The Road to Wigan Pier

Published in 1937, George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier documents the grinding poverty of northern England, namely Lancashire and Yorkshire. As with Orwell's better-known and somewhat similar Down and Out in Paris and London, the author sets out to investigate the conditions of the poor by living among them and writing about his experiences. There is a chapter on coal miners and mines, and Orwell elucidates on the culture and mechanics of the industry; he goes down a mine to report, taking the reader with him. Orwell discusses unemployment (how it's misunderstood, etc.) and touches on how the upper classes view the lower ones.

That, more or less, makes for Part One, which I found engaging from a historical perspective as much as anything. It's meant to be a socioeconomic investigation (a description, a testimony), but because it's 75 years old, it's become a historical document. Part One isn't as lively or vivid as sections of Down and Out, perhaps because there's little dialogue and it lacks that diary-of-life-in-the-gutter quality. The conditions Orwell describes are awful, but, comparatively, there is a sense of detachment in the way he communicates them.

In Part Two, Orwell gears down, going from documentary to dissertation, and though historical, this part is timeless. "The English class system has outlived its usefulness," is the message he wants us to take from Part One, so what's the solution? The most obvious answer is socialism, but is socialism really the medicine society needs to take?

The section about machine-worship notwithstanding (time has proven Orwell, and probably many others, wrong about the future of machines and technology), Part Two makes for provocative, passionate, and insightful analysis. Anyone who's ever given thought to class distinction, class conflict, exploitation, the plight of the working poor, or been drawn, if only momentarily, to socialism or its various forms (Marxism, communism, democratic socialism, etc.) ought to read this book, and carefully. Anybody who reads tracts like Terry Eagleton's Why Marx was Right ought to read The Road to Wigan Pier immediately afterward. They should buy them together.

In socialism, Orwell finds a few good, if loose, ideas, a lot of stupidity, and even more pretension. He lambasts its advocates, arguing they are out of touch with the proletarians they claim to venerate. Socialists are striking a blow at the bourgeoisie, yet they are the bourgeoisie. If a coal miner walked in on one of their meetings, they would feel, at the least, uncomfortable. Socialists hold that "poverty, and what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence."

Socialism is dogma, Orwell illustrates (without saying as much), arguing that it is not a mirror image of fascism, but a perverse form of it (a "travesty" is the word he uses). Though seemingly antipodean, the ideologies have much in common. If you travel far enough toward either end of the political spectrum, you end up as a blip on the opposite side.

The attacks are scathing, and come in bunches. "We have got to admit that if Fascism is everywhere and advancing, this is largely the fault of Socialists themselves. Partly it is due to the mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on...." Moreover, Orwell says, Socialists "have never made it sufficiently clear that their essential aims are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia." The best excoriation, though it's hard to choose, might be: "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. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win."

And it very nearly did win. The prophetic nature of Orwell's ideas is part of his perennial appeal.

`But hey,' interjects the modern-day far-leftie. `Orwell is talking about a brand of socialism that no longer exists. Socialism has changed.'

It has in some regards, but elements of the variety Orwell was talking about are still apparent. Democratic socialism is still championed by people from the middle class, it's still dogmatic, and it still reveres "great" men who believe change must come from above. Socialism is often the final destination of the alienated. It is a mind-numbing religion for the non-religious, intellectual, middle class.

They say a good book tells you what you already know (or suspect), and it's probably for that reason I enjoyed this one so much. I live in one of Canada's poorest cities, thoroughly blue collar. It's hard not to look at the poor and start conjuring up ideas about social engineering. Give them an education, you think. Give them purpose. Break the cycle of generational poverty. I recently reread Marx and even voted for and joined Canada's democratic socialist party, though I quickly wished I hadn't. The rally I attended was dominated by "vegetarians with wilting beards" (or at least many of the local university's bearded faculty), sixties' activists, and "earnest ladies in sandals." I was, quite frankly, put off by this, and by discussions in the crowd about the bright spots of the Soviet Union and a few of communism's "great" men, the handing out of hammer-and-sickle adorned propaganda rags, etc. As Orwell writes, "the thinking person, by intellect usually left-wing but by temperament often right-wing, hovers at the gate of the Socialist fold. He is no doubt aware that he ought to be a Socialist. But he observes first the dullness of individual Socialists, then the apparent flabbiness of Socialist ideals, and veers away."

