Page 6 - Animal Farm and 1984

Introduction
T HE TWO NOVELS THAT you now hold in your hands have become “modern classics” in every sense of both those terms. They are taught in many schools as examples of moral weight and political prescience, and they are still read for pleasure, excitement and instruction even by young people who have not been subject to adult inculcation. They contain several terms and expressions —“Thought Police,” “Doublethink,” “Newspeak,” “Some animals are more equal than others”—that have entered our discourse as surely as “Catch 22.” (Tina Turner’s album “Private Dancer” even included a song written by David Bowie entitled 1984, replete with menacing references to mind-control and cruelty, which conveyed the vague but frightening premonition of a frigidly-controlled future, as apprehended by those to whom 1984 is a date in the remote but recent past.)
In the less distant past, these books used to be banned in every country under Communist rule, and are still occasionally suppressed in the remaining single-party despotisms that disfigure the globe as I write, while Animal Farm is sometimes forbidden reading in the Islamic world—because of its focus on pigs. Even as I began to write this introduction, a stage version of Animal Farm was being produced by a bold theater group in Beijing, where the novel itself is still officially unobtainable.
So wide and so secure is Orwell’s reputation, in other words, that it can be shocking to realise that both of his masterpieces were very nearly aborted or strangled at birth. Animal Farm was almost denied publication, and 1984 had to be finished in a terrible, desperate burst of energy on the part of a man who knew that he was dying. Probably nothing would have surprised their author more than the near-orthodox esteem in which his last two novels are now held: he never in his life expected to be “required reading” in respectable schools. The continuing censorship would have surprised him much less.
Animal Farm was written during the Second World War, at a time when London was being bombed by the Nazis and Churchill’s Britain was an official friend of Stalin’s Russia. Orwell despised Hitler and fascism and had fought and been wounded as a volunteer soldier for the Spanish Republic, but
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