The Fable That Several Publishers Would Not Print

When George Orwell finished Animal Farm in early 1944, Britain was at war and the Soviet Union was its ally. A satire of the Russian Revolution and of Stalin's rule, told as the story of farm animals who overthrow their master and then fall under the rule of pigs, was not an easy book to place. Victor Gollancz, who had published Orwell before, is reported to have declined it, as did several others.

Jonathan Cape accepted the manuscript at first and then withdrew after consulting an official at the Ministry of Information, who advised that publication would be unwise. Faber and Faber also refused it. T S Eliot, writing for the firm in July 1944, praised the quality of the writing but said he was not persuaded by the political outlook that the fable seemed to express.

Secker and Warburg finally published the book in August 1945, when the war in Europe had ended. It sold well and became one of the most widely read political satires in the English language. Orwell had written a preface called The Freedom of the Press, arguing that the greater danger to free expression in England was not official censorship but a voluntary silence, in which people avoided criticising a powerful ally because it was unfashionable to do so. The preface was left out of the book and remained unpublished for decades.

Censorship does not always arrive as a ban.

The history of the book therefore carries a lesson that outlasts its subject. Censorship does not always arrive as a ban. It can come as the quiet decisions of editors, officials and readers who prefer not to hear something at an inconvenient time.