And none too soon.

There is an intriguing aside to The Road to Wigan Pier. The book was commissioned by a publisher named Victor Gollancz, who wasn't at all happy with Part Two and worried about the reactions of members of the Left Book Club, the organization that issued the book. Gollancz wrote a flaying, impassioned foreword, included in the modern Harcourt edition, where he attempts, lest the reader get the wrong impression, to take the edge off Orwell's words. Gollancz apologizes to vegetarians, half-gangster commissars, and cranks, and says Orwell is "astray" and a "frightful snob." Orwell doesn't even define socialism, Gollancz whines; nor does he explain what he means by "liberty" and "justice." The spirited "pretort," if you will, ends with a figurative, if not literal, call to mobilize against the capitalistic enemy.

The observant reader sees Gollancz's foreword for what it is: a wretched attempt at censorship and the very sort of empty rhetoric, hare-brained we-know-best thinking, and militant jingoism Orwell so skilfully obliterates.

Troy Parfitt is the author of Why China Will Never Rule the World

First off, I'd like to point out that socialism is NOT communism, since one of the other reviewers failed to make the distinction.

Secondly, Orwell did not write this book "for the socialists" in the sense that some of the other reviews imply. He wrote the first half of the book-an analysis of living/working conditions of coal miners in North England- by request of the Left Book Club, a British socialist organization. The second half of the book- a critique of socialism and socialists- was not requested by the club, in fact, it prompted a rebuttal from a representative of the organization in the original release (which is included as an introduction in other editions of the book.)

The half of the book about the miners and their lives is heartbreakingly poignant, described well by the other reviews. Read them. The second half is a well reasoned constructive critique of socialism and socialists. Orwell points out that most of those middle-class folk who claim to be socialists, in actuality, are not: they wouldn't be willing to lower their own standard of living for the sake of elevating those in poverty. He points out that the alternate view of "why don't we just elevate the standard of living for EVERYONE?" is a bit of a Jesus complex that would never work. He goes on to compare "bearded juice-drinking Marx-quoting Socialists" to the likes of pushy evangelical Christians, saying that most Socialists actually harm their cause and turn others away from socialism rather than converting them. Hillarious, wether you are a critic or friend of socialism (assuming that you have a sense of humor...)

The one complaint I have about this book is that Orwell states that socialism is "obviously" the only cure for the ills of the coal miners described in the first half of the book. He never says how or why. One could extrapolate that socialism could alleviate the housing shortage by providing subsidized housing in the mining towns, and that it could improve the conditions in the mines by applying industry standards to how the mines are run. Wether this would actually be the case could be argued, but the author doesn't even bother to give any support to his claim.

Overall a great book- read both parts!

When I was in high school in the 'sixties, I had to make a joint book report on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 for an American History class. I was so annoyed with this assignment that I wrote a vehemently nasty review. The teacher was vastly amused. He suggested that I read Road to Wigan Pier. I couldn't see anyway to niggle out of reading it, so I settled down to read it as perfunctorily as possible and still be able to convince the teacher that I had given it due thought. Instead, as I read, I became enthralled by Orwell's descriptions of life in a bleak industrial town in the north of England. I gained new respect for Eric Blair; I still didn't like 1984, but I understood better where he was coming from and why he wrote it.
I've thought about Road to Wigan Pier many times in the intervening years, and I just recently re-read it. It is still just as powerful and despairing. The non-fiction beats the fiction any day. I have an insig! ! htful teacher to thank for recommending this book.

