In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well-”to see the most typical section of the English working class.” Foreword by Victor Gollancz.
The Road to Wigan Pier
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Although George Orwell grew up in the relative comfort of the English middle class, his socialist convictions and general sense of fairness led him to hate his country's deeply ingrained class structure. That perspective permeates this book, but the most striking elements are the quotidian details of life that Orwell observes in his first-person account of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England. Wigan Pier is almost too realistic at times, as Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray the wretched conditions of the working class. That Orwell may have slanted his reporting to make things look worse than they were is a question that does not lessen the book's interest.
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More About the Author
GEORGE ORWELL (1903-1950) was born in India and served with the Imperial Police in Burma before joining the Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was the author of six novels as well as numerous essays and nonfiction works.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
51 of 54 people found the following review helpful
By Susan Paxton
Format:Paperback
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.
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By H. Schneider
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Contrary to my expectations, this is Orwell's most personal book. He bares his soul to us. At least I think he seriously tries to be perfectly honest, if not complete.
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
What a valuable examination! As other reviewers have pointed out, the Left Book Club of UK nearly three quarters of a century ago (!) commissioned Mr. Orwell to write on the condition of the coal miners in North Yorkshire. The first half of the book shows Orwell's observations of the squalor and struggles of those working people. However, Orwell continued with a whole second essay. In that second portion of the text, he criticized the left for its arrogance, its being out of touch with that which it claimed to want to remedy.
Orwell raises issues that could as easily apply today pertinent to those dedicated to "change" the conditions of those of whom they have little grasp. That's the only depressing thing about the book: so little has changed in so much time.
Some observations on the then-growing fascist movement in Europe are eye-openers too.
Read it and weep? Or read it and LEARN!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hey, Socialist: Read This!
A simple assignment from the Left Book Club... Go to the north of England, live among the miners and report on the work and living conditions, and the effects of unemployment. Read more
Published 15 days ago by S. Girard
5.0 out of 5 stars
A picture of the working class in England in the 1930's
Orwell wanted to understand how the working class in England thought, and to do this he lived in different working class households and spent days at mines seeing miners work. Read more
Published 16 days ago by Jordan Bell
5.0 out of 5 stars
I was there
This book was masterly. The first half took me back to the poverty stricken mining communities of Northern England and the second half was a warm account of how Orwell came to his... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Bev Firth
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one...
...and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear." So says George Orwell, in commencing the second part of this book. Read more
Published 3 months ago by John P. Jones III
4.0 out of 5 stars
Orwell's road
Even though I had not realised before reading it that The Road to Wigan Pier is not a novel but an extended essay, I was not disappointed. Read more
Published 6 months ago by reader 451
3.0 out of 5 stars
Second half ruins the book with its repetitive snobbism
George Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, as a personal exposé into the lives of the working-class poor. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Craig Rowland
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant
Published in 1937, George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier documents the grinding poverty of northern England, namely Lancashire and Yorkshire. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Troy Parfitt
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stinging rebuke...
I suppose it is almost five years since I last read this book (my favorite rereading is his Burmese Days), and that was just long enough for much of Orwell's prose to seem fresh... Read more
Published 17 months ago by John the Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gives a fair view...
of what he really saw. One thing that many readers might not know is that Orwell was commissioned to write this book as a way to support Socialism. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Aaron the Historian
5.0 out of 5 stars
"socialism" versus "Socialism"
`The Road To Wigan Pier' is in many ways two separate books. The first half covers Orwell's experiences living in the mining towns of Northern England, describing the poverty and... Read more
Published on November 11, 2010 by H. Jin
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