The Road to Wigan Pier Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  List of Illustrations

  PART I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART II Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Also by George Orwell

  Introduction

  AMELIA GENTLEMAN

  All it takes is four paragraphs for George Orwell to convince us that we want to follow him on his journey to Wigan Pier. If the intention is to horrify readers with the intense squalor of his surroundings, he has chosen his lodgings wisely. He begins his trip staying in a boarding house that doubles up as a tripe store, which, for anyone unfamiliar with this now happily rare delicacy, is the edible lining ripped from the stomach of animals. Before we know why he is there, he is explaining with headache-inducing detail what it feels like to sleep in an airless room next to three other lodgers, in a space so cramped with the remnants of wrecked and redundant furniture that you’re liable to kick a fellow lodger in the back if you stretch out your legs, breathing in a ferret-like stench so powerful that the smell ‘hit[s] you in the face with a smack’, while everywhere there are thick, furry layers of dust. The landlords, Mr. Brooker (an ‘astonishingly dirty’ man) and Mrs. Brooker (‘a soft mound of fat and self-pity’), are so embittered and slovenly that they don’t bother too much with cleaning. ‘I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day,’ Orwell writes, in a sentence that reveals both his unforgiving eye for detail and the wry humour that frequently offsets the bleakness of his subject matter.

  This is not just any tripe store, but one where beetles swarm in the storeroom and last year’s dead bluebottles lie ‘supine in the shop window’; this is a boarding house where the landlady is permanently ill, ‘festooned in grimy blankets’, rousing herself only to ‘eat stupendous meals’, and where the owner neglects to wash his hands after carrying brimming chamber pots around (gripping them with ‘his thumb well over the rim’), and then insists on preparing the food with ‘a peculiarly intimate, lingering manner’, leaving black thumb-prints on the bread-and-butter slices, which make up one of the ‘uniformly disgusting’ meals served to guests. It is only when a full chamber pot is left under the breakfast table that Orwell decides to move on, remarking that ‘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.’

  In January 1936, Eric Blair, then thirty-two and still at the beginning of his writing career, left his part-time job in a Hampstead bookshop and travelled to the north of England to see and smell the deprivation in the depressed mining towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire. His earlier, first full-length book Down and Out in Paris and London, also published under the pseudonym George Orwell, had received good reviews, prompting his publisher Victor Gollancz to commission him to write a piece of reportage on the condition of the working classes in areas of high unemployment in the north. He threw himself into the reporting with huge dedication, inspecting around 200 houses to analyse living conditions – making sure he poked around upstairs where the ‘gauntness of poverty really discloses itself’; he analyses the iniquities of the nascent welfare system, scrutinizing payslips and shopping lists; he travels down mine shafts at sixty miles an hour, packed in rickety lifts ‘like pilchards in a tin’, before crawling miles through low tunnels to the coal face in ‘unbearable agony’, his six-foot-two frame bent double, determined to note the conditions in which miners were forced to work. When the reporting was finished, he returned to London to spend the rest of the year writing an account of what he had observed, followed by a long analysis of what conclusions should be drawn from the scenes of misery he had witnessed.

  The book is divided into two starkly different parts; the first chapters on life in Wigan, Sheffield and Barnsley provide a portrait of poverty; the second part veers between a slightly rambling analysis of the British class system and a savage diatribe against a breed of English socialists who Orwell finds offensive and disappointing in the extreme.

  In Mr. and Mrs. Brooker’s guesthouse there is one (relatively) comfortable double bed, crammed in alongside the single beds; new guests are given the double bed on the first night, to give them a positive first impression, before being manoeuvred out into less luxurious spots. Orwell describes the bed as ‘bait’. Similarly, the scorching first chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier might perhaps be seen as bait to lure the reader in, before Orwell tips us out into the more uncomfortable latter parts of the book.

  The book was to be published as one of the new Left Book Club’s titles, which promoted writing that would further political understanding and ‘help in the struggle for world peace and a better social and economic order, and against fascism’. We know that Gollancz was taken aback by the manuscript delivered in December 1936, because he felt it was necessary to add an extraordinary foreword dissociating himself from many of the ideas in the second part of the book. The work was ‘full of a burning indignation against poverty and oppression’, Gollancz noted, ‘a terrible record of evil conditions, foul housing, wretched pay, hopeless unemployment’. But, he adds, there were ‘well over a hundred minor passages about which I thought I should like to argue with Mr Orwell’, not least his long discussion on whether or not the middle classes believe the working classes to smell, but, more worryingly, his characterization of British socialists in the 1930s as a ‘stupid, offensive and insincere lot’, most of whom are ‘cranks’.

