The animals drive the farmer out and take over the farm. Orwell's 1945 fable is about what happens after that.
George Orwell's shortest work of fiction and his first popular success, published in London in August 1945 and subtitled A Fairy Story. On a run-down English farm, an old prize boar called Old Major tells the other animals that nearly everything they produce is taken from them by human beings, teaches them a song, and dies three nights later. The pigs work his speech up into a system they call Animalism, and when the farmer gets drunk one Midsummer's Eve and forgets to feed the stock, the animals chase him off the property in an afternoon. The harder part comes next: a harvest to bring in without hands, seven commandments painted on the barn wall, two young boars who disagree about everything, and a windmill that half the farm believes in. Orwell wrote it in four months while Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, and four publishers refused it before one would print it.
George Orwell dated the writing at the foot of the last page: November 1943 to February 1944. He had had the central idea since 1937, and in a preface written for a Ukrainian edition in 1947 he traced it to a scene in the village where he was then living, watching a boy of about ten drive a huge cart-horse along a narrow path and whip it whenever it tried to turn. What struck him was that if such animals ever became aware of their own strength, people would have no power over them at all.
Getting the finished manuscript into print took longer than writing it. Orwell said afterwards that four publishers refused the book. Among them were Victor Gollancz, who had published his earlier work, and Faber and Faber, where T. S. Eliot wrote on 13 July 1944 that the firm agreed it was "a distinguished piece of writing" and that the fable was skilfully handled, but that they had no conviction it was the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation. Eliot added that since the pigs were plainly the cleverest animals and the best qualified to run the farm, someone might argue that what was wanted was not less communism but "more public-spirited pigs". Britain was allied with the Soviet Union at the time, and the book is an attack on Soviet communism.
Space was left in the first edition for a preface Orwell had written, called "The Freedom of the Press". It never appeared there. In it he described a publisher who accepted the book and then consulted the Ministry of Information, which advised him against it, and he set out an argument about self-censorship in a free country. The best-known sentence in it is: "If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." The typescript came to light only in 1972, when the scholar Ian Angus found it, and it was printed in the Times Literary Supplement on 15 September that year with an introduction by Bernard Crick.
Orwell was direct about what the story was for, and it is worth separating what he said from what has been read into it since. In the Ukrainian preface he wrote that on returning from Spain he thought of "exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages". Writing to the American editor Dwight Macdonald in December 1946, he called the book "primarily a satire on the Russian revolution" but said he had meant it to have a wider application, and he named the turning point himself: "The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt)." The elaborate keys that circulate around the book, matching each animal and each episode to a Soviet figure or event, are largely the work of critics rather than of Orwell. The story does not need them. It is legible to a reader who knows nothing about Russia, which is exactly what he was aiming at.
Chapters I to IV. Old Major, a twelve-year-old prize boar, calls the animals of the Manor Farm into the big barn one night to describe a dream and to tell them what he has worked out in a long life: that their lives are miserable, laborious and short, that man is the only creature who consumes without producing, and that everything would change if human beings were removed. He teaches them a song, "Beasts of England", and dies three nights later. Two young boars, Snowball and Napoleon, together with a small fat pig named Squealer, turn the speech into a doctrine called Animalism and teach it in secret. The rebellion arrives sooner than anyone expects. Mr Jones, the farmer, gets drunk on Midsummer's Eve, and the animals go a whole day unfed; when they break into the store-shed and the men come at them with whips, they drive all five off the property. They rename the place Animal Farm, paint Seven Commandments on the end wall of the barn, and bring in the biggest harvest the farm has ever had. The five buckets of milk from the first morning quietly disappear, and by autumn the milk and the windfall apples have been reserved for the pigs on the grounds that pigs are brainworkers. In October the men come back to retake the farm and are beaten in what the animals name the Battle of the Cowshed.
Chapters V to VII. Mollie, the white mare who liked sugar and ribbons, leaves. Snowball and Napoleon disagree at every point where disagreement is possible, and most bitterly over a windmill Snowball has designed to give the farm electric power and a three-day week. On the day of the vote, Napoleon produces nine enormous dogs — the puppies he took from their mothers months earlier and reared alone — and they chase Snowball off the farm. The Sunday debates are abolished. Three weeks later the windmill is announced again, now as Napoleon's own idea. Building it means quarrying stone by hauling boulders up a slope and toppling them over the edge, and it means trading with human beings through a Willingdon solicitor called Whymper, which the animals half remember voting against. A November gale flattens the half-built mill; Snowball, who has not been seen since the spring, is blamed and sentenced to death in his absence. The following winter brings real hunger. When the hens are ordered to surrender four hundred eggs a week, they revolt and are starved back to their nesting boxes. Then Napoleon calls the farm into the yard, and animals begin confessing to conspiracies with Snowball, and the dogs kill them where they stand. That evening "Beasts of England" is abolished.
