The Road to Wigan Pier (Penguin Modern Classics)

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.
Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa

“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?

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!

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.

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.