The Road to Wigan Pier

By George Orwell and Débora Tavares

A new edition of Orwell's early work, showing the origins of his commitment to social justice.

A new edition of Orwell's early account of bleak working class life in the industrial culture of Yorkshire and Lancashire, which revealed the distinctions between the upper classes of the British Empire and the reality of the people who worked in the factories to drive wealth and prosperity for others, never to get a share for themselves. Published while Orwell was in Spain, the book highlights the political philosophy that led him to fight for the leftist forces in the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flame Tree 451
• Release date: Jan 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781804172452

George Orwell

George Orwell (1903–1950), the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India and educated at Eton. After service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he returned to Europe to earn his living by writing. An author and journalist, Orwell was one of the most prominent and influential figures in twentieth-century literature. His unique political allegory Animal Farm was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with the dystopia of 1984 (1949), which brought him worldwide fame. 

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The Road to Wigan Pier

George Orwell

With a new introduction by Débora Tavares

flametreepublishing.com

FLAME TREE 451

London & New York

A New Introduction

There is an inspiring force inside George Orwell’s writings, refreshed by ordinary life, that looks towards the decency of common men and women. His particular point of view consists of a fascinating description of his time, reflecting upon how the world works as a society that serves the interests of a few people. His style is crystal clear and to the point, with a purpose to reach everyone: ‘one should never write anything that a working man could not understand,’ Orwell said at a dinner party with friends and family in mid-1945.

His accessible prose is often confused – wrongly – with a simpler technique: smaller, dry and less refined, since he does not use complicated words or rambling sentences. However, what seems unpretentious in form turns out to be a rather complex procedure in content, in which the author dissects all that is around him, with a fierce analytical eye. Orwell’s sophistication lies in making himself understood.

At all times, it is possible to come across passages from his work that, at first glance, may seem to describe what he is observing or thinking about something, but he does so by criticizing the strings that pull it all together. For example, when watching the industrial landscape through the train’s window, as he arrives in Wigan, he claims:

It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

Political Writing into an Art

While he manages to construct images in detail, Orwell does so with a certain purpose: to ‘make political writing into an art’, as he famously explained in his 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’.

When we look at his life’s work, the proximity between historical events and their role in literature becomes rather clear. Orwell’s writing is concerned with commentary on literary form and its context. This is something he holds dear – as seen again in ‘Why I Write’: ‘no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.’ When it comes to Orwell, no work is free from a political stance – especially those claiming to be far from this perspective. Thus, the reader is offered a deeply analytical and critical gaze at the hard times that England was facing during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Road Towards the Oppressed

Published in 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier is divided into two parts. The first describes what happens around him during his journey across the North of England: in a way, the writing here is similar to a travel log. In the second part, we can see the text shifting to an analysis of the English social, political and economic conditions that are drowning in unemployment and hardship.

This is the fifth work in George Orwell’s rather short nine-book literary career. Thus, we are looking at the midway point of his output, at a time, during the years between the world wars, when England was the main focus of his worries and still gasping for air amid the economic crisis resulting from Britain’s Great Depression. This book, specifically, is a documentary essay on coal miners’ social conditions during the 1930s – a deeply political and, at the same time, extremely beautiful piece of writing.

Bearing in mind this historical atmosphere, it becomes clear that we are in the middle of a whirlwind ravaging everyday life: the consequences of the biggest economic crisis of capitalism and the decline of the British Empire – after more than a century spent exploiting colonies around the globe. These moments of social disorder, during which The Road to Wigan Pier was written, sowed the seeds of thorny social relations between classes. The system continues to rise from the ashes, crisis after crisis, at the expense of hard-working people’s labour and lives.

Thus, it seems that Orwell’s writing sips from the waters tainted by this inequality but, at the same time, he wishes to change the system at its core. He is a product of this harsh condition; however, he wishes to reverse it completely. This book is about the dissatisfaction of a writer who is looking at his fellow men suffering from real-life poverty, and reflecting upon what could be done to put a stop to it.

Orwell’s Writing Style

In terms of a literary timeline, it is possible to organize Orwell’s books into three main groups (excluding the hundreds of pieces of non-fiction and articles), based on their themes and writing style. In the first – what could be called the documentary phase – he seems deeply absorbed in and concerned with the observation, description and reporting of life as he saw it in his surroundings. It encompasses Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Burmese Days (1934), Homage to Catalonia (1938) and, finally, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

The second period continues towards a naturalistic approach – so we can call it the naturalistic phase – where Orwell is concerned with describing reality thoroughly, mixing some grotesque aspects of life with some of its most lyrical and moving observations. This is a great homage to English realist literature from the nineteenth century. These aspects can be seen in books such as A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming up for Air (1939).

The final stage is what we could name the satirical phase, where it is possible to see clearly what Orwell meant by making ‘political writing into an art’, as mentioned in the essay ‘Why I Write’. At this point, satire plays a major role in criticizing social systems, political power and the ideas of its time. It comes down to Animal Farm (1945) and, of course, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The Left Book Club

The making of The Road to Wigan Pier was not a spontaneous thing. In contrast to the 1938 book Homage to Catalonia – which Orwell wrote after surviving a gunshot to his throat on the front in the Spanish Civil War – observing and reporting back on the poverty around the Wigan region was not Orwell’s choice but rather that of his editor at the time, Victor Gollancz.