It's worth knowing that this book was originally commissioned by the Left Book Club, a Socialist book club in the UK, and when the manuscript arrived they realized Orwell had delivered more than they'd bargained for. In part one, Orwell brilliantly reports on the atrocious living and working conditions in northern England in the 1930s. His chapter covering his visit to a coal mine has been often anthologized, but the entire section consists of equally vivid portraits. In part two, Orwell discusses Socialism with such a jaundiced eye that it had the editors of the Left Book Club wondering if they could get away with printing only the first half of the book! Orwell did not fully believe in Socialism until he fought in the Spanish Civil War after "Wigan Pier" was printed, and contrary to the right-wingers who have claimed him as one of their own, Orwell was a dedicated Socialist to the day he died, but a skeptical one. Read "Wigan Pier," and for more information, read Orwell's diary he kept during his trip to the north in Volume 1 of the Collected Essays.

The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliantly written work of documentary literature, with a propoganda piece tacked on at the end. Orwell describes the poverty and hardships of working people in the industrial disctricts in the north of England, based on what he himself has seen and heard during his travels there. The second part is entirely political, and does not seem nearly as interesting to today's reader. But the matter it deals with - the great struggle between socialism and fascism - was of extreme urgency in the late 1930's, when Orwell wrote the book. It's important to remember that Orwell did NOT attack socialism. He merely raised what he considered were the most likely objections to socialism, then refuted them. That a large corporation like the store.com would accuse him of "slanting his reporting" shows what a true socialist he really was.

This wonderful book deserves all the accolades heaped on it, the first half being such a tour-de-force I think it should be compulsory reading for every 18 year-old. I learned that pregnant women were strapped into harnesses to pull wagons filled with coal along the pitch black tunnels of the mines, a practice that mercifully had ceased by 1936 when this book was published. I learned that families of eight lived in two rooms (if they were lucky) with only two beds covered with coats and sacks for bedding, the walls crumbling from damp, no hot water and sometimes no running water at all, one toilet 100 yards up the street for ten houses running with bugs and rats. The second part of the book identifies the differences between the working and middle classes and salutes Socialism as the only way to level the playing field. The unemployed are not scroungers or layabouts but the victims of an unfair and unjust economic system, a cry that finds many parallels in Britain of 2015.
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“Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick.” Read with an open heart for the suffering, with open eyes for seeing things from a different perspective, with an open mind for believing that, perhaps, we really have already seen Socialism in all it’s glory and gore. Is it really a glorious hope, after all?

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.

The early chapter describing mining in England is impactful and you will never forget it. The first half of the book describes the life of the poor in England and is very insightful. Unfortunately the second half of the book is Orwell’s argument for socialism and reads like a political science text book.

This book is an excellent account of the working poor in 1930s England. As a quick but dense read, this is an absolutely essential read regardless of one's views. It puts Orwell's other great works into context while also presenting a picture of socialist activist culture in his time.

When I was matriculating at the University of North Florida and taking night classes, only several professors in the English Department taught those three hours classes once a week at night. In the summer of 1984, my favorite prof listed a class on George Orwell. A perfect time to read Orwell...1984! And the class was full of University of Florida students taking a course while vacationing at home with their families and friends.

A surprise assignment was to write a couple paragraphs about ROAD TO WIGAN PIER. ROAD is not a novel...I suppose it's a treatise on England's coal miners. (Most of us know that Orwell had socialist tendencies and often wrote critically about the unfair British class structure.) So if you have to write a short piece about Road, remember it's not a novel... And mention how uneasy you felt when Orwell called the miners the "by-products" of society. That may also be an interesting tidbit to insert in a modern day conversation about "class warfare" or the narrowing of the middle-class.

By the way, we spent so much time in that 1984 class on minor but interesting Orwellian works like BURMESE DAYS and the essays and short stories....that I still cannot adequately discuss ANIMAL FARM and that other numerical title. (But higher education promotes higher education... Summer classes did not have to read a biography of Orwell... but years later, I did and enjoyed it thoroughly.)

