| Summary/Abstract |
When the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm concluded that their misery could be ‘summed up in a single word’, namely ‘Man’, and became resolved to ‘Remove Man from the scene’, it was a song that propelled them to revolution.1 Old Major the boar, the most highly regarded among the animals, addressed his comrades with a philosophical speech about the ‘tyranny of human beings’, going on to tell them of a dream he had had about life after the disappearance of Man. In particular, he recalled a song from the dream, ‘Beasts of England’, the lyrics of which contained ‘joyful tidings’ of a ‘golden future time’ when ‘tyrant man shall be o’erthrown’ and the fields ‘shall be trod by beasts alone’.2 The song ‘threw the animals into the wildest excitement’, much more so than Old Major’s speech had done, and before long ‘the whole farm burst out into Beasts of England in tremendous unison’.3 In short, the song forged a common bond among the animals, transcending their differences and imbuing Old Major’s plan to eradicate Man with a potency and resonance that his rhetoric had clearly lacked.
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