Gollancz had asked him to travel through the main mining cities that were facing strikes and unemployment, and drowning in inequality. The purpose of this expedition was to report back to the Left Book Club the circumstances of the people living there. (The Left Book Club was a publishing group founded by Victor Gollancz and Stafford Cripps in 1936 that offered a monthly book choice for sale to members only with an intention to educate the British Left.)

Orwell was aware of the need to walk away from the prejudices that often come from having a middle-class perspective. According to one of his biographers, Bernard Crick, he stayed in the North for two months, from 31 January to 30 March 1936, immersing himself in the life there.

As a text commissioned to address social conditions and unemployment in the mining region around Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield, this writing project is often compared to the one by Friedrich Engels back in the nineteenth century, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which states: ‘The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie.’

Social Storytelling

The result of such observations and experiences is an intricate piece of social storytelling. Considering the connection between social issues and narrative, the documentary essay works well as a story, and at the same time evokes a reflection upon our own condition.

When Orwell observes the everyday life of mining towns, he draws some parallels with the dominant logic coming from the South, from London. We are carried away by a profound observation of working-class daily life, and the parallels drawn with highbrow culture. Thus, Orwell’s text seeks to provide some explanations on how England could survive this social catastrophe, even before facing the Second World War.

Although we are hit with graphic descriptions of what it was like to be poor in a mining industrial city, Orwell’s prose contains above all hope, like a flower sprouting from concrete. This hope emerges, through literature, as a tool that has practical implications. This beam of light will eventually culminate in the famous passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.’

When Orwell is looking at the miner digging for coal, he is building a writing style that would change twentieth-century literature. By effectively turning political writing into an art, he is making a constant effort to be understood by ordinary people, in a text that is clear and objective but not emptied and simplified. His purpose – to be understood by many – has as its potential result the expansion of the critical understanding of society, especially regarding an awareness of how things actually work.

Documenting and Describing the North

Orwell’s literature operates as an instrument, powerful enough to shed a light on the entire chain that sustains the unequal socioeconomic relations. The first step towards breaking the chain is being conscious of how things work, how people live, how it is to survive in the middle of such squalid conditions: ‘It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy – perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists in England.’

This clear and objective prose seems hard to accomplish and it proves to be a meticulous process, since we are dealing with one of the few authors who were able to look at the society around them and understand how the imperial machine that was Britain in the 1930s actually worked. Thus, Orwell’s eyes were always focused on the weakest link, those being exploited:

All of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

This is a book about coal miners and their life. In order to tell this story and report what he observed, Orwell constructed a plot that revolves around the habits of coal miners, travellers, the unemployed, housemaids, middle-aged men with families to support, and the hundreds of people in line for bread and butter rations. When he is describing the social landscape of the time, there is a clear contrast to Orwell’s own lifestyle, as he mentions when going down the mine in chapter two:

the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.

Everyday Life in Industrial Cities

As Orwell goes further on this road, we can observe that sometimes his writing gets very close to his personal point of view, whereas other times it is more distant, analytical. He reports everything that he sees, feels and, particularly, smells (see here). His perspective leads us through the dark alleys and humid slums, walking a fine line between fiction and reality.

This line is constantly drawn through a few anecdotes that Orwell shares about the characters he meets during his journey. One of these first moments is about a peculiar couple, the Brookers. They own the lodging house where Orwell stays for a few days, in Wigan: ‘The meals at the Brookers’ house were uniformly disgusting (...) The smell of the kitchen was dreadful.’ When describing the daily habits of the lodging and its guests, he comments on the repulsive aspect of the food offered by the Brookers, a couple that barely could keep the house together to make room for workers, travellers and Orwell himself.

The dirty sour smell seems to contaminate everything it encompasses, especially the food: pale fried egg, pale flabby Lancashire cheese. Courageous were those who dared to explore the jam jar covered in an ‘unspeakable mass of stickiness and dust’. In addition, Mrs Brooker had the habit of wiping her mouth on pieces of newspaper which she then left discarded on the floor, creating an atmosphere permeated by disgust, which contaminates the reader’s impression of the place.

Those who stayed there didn’t seem to complain – or at least to be bothered, like Orwell was. He keeps evoking scatological images and associating these with lower-class accommodation, a precarious condition to which travellers must submit to shelter at the end of a working day. Despite this squalid situation, he persists and continues his stay at the Brookers’. The determining factor that makes him leave the place for good is when he eventually comes across a ‘full chamber-pot under the breakfast table’ on a cold morning, heading downstairs for breakfast.

What could explain the use of such an impressive description so early on in the book? One reason could be Orwell’s choice to frustrate the readers’ expectations, offering an account much closer to reality, and based on the working class’s most raw and shocking conditions.

Another answer to this question can be found in Orwell’s review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), in which he admires the writer for his brutal insistence on facts, and he seems to be greatly inspired by this procedure. What draws his attention is the attempt to avoid an idealized vision of the poor, distancing himself from a sanitized representation, which tries to avoid some inescapable aspects of poverty. The Road to Wigan Pier tries to create an account that is humanizing, rather than insulting and dehumanizing, making its people the real subject.

