Customer Reviews

The Road to Wigan Pier

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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.

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.)

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!

England in the 1930's had staggering poverty and unemployment and was still reeling from World War I. Socialism was enjoying interest from those who wanted to do something to fix the wrongs. The Left Book Club commissioned George Orwell, who had stirred attention with DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON to write a book about the working poor in the coal mines in Lancashire. He did that, but he also chose to go beyond the terms of his contract and assess the potential for Socialism to solve problems. His conclusions did not especially please the editors of the Book Club but to not publish the book would seem narrow-minded, so it went to press in 1937 as is tempered with a forward by Victor Gallancz, taking issue with Orwell's evaluation and vision.

The first half of the book stands as a remarkable piece of journalism revealing untold squalor. Coal was the oil of its day and people wanted it in quantity and they wanted it cheap and they did not want to know what it took to produce it. It is difficult to decide what is grimmer, the work beneath the earth or the housing to which the miners returned at night. Especially mean is the fact that the privilege of a family of eight living in two leaky, barren rooms, two hundred yards from an outdoor privy, extracted most of the household wages. Orwell's urgent prose does not let anyone look away.

Orwell then turns to a discussion of class differences, the bourgeois and Socialists. He portrays a culture saturated in a class system that will be difficult to eradicate any time soon, one in which the different classes have different values, fears and perspectives that obstruct understanding and reconcilation. Socialism, which had both its bourgeois and proletariat adherents, had yet to get its act together. Rather dyspeptically, Orwell saw it as a lightening rod for all the modern trends taken up in rejection of the old ways: feminism, vegetarianism, free love, humanitarianism, atheism, pacifism, to name a few. The Socialists fell feverishly upon their new orthodoxies with a zeal Orwell suggests would drive the public towards Fascism. He does not reject Socialism-in the end he equates it with common decency, but he wants it to get its act together in light of his views. In this essay lies the Orwell either side of the divide loves or hates, the Orwell who defies easy categorizing. In it also lies the eloquent, precise voice that makes reading him a pleasure despite wanting to say, "Look, here, there is nothing wrong with being vegetarian (or feminist or whichever of your sacred cows he's dealt some withering words)."

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!

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

Orwell is a great author who gets his points across very clearly. He talks about the working class, miners especially, of Northern England, and how Socialism will help them. I can't imagine that many people think of the working class, and their hardships; and if they do, they don't _really_ pay attention to the details of their lives. Orwell does, and he talks about it in a way that you almost convert to Socialism--until he starts criticizing Socialism and Socialists. It makes you wonder why he was a Socialist at 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.

This book is divided into two sections. The first is a devastating account of the lives of coal miners in the north of England. While this account may be exaggerated it is completely conceivable that life in this time under such social and political conditions might have been like this. He goes to considerable length to explore the personal reactions and methods of endurance of the people he met. Orwell's dedication to exploring what life was really like for the coal miners was made at considerable personal discomfort and were as heroic as Jonathan Kozol's efforts in our present time.

The second half of the book is a long argument by Orwell of the negative aspects of socialism. He does this in order to provoke a serious discussion over how socialism can be implemented in our society. He understood well, as demonstrated in 1984, that many political parties use propaganda as a means of convincing the public that theirs is the right way. But, by taking the opposing view and criticising his own beliefs, he is able to bring the issues of the party into an open forum to consider implementations of change rather than party rhetoric. He does this most sincerely and in no way tries to hide the faults of the socialist political system of thought. In doing so he proves himself to be quite dignified in his system of beliefs. The juxtaposition of these two sections provides a striking idea of the immediate need for political reformation. He did not need to defend socialism because the need for a political change that could effect the lives of the lower class he investigated was obvious. This showed that Orwell's political ideas didn't exist on some ideological utopian plain, but were firmly rooted in the immense danger a political system could inflict upon a large population. It would be wise to remember this in reading the more popular 1984 and Animal Farm as well.

This book is compelling not just for people interested in politics, but also for anyone interested in history and the human condition. It is something you will be able to learn much from and provide you with inspiration.

If for the sake of argument one suspends their ideological beliefs, the working conditions discussed in the coal mines of Northern England were appalling. In making the reader understand these conditions, George Orwell establishes his position on the corrosive working conditions of this period and the path to change. In effect, the coal mines are Orwell's tool for presenting socialism as a more fair system.

Some reviewers have made the argument that this is Orwell's manifesto for socialism. The first half of the book is an eye opening experience in viewing conditions in a coal mine. This was a time before strong labor unions or any type of organized labor. Though Orwell observes that the workers seem to be content in their squalor, their contentment does not make it acceptable. The conditions and lifestyle are sickening. As Orwell states "I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, ... were decent young miners and cotton workers gazing at their destiny with a sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. ...They had been brought up to work, and behold! and it seemed as if they were never going to get a chance of working again" (p 81).

The remainder of the book is Orwell's explanation of socialism and why so many are repulsed by it. In nature, the class system is far from just. Orwell never seems to completely follow through on his argument. While some readers will be negative toward the book because of a socialist theme, my negative view is based on the fact that Orwell's argument for socialism is far from complete. I am not sure many can be sold on the ideology from this book. Aside from explaining the process of Orwell's coming to terms with socialism and prejudices that exist in others, the argument lacks a sense of focus and perhaps even clear purpose.