In this blog post, I’ll summarize how George Orwell’s life and experiences led to the world of ‘Animal Farm’.

Birth and Family Background

George Orwell, whose birth name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, Bengal, India. His father was a British civil servant of Scottish descent who worked for the Indian administration, and his mother came from a family of timber merchants in Myanmar.

Childhood and School Years — The Formation of an Introverted Sensibility

As a child, he had an introverted and sensitive personality. At the age of eight, he enrolled in a private preparatory school near Eastbourne attended by the children of the upper class. There, he experienced stark class distinctions and endured a period of depression and distress.
Although he spent six years at the preparatory school, what he gained during that time was not so much academic achievement as a profound sense of loneliness, alienation, and inferiority, along with a searing awareness of the contradictions inherent in the rigid British class system. This led to the development of an aversion to organization and strict control.
After graduating from preparatory school, he entered Eton College in 1917 and graduated in 1922; however, due to financial circumstances and other factors, he was unable to attend Cambridge.

Service in the Indian and Burmese Police and His Literary Foundations

From 1922 to 1927, he moved from India to Burma to serve as a police officer. As a member of the colonial administration, he gradually became disillusioned with his role in dealing with the indigenous population, and this experience had a profound impact on his intellectual development.
His work ‘Burmese Days’, published in 1934, was based on his experiences in Burma, and these experiences served as a crucial foundation for his later political insights and literary themes. In 1927, he returned home on leave due to deteriorating health and subsequently resigned from the police force.

Experiences of Poverty in Paris and London — The Birth of the Pen Name “George Orwell”

In 1928, he left for Paris, where he took on menial jobs such as washing dishes in hotels and restaurants. Eventually, driven by financial hardship, he spent about 18 months living a miserable life on the streets, among vagrants and in slums.
With the 1933 publication of his debut work, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, which candidly chronicled the hardships of this period, he began using the pen name “George Orwell” for the first time.

Marriage and the Spanish Civil War — Political Awakening

In 1936, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy and left London to move to Hertfordshire. Toward the end of that same year, he traveled to Barcelona to cover the Spanish Civil War.
In Barcelona, he joined the Marxist United Workers’ Party (POUM) and fought on the Aragon front as a member of the militias. In early 1937, he was wounded in the neck during combat and evacuated to Barcelona.
Later, as the Communist crackdown on the POUM intensified, Orwell narrowly escaped to France after facing several near-arrests. His experiences in Spain left him with the strong impression that communism was a form of fascism disguised as socialism.

The Writing and Publication of “Animal Farm”

When World War II broke out, Orwell attempted to enlist in the army but was unable to do so due to health issues; it was during this period that he began writing “Animal Farm.” He spent about six months developing the concept and completed the manuscript in February 1944.
However, publishers in Britain and the United States at the time were reluctant to publish it, rejecting it on the grounds that it was critical of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, ‘Animal Farm’ was not published until August 1945, immediately after the end of World War II.
It received high praise in both Britain and the United States upon its release and has since been translated into numerous languages, becoming a timeless classic with tens of millions of copies sold to date. Thanks to this work, Orwell gained both literary fame and financial stability.

Correspondence Between Satirical Targets and Symbols

On the surface, it is generally interpreted that ‘Animal Farm’ is a satire aimed at the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. However, it is important to note that the satire was not directed solely at the Soviet Union; countries such as Britain and Germany—which maintained close diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union amid the global political landscape of the time—were also targets of satire.
When the characters and events are correlated with real-life figures and nations, the following analogies emerge: Old Major corresponds to Lenin, Napoleon to Stalin, Snowball to Trotsky, the nine guard dogs trained by Napoleon to the secret police, Jones to the Russian Tsar, Pilkington to Britain, and Frederick to Germany.
Furthermore, Snowball’s exile can be read as symbolizing Trotsky’s exile; the construction of the windmills, the Soviet Five-Year Plans; trade with Frederick, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact; and events such as the card game between Pilkington and Napoleon can be interpreted as symbolizing diplomatic events like the Tehran Conference.

Universal Patterns of Power and Orwell’s Insight

The conflicts among the characters in this novel, as well as the establishment and development of Animal Farm, are not merely the story of a specific regime during a specific period. Rather, they reveal universal patterns that inevitably emerge when power structures operate in concrete terms.
Although Orwell targeted the concrete realities of Stalinism, his keen insight pierced through to the very essence of power and the laws governing its operation that lay hidden behind it. Using the form of a political fable, he laid bare the concealment, distortion, and obliteration of the truth by those in power, as well as the terror of media control.

Later Years and Legacy

After returning to England in 1945 following his wife’s death from illness, Orwell immediately began conceptualizing ‘1984’. However, due to his tuberculosis, which had worsened around this time, he stopped writing fiction and criticism in the spring of 1946 and moved to Banhill Farm on the Isle of Jura off the west coast of Scotland.
‘1984’ was nearly complete by the end of 1947, but his illness forced him to be hospitalized in Glasgow for a time. In 1949, after battling his illness while shuttling between sanatoriums and hospitals, he returned to Banhill and finally completed this masterpiece.
Orwell died suddenly in January 1950 at University College Hospital after coughing up blood; he was 47 years old. His works, which combine political insight with literary merit, remain widely read and highly influential to this day.