Narrating the Forgotten

As Orwell follows his vision, it is possible to observe one major preoccupation throughout the descriptions and images being documented: his unique perspective towards a social class that is not his own. We can reflect on how this is the core that brings The Road to Wigan Pier together: Orwell is constantly observing the world from a middle-class perspective, and at the same time feeling closer to those abandoned by the system: the working-class poor.

The book is rooted in a sense of duality which plays a major role in Orwell’s identity – in his own life – and has deeply shaped his literary style, with an ideologically accurate point of view. On the one hand, he belongs to a certain economic class, but on the other, his heart is beating alongside those who have nothing to lose. As Orwell himself reflects:

Economically, I am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand; remind me of that and I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand: lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against them.

Turning to the dispossessed, he highlights what is most crucial for workers suffocated by the coal dust: ‘Napoleon’s maxim An army marches on its stomach (…) a human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.’ Before doing any reflective activity, one needs to be fed. And the more coal miners are exploited, the more they are distant from being capable of thinking on their own, unable to look closely at what is happening around them.

The Girl Unclogging a Pipe

Reflecting upon such harsh class contrasts, there is an unforgettable passage in the book, where Orwell wanders through the working-class villages, full of sprouting houses, with their windows fogged up and full of dust. He watches from the train window a young woman unclogging a drain, kneeling in a cold alley:

She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.

This young woman seems to represent the inequality that can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, which had first reached the urban centres in the nineteenth century and by then, in 1937, was still sweeping through working-class villages. The kneeling woman trying to unclog the sewer lives as before, frozen in time, next to the dirt of the cobblestones. The Wigan region, as well as other industrial towns, was responsible for the economic development of the country and, at the same time, paid a high price for bearing this burden. The conditions were extremely hard for those supporting the system off the back of their labour and being exploited cruelly.

When Orwell stares at her, he seems to be facing society as a whole, on the brink of collapse. The young woman’s face, with the most desolate expression he had ever witnessed, seems to represent the entire social structure to which she is subjected. When observing her condition, he is looking into the eye of the British Empire, stripped of all the opulence. As Friedrich Engels also seemed to have noticed when describing what a preacher saw in the industrial cities, in the book The Condition of the Working Class in England:

If we really desire to find out the most destitute and deserving (...) we shall become acquainted with a mass of wretchedness and misery such as a nation like our own ought to be ashamed to permit.

The Underground and the Surface

Later in the book, when Orwell eventually went down a mine, he meditated upon his own condition as a writer. There is a clear symmetry throughout the whole book – there are two parts, two regions of the country in deep contrast, two social places: the underground and the surface. On the surface the world of women and children prevails, taking care of domestic affairs, while underground lies a stark world where the masculine force of workers appears.

The physical and social distance existing between Orwell and the miners exposes that there is, apparently, nothing in common between them. The surface rules do not apply to the underground. These are two different realities that are codependent – specifically, it is the surface in relation to the underground, filled with precious coal.

The working condition of those underground does not have an equivalent to that of those on the surface – the rules are different. Walking through the city for a few miles is not the same as crawling for miles in a mine, as Orwell quickly notices:

Here is this frightful business of crawling to and fro (...) it is not part of the miner’s work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man’s daily ride in the Tube.

This breach in what happens below and above ground seems to highlight the abyss between the mining class and the writer, contrasting the daily life of the former as an anthropologist in the depths of the jungle.

By observing their work routine, Orwell becomes aware of the different roles they occupy in society. And this awareness comes from discovering how difficult it is to extract coal from the ground, which, in turn, involves a perception that not everyone is willing to have. However, making this effort is one of the main obligations of those who work on the surface, as he brilliantly realizes ‘the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above’. When perceiving the logic of workforce exploitation, there is clearly ‘a division between material and spiritual work’, as famously mentioned by Marx and Engels in the book The German Ideology (first written in 1846). It means, at the very least, that one needs to be aware of the entire production chain operating like a well-oiled machine.

Coming Back Transformed

When Orwell comes back from the mine, this unforgettable experience allows him to ponder his life from another perspective, enriched by class consciousness:

I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one (…) by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

When he is with the miners, it becomes clear to both sides that Orwell is not a manual worker like them. And, consequently, thanks to some privileges he enjoyed in the world of culture, Orwell can reveal that he is conscious of the role of the working class in society, as distinct from his role.

He concludes, mainly, that the more an intellectual is distant from social reality, the more his mistaken notion about labour exploitation increases, leaving him isolated from the lower classes. After all, the miners perished in carrying out this work, just as the intellectual would perish if they had to carry the pickaxe, as evidenced by ‘the fact that in any large industrial town the death rate and infant mortality of the poorest quarters are always about double those of the well-to-do.’ It seems that the more workers are physically exploited, the worse their living conditions. The capitalist society consumes every ounce of sanity and strength from its servants.

Thus, submerging himself to the ‘lowest’ levels of the social system, to experience the life of the oppressed is, above all, a choice that reflects an ideological attitude. In the same way that other writers have approached the matter of social injustice, Orwell keeps this tradition so that the main point in The Road to Wigan Pier seeks to unveil a theory, in which the material truth can be exposed. Also, Orwell notices that behind this exploitation there seems to be no rational justification, other than an accumulation of more profit, as Max Horkheimer claimed in ‘Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History’ in 1930: ‘history’s route lies across the sorrow and misery of individuals. There is a series of explanatory connections between these two facts, but no justificatory meaning.’

