Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER” by George Orwell (first published 1937)

Continuing with my examination of George Orwell’s non-fiction books (see the posting for Downand Out in Paris and London) I now turn to The Road to Wigan Pier, researched and written in 1936 and first published in 1937. Like Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier falls awkwardly into two separate parts which do not quite fit each other, and not for the first (or last) time Orwell ran into trouble with his publisher Victor Gollancz. The copy of The Road to Wigan Pier I have on my shelf was printed in the 1960s and is prefaced by a very long, and somewhat pompous, introduction by the (now deceased) sociologist and literary critic Richard Hoggart. Hoggart notes, truthfully, that nearly all commentators have regarded The Road to Wigan Pier as Orwell’s “most disappointing performance”. Much of the criticism of The Road to Wigan Pier is based on political views. As Hoggart says, Orwell was essentially concerned with social class and was trying, as an “upper-lower-middle-class” man, to understand the working class from his own class perspective, which led to an internal struggle. In many ways he admired working-class people more than he admired upper-class people, but he still clung to sturdy middle-class values such as duty and decency.

The background to the genesis of The Road to Wigan Pier (and here I am once again leaning on the biographies of Orwell written by Bernard Crick and D. J. Taylor) goes like this: in January 1936, Victor Gollancz commissioned Orwell to write a book about the condition of the unemployed in the North of England, mainly Yorkshire and Lancashire. Orwell went north and spent two months observing and researching. But when he presented Gollancz with his finished manuscript, Gollancz was appalled. The first half he liked, which gave a very vivid account of conditions in the North. But the second half he found intolerable, as in the very polemical second half Orwell gave his mixed opinions on Socialism (he always spelt Socialism with a capital letter) and also included some autobiography. Not only was this not what Gollancz had commissioned, but it annoyed the (mainly Communist) people who chose which books should be published by Gollancz’s Left Book Club. So Gollancz decided to publish the full text of Orwell’s book only in a very limited edition; but for the Left Book Club he would publish only the first half of The Road to Wigan Pier in a much greater print-run and at a lower price. Thus it was first presented to the world.

Considering the full text, and not Gollancz’s abridged version, The Road to Wigan begins with Orwell waking up to the sound of girls’ clogs as they walk to work. He is in a filthy cheap lodging house run by a couple called the Brookers. His description of the place is very like his descriptions of disgusting lodgings in Down and Out in Paris and London - unsanitary food, bed-sheets hardly ever cleaned, sick people coughing and stingy hosts. He remarks: “I have noticed that people who let lodgings nearly always hate their lodgers. They want their money but they look on them as intruders and have a curiously watchful, jealous attitude which at bottom is a determination not to let the lodger make himself too much at home. It is an inevitable result of the bad system by which the lodger has to live in somebody else’s house without being one of the family.” (Chapter 1) Orwell bolts and finds somewhere else to live.

He then sets out to see how proletarian men work in the North, and (in Chapters 2 and 3) he examines coal-mining. These two chapters are frankly the high point of the book – a brilliant and vivid piece of reportage, among the best things Orwell ever wrote. Very helpful miners guide him through a coal-mine far beneath the surface. There are the “fillers” who have to kneel to shovel coal over their shoulders onto the conveyor belt. Miners have to walk miles underground before they reach the coalface. The ceiling is so low that they have to crouch much of the way (a great problem and pain for Orwell as he was very tall). Orwell notes the incredible hardiness of the miners and their physical strength as they do their daily work amid stifling coal dust. He is upset to find that coal-miners are paid only for the hours that they are literally  extracting coal. They are not paid for the time (sometimes hours) that they have to crouch-walk underground to and from the coalface. Orwell speaks of the blue scars so many miners have on their necks and arms, the result of coal dust invading wounds and scars. He notes that very few collieries have pit-head baths for miners, meaning miners have to go home, covered in filth, where they attempt to wash. Wages are often stingy, and miners are often “laid off”, with no wages in spring and summer when less coal is required. Every year one coal-miner out of nine-hundred dies in a mining accident, but every one-in-nine will be injured, some permanently lame. There are often cave-ins and gas explosions. Many miners end up with nystagmus, going blind by working in the dark and having coal-dust constantly invading their eyeballs.

All of this is conveyed more viscerally, more immediately, than I have reported it here. And all the time, Orwell chastises his more complacent readers (mainly middle-class readers) by insisting, as was true in the 1930s, that the whole civilization they enjoy is run on coal – coal fuels factories, railways, steamships, power stations giving electricity  etc. and all the comforts thoughtless people take for granted.

