[In the following essay, Jones posits that H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau was Orwell's inspiration for Animal Farm and draws parallels between the two works.]

I

In his Preface to the Ukranian edition of Animal Farm, Orwell said that the germ of his story came from seeing

a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.¹

But if this was the actual stimulus, it was not the only source of Orwell's tale. A much more extensive and significant source is H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau.

That Orwell knew and admired Wells's work is evident from his letters and essays. In May 1947 he said that Wells was one of the favourite authors of his boyhood (C.E.J.L. IV. 394) and a year later, that he was a ‘very early influence on me’ (C.E.J.L. IV. 478). We also know that he had been reading The Island of Dr. Moreau so closely that in 1941 he was able to point out to Wells himself the persistence of misprints ‘in edition after edition since 1896’ (C.E.J.L. IV. 326).²

Wells's singularly horrifying story is about a large-scale experiment carried out by a fanatical scientist in order to change the nature of animals and their relation to each other by turning them into men. By means of vivisection the creatures ‘are carven and wrought into new shapes’ (M. 81).³ But the transformation is as much mental as physical. The scientist, Dr. Moreau, argues that ‘the possibilities of vivisection do not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis; a pig may be educated. The mental structure is even less determinate than the bodily’ (M. 82). Consequently, by using hypnotism, he attempts to replace ‘old inherent instincts by new suggestions’ and by ‘moral education’ to change pugnacity into self-sacrifice and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion. Finally, by operating on the larynx and making the animals capable of uttering human speech, he enables them ‘to frame different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained’ (M. 82).

The most significant way in which this later, and more efficient, Frankenstein brainwashes his new community was by means of a code of laws which they have to memorise and rehearse. The set of laws remarkably anticipates the Seven Commandment of Animal Farm—another code designed as ‘an unalterable law by which all the animals … must live for ever after’ (AF [Animal Farm]. 22). In The Island of Dr. Moreau the laws run:

‘Not to go on all fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to claw Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’

(M. 66)

Wells's narrator, Prendick, an amateur scientist shipwrecked and forced to live on Moreau's island, is made by the Beast folk not only to participate in the ceremony of repeating the Laws ‘with rhythmic fervour’, but also to witness the singing of another anthem that deifies the ‘Master’, Moreau—and one which, this time, foretells the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the figure of Big Brother:

His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.
His is the Hand that heals.

(M. 67)

One is inevitably reminded of Winston's response to O'Brien—‘He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend.’ (1984. 196)—and of the ‘hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother’ with its ‘deep, slow rhythmical chant of “B-B.” … “B-B.” … “B-B.” … a heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms’ (1984. 17). There is the same demand for total faith, the same contradictory attribution of cruelty and love.

Well's story is an island fable in the tradition of Utopia, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels. His island community is both an ironic and a pathetic image of the operation of evolution. The animals in their changing state represent man as the victim of the process of evolution; as a creature painfully evolving his humanity; or, in Wells's own words, as ‘the round Palaeolithic savage in the square hole of the civilized state.’⁴ The power of evolution is conveyed in the figure of the amoral scientist Moreau, a man scornful of humanity and intent only on experiment. The narrator, Prendick, does not at first understand what he sees. He thinks the creatures that he meets are men, though of a repellent ugliness; later, that they are men on whom an obscene surgery has been practised; only from Moreau does he learn the truth. Ironically, after living with them for ten months, he increasingly sees the Beast People as an image of humanity; and when he returns to London, sees in Londoners the image of the beasts.

There might not at first seem to be much in common between this story and Orwell's. The totalitarian power in Wells is not a party but a process; the dictatorial figures are not politicians but scientists. But basically both fables are about intelligent and ruthless men who reorganize and exploit simpler folk into forming a new kind of society, ostensibly for their own benefit, and who use indoctrination and terror as their instruments for keeping them in subjection.

The initiating vision in each story is of a ‘strange dream’ (AF. 9) told by a man in rebellion against his society. Major's dream is well known and does not need repeating. In Wells's fable, Moreau tells Prendick how he was expelled from England for research which offended the nation and so set up his new laboratory and experiment on an uninhibited island. But Moreau is a more complex character than the Major. He might be thought of as combining the authority of Major with the cruelty of Animal Farm's Napoleon; or as having both the compelling power and the scientific sadism of an O'Brien. Like O'Brien (1984. 206), Moreau talks with fanaticism about his conditioning of his subjects; he dismisses the pain caused as merely part of the process of conditioning, and his account of the creation of his first man out of the gorilla is gruesomely close to O'Brien's experiments on Winston, ‘the last man’ (1984. 217):

… I made my first man. All the week, night and day, I moulded him. With him it was chiefly the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed.