The Decency of Socialism

The Road to Wigan Pier is filled with compelling and moving descriptions of misery and urban life at the beginning of the twentieth century, resembling the procedure of a realist nineteenth-century Dickens novel. In a way, those images lay the foundation for the reflection in the second part, with a theoretical style, talking about complicated political concepts such as social class, the role of the intellectual and socialism. Orwell ponders that ‘the interests of all exploited people are the same’ and that ‘Socialism is compatible with common decency’ (see here).

Orwell sees himself as a socialist, always walking alongside the oppressed, as he clearly states in ‘Why I Write’: ‘Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.’ He seems to go beyond writing genres, not drawing a distinction between documentary and literary journalism. As far as literary practice is concerned, his writings from the 1930s are a mixture of lived experiences that meet ‘human decency’, even in the most challenging conditions.

Therefore, we can notice the path traced by his point of view as a route, in which literature starts to change society. It begins with choosing a perspective, usually in defence of those placed on the edges of the system. Then, Orwell goes deep into the most mundane aspects of the working class: the food they ate, the dry bread with the greasy butter, the housing, the damp and urine-smelling boarding houses, the paths taken to work, the slow pace of life of those awaiting financial support from the government, the compromised health of workers who breathed coal dust for 16 hours a day, the way their curved backs were forced to bend in suffocating mining tunnels, their language traits, their outlook on life, their deepest fears.

With all these aspects as a backdrop, Orwell describes and at the same time reveals the inequality endured by these people, generation after generation. By displacing a few key pieces in the jigsaw puzzle put together by a system that operates around exploitation, he shows his deep knowledge of the social matter he investigates.

Leaving Old Norms Behind

After looking closely at the contrasts between classes and suffering that the miners were facing, we can detect the power of political writing as a work of art: constant social criticism. Orwell brings up the ongoing privilege of those who hide under institutional cloaks and opulence: the intellectuals in the South who knew nothing about such harsh conditions going on, unchecked, in the North.

When Orwell talks about Wigan, he is opening the cracks of a structure that is collapsing. And then he flashes us a bright beam of light. Even amid the mouldy odour from the cluttered old reading rooms in the decadent

Reviews for The Road to Wigan Pier

[ionas_7 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a disappointing Orwell book that I couldn’t get through. It was a long section about mining and mines that proved too much for me; Orwell was down the mines several times, apparently, and experienced for himself how difficult it was, not the actual mining, but just the crawling for miles to where the coal could be got to. Orwell was tall, which didn’t make it easier. I didn’t see much about Wigan, if anything. Most of the paragraphs were long, which made the book even more unreadable. So, not a book I would recommend.

[marshapetry · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's just a treat to read(listen to) his writings... The style is beautiful

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My third Orwell in as many weeks, if you’re keeping score.Part 1 is his tour through the living conditions of the working class in industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire, primarily coal miners and the unemployed. Part 2 is an examination of the feelings of middle class British socialists (virtually all British socialists, Orwell included, being middle class) and the British working class (virtually none of them socialists) towards each other. He concludes that British class feeling is basically impossible to eradicate and that British socialists would do well to stop vilifying the middle class, i.e., themselves, because everybody can smell a phony.It was first published with grave reservations by noted lefty publisher Victor Gollancz as a selection of the Left Book Club. He tried to get Orwell to let him publish part 1 without part 2, but Orwell refused. The compromise was that Gollancz published the whole thing but also included a forward he wrote in which he more or less apologizes to every member of the Left Book Club and repudiates all of part 2, which includes gems like this:"The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England."(Tag yourself in that last bit.)Think of all of those sad British lefties in 1937, crying into their warm beers when they read that.Even so, part 1 was compelling enough that I am convinced that no owner of a colliery has ever been admitted to Heaven. Absolutely brutal.

[theelliemo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Part 1 of this book describes life in the slum dwellings of industrialised towns in the 1930s, and the typical life of a mining community, and is quite an education - miners usually ended up with blue scars because coal dust would get into their cuts before they healed - who knew?!

Part 2 is a lengthy essay in why Orwell believed we should all become socialists and why he thought we weren’t. It’s interesting, particularly with the benefit of over 80 years of hindsight, to see how things have changed since the book was written, but also how some things haven’t changed at all. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I did have some issues with the book; there is some blatant racism towards the indigenous populations of some of the former British Colonies (India and Burma in particular); while Orwell, who considered himself middle-class, did not consider himself better than the working-classes, he very much considered himself to be better than a Burmese. And even towards the “working classes”, he can sound very condescending.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Much like Hemingway's lost satchel or Genet's samizdat manuscripts, I'll piece this together from jumbled memories. How's that for hubris?

The Road To Wigan Pier was amongst the best books I've read this year. The route established by Orwell is more sinuous than expected. He examines a lodging house and then travels to the pits themselves. He finds valor in those who toil. He doesn't patronize.

