The History behind George Orwell’s Animal Farm Unpublished Preface
George Orwell’s long history behind the publication of Animal Farm is not new or surprising. The book was rejected by various publishers during World War II when Britain was working side-by-side with the Soviet Union against Hitler. Orwell’s book, which was a satire of Joseph Stalin’s reign and the happenings after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, was printed through the characters of Animal Farm. Napoleon the pig, who betrayed the revolution and became everything they had fought against was clearly a depiction of Stalin, while the elder and philosopher pig, Mayor, was a representation of Lenin, and Snowball, the pig with different ideas from Napoleon, was an undeniable reference to Trotsky and his exile from the Soviet Union.
These circumstances made Animal Farm a dangerous novel in the hands of any publisher between 1943–1945. T.S. Eliot, then director at the historic publishing house Faber & Faber, wrote to Orwell explaining the reasons for the rejection of his novel:
“We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skillfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane — and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.
On the other hand, we have no conviction (and I am sure none of other directors…