Chapters VIII and IX. The commandments on the barn wall keep turning out to have words in them that nobody remembered. Napoleon is now addressed as our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, takes his meals alone off the farmhouse china with two dogs waiting on him, and has a black cockerel walk in front of him to announce his speeches. He sells the farm's timber to Mr Frederick of Pinchfield, insisting on cash, and the banknotes turn out to be forgeries. Frederick's men arrive with guns the next morning and blow the rebuilt windmill to pieces with blasting powder; the animals drive them off at heavy cost and are told it was a victory. Rations are cut again, except for the pigs and the dogs. Thirty-one piglets are born to the four sows, and Napoleon is the only boar on the farm. It is proclaimed a republic and Napoleon is elected president, unopposed. Boxer, the cart-horse who has done more work than any three animals and who has been counting the months to his retirement, splits a hoof, will not rest, and one summer evening goes down in the shafts of a cart on the way to the windmill.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.
The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
Ten chapters, about a hundred pages, and no difficulty anywhere on the surface. Orwell set out to write something that could be understood by almost anyone and translated easily into other languages, and the plainness is the achievement rather than a limitation.
Squealer wins every argument on the farm with two moves: figures nobody can check, and the reminder that the alternative is the old farmer coming back. He never says reduction; he says readjustment. Asked about a rule the animals remember voting on, he asks whether they have any record of it in writing.
Written while Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, refused by four publishers, and published a fortnight after the war ended. The preface Orwell wrote about that experience was itself suppressed for twenty-seven years.
A large, fierce-looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm. He is not much of a talker and has a reputation for getting his own way. Early on he takes nine newly weaned puppies away to educate privately, and the farm forgets they exist.
The other young boar of the Rebellion: quicker in speech than Napoleon, more inventive, and the one who can write. He paints the Seven Commandments on the barn wall, organises committees for everybody, and designs a windmill that would give the farm electric light and a three-day week.
The cart-horse the farm runs on: nearly eighteen hands and as strong as any two ordinary horses. He is not clever, and he knows it. His answer to every setback is "I will work harder", and after the first year he adds a second maxim: "Napoleon is always right."
The small fat pig who explains things. Round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements and a shrill voice, with a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail while he argues that the other animals find somehow very persuasive. They say he could turn black into white.
The twelve-year-old prize boar whose speech in the barn starts everything. He had been exhibited under the name Willingdon Beauty, has had over four hundred children, and dies three nights after he speaks.
The donkey: the oldest animal on the farm and the worst tempered. He can read as well as any pig and almost never does, refuses to give an opinion about the Rebellion, and is quietly devoted to Boxer.
The stout motherly mare who never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. She is the farm's memory: the animal who keeps going to the barn wall to check the commandments against what she thinks she remembers agreeing to.
The farmer the animals drive out. He was a capable farmer once, lost money in a lawsuit and took to drinking; the Rebellion happens on an evening when he has forgotten to feed the stock. His name is used on the farm for years afterwards as the alternative to obedience.
The foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr Jones's trap. She cares about sugar and about the red ribbons her mane is plaited with, and she is the first animal to ask out loud what the Rebellion is going to cost her.
The tame raven, who tells the animals about Sugarcandy Mountain — a country a little way beyond the clouds where it is Sunday seven days a week and lump sugar grows on the hedges. He was Mr Jones's especial pet, does no work, and the pigs never quite get rid of him.
The white goat, and the farm's reader. She reads better than the dogs, spells the commandments out loud when Clover asks her to, and used to read scraps of newspaper to the others in the evenings.
The flock. They cannot learn the Seven Commandments, so Snowball reduces the whole of Animalism to one maxim for their benefit — and from then on the sheep are the loudest voice on the farm and the reliable way to end a discussion.
There are three at the start — Bluebell, Jessie and Pincher. Their nine puppies are taken away as soon as they are weaned to be educated privately by Napoleon, and they come back as the thing that settles arguments on Animal Farm.
The owner of Foxwood, the large neglected farm on one side of Animal Farm: an easy-going gentleman farmer who spends most of his time fishing or hunting according to the season. He and Mr Frederick dislike each other too much to act together.
The owner of Pinchfield, the smaller and better-kept farm on the other side: a tough, shrewd man, perpetually involved in lawsuits, with a name for driving hard bargains. The stories that reach Animal Farm about how he treats his own animals are the worst in the book.
The solicitor in Willingdon who acts as Animal Farm's broker with the outside world. A sly-looking little man with side whiskers, in a very small way of business, who worked out before anybody else that a farm run by animals would need somebody to sell its eggs.
A pig with a remarkable gift for composing songs and poems. He sits on the platform beside Napoleon and Squealer, writes the song that replaces "Beasts of England", and composes the ode "Comrade Napoleon", which is painted on the barn wall under a portrait of Napoleon in profile executed by Squealer in white paint.
A young pig given the job of tasting all Napoleon's food before he eats it, in case of poison. He is named once, when the precautions are stepped up after three hens confess to a plot, and never mentioned again.
She comes in last to Old Major's speech, looks round for the warmest place, and purrs through the whole of it without listening to a word. She votes on both sides of the question of whether rats are comrades, cannot be found when there is work to be done, and disappears just before the animals are called into the yard for the executions.
The farmer's wife. She is asleep and snoring on the first page, watches the Rebellion from the bedroom window, flings a few possessions into a carpet bag and slips out of the farm by another way. Her green tablecloth becomes the flag, and a piece of her blue ribbon is what tempts Mollie in the farmhouse.
