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell's subsequent writing.

By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness. Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books.

Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan. At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys' weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party.

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George Orwell | Biography, Books, Real Name, Political Views, & Facts

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George Orwell, English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the fictionalized but autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

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