The Road To Wigan Pier

Contrary to my expectations, this is Orwell's most personal book. He bares his soul to us. At least I think he seriously tries to be perfectly honest, if not complete.
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)

Most folks only know the great Orwell through Animal Farm and 1984 (or at the very least, they associate him with them) but his earlier material is essential reading for insight to his socialist beliefs. His colorful, honest style of reportage whilst lodging, eating, working and living amongst the coal miners in England's north country provides a harrowing account of workers' struggles and tragedies and a scathing rebuke of capitalist greed and apathy toward it's labor force. You could almost taste the coal dust and breathe the fetid air with his descriptive detail.

England in the 1930's had staggering poverty and unemployment and was still reeling from World War I. Socialism was enjoying interest from those who wanted to do something to fix the wrongs. The Left Book Club commissioned George Orwell, who had stirred attention with DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON to write a book about the working poor in the coal mines in Lancashire. He did that, but he also chose to go beyond the terms of his contract and assess the potential for Socialism to solve problems. His conclusions did not especially please the editors of the Book Club but to not publish the book would seem narrow-minded, so it went to press in 1937 as is tempered with a forward by Victor Gallancz, taking issue with Orwell's evaluation and vision.

The first half of the book stands as a remarkable piece of journalism revealing untold squalor. Coal was the oil of its day and people wanted it in quantity and they wanted it cheap and they did not want to know what it took to produce it. It is difficult to decide what is grimmer, the work beneath the earth or the housing to which the miners returned at night. Especially mean is the fact that the privilege of a family of eight living in two leaky, barren rooms, two hundred yards from an outdoor privy, extracted most of the household wages. Orwell's urgent prose does not let anyone look away.

Orwell then turns to a discussion of class differences, the bourgeois and Socialists. He portrays a culture saturated in a class system that will be difficult to eradicate any time soon, one in which the different classes have different values, fears and perspectives that obstruct understanding and reconcilation. Socialism, which had both its bourgeois and proletariat adherents, had yet to get its act together. Rather dyspeptically, Orwell saw it as a lightening rod for all the modern trends taken up in rejection of the old ways: feminism, vegetarianism, free love, humanitarianism, atheism, pacifism, to name a few. The Socialists fell feverishly upon their new orthodoxies with a zeal Orwell suggests would drive the public towards Fascism. He does not reject Socialism-in the end he equates it with common decency, but he wants it to get its act together in light of his views. In this essay lies the Orwell either side of the divide loves or hates, the Orwell who defies easy categorizing. In it also lies the eloquent, precise voice that makes reading him a pleasure despite wanting to say, "Look, here, there is nothing wrong with being vegetarian (or feminist or whichever of your sacred cows he's dealt some withering words)."

The first half of the book contains some great descriptions of what it was like to work in a coal mine in the early 1900's. Now it's worth reading just for that, but that's mostly in chapters 2 and 3. He says they used to work naked. I thought that was awesome. But the whole second half of the book is basically an essay about the workers parties of his day. Basically he says they appeared to outsiders as disingenuous and weirdos (though the case is strong enough he pretty clearly believes it himself). Here are a couple of choice quotes:

"The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight." (Yes, I had to look up the meaning of "prig" too)

"Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed"

I found this book when I was living in Sydney, Australia. When I brought the book to the front to pay for it, the clerk kept tucking it under a paper bag, hiding it from the other customers milling around the desk. Everytime I took it out from under the bag, the clerk hid it again. This happened several times, until I finally left. It gave me the immediate feeling that I was buying something a little bit illegal, a little dangerous, something that I shouldn't have, because the clerk had never done that to me before or after.
The first thing I noticed about my little copy of the Road to Wigan's Pier is that is said it was not for sale in the U.S.A.. I recognize now that it was because of copyright issues, but at the time, I thought maybe the reason I had never seen this book in the States, is because it was somewhat suppressed for some reason.
I was expecting more 1984, not a documentary of life in Northern England, not a political commentary. Since then, I have read the book perhaps ten times. It seems that Orwell (Blair) wrote the populist 1984 and Animal Farm simply to get readers to read his earlier works, like this one. Orwell is clearly a master of words, of pacing and of emotion. He can manipulate the reader transparently. By about the fifth reading of Pier, I began to feel that Orwell could have written bestsellers like 1984 and Farm much more easily than this one.
So why is the book important, if for half of it he simply analyses the now-historical beginnings of the Socialist movement? Maybe because it doesn't matter in what direction Socialism has headed since he wrote this book, he wasn't analysing socialism or class issues as much as was busy digging up the truth of socialists, of the unemployed, of the homeless, of the middle class and the upper class. This analysis is still just as valid in 2004, as it was in 1930, even if the names of the political parties and the occupations have changed.
This book was witten by a truthful person, who perhaps stretched the truth a bit, or condensed it, or altered it. These are literary devices. But the meaning of the book, as is most valuable today, is about a poverty-stricken middle class that gets itself into debt to keep up the appearance of a higher class. And it is about a lower class that is essentially better off, even with the hungry belly and the dirty rooms, than this affected middle class from which Blair came.
Maybe this is the message that is so dangerous, the one that bookshop clerk tried to hide from the other customers. This book brings the poverty to light, and finds that the poverty-stricken can redeem themselves. But when Orwell unearths the truth of the middle class, the true subversive nature of this book spills all over the floor like a drunk puking on stage. What has not changed in almost a century is that the middle class may never be redeemed so long as we think that a "plate of strawberries and cream" is somehow our key to salvation. It fills our guts with something other than what we genuinely hunger.
To toss that plate onto the floor and stomp around the house for a piece of black bread with hard crust will wake the babies. But more dangerous, it may force the owner of the strawberry farm and the owner of the dairy farm to get their own hands dirty. "And what of the farmhands, if these soft-hands are doing the work they once did?" As Blair points out, it can only get better when you're already living at the bottom.

