TheCambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950--2000

The mood of Orwell’s fables, however, might now seem backwardrather
than forward-looking in some respects. At the level of prophecy,
it is true, the repudiation of the corrupt mechanics of the communist state
implicit in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four chimes with the Cold
War mood, which is dominant in Western society through into the 1980s.
But in terms of gestation, both works have an eye to the past, and particularly
to Orwell’s disillusioning experiences fighting for the revolutionary POUM
(Partido Obrero de Unificaci´on Marxista) militia in the Spanish CivilWar.2
The immediate resonance of both books in Britain, moreover, was dependent
upon the post-war experience of austerity, where shortages, rationing,
and government control and bureaucracy made (in particular) the confinement
of ‘Airstrip One’, Orwell’s depiction of London in Nineteen Eighty-
Four, seem a faintly plausible extension of reality. In the 1950s, however, with
the end of rationing, and a developing consumer boom, a new public mood
emerged. This survey takes 1950 as a dividing line that separates the war and
its aftermath from the distinctive nature of post-war society, governed by new
economic and social energies. If the work of Orwell helps define this historical
divide, however, there is little sense that fiction

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