Animal Farm - A Fairy Story
British first edition, 1945
Animal Farm (1945) is George Orwell's satirical allegory of revolution and its betrayal, in which a group of farm animals overthrow their human master and establish a society of their own, only to watch it replicate the very tyranny they rebelled against. It is one of the most widely read political fables of the twentieth century. British first edition, published by Secker & Warburg in August 1945. The book was completed in 1943 but struggled to find a publisher, as several houses were reluctant to criticize the Soviet Union during wartime. When it finally appeared, it was produced under wartime paper restrictions, and the dust jacket was cheaply made. As a result, the first printing is notably scarce, and copies in any collectible condition are genuinely rare. The subtitle A Fairy Story, present on the British first edition title page, was dropped from the American and most subsequent editions.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth boards. London: Secker & Warburg, 1945. #10309.
Very good in original dust jacket with minor shelf wear and nicks, slight loss at spine ends, with some edge wear along spine folds. Overall, a pleasing copy.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth boards. London: Secker & Warburg, 1945. #10309.
Very good in original dust jacket with minor shelf wear and nicks, slight loss at spine ends, with some edge wear along spine folds. Overall, a pleasing copy.
Additional Details
Animal Farm was written by George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) and published in August 1945 by Secker & Warburg in London. Orwell had completed it in 1943, but finding a publisher proved difficult. Several houses declined it, including Victor Gollancz and Jonathan Cape, largely because the book's satirical target was the Soviet Union, then a wartime ally of Britain. The manuscript was famously rejected by T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber as well. When Secker & Warburg finally agreed to publish it, wartime paper shortages made even a modest print run a logistical challenge. The first edition appeared in a cheaply produced dust jacket that has not survived in collectible condition in more than a small fraction of known copies.
The book is structured as a beast fable, a form with roots in Aesop and La Fontaine, in which animals stand in for human types and social forces. Orwell uses the form with deliberate simplicity. The prose is plain, the story moves quickly, and the allegorical correspondences are clear. The Russian Revolution, the rise of Stalin, the purge trials, the rewriting of history, and the ultimate betrayal of the working class by the revolutionary leadership are all legible in the narrative without requiring the reader to decode them.
The story begins at Manor Farm, where an elderly boar named Old Major gathers the animals to share a vision of liberation. Man, he argues, is the source of all the animals' suffering. Remove Man, and the produce of their labor will be their own. Old Major dies shortly after delivering this speech, but his ideas are taken up by the pigs, who are the most intellectually capable animals on the farm. Two pigs in particular, Napoleon and Snowball, emerge as leaders. When the neglectful farmer Mr. Jones fails to feed his animals, they spontaneously revolt and drive him off the property. The farm is renamed Animal Farm and governed by Seven Commandments, the most important of which is the last: All animals are equal.
What follows is a study in the mechanics of political betrayal. Authority consolidates gradually. The pigs begin making decisions on behalf of the collective. Napoleon, the more ruthless of the two pig leaders, drives Snowball out of the farm and then systematically erases the memory of his rival's contributions, eventually rewriting history to cast Snowball as a traitor who had been working against the animals from the beginning. The public confession and execution sequences are a direct parallel to Stalin's show trials of the 1930s.
Throughout, Orwell traces the corruption of language alongside the corruption of power. The pigs' spokesman Squealer is the novel's most chilling figure in some ways, more so than Napoleon, because he represents the mechanism by which outright lies are made to seem reasonable. The Seven Commandments are quietly amended to accommodate each new abuse: "No animal shall sleep in a bed" becomes "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." "No animal shall kill any other animal" becomes "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." Each revision is presented as a clarification of what was always meant, and the animals, whose memories are short and whose access to the written record is limited, accept the revisions.
The novel ends with the pigs walking upright, wearing clothes, carrying whips, and sitting down to dinner with the human farmers they once overthrew. The farm has been renamed Manor Farm. The final Commandment reads: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Looking through the farmhouse window, the other animals can no longer tell the pigs from the men.
Orwell was explicit about his intentions. In a preface written for a Ukrainian edition, he described Animal Farm as his attempt to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose, and to expose the Soviet myth while the Soviet Union was still seen in the West as a beacon of socialist hope. The book's publication in 1945 coincided with the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, and its reception was shaped by that political moment. It remains one of the most widely read political allegories in the English language, translated into dozens of languages and consistently taught in schools around the world.
The novella has been adapted several times, most notably in a 1954 British animated film, the first feature-length animated film produced in the United Kingdom. The production was covertly funded by the CIA as part of its cultural Cold War activities, a fact that did not become public knowledge until decades later. A live-action television adaptation appeared in 1999.
The book is structured as a beast fable, a form with roots in Aesop and La Fontaine, in which animals stand in for human types and social forces. Orwell uses the form with deliberate simplicity. The prose is plain, the story moves quickly, and the allegorical correspondences are clear. The Russian Revolution, the rise of Stalin, the purge trials, the rewriting of history, and the ultimate betrayal of the working class by the revolutionary leadership are all legible in the narrative without requiring the reader to decode them.
The story begins at Manor Farm, where an elderly boar named Old Major gathers the animals to share a vision of liberation. Man, he argues, is the source of all the animals' suffering. Remove Man, and the produce of their labor will be their own. Old Major dies shortly after delivering this speech, but his ideas are taken up by the pigs, who are the most intellectually capable animals on the farm. Two pigs in particular, Napoleon and Snowball, emerge as leaders. When the neglectful farmer Mr. Jones fails to feed his animals, they spontaneously revolt and drive him off the property. The farm is renamed Animal Farm and governed by Seven Commandments, the most important of which is the last: All animals are equal.
What follows is a study in the mechanics of political betrayal. Authority consolidates gradually. The pigs begin making decisions on behalf of the collective. Napoleon, the more ruthless of the two pig leaders, drives Snowball out of the farm and then systematically erases the memory of his rival's contributions, eventually rewriting history to cast Snowball as a traitor who had been working against the animals from the beginning. The public confession and execution sequences are a direct parallel to Stalin's show trials of the 1930s.
Throughout, Orwell traces the corruption of language alongside the corruption of power. The pigs' spokesman Squealer is the novel's most chilling figure in some ways, more so than Napoleon, because he represents the mechanism by which outright lies are made to seem reasonable. The Seven Commandments are quietly amended to accommodate each new abuse: "No animal shall sleep in a bed" becomes "No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." "No animal shall kill any other animal" becomes "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." Each revision is presented as a clarification of what was always meant, and the animals, whose memories are short and whose access to the written record is limited, accept the revisions.
The novel ends with the pigs walking upright, wearing clothes, carrying whips, and sitting down to dinner with the human farmers they once overthrew. The farm has been renamed Manor Farm. The final Commandment reads: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Looking through the farmhouse window, the other animals can no longer tell the pigs from the men.
Orwell was explicit about his intentions. In a preface written for a Ukrainian edition, he described Animal Farm as his attempt to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose, and to expose the Soviet myth while the Soviet Union was still seen in the West as a beacon of socialist hope. The book's publication in 1945 coincided with the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, and its reception was shaped by that political moment. It remains one of the most widely read political allegories in the English language, translated into dozens of languages and consistently taught in schools around the world.
The novella has been adapted several times, most notably in a 1954 British animated film, the first feature-length animated film produced in the United Kingdom. The production was covertly funded by the CIA as part of its cultural Cold War activities, a fact that did not become public knowledge until decades later. A live-action television adaptation appeared in 1999.
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