19 FEBRUARY 1941
The Lion and the Unicorn was the first of the Searchlight Book series. They were planned in the summer of 1940 by Fredric Warburg, Tosco Fyvel, and Orwell at Scarlett’s Farm, where Warburg lived, near Twyford, Berkshire. At the time, as Warburg recalled, bombs were beginning to fall on London and British fighter planes zoomed overhead. Orwell wrote at speed and delivered the typescript in November 1940. Warburg published it as a 64-page ‘pamphlet’ on 19 February 1941 at two shillings. Initially 5,000 copies were planned but they sold quickly and the run was extended to 7,500. A second impression was ordered in March 1941. However, when Plymouth was bombed (where it was being printed) the type, and that of Homage to Catalonia, was destroyed.
It is time for the people to define their war-aims. What is wanted is a simple, concrete programme of action, which can be given all possible publicity, and round which public opinion can group itself.
I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:—
The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person could not understand and see the reason for. In the form in which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of the Daily Mirror. But for the purposes of this book a certain amount of amplification is needed.