This book is divided into two sections. The first is a devastating account of the lives of coal miners in the north of England. While this account may be exaggerated it is completely conceivable that life in this time under such social and political conditions might have been like this. He goes to considerable length to explore the personal reactions and methods of endurance of the people he met. Orwell's dedication to exploring what life was really like for the coal miners was made at considerable personal discomfort and were as heroic as Jonathan Kozol's efforts in our present time.
The second half of the book is a long argument by Orwell of the negative aspects of socialism. He does this in order to provoke a serious discussion over how socialism can be implemented in our society. He understood well, as demonstrated in 1984, that many political parties use propaganda as a means of convincing the public that theirs is the right way. But, by taking the opposing view and criticising his own beliefs, he is able to bring the issues of the party into an open forum to consider implementations of change rather than party rhetoric. He does this most sincerely and in no way tries to hide the faults of the socialist political system of thought. In doing so he proves himself to be quite dignified in his system of beliefs. The juxtaposition of these two sections provides a striking idea of the immediate need for political reformation. He did not need to defend socialism because the need for a political change that could effect the lives of the lower class he investigated was obvious. This showed that Orwell's political ideas didn't exist on some ideological utopian plain, but were firmly rooted in the immense danger a political system could inflict upon a large population. It would be wise to remember this in reading the more popular 1984 and Animal Farm as well.
This book is compelling not just for people interested in politics, but also for anyone interested in history and the human condition. It is something you will be able to learn much from and provide you with inspiration.

This is sort of a bittersweet review for me. My granddad was a coal miner in England and Wales around the time Orwell was referencing in the book. As I read it, I could not help but think of him down in the mines and how terrifying and hard that job must have been. It made me really sad to think about it, but also very proud because I come from very hard working stock. So yes, in a way I really liked it but it saddened me to think of the hardships he went through. My mother told me stories about when he would come home from the mines and they were so similar to Orwell's tales.

As the story goes, Orwell was engaged to write a story about the then massive unemployment in the North of England.
The first few chapters recount Orwell's experience in a working-class boarding house and then underground with coal miners...and they are fascinating. Orwell's deft talent for recounting the subtle is well demonstrated in these compelling and often hilarious early chapters...
and then it happens.
Orwell's insights into class distiction are well known, and way too often shared, especially here. Orwell cheaps out by prattling on about why he thinks no one really wants true socialism and blah, blah, blah.
Even cheaper(!), Orwell constantly references already written works to demonstrate his point. So much so, that any reader would be vastly better off reading Orwell's fabulous semi-biographical "Down and Out in Paris and London" instead.
If you decided to read this book, I think you can guiltlessly toss it aside after the coal mining recallections.

Orwell wrote this before his breakthrough novels 1984 and Animal House, commissioned in the mid-1930s by the Left Book Club in Britain to write about the plight of the unemployed in the northern mining community of Wigan.

He ignored this commission and wrote about both the employed and unemployed mining workers in Wigan. The book is a vivid description of the awful working conditions of these miners, wonderfully told in a very personal style. I found very interesting his visits to the homes of these families, and the various conditions he recounts as part of their "quality" of life.

The second half of the book is his reaction to what he found, and an analysis of different policy-based solutions proposed to assist these folks out of their misery. He takes on and debunks many conventional notions held by socialists and other intellectuals in Britain during this era, making the book quite controversial for the Left Book Club, so much so that the introduction consists of the Left Book Club editors' response to Orwell's criticisms.

A fascinating glimpse at a slice of life in Britain during this time frame, as well as a worthy contribution to the debate on how to address this significant social issue.

An amateur, back-of-the-cocktail-napkin ethnographic study of coal miners in Depression-era northern England, combined with a strangely personal and convoluted meditation on the momentary travails of the English socialist movement should be the kind of book that no one in 2018 bothers to read any more. How can a book like that stand the test of time? It shouldn't, really. No one is going to be reading Alice Goffman's "On the Run" or Matthew Desmond's "Evicted" 80 years hence, and those (modern) books are more or less, in some sense, what Orwell has provided here. And yet, somehow, bizarrely, amazingly, Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier remains not just readable, but interesting and, for reasons that I can't quite comprehend, pretty compelling. It's not *relevant* to anything, really; and indeed it fell into irrelevance as soon as the Nazis invaded France. The subject matter is not the point any more. What makes the book worth reading is the quality and skill of Orwell's writing--his descriptions of the hell of depression-era coal mining make you feel as if you are hunched over scurrying through endless tunnels of sharp rock and black dust--and Orwell's fascinatingly complex and contradictory personality and thought, which is not so much intellectual in the sense of objective remove, and which lacks, thankfully, any of the snobbish methodological pretense of modern sociology, but rather intensely subjective, personal, complicated and inconsistent. He he repelled by the working class--especially by their smell!--and yet he greatly admires (some) of them for being stronger and better people than he is; he thinks socialism is the only solution to the dilemmas of modern economy and society, and yet he thinks socialists are, for the most part, hippy-dippy losers and scolds who succeed mostly in driving people toward fascism. His feelings and his reactions and off-the-cuff observations are the point, not his policy prescriptions , which he casts about loosely and without much conviction, and not his "data", which he somehow charmingly and guilelessly presents as lists of random statistics that he has stumbled across. We learn much more about Orwell in this book than we do about anything else, and perhaps that is what makes this strange historical remnant worth reading today.