(M. 85)

In each case, too, the pain inflicted produces not hatred and revulsion but worship. In the Ministry of Love, with the pain only ‘half forgotten’, Winston

opened his eyes and looked up gratefully at O'Brien. At sight of the heavy, lined face, so ugly and so intelligent, his heart seemed to turn over … He had never loved him so deeply as at this moment. …

(1984. 202)

The peculiar reverence for O'Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. …

(1984. 220)

The reverence, in this case of course, has to be transferred to Big Brother—O'Brien explains that ‘it is not enough to obey him: you must love him’ (1984. 227)—and Winston finally achieves it. Moreau's Beast Folk worship him in the same way:

As they came forward they began to cringe toward Morea and chant, quite regardless of one another fragments of the latter half of the litany of the Law: ‘His is the Hand that wounds, His is the Hand that heals. …’

(M. 102)

To the independent narrator, Prendick, however, Moreau's dictatorial nature is always apparent. He is everywhere accompanied by huge dogs that keep the Beast Folk in terror and—again like Orwell's Napoleon—he always carries a whip. In fact, the title that Moreau, his assistant Montgomery, and Prendick assume is ‘We of the Whips’ (M. 132). The ferocity of the dogs in the attack on the Ape-Man (M. 15) recalls several incidents in Animal Farm, and the pursuit of the rebel Leopard Man (M. 105) is reminiscent of the baying hunt after Snowball (AF. 39-40).

The first of the incidents on Animal Farm involving the dogs also has a significant corollary in The Island of Dr. Moreau. In both stories, the first threat to any possibility of the maintenance of a communal ideal comes in attacks by one set of animals on another. In Wells, the slaughter increases as the experiment to reverse the animals' natural tendencies breaks down and the power of propaganda fails. The first signs of reversal were the dismembered bodies of rabbits; just as, in Animal Farm the threat comes in the dog's attack on the rats. Under the influence of the Major, the inhabitants of Animal Farm tried to arrest the return to nature by voting that ‘rats were comrades’; and Moreau's creatures, similarly, follow the Sayer of the Law—their Squealer, ‘a grey, horrible, crooked creature’ (M. 117)—in recantations and confessions.

‘Evil are the punishments of those who break the Law. None escape.’

‘None escape’, said the Beast Folk.

‘None, none’, said the Ape Man. ‘None escape. See! I did a little thing, a wrong thing once. I jabbered, jabbered, stopped talking … I am burnt, branded in the hand. He is great, he is good’.

‘None escape’, said the great creature in the corner.

‘None escape’, said the Beast People, looking askance at one another.

(M. 68-69)

Prendick, appalled at the humiliation of the animals, tries to rouse them to rebellion, following the same line of thought as Orwell himself when he saw the little boy whipping the horse:

‘You who listen’, I cried, pointing now to Moreau, and shouting past him to the Beast Men, ‘You who listen! Do you not see these men still fear you, go in dread of you? Why then do you fear them? You are many—’

(M. 75)

But there is no hope. Those who do break the Law in following their animal natures are hunted down, and in each case the fifth commandment, ‘Not to chase other men’, is abandoned. The same happens on Animal Farm in the abandonment of their sixth commandment, ‘No animal shall kill any other animal’. But while in Wells the collapse of indoctrination and the return to the state of nature is at last recognised by the animals—‘The House of Pain—there is no House of Pain’ (M. 137)—the greater poignancy of Animal Farm, as the animals return to their subject status, is caught in their continuing acceptance of the propaganda of equality:

None of the old dreams had been abandoned. The Republic of the Animals which the Major had foretold … was still believed in … If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went on two legs. No creature called any other creature ‘Master’. All animals were equal.

(AF 85-6)

There are many slighter similarities between the two stories. Boxer's inability to get beyond four letters of the alphabet mirrors Moreau's gorilla who was taught to read, ‘or at least to pick out letters’ (M. 86); Mollie's pretty ribbons and the pigs' clothes are echoes of the garments that the Beast Folk wear so incongruously; even Animal Farm's preacher, Moses, the ‘clever talker’ about Sugarcandy Mountain (AF. 17), is anticipated by the evangelical Monkey Man and his ‘Big thinks’ (M. 140).

