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Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier
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The first half of this odd book is universally beloved, and I can see why – I loved it too! Investigative journalism at its finest, 1937 style. The second half was greeted with cries of horror and consternation, and I can very easily see why! The publisher, who paid George a handsome sum up front for this, was so outraged he wanted to publish the two parts separately and have part two prefaced by a long apology from himself!
PART ONE
So, part one is where George Orwell does a poverty tour of the industrialised part of England referred to by everyone in hushed tones as “the North”. He stays with miners, goes down mines, lodges in a tripe shop, describes houses and lives – incomes are itemised and analysed, such as the weekly wage stoppages for a miner (insurance, hire of lamp, for sharpening tools, check-weighman, infirmary, benevolent fund, union fees – total 4 shillings 5 pence) – all of this is beautifully presented with a simmering outrage and a refusal to sentimentalise. And he throws out his eyebrow-raising observations like confetti.
A man dies and is buried and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.
OH NO – PART TWO!
So Part One is brilliant, five star reading all the way. In Part Two he changes gear and gives us a long, often bizarre essay, kind of like a “What Must Be Done?” cri de coeur, starting off with some autobiography to show how a posh Eton-educated boy like himself ended up as a committed Socialist – this is fair enough – but then he starts flailing and thrashing around trying to answer several questions all at once, the main ones being
Why Do the Middle Class and the Working Class Hate Each Other?
Why Isn’t Every Working-Class Person a Socialist?
And
What is Socialism Anyway?
George was writing for a leftwing audience and here he tells them just what he thinks of them. They’re all hopeless! They talk over the heads of the very working class people they should be attracting, using their horrible Marxist jargon, spouting utopianism and worshipping Russia. And the people who are attracted to Socialism! What a shower!
There is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
Yes, we see George counted feminists as unwelcome cranks.
I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say “whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian”. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question.
Wouldn’t we love to grab up George Orwell in our time machine and have him wander round our 21st century world and then write a 100 page essay about it!
THE ORWELL EFFECT
Readers of his often-wonderful sometimes-tiresome essays will be familiar with the Orwell Effect. His plain-dealing honest-speaking unaffected tone of voice creates this idea in your mind that George was the most common sensical man who ever lived and that nobody therefore could possibly disagree with him. He always sounds like he knows what he is talking about. And he throws out the most extraordinary generalisations as if they are so obvious as to almost not be worth mentioning :
The habit of washing yourself all over is a very recent one in Europe
The soldier’s attitude to life which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a lawless attitude
Mongolians have much nicer bodies than most white men
People usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves
No modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country
Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed
Such offhand remarks twang around the reader’s head so regularly that after a while you forget to dodge.
No doubt, Orwell seems to think pretty much everybody has got pretty much everything wrong apart from him. He’s a bad tempered eccentric curmudgeon with a great love of the poor and the neglected. The love and outrage that fires this book makes it worth reading, not his loopy trashing of all his fellow leftwingers, during which he seems to be presenting his political enemies with all the ammunition they could ever require.
An extraordinary book.
PART ONE
So, part one is where George Orwell does a poverty tour of the industrialised part of England referred to by everyone in hushed tones as “the North”. He stays with miners, goes down mines, lodges in a tripe shop, describes houses and lives – incomes are itemised and analysed, such as the weekly wage stoppages for a miner (insurance, hire of lamp, for sharpening tools, check-weighman, infirmary, benevolent fund, union fees – total 4 shillings 5 pence) – all of this is beautifully presented with a simmering outrage and a refusal to sentimentalise. And he throws out his eyebrow-raising observations like confetti.
A man dies and is buried and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.
OH NO – PART TWO!
So Part One is brilliant, five star reading all the way. In Part Two he changes gear and gives us a long, often bizarre essay, kind of like a “What Must Be Done?” cri de coeur, starting off with some autobiography to show how a posh Eton-educated boy like himself ended up as a committed Socialist – this is fair enough – but then he starts flailing and thrashing around trying to answer several questions all at once, the main ones being
Why Do the Middle Class and the Working Class Hate Each Other?
Why Isn’t Every Working-Class Person a Socialist?
And
What is Socialism Anyway?
George was writing for a leftwing audience and here he tells them just what he thinks of them. They’re all hopeless! They talk over the heads of the very working class people they should be attracting, using their horrible Marxist jargon, spouting utopianism and worshipping Russia. And the people who are attracted to Socialism! What a shower!
There is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
Yes, we see George counted feminists as unwelcome cranks.
I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say “whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian”. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question.
Wouldn’t we love to grab up George Orwell in our time machine and have him wander round our 21st century world and then write a 100 page essay about it!
THE ORWELL EFFECT
Readers of his often-wonderful sometimes-tiresome essays will be familiar with the Orwell Effect. His plain-dealing honest-speaking unaffected tone of voice creates this idea in your mind that George was the most common sensical man who ever lived and that nobody therefore could possibly disagree with him. He always sounds like he knows what he is talking about. And he throws out the most extraordinary generalisations as if they are so obvious as to almost not be worth mentioning :
The habit of washing yourself all over is a very recent one in Europe
The soldier’s attitude to life which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a lawless attitude
Mongolians have much nicer bodies than most white men
People usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves
No modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country
Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed
Such offhand remarks twang around the reader’s head so regularly that after a while you forget to dodge.