He ponders the unemployment issue in England. He busts myths. He unrolls lengths of statistics. He then concludes his book by meandering back and forth between the theoretical and the autobiographical. It is easy to see how this spurned readers, both then and now.

My reasons for reading this now were related on Hadrian's Wall (sorry I couldn't resist.) but Orwell's book did serve as a pleasurable counterpoint to my own holiday experiences.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about poverty, either in work or unemployment, Socialism, and the ills of industrialisation. Written during the "Great Depression", it shows the effects of this period on the lives of working class people. In the first half of the book Orwell describes his visit to the Lancashire and Yorkshire in the mid 1930s, where he spends time in Wigan, Barnsley, Sheffield, and other predominantly coal mining towns. The difficult lives of coal miners are described vividly, including their working life, family life, housing, and living conditions. Orwell is quite detailed in his descriptions of people, their mannerisms, their environment, and their attitudes, which put together a picture of almost Dickensian poverty and hardship. In the second part of the book Orwell talks about his own upbringing, class prejudice, and how this has affected his social and political attitudes. There is also quite a bit of discussion on the causes of poverty and dire living conditions which are rooted in industrialisation and "machine-civilisation". Socialism is discussed as a possible alleviation to the circumstances that induce poverty, and arguments are made on how and why socialism must change to gain greater acceptance and influence.Like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, this book shows Orwell's political engagement on behalf of those who do not usually have a voice in literature. As a record of social history it is also of considerable interest aside from any political or moral implications that it might have. As always, Orwell is a pleasure to read and intelligent in his arguments and observations.

[pilgrimjess · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.”The Road to Wigan Pier is written in two parts. The first part of this book in truth needs little description as Orwell tries to give a detailed view of the conditions of the poor and unemployed. In the first chapter Orwell describes living in a cheap lodging-house, a thing that he actually did himself for a couple of weeks in this house during his researches. Next he moves on to the life of the miners, their working conditions which perhaps unsurprisingly are very bad, the hygienic situation where only a third of mines has a bath or shower for the miners to use whilst the situation at home is even worse with very few homes having bathrooms, the misconception that miners have plenty of leisure time and are well paid, pay levels are dependant on exactly what job the miner is doing at the pit, then there are all kinds of stoppage which are deducted from the miner’s wage every week which actually includes some of his tools and safety equipment.The next chapter deals with the housing situation in the mining districts in particular the shortage of decent housing. Where people are forced to accept all sorts of unsuitable housing and bad landlords, just to get a roof over their heads. Sounds familiar even today.This is then followed by a chapter on unemployment. In 1937, when this book was written, there were about two million unemployed. But this number only shows how many persons are receiving the dole rather than everyone who was economically inactive. This then moves on to look at the food that a family living on the dole might exist onIn the second part Orwell describes his personal idea of socialism in England. The general idea being that Orwell believes that socialism and communism are no longer movements of the working class. Rather the movement is lead by the middle-class and it is often the British class system that stops real Socialism occurring. In particular Orwell dislikes middle-class socialists who speak out against their own class yet their behaviour is that of a middle-class person. Overall Orwell seems to suggest that socialism is a nearly impossible thing.Now I must admit that I felt thoroughly engaged with the first half of this book as I am always interested to read about 'social' history. However, whilst I agree with many of the points that he made in the second half about socialism (personally I feel that the vast majority of the MPs of today's Labour Party are professional politicians who have never done a hard days work in their lives so can not truly have any idea of what it means to be working class) I found it rather overblown and as such much of his message got muddled if not lost altogether. An interesting read overall which perhaps show his true perceptibility as it is still largely relevant today 80 years after its first publication.

[sullywriter_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant, compassionate portrait of the English working class, specifically mining families and northern England followed by a sharp critique of Socialism.

[rabascaa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book is written in the style of persuasive essay. The author writes paragraphs that tackle the staggering arguments he himself sets forth. He provides a recorded account of what he witnesses, and then offers the reader compelling statements that only a misanthropic man could defend.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Road to Wigan Pier is a book in two parts, both observant and fiery. This is one of Orwell's lesser-known works, but still one of his better ones. It surpasses Burmese Days and might almost reach Homage to Catalonia.

The first part is a visit to the coal-mining areas up north, and a chronicling of the miners' lives. It's reminiscent of Engels' Conditions of the English Working Class, but with less statistics and more coal mining, and the social conditions of the miners themselves. Here, he has an astonishing eye for detail. He crawls into the mines - you can crawl or kneel most of the way. Breathes in the black corrosive dust which the workers never seem to get off of their hands. Sits down at their table. Talks to them. Orwell, who confesses that his life was full of easy comfort, recognizes a real empathy with these people beyond class. He could not imagine living and working as hard as they do.



This little journey of his shatters myths. It's only too familiar to learn that even in the early 20th century, the old canards about the poor were still there - the belief that the poor were all lazy, and would get drunk and do nothing forever if unemployed. When Orwell interviewed those without work, the vast majority were desperate for it. All this in spite of the horrific labor conditions. They wanted to be able feed their families better than what stipend or charity provides and to end the gnawing boredom and feelings of uselessness. "Oh, God, please, let me work!" one begs.

Orwell even notes a trend where those who have less money to spend on food tend to spend it on more unhealthy food - an interesting precursor to the trend between obesity and income in the United States today. Only the rich can afford to eat healthy.