The only animals on Animal Farm who mount a rebellion of their own. Told to surrender four hundred eggs a week under a contract Napoleon has signed, and led by three young Black Minorca pullets, they fly up to the rafters and lay where the eggs will smash on the floor. One of them also asks the first awkward question in the book, about the milk.
The farm's messengers and its foreign policy. They flutter up to the rafters for Old Major's speech, are sent out in flights with instructions to mingle with the animals on neighbouring farms and teach them the tune of Beasts of England, cooing it in the elms, and they open the Battle of the Cowshed by muting on Jones's men from mid-air. They also bring back the two pieces of news nobody on the farm wants: where Mollie has gone, and that Boxer has fallen.
The only pigs who ever object out loud. When Napoleon abolishes the Sunday-morning debates they utter shrill squeals of disapproval from the front row and all four spring up and try to speak at once, and the dogs growl them back into their seats.
Napoleon's trumpeter. He marches in front of the Leader and lets out a loud cock-a-doodle-doo before Napoleon speaks, and he heads the procession at the Spontaneous Demonstrations, ahead of the dogs and the sheep.
Read in manuscript by · 1944-07
Eliot read the typescript as a director of Faber and Faber and turned it down on 13 July 1944, with a second director in agreement. He called it a distinguished piece of writing and said the firm had no conviction that this was the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the time. Secker & Warburg published the book in August 1945.
1937
George Orwell has the central idea, prompted, he later wrote, by watching a boy of about ten drive a huge cart-horse along a narrow path and whip it whenever it tried to turn.
November 1943 – February 1944
The book is written. Orwell prints those dates at the foot of the last page.
13 July 1944
T. S. Eliot, a director of Faber and Faber, declines it. Four publishers refuse the book in all.
17 August 1945
Secker & Warburg publish it in London as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, three months after the war in Europe ended.
1946
Harcourt, Brace publish the first American edition, and the book becomes a commercial success large enough to give Orwell financial security for the first time.
1947
Orwell writes a preface for a Ukrainian edition, produced in Munich for Ukrainian displaced persons. It is the fullest account he gave of why he wrote the book.
1954
John Halas and Joy Batchelor's animated version is released, the first British animated feature distributed worldwide. Its production was covertly financed by the CIA and its ending was rewritten.
15 September 1972
"The Freedom of the Press", the preface left out of the first edition, is printed in the Times Literary Supplement after the typescript is found by Ian Angus.
The two books everybody arrives by, written four years apart, and the argument is continuous: the fable shows a revolution going wrong, the novel shows what it settles into.
Read our take
The Spanish chapters are where he first watched the record being altered by people who had been there. This is that, told as a fairy story.
Read our take
The first novel and the most famous one, both about how a small group holds authority over a much larger one that outnumbers it.
Read our takeAnimal Farm is a short novel by George Orwell in which the animals of an English farm drive out the farmer and run the place themselves. It was published in London in 1945 and subtitled A Fairy Story. The animals talk, hold meetings and paint their own laws on the barn wall; the pigs, being the cleverest, take charge of organising everything, and the book follows what that arrangement turns into over the years that follow.
Yes, by George Orwell's own account. Writing to the American editor Dwight Macdonald in December 1946, he called the book "primarily a satire on the Russian revolution" and said he had meant it to have a wider application: that a violent conspiratorial revolution led by people who want power can only produce a change of masters. He also named one correspondence directly, calling the moment the pigs keep the milk and apples the turning point of the story and glossing it "(Kronstadt)". The detailed keys that match every animal and episode to a Soviet figure or event are the work of critics rather than of Orwell.
They are farm animals, and George Orwell writes them as characters rather than as labels. Old Major is the elderly boar whose speech starts the rebellion. Napoleon and Snowball are the two young boars who lead afterwards and disagree about everything. Squealer is the pig who explains the leadership's decisions. Boxer is the cart-horse who answers every problem with "I will work harder", Clover the mare who keeps checking the rules against her own memory, and Benjamin the donkey who can read and refuses to. The humans are Mr Jones, the farmer they expel, and his neighbours Mr Pilkington and Mr Frederick.
The subtitle was George Orwell's own, and it is on the first edition, published by Secker & Warburg in London on 17 August 1945. It names the form: a beast fable, the old kind of story in which animals talk and the moral is the point of the exercise. Many later printings drop it, which is why most readers know the book as Animal Farm alone.
Because Britain was allied with the Soviet Union when George Orwell finished it, and the book is an attack on Soviet communism. Four publishers refused it. Victor Gollancz, who had published his earlier books, was one; Faber and Faber was another, where T. S. Eliot wrote on 13 July 1944 that it was a distinguished piece of writing but that the firm had no conviction it was the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation. Secker & Warburg published it in August 1945, after the war in Europe had ended.
No. The talking animals and the subtitle suggest one, and it is often given to schoolchildren, but George Orwell wrote it for adults and it contains public executions, a purge and an animal sold to a knacker. The plainness of the writing was a deliberate choice: he wanted a story that could be understood by almost anyone and translated easily into other languages.