Postscript (May 5, 2012):
A comment on my review about the Orwell biographies proved to be most interesting research. It seems that Orwell in his will requested that no biography of him be written, and his wife Sonia Brownell seemed determined to repel every attempt. She finally commissioned Bernard Crick, a left-wing professor of politics at the University of London, to write a life but later tried unsuccessfully to suppress the 554-page tome: George Orwell: A Life. Crick's biography was published in 1980...and because it was considered the first major biography of Orwell, it was surely the one I missed.
Orwell: The Authorized Biography (1991) by American professor of literature, Michael Shelden, is the biography I read. An the store reviewer said Shelden's bio "is the 3rd attempt to write a complete one (i.e. other than the ex-girlfriend's or younger sister's partial view). The first one was seriously hampered by Sonia's refusal to cooperate and even to let the authors (Stansky/Abrahams) quote Orwell's work. The second one (Crick) was 'official', i.e. approved by Sonia, but then it displeased her strongly. Shelden's was written after Sonia's death and with approval by the literary executor." Shelden's bio was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 1991.

Jane

This is an excellent book. After having to read in high school (in the 1970s) both Animal Farm and 1984, I confess that I approached this book with some trepidation. However, Orwell's descriptions of life as a coal miner and his honest thoughts about Socialism, both in defense and in criticism, make me wonder why the English teachers of the early 1970s didn't have us read this book instead. It is much better written and more honest.

Orwell's writing is alive. It interacts with you, striking you, caressing you, wiping away your tears, turning up the corners of your mouth in a smile. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he recreates for you this wonderfully real portrait of a working-class slum in 1930's England, and you can see how strongly he reacted to it. The first half is an almost overpowering description of the appalling conditions he found there, and it's all written Orwell's way: the floor so old it's transparent, the landlord with the black thumb, the sweaty claustrophobia of a coal mine. The second half of the book is Orwell's political standpoint of the time, which would alter radical over the course of his life. It's not exactly a watertight argument (it somehow feels unfinished), but Orwell, you must admit, is angry and he makes you angry. This is a very gutsy and well-written book

George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, as a personal exposé into the lives of the working-class poor. Orwell infiltrated the industrial and mining towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire by sharing overcrowded and often unsanitary rooming houses with other workers. He reported on their appalling working and living conditions and in his descriptions did not hold back in using the most subjective language:

"In Sheffield you have the feeling of walking among a population of troglodytes."

The Road to Wigan Pier is filled with language one might expect a mother to use if she stumbled across her teenaged son's room. When Orwell rents a room from a couple named Brooker, he has to share with three other men. The four of them are so cramped inside that Orwell, who was quite tall, couldn't sleep with his legs fully extended. Orwell keeps the dirty people he rooms with and whom he meets at arm's length if he can bear to look at them. This is one of Orwell's constant remarks about poverty in northern England: not only are the houses but the people themselves are dirty. This remark reeks of prejudice, which would have gone unchallenged in the class society of England in the mid-thirties. Orwell seemed on a "dirt hunt", checking under the fingernails and in the creases between the toes of his neighbours. In regards to the Brookers' rooming house, Orwell wrote, often with contempt:

"Generally the crumbs from breakfast were still on the table at supper. I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day."

Meal preparation at the Brookers was an ordeal Orwell could not stomach:

"The meals at the Brookers' house were uniformly disgusting. For breakfast you got two rashers of bacon and a pale fried egg, and bread-and-butter which had often been cut overnight and always had thumb-marks on it. However tactfully I tried, I could never induce Mr. Brooker to let me cut my own bread-and-butter; he would hand it to me slice by slice, each slice gripped firmly under that broad black thumb."

To Orwell, poor people were dirty, miserable and had no personal pride:

"In the mornings he [Mr. Brooker] sat by the fire with a tub of filthy water, peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow-motion picture. I never saw anyone who could peel potatoes with quite such an air of brooding resentment. You could see the hatred of this 'bloody woman's work', as he called it, fermenting inside him, a kind of bitter juice. He was one of those people who can chew their grievances like a cud."