Having said all this – and note he is not yet talking about the unemployed – Orwell turns to the slum nature of housing in the economically depressed areas of the North, often referencing not only Wigan, but Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley and Manchester.

He says that, with very few exceptions, he was greeted courteously by working-class people when he asked to enter and examine their homes. He describes the unliveable one-up-one-down cramped houses which are meant to accommodate whole families; the communal lavatories which are often inaccessible; and houses that should have been demolished and replaced years earlier. He notes: “In a town like Wigan… there are over two thousand houses standing that have been condemned for years, and whole sections of the town would be condemned en bloc if there was any hope of other houses being built to replace them.”  (Chapter 4) And because of subsidence of land due to mining “In Wigan you pass whole rows of houses which have slid to startling angles, their windows being ten or twenty degrees out of the horizontal.” (Chapter 4) Yet what is often called “slum clearance” creates its own problems. “Slum clearance” tends to be advocated by people of higher class who live far from the slums, and working-class people who are moved into better Corporation houses often find that they have to pay higher rent and rates. Often, too, working-class people who are relocated into better housing find they are no longer part of the community they are used to. 

We then come (Chapter 5) to the question of unemployment in the North, and the manoeuvres of the P. A. C. (Public Assistance Committee) and the Means Test that confront the unemployed before that can claim the dole. Orwell says there are far more people unemployed in England than the government’s official number given as two million. He notes that many workers who are “laid off” for months (without wages) are not regarded as unemployed. Yet he says he sees fewer beggars and totally destitute people in the North than he has seen in London. On the domestic front he notes that unemployed men stay at home and leave all the housework to their wives, on the assumption that doing “women’s work” will lessen their manliness and social status. On the whole, he says, communities have not disintegrated and despite poverty, people have got used to their condition. No revolution is brewing. Prophetically, as it turned out, Orwell remarks: “We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will – unless another war breaks out – never have a real job this side of the grave.”  (Chapter 5)

Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the matter of food and with how Southerners regard Northerners and vice versa. Families, employed or unemployed, rely on very limited budgets and as a result they have to eat cheap and generally unhealthy food. In the North fuel (meaning coal) is abundant and cheaper than it is in other parts of England, so most families are warm. Even so, many of the unemployed have to pick the scrapings of coal out of slag heaps to get fuel. The debate between Northern and Southern attitudes towards each other is the most redundant chapter in the whole first half of The Road to Wigan Pier. And Orwell has often been criticised for idealising the working-class household in this paragraph: “ In a working-class home – I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of comparatively prosperous homes – you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady works and drawing wages – an ‘if’ which gets bigger and bigger – has a better chance of being happy than a  ‘educated’ man. His home life seems to fall naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat – it is a good place to be in, provided that you can not only be in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.”   (Chapter 7) [Not only is it idealised, but 90 years since it was written, Orwell is now condemned for applauding the “patriarchal” concept of a happy family.]

And so we come to the quite separate second part of the book. Orwell begins (Chapter 8) with autobiography about his being of the “lower-upper-middle-class”. He gives a very muddled and ambiguous account of the nature of different social classes in England and the enduring gulf between the middle-class and the working-class. He makes the statement that it is smell that mainly separates the working-class from the middle-class. He speaks of his own childhood when he was was trained to think in this way. But he also notes that in Britain the Socialists and Communists are mainly middle-class and have middle-class habits. He (in Chapter 9) says that after the war [now known as the First World War], there was the sense that prosperity would reign, and for a very short time this was so. But even by the early 1920s, unemployment began to rise. As a schoolboy at Eton, says Orwell, he hated those of the upper classes who looked down on him, but he himself shared all the bourgeois prejudices and habits. His experience as a policeman in Burma gradually taught him the evils of colonialism, and he returned to England hating the British Empire. He tried to understand the condition of the working-class of which he was not a part by exploring the world of the impoverished by going tramping and taking up menial work (as in Down and Out in Paris and London). He says (Chapter 10) on class attitudes, that middle-class people tend to believe they are not snobs and do not look down upon the working-class, but they give themselves away by the way they speak (i.e. their accents and vocabulary) and by their habits and assumptions. And among the proletariat, many act as if those of the middle-class are their superiors. Of his exploration on the North, he says he got on with the working-class people he met, but: “Even with miners who called themselves Communists I found that it took tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me ‘sir’; and all of them, except in moments of great animation, soften their northern accents for my benefit. I like them and hope they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it. Whichever way you turn, this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone.”  (Chapter 10)