No doubt, Orwell seems to think pretty much everybody has got pretty much everything wrong apart from him. He’s a bad tempered eccentric curmudgeon with a great love of the poor and the neglected. The love and outrage that fires this book makes it worth reading, not his loopy trashing of all his fellow leftwingers, during which he seems to be presenting his political enemies with all the ammunition they could ever require.
An extraordinary book.
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Reading Progress
March 19, 2023
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Started Reading
March 20, 2023
– Shelved
March 21, 2023
– Shelved as:
politics
March 21, 2023
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Finished Reading
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Glenda
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Mar 21, 2023 10:19AM
Wonderful insightful review Paul. I always enjoy your thoughts. However I’m going to skip this one. Thanks.
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I'm guessing Orwell didn't mean all feminists, but rather the ones who give feminists a bad name (we have some of those today, even!). But also, was he wrong about the types of people who end up in Socialist movements? The 2019 DSA National Convention is legitimately one of the funniest things on Youtube
I should check that out!
I dunno man, his trashing of the left had some valid points
I can't disagree, but he is really rather rude!
Well, talking over the heads of people they want to attract... That's something modern-day social democrats are often guilty of as well. Here in Holland, that is.
I am now reading through Wigan Pier via daily installments from the Orwell Foundation via Substack which follows their prior installments of Down and Out in Paris. Along with Homage to Catalonia these journalistic pieces laid the way for 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell is a giant. Thanks for this review.
Orwell wasn't a particularly empathetic sort of person, nor was he notably kind. He just really hated being the poor boy at Eton, I expect. And the man who flings proposals about indiscriminately when his wife suddenly died would almost certainly mean *all* feminists.
I recently read his biography and yes he did indeed go round proposing to various women after his wife died. It was kind of weird.
This has sat on my to read shelf for too long - your review has prompted me to try and move it up the list, thank you! Trouble is I'm addicted to libraries so can't resist their new books shelves! Just FYI, my great grandfather lived for a time and died while resident in Canonbury Square, 1945 address for George Orwell!
Paul wrote: "I recently read his biography and yes he did indeed go round proposing to various women after his wife died. It was kind of weird."KInd of, yes.
"yes, we see George counted feminists as unwelcome cranks" and he was right. Ask any feminist activist of her own personal experience with male feminist and what they think about guy that speak a lot about their commitment to being feminist (almost always it's ending up with discovery that feminist guy is some kind of horrible perv who prey on women). In other texts Orwell clearly support the side of equality of women and women rights, but agreeing with feminists demands doesn't mean that someone should call himself a committed feminist.
If I had the energy still to write long reviews, I would like to think that I might have written this review! I listen to the audible version, and that version did include the preface that was written in response to the second half of the book that you alluded to. As a person in the United States, who would like to consider himself a socialist, the problems with socialism not catching on in Great Britain in the mid 20th century are quite a bit different Probably than the problems in the US where the two party system joins together to batter down any efforts toward a viable third-party .
thanks Larry - I myself would suggest that socialism did in fact catch on in Britain in the form of the radical 1945 Labour government which created the National Health Service, since become a kind of secular religion here. They didn't stop there, they created a welfare state which the Conservatives found so popular they never tried to dismantle it. These changes did not do much to ameliorate the vast chasms between the cosy middle class and the suffering masses, but they tried hard.
Conservatives never tried to dismantle it? Seems like that was the sole purpose of Thatcher and every Tory govt since. The NHS has been funded at about 40% of its requirements for the last 15 years, and nearly every public service (transport, utilities, infrastructure) has been sold cheaply to private capital. Difficult to imagine a greater dismantling of public welfare.
But did you ever notice how every single tory politician promises faithfully that they are the true custodians of the NHS ? Also - this is from a website called UKPublicSpending :Costs rose sharply in the early years of the NHS, reaching 3.4 percent of GDP by 1951 and then dropping to 3.0 percent of GDP by 1955. Spending increased steadily after the mid 1950s, running at about 3.5 percent of GDP in the early 1960s and increasing to 4.0 percent of GDP by 1970 and peaking at 4.94 percent of GDP in 1975.
Health spending declined in the late 1970s, down to 4.6 percent of GDP in 1979 and increased thereafter, reaching 5.24 percent of GDP in 1981 before beginning a decline to 4.28 percent in 1988. Then spending began increased to 5.35 percent of GDP in 1993 and declined to 5.05 percent of GDP by 1998.
Spending began increasing sharply after 1999, and topped out at 7.65 percent of GDP in 2010. Then a decline set in, down to 7.29 percent GDP in 2015 and 7.4 percent GDP in 2020. In the COVID year of 2021 health care expenditure exploded to 10.4 percent GDP.
I would provide the link but GR don't let us do that anymore.
I think the tories would like to dismantle the welfare state but they can't.
I just read Down & Out in Paris & London, which I found an odd mix of excellent journalism and gratuitous antisemitism. Worth reading for sure but hard to love.