  It is true that eighty or so years after publication, the first half remains an easier read. The book has become a template for intensive reportage of social ills, and the road to Wigan Pier has been retrodden so many times by new generations of writers in the succeeding decades that the reviewer of one recent Wigan Pier-revisited book noted acidly that, ‘it’s a wonder there is any asphalt left on Darlington Street’. Residents remain irritated by the way their town has become a byword for deprivation because of Orwell’s journey, and rumours persist that he carefully sought out the squalor of the Brookers’ boarding house because previous lodgings were not sufficiently sordid to make good copy. Nevertheless, there are many parallels to be found in modern deindustrialized Wigan, a place where unemployment rates are still higher than the national average, and where low-paid, minimum wage, precarious zero-hours contract work is no longer down the mines, but in fast-food outlets, in vast online retail warehouses, and in food-processing factories.

  The book remains acutely relevant partly because the searing description of the lives of those worst hit by the Depression of the 1930s is itself an enduringly powerful read, but also because the questions he asks and the themes he explores resonate with so many contemporary problems.

  Orwell forces readers to engage with subjects that are uncomfortable. He takes us down a mine to enlighten readers about the conditions in which miners were working. ‘Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space,’ he writes, evoking the terror of crawling through narrow tunnels, ‘a tolerable-sized mountain’ with ‘green grass and cows grazing on it’ somewhere above him. But, there is always a purpose to the description, and here he is determined to expose a reality that most would rather not dwell on. ‘Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer
not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolute necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly.’

  If he was writing today, Orwell would be visiting mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where workers are labouring to extract cobalt, a vital component for the batteries that charge our laptops and smartphones and electric vehicles – dissecting conditions that we prefer to ignore. He would be in the sweat shops of Bangladesh, where cheap fast fashion is made, or travelling to Chinese sportswear factories, forcing us to make the ‘definite mental effort’ required to connect our consumption with the lives of those at the coal face.

  So many of the characteristics of British poverty which Orwell highlights remain surprisingly constant. The unemployed still shelter in libraries for warmth and find themselves forced to pay unaffordable high rents for shoddy housing with leaking roofs and walls that ooze damp. The appeal of cheap, trashy food endures, making up for what it lacks in nutrition with its instant mood-boosting qualities. ‘A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t’, he writes – a line that still rings true in an era when tech billionaires like to preach about the merits of veganism and oat milk. Orwell understands why the benefits of clean eating are viewed with a jaundiced eye by those for whom life is already hard enough, without adding an extra layer of self-imposed deprivation. ‘When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit “tasty”.’ He skewers the still prevalent middle-class ignorance about the reality of poverty, their unshakeable conviction that most jobless people are ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ who could ‘all find work if they wanted to’, a notion which remains central to the world view of Conservative ministers and Daily Mail columnists.

  Orwell works so hard to force readers to feel the extremes of poverty, acutely aware that simply bombarding us with bare statistics of overcrowded housing will cause readers’ eyes to glaze over. ‘Words are such feeble things. What is the use of a brief phrase like “roof leaks” or “four beds for eight people”? It is the kind of thing your eye slides over, registering nothing. And yet what a wealth of misery it can cover!’ He is at pains to ensure that his words are not feeble. At times he piles on adjectives expressing hyperbolic revulsion to force us to pay attention – everything is evil, hideous, ugly, intolerable, miserable and abominable. Elsewhere, he confronts us with arresting detail, so that we cannot fail to appreciate the chill felt by people unable to afford bedding, who sleep instead beneath a heap of overcoats and rags.

  He is clear-sighted about why it falls to him, an Eton-educated southerner, to chronicle the lives of the working classes. He correctly identifies that the hardships of poverty make writing near impossible, noting: ‘to write books you need not only comfort and solitude – and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home – you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with the dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.’

  There are elements of the first part which have dated less well. There is the strange jolt into the romanticization of the working-class family, tacked on jarringly after seven chapters detailing the horrors of industrialized life, with its slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast furnaces. Occasionally, Orwell comes across unattractively as a naturalist, peering keenly through a microscope at a repellant specimen with whom he shares nothing. He doesn’t bother much with the women he encounters, except to describe them as drudges with skull-like faces, ‘dumpy, shawled women’ who he glimpses ‘kneeling in the cindery mud’. But, throughout, he is appealingly unfiltered and honest about the development of his thoughts, describing a flash of understanding he has when he realizes that the woman he glimpses from a train window, on her knees on the stone pavement, poking around a foul drain-pipe to unblock it, was not experiencing the ‘ignorant suffering of an animal’ but was fully aware of her ‘dreadful destiny’. You wonder slightly why this comes as a revelation, but appreciate his frankness.