He then turns (Chapters 11, 12 and 13) to the matter of Socialism. On the whole he favours Socialism, but he takes the peculiar path of explaining in detail why so many in England are repelled by it. Thus (Chapter 11) he notes that Socialism is attracting fewer people because most Socialists tend themselves to be middle-class and often have “cranky” ideas that alienate the working-class. Most members of the left-wing I. L. P. (the – now long gone - Independent Labour Party) and the Communists have unreal agendas and “the underlying motive of many Socialists… is simply a hypertrophied sense of order.” In detail he explains (Chapter 12) that Socialism is tied to the age of the machine; and the machine is made to ease toil and therefore make toil less onerous. But this merely assumes that this is an improvement of human life when it actually makes for human weakness. The socialist, as he now is, is generally in favour of “progress”, which actually means mechanisation, rationalisation and modernisation. As Orwell sees it, Socialism is necessary in the sense of raising welfare, making good housing for all, ensuring work, taking essential industries out of the private sector, and yet still allowing for freedom of thought and expression. But, he says, the Socialists have not made their case clearly, have been sidelined by contentious polemics, and are in danger of being overwhelmed by Fascism which, repellent though it is, has some valid points to make and is growing in England [remember this was written in 1936]. Finally (Chapter 13) he argues that socialists too often damn the bourgeoisie while ignoring the fact that a large part of the middle-classes are as impoverished as the working-class. And of course, as a writer who was deeply concerned about the nature of language itself and its misuse, he takes pot-shots at the much of the alienating jargon the socialists use, including “proletariat”, “bourgeoisie”, “deviationist” etc. etc. etc.

From my own summary here, I hope you can see what a muddle and hotch-potch the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is. Victor Gollancz was boorish in the way he published Orwell’s work, but even so, the second half of the book does not match the vivid reporting of the first half. From Chapter 9 onwards, Orwell’s prose become nebulous, lacking the precise language he mainly used from Chapter 1 to Chapter 8. His points of reference are vague, he generalises and asserts things without any documenting, and resembles somebody trying to put across theories without organising them. To put it crudely, he often descents into rant. And of course, despite his beliefs, he never does make a persuasive argument for Socialism.

There is also the problem of Orwell’s ingrained prejudices, which are found in both parts of The Road to Wigan Pier. Take it for granted that he hated Catholics, a common English prejudice. But note whom he damns when he is talking of the importance of coal: “In order that Hitler may goosestep, that the pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord’s, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another’s backs, coal has got to be forthcoming.” And on the following page he ridicules “You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants…”   (Chapter 2) “Nancy poets?” Gosh. Then much later there’s this rant: “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-manic, Quaker, ‘Nature cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” (Chapter 11) So pacifists can be equated with sex-maniacs? And what’s so perverse about drinking fruit-juice? And what worries him about feminists? Once again… Gosh.

When I consider the better half of The Road to Wigan Pier, I get the strong sense that I am visiting the dead past. Orwell says the world and all industry runs on coal and in effect determines our whole civilization… but that was then, not now. Orwell’s reportage is robust, forthright and compassionate, but it is very topical in the sense of addressing the era he was living in. We are now more concerned with coal only in the sense that burning coal sends carbon into the stratosphere and hastens climate collapse. We favour “clean” means of producing energy. In effect, I read The Road to Wigan Pier as if it were an old black-and-white newsreel-with-commentary as made in the 1930s by some British pioneer of documentary film such as John Grierson… and then I wake up and remember the Pike River disaster and understand that in many parts of the world, men are still dying in the extraction of coal. At least some of Orwell’s reportage is relevant to today.

Footnotes: The most iconic and most often quoted paragraph in the book comes very early in The Road to Wigan Pier. It is near the end of Chapter 1, where Orwell, passing in a train, sees a working-class woman desperately trying to un-block a blocked drain on an awful winter morning. The passage is too long for me to quote in full, but Orwell draws the moral that the woman’s suffering would be as intense and conscious as it would be for any member of any class. He refutes the smug idea that many middle- or upper-class people hold, that the working class are used to such things and don’t suffer by such unpleasantness. 

Also, severe critics have ridiculed Orwell for flinching when, crawling through a coal mine, his hand falls on something greasy and disgusting. It turns out to be a gob of chewed tobacco which a miner had spat out. So, say Orwell's fastidious critics, this shows what a timid and fussy bourgeois man Orwell must have been, unused to proletarian ways. But, dear reader, are you so sure that you wouldn't flinch if, in the dark, your hand fell on something that felt disgusting? And after all, if you are reading this at all, you're probably bourgeois yourself comrade.