George Orwell lived in Wallington between 1936 and 1940. It was this period that inspired his book, Animal Farm. It's the book I've reread more often than any other I own. "All men are equal, but some men are more equal than others" is just one of Orwell’s shrewd phrases. Simply brilliant.
Orwell had just married when he moved to Wallington in 1936. He rented a house there, "The Stores," which was once a kind of community shop. It came with a large plot of land, but Orwell rented some additional land in the village between Cambridge and Luton. He used this extra land primarily for pasture, where he kept goats. At first, only Muriel was there, but later Kate joined her. How cosy.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm long after he returned to London, but the story is largely based on his experiences in Wallington, as Oliver Lewis reports in his book The Orwell Tour. I bought it today at a bookshop in the heart of Brighton that advertised that no book would cost more than £5. That proved to be true. Each book cost £4.99.
I immediately started reading The Orwell Tour. It traces the locations in Orwell’s life; a man born in India, raised in Henley-on-Thames and Eton, wanderings from Burma, via Paris, Marrakech, and Catalonia in Spain—if that's not an oxymoron—to spend his final years primarily in London.
In between, Orwell also spent several years in Wallington with his new wife, Eileen. There they grew their own vegetables and Orwell was fascinated by the farm life around them. It's a region that still has a lot of pig farming. He studied these animals extensively and used his insights to create what I consider his masterpiece.
Muriel is one of the most sympathetic characters in Animal Farm. Muriel is a white goat in the book, just as she was in the real-life Wallington. Muriel is one of the few animals that can read, who understands that the pigs of Animal Farm are compromising their principles, but at the same time is too calm—and perhaps simply too old—to resist the dictatorial changes.
Resignation is the word that best describes Muriel. Trying to make the best of given circumstances. Even if the best isn't good, it can still be good enough. It's an attitude that garnered a lot of sympathy from Orwell, who, whatever others may say of him, was more reactionary than revolutionary.
Incidentally, Muriel wasn't the only named animal around Orwell's house in Wallington. There was a rooster named Henry Ford and a dog, a poodle, named Marx. They don't appear as such in Animal Farm, but the poodle (that George and Eileen both deeply disliked) did, in a sense, colour Animal Farm, which is above all a satire on Russian communism.
Interesting!