Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy is a play written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an English author. Perhaps the greatest gift from Bulwer is his discovery: the pen is mightier than the sword. The invincibility of this great line is driven home in the work of George Orwell – Animal Farm.
Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair to Richard Walmesley and Ida Mabel in Motihari, India in June 25 1903. His mother resettled with him in Oxford shire, England in 1904. Little Arthur received education at Sunny lands, an Anglican school in Eastbourne, Sussex, Wellington College and Eton College between the year 1917 and 1921.
Orwell’s contribution to human life comes through wake-up calls expressed in many of his works. In the prophetic 1984, published in 1949, Orwell reveals his paranoid in a future world of totalitarianism. His use of phrases like Thought Police, Big Brother is watching you, and the sensory description of disappearances, reappearances to the chagrin of a final disappearance make the dark moments in the darkly book terrific, creating before us a foreboding sense of a world on the edge of a cliff.
Animal Farm, published in 1945, is my favorite. For an author whose strongest point is in his personal conviction that language must be used to tell the truth in the simplest form of expression, we could not ask for more than what we get in Animal Farm. Revealing to us the signs of our lives, Orwell reminds that our society is naturally stratified and key players already established without our input in the pattern of the Strong and the Weak, the rich and the poor; a well-intended revolution is always susceptible to the tricks of a tyrant who lurks around waiting for the right moment.
As Animal Farm is the byproduct of Orwell’s suffering in the hands of Stalin’s communism, the validity of Bulwer’s strength of the pen is summarized in Russell Baker’s preface to the 1996 edition, “Soviet communism paid a heavy price for what it did to Orwell in Spain… Animal Farm became one of the century’s most devastating literary acts of political destruction”.