In Jonathan Cape’s rejection letter for Animal Farm, he wrote that “it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs”. TS Eliot was equally concerned about the leading species on the farm and thought they needed to be “more public-spirited”.
George Orwell later revealed in the preface to the Ukrainian edition that, for him, the animals were more than just necessary scaffolding for a fable. Describing how he arrived at the details of the story, he wrote: “One day… I saw 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.”
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