  Much of part two feels harder work, and, on first reading, my eyes wanted to slide over some of Orwell’s rambling arguments about the links between machine production, industrialization and socialism, a section which drags on at length, before concluding (contentiously) that ‘the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle’.

  But it’s hard not to be gleefully delighted by the intensity of his spite in his attack on the fuzzy-haired socialists of the 1930s. Orwell is depressed that English socialism is confined entirely to the middle classes. The 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,’ he declares, before denouncing socialists as ‘vegetarians with wilting beards’, ‘earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics’. He reserves particular venom for two short, pink, chubby sixty-year-olds, dressed in ‘pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple’, who he spots returning from a socialist summer school. His sneering at the bearded fruit-juice drinkers goes on for pages and it is only really at the end that he hammers home why he feels this is so vitally important.

  This pre-war era was a time of global upheaval, with the looming clash between the forces of the left and the right threatening catastrophic consequences. Shortly after delivering his manuscript in 1937, Orwell left to fight fascism in Spain. In the context of this real and justifiable fear that fascism might prevail, it is not surprising that Orwell is so passionately irritated by English socialists, and determined to tell them that they should stop being so weird. He is alarmed to see ‘decent’ people so alienated by socialism. ‘You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings or the game is up.’ Socialism smells of ‘crankishness’, he warns. ‘Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.’

  Some of Orwell’s analysis of class feels dusty now, with its central division between those who pronounce their aitches and those who do not. But his exploration of how snobbery is instilled in children remains compelling, mainly because of his touching honesty in examining the revulsion inculcated in him from about the age of six. He describes the process of being led to abandon his hero worship of working-class people, who until then he had admired for their interesting jobs as fishermen, blacksmiths and bricklayers. Instead, he is guided towards treating them as enemies with ‘coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners’. His time as a scholar at Eton only makes things worse, so that the thought of smelling lower-class sweat begins to make him sick and he wants to vomit if he has to drink from a bottle already touched by ‘lower-class male mouths’. The public-school system has a lot to answer for, he notes. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school, ‘but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.’

  His desire to root out this bindweed is partly what drives his work seeking out the underdogs, as well as a need to rid himself of the bad conscience he acquired during his time working as a police officer in the British colony of Burma (now Myanmar). He felt so guilty at the memory of ‘subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist’ that he ‘wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.’ The Road to Wigan Pier represents an advance on his earlier account of dressing up as a tramp in Down and Out in Paris and London. ‘[U]nfortunately you do not solve the class problem by making
friends with tramps,’ he notes, acidly critiquing his own work. The second part may at times feel wearisome and patchy, but you have to admire Orwell for going beyond simply offering a portrait of despair, and for his attempts to sketch out an alternative path.

  List of Illustrations

  1. Coal Searchers

  2. South Wales: Miners of the Fernhill Colliery come to the surface after a stay-in strike of nearly two weeks underground

  3. Cilfynydd, Pontypridd, South Wales: Unemployed miners watching the buckets tipping slag in the hope that some coal may fall

  4. Nine Mile Point Colliery, Newport: Relatives and friends waiting at the pit-head for news of the miners, who are conducting a stay-in strike below

  5. A Row of Undermined Houses in Blaenavon, Monmouthshire

  6. A South Wales Miner takes his Bath

  7. Miners’ Cottages

  8. Outside Newcastle

  9. Miners’ Cottages at Coatbridge

  10. Miners’ Cottages at Blantyre

  11. Blaina, Wales: Rotting interior of a slum dwelling

  12. House near Swansea Threatened by Slag Heap

  13. Blaina, Wales

  14. Gap by a Window of a School in Wales

  15. Scullery in an “Offshoot” Coming Away from the Main Building (now reconditioned)

  16. A Basement in Limehouse: One of a whole street

  17. Limehouse

  18. Limehouse

  19. Scullery in Limehouse

  20. Bethnal Green

  21. Bethnal Green

  22. Bethnal Green

  23. Stepney

  24. Stepney: Shadwell District

  25. Stepney: Shadwell District

  26. Stepney

  27. Dinner on the Table in Poplar

  28. St. Pancras: Before the slum clearance

  29. Poplar

  30. Poplar

  31. Caravan Dwellers near a Durham Quarry