II

Orwell's use of the animal fable, however, is radically different from that of Wells. The disturbing effect of Wells's story arises from its mixture not only of animal and human but also of realism and myth. We travel with the confused Prendick through a vivid and horrifying sequence of incidents, of animal smells, hunted terror and appalling butchery. Through these events, Wells conveys a fearful and even misanthropic picture of the animal nature of man. The process begins with Prendick's thinking at first that the animals were men and writing of ‘the black-faced man’ (M. 14), ‘the deformed man’ (M. 15), ‘brown men’ (M. 29), ‘the grey-haired man’ (M. 35). The confrontation with Moreau brings the explanation of the ‘manufactured monsters’ and Prendick's ensuing terror of the Leopard-Man, the Hyaena-Swine Man and others. But the direction of the narrative gradually changes again as Prendick gets used to them:

I would see one of the bovine creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth and find myself trying hard to recall how he differed from some truly human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-Bear Woman's vulpine shifty face, strongly human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.

(M. 95-6)

As he gets to know them through ten months of living together, they become for him the image of humanity; ‘the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason and fate in its simplest form’ (M. 108). It will not be surprising to readers of Swift that Prendick retains these feelings when back in London; that he meets prowling women, furtive men, weary pale workers coughing by, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer, and ragged tails of gibing children; and that when he goes to a chapel, he finds that ‘the preacher gibbered Big Thinks, even as the Ape Man had done’ (M. 150). Even Prendick himself is tinged with the element of animal in his nature: he is tempted to cannibalism when at extremity in the lifeboat, loves the taste of meat, and is several times satirically endowed with animal characteristics. He ends his story, fearing that he was ‘not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain’ (M. 150-1).

In Animal Farm, in contrast, we meet a totally different experience. It is ‘A Fairy Story’, a world of formal allegory, with allegory's distancing and universalising effect. This is because Orwell wants to use only one element of Wells's complex story. Wells, somewhat confusingly, includes different responses to his plot: both an agonised image of human suffering under the tyranny of evolution, and a satiric exposure of the animal nature of man. The writing is sometimes indebted to Hardy⁵ and at others to Swift. He employs Moreau as the image of the sadistic tyrant and the animals as sufferers, and uses the figure of Prendick to focus the distress because he shares both roles.

Orwell, however, was writing not about the general nature of man but about the specific issue of the corrupting nature of absolute power. He needed both to keep separate the images of tyrant and victim, and to remove the confusing presence of an intermediary, participating, narrator.⁶ Instead, he adopted the traditional form of children's fable and gave us two carefully separated images: of animals as victim and of man as tyrant. The animals, of course, as William Golding indicates, convey human responses—

George Orwell's splendid fable, having to choose between falsifying the human situation and falsifying the nature of animals, chooses to do the latter. Often we forget they are animals. They are people, and Orwell's brilliant mechanics have placed them in a situation where he can underline every moral point he cares to make.⁷

We recall not only Boxer's loyalty and Clover's grief at the loss of her pastoral, but also Benjamin's alert scepticism about politicians, Mollie's human vanity and the cat's shrewd opportunism. But they do not adopt the human image: they retain the image of animals. The increasing corruption of the pigs, in contrast, can be caught in their changing image as they become more and more like dictatorial man. The satire of the Communist dictatorship is imaged in the one group of animals which insists on its common nature and destiny with the others but increasingly departs from it.

It is in his brilliant analysis and presentation of the role of Man that Orwell achieves his most penetrating satire. ‘Only get rid of Man’, says the Major, ‘and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free’. (AF. 13). Again, the relation to Wells works by contrast not similarity. In Wells's story, getting rid of Moreau freed the animals from his dictatorial power and they reverted to their earlier state. But this does not happen on Animal Farm. In Major's proposals there is an unperceived ambiguity. On the simple level of story, animals are animals and men are men. But on the allegorical level, some animals are simultaneously animals and men. Jones is simply Jones, but Napoleon is also Stalin. ‘Only get rid of Man’ works on the simple level of story; but if the pigs are simultaneously images of men, you do not get rid of Man simply by sacking Mr. Jones. The aspect of human nature that the pigs represent is a permanent part of the picture; and utopia that starts with the provision ‘Only get rid of Man’ is shown in its nature to be illusory. The historical allegory thus allows a separation between the animals and the pigs, and allows Orwell to extend his theme from that of a satire on a particular political philosophy to a more universal account of the age-old conflict between the governors and the governed.