No doubt mining is different here - so we'd like to think in the United States, with empty promises of 'clean coal'. But there are still consequences here. For an example, see West Virginia, all of it. Economic dependence, decline, depressed standards of living, political entanglement with King Coal. Accidents still do happen. And if not that, then the wasting death of black lung, which has made a recurrence. Then we remember that the Chinese produce the most coal in the world today, and they do not have nearly as many bothersome safety or environmental regulations.

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The second part is even more fiery. It is an examination of the political means - what is to be done? First, he states that these living conditions are intolerable. Second, he acknowledges that socialist policies would be an effective means of affecting this economic problem. So his Big Question is: why, then, is not everybody a socialist?

Already, in 1936, he notes that something is wrong with the state of Socialism. There is, of course, the matter of Stalin's empire in the east, and the unsettling rumors which arise from its gaping maw. Socialism, instead of the charitable ideal of reducing exploitation here and abroad, and raising the standards of living, has been mutated into yet another excuse for tyranny.

Not just this. He also lances the ugly boils which marred socialism then and now. Endless petty factionalism, boring terminology, a religious adherence to major thinkers (Marx), and so forth. These would create disunity within socialists, and scare away any new converts. Thus they are easy prey for political enemies.

Orwell also has to combat ideas of what socialism is not. He has to argue with the 'useful idiots' who praise Stalin - George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells. Their visions were of a machine socialism, were technology somehow makes everything better without any major societal change. Technology, as good as it can be, has a cost. If the rich can afford to live in comfort, then the disparity between them and poor would only worsen. Technology has to be cheap and public in order for any real change to disseminate.

Orwell sees their visions as useless. A paradise of 'fat little men' reduced to hedonistic consumerist pleasure. They resemble the infantile dreams of Ray Kurzweil, who starts off with explanations of doubling computer power, and ends with humanity becoming godlike immortal computer beings, a deranged version of that already dangerous dogma of Rapture.

Orwell does take a moment here to praise Aldous Huxley and his Brave New World, which describes this 'paradise'. No doubt it would influence his 1984.

It is not just the future of socialism which concerns him, however. Fascism continued its bloody march in Europe. At the time he wrote this, the Civil War in Spain broke out. Socialist v. Anarchist v. Fascist.

The events of this book gave him a firm conviction that he needed to do something. This led to his volunteering to fight in a Socialist militia in the Spanish Civil War, and the experiences in that war would lead to a new book, Homage to Catalonia. The nature of totalitarian regimes deeply frightened and scared him, and the rest is 'history'.

An excellent book, perhaps one of Orwell's best.

[histreader · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't know why I have such an affinity for Mr. Orwell, because our politics are nearly polar opposite. However, I do enjoy reading his take on the need for Socialism and how the slogans and "arguments" have not changed since the 1930s. The Road to Wigan Pier is a two-part work by Mr. 1984. The first section is an expose on the horrid living and working conditions of working class Britons in the coal mines. He uses this introductory section to set-up his justification for bringing about Socialism (which I thought Great Britain always was). Part Two makes up the bulk of the section, a sort of philosophical dissertation about how previous attempts to unite the citizenry of England have failed and his fear of sliding towards Fascism is ever present. The more I read works by those who bemoan the "class" society, the more I realize a "classless" world will never exist; abolishing classes is to abolish an innate human function of compartmentalizing. Try to deny it as the may, Leftists do it despite their best personal efforts to pretend they don't. We need not abuse others in separate classes, but we shouldn't imagine a radical change in human psychology.

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is George Orwell's classic description of the terrible living and working conditions in industrial towns, particularly among the miners, in the north of England in the mid 1930s, including but not limited to Wigan. Orwell's style is simple and direct and draws you in to the miseries he describes in a way that only the best journalists or commentators can do. In the generally less highly regarded second half of the book, Orwell recounts his views on socialism and different types and characteristics of socialists, many of which he thinks give socialism a bad name. Many of these comments were controversial and Victor Gollancz, editor of the Left Book Club insisted on writing a foreword to the published version of the book to some extent debunking these views, though it seems to me he raises some interesting points for reflection by the Labour movement then and now. Less controversially, he looks ahead to the overwhelming need for all those on the left, and indeed all who believe in social justice and decency, to unite to fight the growing menace of fascism (this was written after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland and Italy had invaded Abyssinia). Occasionally, this second half gets a little repetitive but Orwell is never less than thoroughly readable and should be studied by anyone interested in politics, whatever their own views.

[sandydog1_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book isn't just about coal miners. That's only the first half. Then ol' George is on a tear, and writing brilliantly about class differences, socialism, socialists, socialist literature, food, personal hygiene, unemployment, imperialism, automation, war, fascism, vegetarians, people who wear sandals, "fruit juice drinkers", etc.He's Mark Twain with a lot more eloquence and a lot less hyperbole.How often do you read a foreward that is actually a rebuttal by the publisher? If you start by reading the Left Book Club foreward, read it afterwards as well.

