An allegory for our times

What if, one fine day, all the animals enslaved, exploited, mistreated and wantonly abused by humankind were to rise up against their oppressors? This was the opening premise of George Orwell’s brilliant parable “Animal Farm,” published in 1945. And 120 years earlier, it was also the premise of an equally dark political satire called “The Rebellion of the Beasts.”

When “The Rebellion of the Beasts” was first published in England in 1825, its author elected to conceal his identity under a pseudonym. It was an era of harsh political repression that had been going on for more than two decades, first in reaction to the unprecedented upheavals and transformations of the French Revolution, then continuing in the wake of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

Bright spots on this bleak scene were few. Although Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, even William Wilberforce, a leading opponent of slavery, had little sympathy for the British poor, whom he thought should be content with their lot. But their lot was lamentable, as prices rose, wages fell and the government’s only response to unrest was repression. In 1811, when British stocking makers were threatened with the death penalty for breaking the machines that were putting them out of work, only a young Lord Byron spoke out in their defense in the House of Lords.

The Corn Law, forbidding the import of cheap foreign grain, was passed in 1815, raising the price of bread. And 1819 was the date of the infamous Peterloo Massacre, when a cavalry charge against a crowd of 60,000 people demonstrating in favor of reform killed nine and injured 600. Percy Bysshe Shelley summed up the situation in the poem “England in 1819”:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring:

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th’untilled field ...

Among those who tried to keep alive the liberal tradition were the Hunt brothers, John (1775-1848) and Leigh (1784-1859), who throughout those bleak decades published an impressive array of reform-minded journals, political and literary, notably the Examiner and the Liberal. In 1813, the brothers were sentenced to two years in prison for publishing work deemed libelous to the Prince Regent, who would later reign as King George IV (they called him a liar and “a fat Adonis of fifty”).

This was neither the first nor the last time the Hunts were prosecuted, fined or threatened with legal action. And it is not surprising that, in such a climate, the author of a scathing political satire might choose to remain anonymous. Because it is known that “The Rebellion of the Beasts” was published by John Hunt, and no other candidates for authorship have emerged, most scholarly authorities have tentatively attributed the work to the more literarily active Leigh: essayist, critic, poet and playwright, friend of Shelley, Byron, Keats, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, but now best remembered for his slight, charming lyric “Jenny Kissed Me,” a tribute to Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the irascible Victorian sage.

In his introduction to “The Rebellion of the Beasts,” Douglas Anderson, a Tolkien scholar, discusses the reasons for believing Leigh Hunt to be its author. But, to his credit, he also admits that this attribution is a conjecture rather than a certainty. Still, clearly, it’s a pretty sound view: The piece’s strongly anti-royalist views are similar to Leigh Hunt’s, and critics have discerned stylistic qualities that indicate the piece was a product of his pen.

Not surprisingly, Anderson points out the parallels between “The Rebellion of the Beasts” and Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” but he scrupulously admits there is no concrete evidence that Orwell knew the earlier work. Whether there was any direct influence, similarities of time, circumstance and history seem to have played a part in shaping both works. Both Orwell and Hunt were writing their satires in the wake of revolutions that went wrong. Just as Orwell parodies Stalin’s destruction of Trotsky in his account of the power-hungry pig Napoleon’s campaign to destroy his former ally Snowball, so too Hunt parodies a situation that obtained in the French General Assembly. The rift between the radical Jacobins and the more moderate Girondins is mockingly echoed by the fierce partisanship that springs up among the beasts in the aftermath of their successful rebellion:

“The parties were three; the Ultra-Liberators, that secretly wished for the total destruction of the race of man; the Liberators, who wished a separate interest to be formed between man and brute, by which one should mutually assist the other; and the Enemies of Rebellion ... who were secretly playing the part of the tyrants; and these were the king’s horses, who ... were mortal enemies to the new order of things that deprived them of all their luxuries.... These parties contended grievously amongst one another; but it was evident that the ultra-revolutionists were gaining ground; and could swallow up everything by their violence and fury; and their party was much strengthened by several foreign brutes ... amongst these were tigers, baboons, and wolves.”

Indeed, like Tom Paine, William Blake and many other liberal Englishmen, Hunt was appalled by the bloodthirsty and chaotic goings-on that culminated in the Reign of Terror, and he gets in a few licks of his own against these “foreign” (as distinct from British) revolutionaries with a letter sent by the “Continental” beasts congratulating their British cousins on the success of their uprising:

“Send us a deputation of your finest young lambs. We have always admired their unsophisticated patriotism, and we long to embrace the south-down heroes, of whose good qualities the world says so much.” The reaction among human rulers to the beasts’ rebellion is much the same as the reaction of the British government to labor unrest: They resolve to take away the few remaining liberties of their fellow humans. Hunt has them going so far as to burn the Magna Carta, to the loud cheers and huzzahs of the country gentlemen.

As with Orwell, Hunt’s central insight is a sad one: the way revolutions have of turning tyrannical and a tendency, seemingly innate and intractable in human nature, propelling individuals, groups and societies toward inequality, despotism, cunning, crime, corruption and oppression. The animal who cunningly, connivingly and doggedly pushes himself into the dominant position is none other than the patient, “dumb,” formerly humble ass, which the narrator explains “by the well known fact that those have been long in a state of servility, are most likely to be corrupt in principle, and fond of dominion, and when by accident they have got power, to abuse it most odiously.”

Through a series of ugly subterfuges, the ass maneuvers himself into the position of dictator, then king. At this point, “The Rebellion of the Beasts” becomes a devastating attack on royalty and all its accompaniments. An official religion worshipping the god Mammoth is established; the priests are elephants, and no lay animal is permitted to peruse the contents of the sacred book titled (amusingly to us in the age of William Bennett) “The Book of Morals.”

Although the beasts’ original credo was based on the fact that they had enabled humans to prosper by working for them, the new society, like the old, becomes one in which any creature who does anything “useful” is scorned as “inferior.” Sycophancy reigns, aptly symbolized by the custom of “licking tail” -- the higher up, the better -- and there’s court intrigue aplenty. And before long, the asinine king institutes libel laws and censorship, measures with which the Hunt brothers were all too familiar.

A generation ago, Hunt’s dystopia would have struck the reader as a reminder of the bad old days we had left well behind. At the beginning of this new century and millennium, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair abolishing such time-honored legal safeguards as one’s right to protection against double jeopardy and with a perceived climate of increasing inequality and repression in the United States -- to say nothing of a blind worship of celebrity, money and success at any price -- “The Rebellion of the Beasts” seems disturbingly timely.

*

From The Rebellion of the Beasts

At six o’clock in the morning, the din was universal in the streets of London. All the hackney coaches were broken to pieces in the streets; and thousands of people kicked to death by revolutionary jack-asses, and republican geldings. The people had not slept a wink all night, owing to the vigorous attacks of the fleas, bugs, and gnats ... and all the peeresses in their own right had kicked and tumbled about so, on their soft feather-beds, that they were thrown into a perfect fever.