The Road to Wigan Pier(1937)
Author George Orwell
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Autobiography
Publisher Victor Gollancz
(London)
Publication date 8 March 1937
Media type Print (Hardback)
ISBN ISBN
The Road to Wigan Pier was written by George Orwell and published in
1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of
Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War
II. The second half is a long essay of his upbringing, and the development of
his political conscience, which includes a denunciation of some aspects of
British socialist attitudes and behaviour.
CONTENTS
1 Background
2 Structure
o 2.1 Part One
o 2.2 Part Two
3 Quotes
4 Misquotations
5 Name of the Book
6 Criticism
Background
Victor Gollancz suggested at the end of 1935 that Orwell spend a short
time investigating social conditions in economically depressed northern
England. In the period from 31 January to 30 March 1936 Orwell was living in
Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield and researching the book. The conventional view,
based on a recollection by George Gorer, is that this was a specific commission
with a £500 advance — two years' income for him at the time.
However Taylor argues that Orwell's subsequent circumstances showed no
indication of such largesse, Gollancz was not a person to part with such a sum
on speculation, and Gollancz took little proprietorial interest in progress.
Gollancz published the work under the Left Book Club which gave Orwell a far
higher circulation than his previous works. However Gollancz feared the second
half would offend Left Book Club readers and inserted a mollifying preface to
the book while Orwell was in Spain.
Structure
The book is divided into two sections.
Part One
George Orwell set out to report on working class life in the bleak
industrial heartlands of the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire. Orwell spent
a considerable time living among the people and as such his descriptions are
detailed and vivid.
Chapter One describes the
life of the Brooker Family, a more wealthy example of the northern working
class. They have a shop and cheap lodging house in their home. Orwell describes
the old people who live in the home and their living conditions.
Chapter Two describes the
life of miners and conditions down a coal mine. Orwell describes how he went
down a coal mine to observe proceedings and he explains how the coal is
distributed. The working conditions are very poor. This is the part of the book
most often quoted.
Chapter Three describes the
social situation of the average miner. Hygienic and financial conditions are
discussed. Orwell explains why most miners do not actually earn as much as they
are sometimes believed to.
Chapter Four describes the
housing situation in the industrial north. There is a housing shortage in the
region and therefore people are more likely to accept substandard housing. The
housing conditions are very poor.
Chapter Five explores
unemployment and Orwell explains that the unemployment statistics of the time
are misleading.
Chapter Six deals with the
food of the average miner and how, although they generally have enough money to
buy food, most families prefer to buy something tasty to enrich their dull
lives. This leads to malnutrition and physical degeneration in many families.
Chapter Seven describes the
ugliness of the industrial towns in the north of England.
Part Two
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In contrast to the straightforward documentary of the first part of the
book, in part two Orwell discusses the relevance of socialism to improving
living conditions. This section proved controversial.
Orwell sets out his initial premises very simply
1. Are the appalling conditions
described in part 1 tolerable? (No)
2. Is socialism
“wholeheartedly applied as a world system” capable of improving
those conditions? (Yes)
3. Why then are we
not all socialists?
The rest of the book consists of Orwell’s attempt to answer this
difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism
do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not
believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons,
which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies 5 main
problems.
1. Class prejudice.
This is real and it is visceral. Middle class socialists do themselves no
favours by pretending it does not exist and — by glorifying the manual
worker — they tend to alienate that large section of the population which
is economically working class but culturally middle class.
2. Machine worship.
Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of
technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to
softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced
socialist utopias are deadly dull. H.G. Wells in particular is criticised on
these grounds.
3. Crankiness.
Amongst many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or
wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative
reputation among many more conventional people.
4. Turgid language.
Those who pepper their sentences with “notwithstandings” and
“heretofores” and become over excited when discussing dialectical
materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
5. Failure to
concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair
shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.
In presenting these arguments Orwell takes on the role of devil's
advocate. He states very plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism but
feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people, who would benefit from
socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong
opponents. It is perhaps unfortunate that Orwell’s language in these
passages is so lively and amusing that people tend to remember these parts of
the book and forget its overall message.
Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, was so concerned that these
passages would be misinterpreted, and that the (mostly middle class) members of
the Left Book Club would be upset and write to him complaining letters, that he
added a foreword in which he raises some caveats about Orwell's claims in Part
Two. He suggests, for instance, that Orwell may exaggerate the visceral
contempt that the English middle classes hold for the working class, adding,
however, that, "I may be a bad judge of the question, for I am a Jew, and
passed the years of my early boyhood in a fairly close Jewish community; and,
among Jews of this type, class distinctions do not exist." Other concerns
Gollancz raises are that Orwell should so instinctively dismiss movements such
as pacifism or feminism as incompatible with or counter-productive to the
Socialist cause, and that Orwell relies too much upon a poorly defined,
emotional concept of Socialism. Gollancz's claim that Orwell "does not
once define what he means by Socialism" in The Road to Wigan Pier is
indeed difficult to refute. The foreword does not appear in some modern
editions of the book, though it was included, for instance, in Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich's first American edition in the 1950s.
At a later date Gollancz published part 1 on its own, against
Orwell’s wishes, and he refused to publish “Homage to
Catalonia” at all.
Quotes
“...[A] middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash
his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the 'lower
classes'.”
“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.”
“...[T]he food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut
himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of
his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.”
“Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the
human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. That is the goal
towards which we are already moving, though, of course, we have no intention of
getting there; just as a man who drinks a bottle of whisky a day does not
actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver.”
“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."
"We have reached a stage when the very word ‘Socialism’
calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge
glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of
vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half
gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing
polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party
backstairs-crawlers."
"If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put
in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent
home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!"
“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles
into the working classes where we belong, and probably when we get there it
will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose
but our aitches.”
Misquotations
Quotations wrongly attributed to George Orwell have appeared in
buildings around Manchester. In Urbis, the entrance to the lift reads
"Manchester, the belly and guts of the nation" and is cited as George
Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier. This line does not appear in the book and is
unlikely that he wrote the words at all. Yet, the exact quotation also appears
on the ground floor wall of The City Tower near Piccadilly Gardens. In 2007 the
satirical character of Sleuth on Manchester website Manchester Confidential
admitted that he'd made a mistake in providing this quote to Urbis —
Sleuth 31/08/07. Sleuth is generally seen to be the alter-ego (if not
exclusively) of the editor of the site, Jonathan Schofield.
Name of the Book
The name of the book comes from a music hall routine by a British
comedian. Although a pier is a structure built out into the water from the
shore, in Britain the term has the connotation of a seaside holiday. Wigan was
a small grimy mill town on a canal accessed by boats via an offloading
structure, although it primarily used land transport. Hence the music hall joke
of a mill town with its own seaside resort, and Orwell's choice of title
implied his belief that socialism could improve life to an unprecedented degree
even in a mill town.
Geographically, Wigan Pier is today the name given today to the area
around the canal at the bottom of the Wigan flight of locks on the Leeds and
Liverpool Canal. The original "pier" at Wigan was a coal loading
staithe, probably a wooden jetty, where wagons of coal from a nearby colliery
were unloaded into waiting barges on the canal. The original wooden pier is
believed to have been demolished in 1929, with the iron from the tippler being
sold as scrap.
Criticism
Scottish singer-songwriter Dick Gaughan has described Orwell's book as
an "insulting portrayal of the working class", accusing the author of
being "incapable of seeing beyond superficial appearances".