[sanddune_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 1937 George Orwell travelled through the cities and towns of Northern England investigating the living and working conditions of the unemployed and working class of England, in particular in coal mining areas, and this two part book was the result. The first part is a polemic detailing the sometimes appalling living conditions that poorer people had to put up with at that time, and the second a more discursive section on what should be done about it.The first section stands up well today as historical evidence for some of the worst conditions of that period. In particular the chapters on housing and diet are sobering with the details of large families crammed into tiny damp, back-to-back houses with only one or two bedrooms and no bathroom, and with toilet facilities shared between dozens of houses. What I'd have liked, however, is some assessment of how widespread these conditions were among the working class in general at that time. I know from my own family that many people in these types of job did not always live in conditions such as those described. My mother, born the daughter of a coal miner in 1921, was brought up as one of three children up in a solidly built council house larger than any of those described in the book, which would be an acceptably sized house to bring up a family of that size today. My father, the youngest of six children of a stone-mason working at the same colliery, was brought up in a solid stone built privately rented house, which again would still be an acceptable house today. It may be that housing conditions in South Wales were generally better than those in Northern England (it's not a subject I know much about); my perception is that there was less wholescale slum clearance in South Wales than in the north of England which might suggest that the housing stock was better to start with.As a member of what he describes as the lower upper-middle class, the Eton-educated Orwell was suprisingly sympathetic to the problems of 'the working classes', although perhaps as a consequence of his own background he does seem to consider working people as a homogeneous mass, all with similar aspirations and values, which I think leads him into over-simplification in some areas. For example he comments that 'Working people often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education' touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy instinct'. This doesn't ring true with the picture of my mother who left school at 14 in 1936 after coming fourth in the exam to win a scholarship to grammar school where only three places were available, and 77 years later has not completely got over her disappointment. Or my father who always resented the fact that he'd failed his grammar school exam because he had not been able to have private lessons in French. So overall, a flawed but intensely interesting book, which has relevance today in the UK where falling levels of social mobility and the unaffordabilty of houses in many areas are key political issues.

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After returning from Burma in 1927, George Orwell found that his beliefs and prejudices had been completely upturned after witnessing the evil brutality of the British imperial system. He decided he wanted “to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.”He ended up spending much time amongst the working class, and the result of that was his excellent book Down And Out In Paris And London, which I read last year and greatly enjoyed. The Road To Wigan Pier continues in this vein, but was written several years later after Orwell had established himself as a writer and distilled his outrage into a coherent socialist philosophy. He was commisioned by an organisation called the Left Book Club to carry out a report on the living conditions of the unemployed in England’s industrial North. This investigation comprises the first half of the book; the second comprises Orwell’s reflections upon that situation, and what must be done about it.I preferred the first half of the book to the second, as Orwell throws himself into the atrocious hovels and slums of Wigan and Sheffield, making his usual wry and witty observations. (“There are also houses of what is called the ‘blind back’ type, which are single houses, but in which the builder has omitted to put in a back door – from pure spite, apparently.”) Orwell’s famous dedication to clear, concise writing makes him endlessly entertaining and readable, and he comes up with some marvellous similes.The second half of the book was less entertaining; it is largely a political essay, which I don’t mind, but like many essays in Shooting An Elephant it is quite dated. Orwell wrote this book in the late 30s when socialism was still considered a feasible possibility in many parts of society, and while fascism was running rampant across Europe. He very clearly thought the next major struggle in the world would be between Fascism and Socialism, not Capitalism and Communism. Reading through it, I was mostly struck by how wrong Orwell turned out to be. He spends much of his time arguing why socialism had failed to gain many adherents, and one of his points is that many people disliked industrialism and mentally associated it with socialism. Orwell himself, while believing it to be “here to stay,” is also quite critical of what he calls “the machine-society.” He then later says:There is no chance of righting the conditions I described in the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from Fascism, unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence. It will have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognise as desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda. Less about ‘class consciousness,’ ‘expropriation of the expropriators,’ bourgeois ideology,’ and ‘proletarian solidarity,’ not to mention the sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty and the plight of the unemployed. And less about mechanical progress, tractors, the Dneiper dam and the latest salmon-canning factory in Moscow; that kind of thing is not an integral part of Socialist doctrine, and it drives away many people whom the Socialist cause needs, including most of those who can hold a pen.No such Socialist party came about, yet England was not consumed by Fascism. And how were the conditions in northern England righted? Through technological advances and the progress of the machine-society which Orwell so disapproved of. There is clearly still an imbalance of wealth in England today, but to compare the houses of the working class now with the houses of the working class of eighty years ago is to compare modern luxury with medieval squalor. Television, broadband Internet, mass-produced clothing, central heating, affordable white goods, hot water, subsidised medical care and unfailing electricity combine to create what the miners and labourers of Orwell’s day would regard as paradise.Curiously enough, Orwell actually touched upon in the first half of the book:And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.The difference, of course, is that the modern British welfare state (which I am not particularly familiar with the history of, but which appears to exist in a limited form in The Road To Wigan Pier) ensures that nobody is actually starving, even if they have been unemployed their entire lives. Whether or not the “cheap luxuries” of today seem superior to those of Orwell’s time because of my own modern vantage point, or because they actually are, is hard to say. Perhaps eighty years from now we will all have robot butlers and want for nothing, and consider having to work forty hours a week to have been a cruel and terrible fate.Then, however, there’s the fact that our own cheap luxuries are not a result of the industrial process having been perfected, but rather because the Western world simply bucked its “working” class status onto East Asia. Now the same thing is happening in China, as hundreds of millions are lifted out of poverty and expect higher living standards, and manufacturers look to Vietnam or Indonesia or somewhere else where people are still poor and will work for a dollar a day. What happens when everybody on Earth is rich and prosperous? I can’t find the exact quote, but somewhere in The Road To Wigan Pier Orwell mentions that the whole world is a raft flying through space, which contains more than enough for everybody to live comfortably. This may have been true at the time, but it certainly isn’t today; the one or two billion OECD citizens are living well beyond their means, let alone the five billion in the developing world. Either we will exhaust the planet’s resources and collapse into a prolonged Dark Age of death, misery and poverty, or we will expand space travel and harvest the resources of other planets to provide for the billions of new TV-watching, Coke-drinking people who will be created once the developing world finishes developing, which will certainly happen within the next fifty years. And, ironically enough, the most likely push for that more optimistic outcome will be capitalist thirst for raw materials.As you can see, Orwell gets me thinking. I didn’t enjoy The Road To Wigan Pier quite as much as Down And Out In Paris And London, but it’s still an excellent book and a valuable historical document.