Nineteen Eighty-Four reverted to a disturbing ambivalence that is closer to Wells's mixture of realism and myth. There is a deliberate uncertainty in the role of the narrator and consequently in the attitude to the people. Winston's early attitude to the proles has the same contempt as that of other members of the Party:

The Party claimed, of course to have liberated the proles from bondage … But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules … Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern … As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free’.

(1984. 60)

In the words of Symes, ‘The Proles are not human beings’. (1984. 46). After a bomb attack, in which his life was probably saved by one of the Proles, Smith casually kicks a severed hand into the gutter (1984. 71); and his growing belief, that ‘if there is hope, it lies with Proles’ (1984. 69), is challenged by their degraded condition after decades of Party rule. In a walk, very similar to Prendick's tour through the London suburbs, he sees

girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who played in the puddles and then scattered at angry yells from their mothers.

(1984. 69)

His growing egalitarianism is characterised as ‘a mythical truth and a palpable absurdity.’ (1984. 69)

But Winston Smith is not Orwell. He is shown to be wrong at first about many other people—about Julia, O'Brien, Charrington—and it would be absurd to identify the attitudes of the characters with those of the author. Winston gradually learns the centrality of human values, and in his last moment of free insight he acknowledges the beauty and power of the representative figure hanging clothes on the line:

The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distance … The future belonged to the Proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at least it would be the world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity … The Proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

(1984. 175)

The religious euphoria of his language alerts the reader to the tragic reversal that is immediately to follow. O'Brien convinces him that History like all other structures of thought is malleable and that the Party will continue in perpetual dictatorship, stamping on the faces of the people. But again, the mad and enthusiastic O'Brien is not Orwell, either, and the reader does not accept his version of things. The book's material is not presented as an image of the truth, a prophecy of the future, but as a monstrous parody, a black satire of the possibilities that technology offers to the ruthless power-seekers of communism and capitalism. The word ‘parody’ is Orwell's own description of the book in a press release he dictated on learning of early misreadings and mis-representations.⁸ The doctrines of O'Brien and the conditions of the Proles are there, not as in Wells to offer a picture of the human condition, but to provoke a response that will see the dangers and oppose the horrors:

The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you.⁹

Wells might be misanthropic and contemptuous of the uneducated mob, but Orwell's vision of the corruption of power, while allowing no easy optimism, defends the dignity of human nature and of the people. He did not share Wells's confidence in scientific socialism managed by an elite, and it is significant that he can re-shape Wells's powerful fable for radically different ends.

Notes

1. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. (Penguin, 1970), vol. 3, pp. 458-459. Hereafter C.E.J.L.

2. It is clear from the Preface to the Ukranian edition that it was about this time that Orwell was pondering Animal Farm: ‘the main outlines of the story were in my mind over a period of six years before it was actually written’ (C.E.J.L. III. 459).

3. H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Essex edn., vol. xlv, (Benn, London, 1927).

   Page references to both Wells and Orwell will be indicated immediately after each quotation, The Island of Dr. Moreau references being preceded by M, Animal Farm by AF and Nineteen Eighty-Four by 1984. The Animal Farm edition used is the Secker and Warburg edition, 1945; the Nineteen Eighty-Four edition is the Penguin.

4. The Island of Dr. Moreau expressed in the form of fiction ideas that Wells published in theoretical form in his essay ‘Human Evolution, An Artificial Process’. He summarised his argument thus:

   That in civilised man we have (1) an inherited factor, the natural man, who is the product of natural selection, the culminating ape … and (2) an acquired factor, the artificial man, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion and reasoned thought. In the artificial man we have all that makes the comforts and securities of a civilisation a possibility … And in this view, what we call Morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in the square hole of the civilised state. And Sin is the conflict of the two factors—as I have tried to convey in my Island of Dr. Moreau. (See H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Univ. of California Press, 1975).

5. See, for instance, the last page of Chapter XVI, including:

   A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence, and I, Moreau by his passion for research, Montgomery by his passion for drink, the Beast People, with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels. (M. 109)

6. See Raymond Williams, Orwell, (Fontana Modern Masters series), p. 69: ‘Animal Farm is unique in Orwell's writing in the absence of an Orwell figure’, and the subsequent argument.

7. See William Golding, ‘Fable’, The Hot Gates (Faber and Faber), p. 86.

8. See Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Secker and Warburg), p. 395.

9. Crick, op. cit., p. 395.