The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell, 1937

The opening sentence to chapter eight of this book explains that ‘the road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear. ‘

This would have been a wonderful introduction to The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell’s decision to go to Burma for a post in the Indian Imperial Police straight from Eton (rather than taking the road more often travelled to university) was obviously a turning point in his life. The next stage of his personal odyssey, from Burma to Wigan in early 1936, would have made a fascinating story, and it is one he obviously wants to tell. He can’t completely remove himself from the narrative –

I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the eighties and nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday”

and he regularly mentions how tall he is in comparison with the people of northern England. But we only get intermittent glimpses of this story. Orwell had been commissioned by the newly established Left Book Club to write about the living conditions of the unemployed in the north of England and from time to time he makes a genuine effort to stick to this brief. So there is a tension throughout the book – at points it is about the subject he was supposed to be writing about and at others autobiographical elements intrude.

I have to wonder whether Orwell delivered what he had been commissioned to write? Certainly he found what he expected to find – widespread poverty, appalling housing conditions, and little sign of organisation within the working class to improve things. A benevolent middle class intervention to help the struggling poor was Orwell’s inevitable diagnosis. But so much of the text is not on the subject Orwell was supposed to be writing about – the standards of living of the unemployed in the North. He wanders off topic for large sections of the book, and then in the second section abandons it altogether.

The opening chapter in part one describes life in a cheap boarding house. We are not told where this house is nor why Orwell is staying there (the book has no real introduction at all, other than the contentious opening by Victor Gollancz, the commissioning editor and promoter of the Left Book Club, which argues with several of Orwell’s conclusions). An un-emptied chamber pot left in the boarding house’s dining room causes Orwell to quit his shared room and get on a train to the North. This chapter includes the famous description of a view from the train:

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the-embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that’ It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.

You will note that in this paragraph Orwell talks about ‘we’ – himself and the implied reader, the Left Book Club subscriber who has someone else to unblock their drains. He does this elsewhere in the text, assuming that his reader will be middle class and Southern like himself, viewing the industrial northern working class as an alien race that needs to be introduced and explained by Orwell, the traveller into a strange land. The second chapter, later printed as a standalone essay in Inside the Whale, describes the lives of miners and their working conditions down a coal mine. This chapter vividly captures the horrors of mine working. I don’t want to over-emphasise this element of the text but it is impossible to avoid the homo-eroticism of Orwell’s descriptions of the miners:

“They really do look like iron hammered iron statues–under the smooth coat of coal dust which clings to them from head to foot. It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads.”

(He later writes in similar terms about the attractiveness of Burmese men compared to Englishmen, in particular himself). The following chapters describe the housing and economic position of the average miner. Orwell agonises over the housing shortage in the north without being able to identify the obvious solution of a mass state sponsored house building programme. Eventually in chapter 5 he reaches the issue of unemployment, but this is a cold statistical analysis rather than a personal record of life without paid work. Orwell makes some good points about how hard to is to eat well or sensibly on poverty income levels – an issue that remains pertinent to this day.

The second part of the book is almost entirely comment, sometimes wandering quite some distance from the original point of the commission. He struggles to answer the question of why socialism has not been embraced by the working class in the UK, given the self evident argument that it would address all the problems outlined in the first section of the text. Orwell is honest about his social origins, his class prejudices and his efforts to overcome them. He is quite dismissive of socialists in the UK, finding them largely detached from the working classes whose lives they are planning to improve. This is largely polemic, based upon the stark contrast between his experiences as an intellectual in London and the South East and his weeks in the North. These chapters are characterised by muddled logic, prejudice and contradiction. Often you get the impression Orwell is more interested in crafting a quotable phrase than developing a line of argument. Certainly he is never afraid of hyperbole:

“Looking back upon that period (post-war) I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus conductors”;

or

“There is probably no-one capable of thinking and feeling who has not occasionally looked at a gas-pipe chair and reflected that the machine is the enemy of life.”

He argues that mechanisation is effectively synonymous with socialism, as if that is simply self-evident rather than something contentious that he has to demonstrate (“This, then, is the case against the machine. Whether is is sound or unsound case hardly matters“) then goes on to bemoan at significant length the damage machines have done to the quality of life in the UK and to his life in particular.

“As you can see by looking at any greengrocer’s shop, what the majority of English people mean by an apple is a lump of highly-coloured cotton wool from America or Australia; they will devour these things, apparently with pleasure, and let the English apples rot under the trees. It is the shiny, standardized, machine-made look of the American apple that appeals to them; the superior taste of the English apple is something they simply do not notice. Or look at the factory-made, foil-wrapped cheese and ’blended’ butter in any grocer’s; look at the hideous rows of tins which usurp more and more of the space in any food-shop, even a dairy; look at a sixpenny Swiss roll or a twopenny ice-cream; look at the filthy chemical by-product that people will pour down their throats under the name of beer. Wherever you look you will see some slick machine-made article triumphing over the old-fashioned article that still tastes of something other than sawdust.“

Coming up for Air is tainted by the same pervading sense of nostalgia, a dim awareness that things were better when Orwell was a young man. It was this strand of conservatism (even when he was trying to develop an argument for socialism) that led him to being quoted approvingly by John Major. Orwell can recognise that industrialisation and mechanisation have brought benefits in terms of living standards and improvements to the world of work. But his apples have a machine-made look and it is our fault anyway for preferring American apples to the innately superior English varieties. We’ve all heard similar complaints from old people (Orwell was only in his thirties at this point, but sounds a lot older) about how things were better in the old days, and the claim rings as hollow today as it did then.

And then we come to the difficult passages where Orwell makes the argument that working class people smell. Quite why he felt the need to be so disrespectful to the people who had welcomed him into their homes, shared their food and shown him every hospitality, is beyond me. He was never afraid of being controversial, sometimes actively seeking out controversy, and I am sure he genuinely believed this to be the case, but he could have chosen to point out any number of other aspects of poverty-line daily life – badly made clothes, rotten teeth, untreated medical ailments, shoes with no soles, etc. Instead, as always it seems for Orwell, it is the ‘scent narrative’ (as John Sutherland puts it in his book on this very specific topic, Orwell’s Nose, A Pathological Biography)

The real secret of class distinctions in the West–the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell. That was what we were taught–the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.

He tells himself that it is wrong to feel this way, but he can’t ever fully overcome this instinctual sense of repugnance at the working classes.

Class prejudice is accompanied by casual homophobia, anti-Semitism and other prejudices that shouldn’t be brushed away too casually:

It would help enormously if the smell (smell again!) of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shorts 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”.

“In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, 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.

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 backstairscrawlers.

While The Road to Wigan Pier doesn’t cover in any detail the subject it was commissioned to address and exposes a lot of Orwell’s prejudices, at the same time it is an important text. I originally read it over forty years ago, and while books I read last year have already started to fade from my memory, Wigan Pier still resonates, however wrong-headed and muddled it may be. This is in part because of Orwell’s legendary uncomplicated prose, in part because even when completely wrong he is always interesting, and mostly because no-one wrote about the state of pre-war Britain in the way he did. It ends with a slightly forced rallying call for class solidarity between the proletariat and the white collared middle classes and with an awful joke: “We have nothing to lose but our aitches“.

The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell, 1937