[carolfoasia_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I learned about socialism, and Orwell's reflections as Hitler and Mussolini were on the rise. Fascinating!

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is part journalistic look at 1930s Northern England coal miners and unemployment and part treatise on Socialism. I enjoyed the book, though Part 2 did get a bit tedious and long-winded. It was very interesting to read -- with 2010 hindsight-- Orwell's 1930s vision of Socialism. Also, his predictions about both economics and industrial technology are amusing. Some are right on while others are wildly off-base. His writing and though processes are logical and clearly articulated, which I found refreshing. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject matter.

[seisdedos_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Orwell’s anti-communism is primarily seen through his two great works, ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984.’ But for a deeper understanding of his beliefs it is necessary to read his two major works of non-fiction. The events described in “The Road to Wigan Pier’ and ‘Homage to Catalonia’ take place well before he achieved any fame and acclaim and go a long in explaining why he initially achieved infamy in left-wing circles. In ‘Wigan Pier’ Orwell travels to the north of England and describes in exacting detail the living and working conditions of its laborers. Orwell’s language is very straight-forward and accessible. Nothing pretentious or overly scholarly here. He completely immerses himself in the working-class environment and culture of the region - the cramped and unsanitary lodgings, the meager and debilitating diet and even comments on the centrality of the pub to the worker’s lives and working-class slang. But Orwell’s most harrowing description is of the miners “going down to the pit” and discovering for the first time in his life the grueling and almost inhuman work which, according to him, constitutes the backbone of industrial society. In the second half of the book, Orwell discusses how the large gulf between Britain’s intelligentsia and its working-class could ultimately pave the way for fascism or a government sympathetic towards it. He counsels democratic socialist and Labour party leaders to be less concerned with dogma, orthodoxy, Marxist rhetoric and to instead focus on the basic ideas of social justice and equality. He also takes some shots at feminism, pacifists, and vegetarians which modern readers would find offensive if not down right reactionary. But it’s hard to argue with his main argument that radical intellectuals of the 1930s were every bit as outside the mainstream as a member of the House of Lords.

[simonw11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Last months book club read took ages to read I felt that I was forcing my way through the Darien Gap. This month It took also as long a time but mainly because I kept stopping for picnics.This really was a most pleasant walk in the park. There was no need to hurry. Orwell's clarity and his ability to find the memorable phrase made for easy reading. The book consists of two parts in the first he launches us without explanation straightinto a scene of the most squalid poverty. Then leads us around the towns and cities of the north illustrating the grim economic servitude that brings such conditions about.All the time struggling to be fair in his description for this is no mere polemic, no need to preach since it was originally writtenfor the Left Book Club. Instead throughout he assumes that the audience is as they say on side. Thus as outsiders it is only gradually by and by implication that it it becomes clear what Orwell thinks all reasonable men believe.In part two Orwell addresses the problem of disseminating that message to a largeraudience. The obstacles are many: There are numerous cranks within the movement, that harm its reputation. There is lack ofsolidarity amongst a people who's perceived social classes have little resembance to the economic groupings that Marxian theory envisioned. The fears of a dehumanising state and of course the spectre of Fascism.To modern eyes many of the problems presented by these obstacles are overwhelming.But Orwell continues with an idealistic naif intelligence. Urging a reformation in approachand changes with the socialist novement This is "leak3ed Memo"stuff but he is uncaring as to how it might read outside the readingcircle of the left book club. As it is number of times I found myself wanting to tell himHe would be first against the wall when the revolution came.I did enjoys his side swipes at other literary figures.Now if they were to do a series of Big Brother where they locked orwell in a house with a christian apologian, say Chestertonor Lewis and some reactionary, maybe Waugh. I might watch it.In conclusion the historical pespective has inevitably removed much of the heat From this book. The times when people from my home town would boast about dropping brownshirtson their heads, when idealists went to fight in Spain are no longer with us. The work remains urbane, informative and well written but there is no fire left no cause to rally. The battle is lost and won. This battle flag just one more museum display.