Mr. Whymper

Mr. Whymper’s name is one of many barbs concealed in the text of Orwell’s novel. Whymper acts as “an intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world” (6.7), and he is the first human the pigs permit contact with after the Rebellion. He shows up repeatedly in the novel, though always in a minor role, because he is only receiving or passing on communications from Napoleon to the other humans.

Whymper is described as “a sly-looking man with side whiskers, a solicitor in a very small way of business, but sharp enough to have realized earlier than anyone else that Animal Farm would need a broker and that the commissions would be worth having” (6.9). Whymper is in it for the money, which makes him an easy man for Napoleon to take advantage of. As the harvests begin to shrink on Animal Farm, Napoleon uses Whymper to spread rumors that all is still going well. Similarly, Whymper conveniently hears nothing when Napoleon squashes out the Hens’ Rebellion by starving several of the hens.

Mr. Whymper and Stalin's Russia

Whymper is an allusion to all those Westerners that catered to Soviet interests and helped spread the Soviet myth whether for personal profit or out of simple gullibility. There are few better doubles for Whymper than the intellectual Lincoln Steffens, who after visiting the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, said, “I’ve seen the future, and it works.” It was the casual proclamations of such "whimpering" intellectuals that Orwell worked to destroy with Animal Farm.