Orwell looked down on the poor working class from his bourgeois pedestal. Those who failed in business were themselves to blame for lack of business sense was a congenital trait. The poor could not succeed in business because they were too stupid to know any better:

"Certainly it was true that the shop did not pay. The whole place had the unmistakable dusty, flyblown air of a business that is going down. But it would have been quite useless to explain to them [the Brookers] why nobody came to the shop, even if one had had the face to do it; neither was capable of understanding that last year's dead bluebottles supine in the shop window are not good for trade."

Orwell in his analysis of reasons behind the current state of the British economy used two terms from the very beginning of The Road to Wigan Pier, which he didn't explain till a considerable length into the book. I was puzzled by the abbreviation "PAC", which he didn't elaborate upon or define as the Public Assistance Committee until page 71. Orwell also made repeated references to the Means Test, yet didn't explain what that was until page 73.

The Road to Wigan Pier is divided into two parts, equal in length. After the exposé on the working-class poor, the second part is Orwell's socialist rant. I found this part overbearingly repetitive and boring. Orwell raises the same points over and over in favour of socialism, and in his own warped way gets into the minds of those who are against him and ridicules them. He reminded me of a psychologically imbalanced teenager who believes he knows exactly what every one of his fellow students is thinking and why everyone is against him. His subcutaneous omniscience rendered laughter instead of learned insight. I couldn't repress laughter whenever Orwell railed against fellow socialists who happened to be of the wrong class. He described these people as "sandal-wearers" and "bearded fruit-juice drinkers". Instead of seeing these people as allies and working with them, he belittles and dismisses them.

I dreaded the second half of this book. I raced through reading the first part yet the second part plodded along; I couldn't wait to put it down and be done with it.

This is just for the paperback edition I ordered (http://tinyurl.com/k5kwccl). It's a facsimile edition that used some really bad text recognition software. Almost every indented quote is all the same character (rectangle with a ?) and a number of other characters are replaced with empty squares. Buy a different edition!

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.

A politically niave and socially ignorant work of at least admirable intentions. A worthy read, but one should approach it with a cynical and open mind. Do not let Orwell spoon feed you with his prejudice. He attacks the entire middle class for being of one particular type and seeing the working class as another diametrically opposed type without seeing that he himself is guilty of the same crime, although the victims may be less 'worthy'. There is no blurring of the line, no consideration for specialist cases. Orwell's world is black and white, but mostly black. His views of socialists are appalling, as is his argument in favour. The heavy-handed emotive poignancy of the first half of the book is excessive in parts, although Orwell's descriptions of various wives in the same half of the book are utterly beautiful and make the book a must-read on their own. Any would-be socialists should read this, just for the feeling of indignant rage it gives you. Students of social policy or economic conditions in 1930s Britain will need to take it with a whole sack of salt.
Still, a massively entertaining and thought-provoking read. Go on, try it.

The first half of this book was very consuming. I found myself caught up in the mines of England and could relate to the characters with Orwell's great descriptions. But the second half of the book was totallu different. It was Orwell writing a paper about how he felt about socialism and class destinctions in England. To some this may be a very appealing subject, but to me, I had trouble understanding what Orwell wanted to say to the reader. Part one of this book is great and I highly reccommend it, but once I began to read part two I had trouble picking the book up to finish it.

A well-written, if dated, account of George Orwell's trip to the industrial north of England to investigate unemployment. The book was important for me to read because I have read many of Mr. Orwell's books previously.

This work is a kind of investigative journalism of the 1930s. Although the main premise is to investigate unemployment, Mr. Orwell covers the class system and the future of socialism, and takes swipes at vegetarians, femininsts, and men with beards. He is delightfully cranky in his treatment of "cranks."

The book is in need of a 21st century editor, someone who can explain the currency (Pounds/Shillings/Pence), who miscellaneous public figures are, and put the work into a context that a non-specialist can understand.