THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER - Essay

THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER-Essay

By George Orwell

History

     The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell was written in 1930 as propaganda fro the Socialist Party in England.  The book was written in two parts.  The first described urban oppression and the class conflicts in England.  In the second part George Orwell describes what he believes to be the problems with socialism.

     In order to write the first part of his book, George Orwell went to live with the unemployed and working class of Northern England.  To begin with he stayed at a boarding house and described the place and the people there.

     He describes the boarding house as being dirty, having a vile smell and horrible food, but also having a feeling of stagnant meaningless decay.  It was a regular house before it had become a boarding house and was run by a couple named Brookers.  The Brookers had received the original furniture with the house and had not bothered to remove it when they made non bed rooms into bedrooms.  Therefore the Brookers just put the beds into the rooms with the furniture that was already there.

     Four people generally slept in the same room and Mr. Orwell had to sleep with his legs doubled up or he would have hit another person in the middle of the back  Mr. Orwell then goes on to describe the general state of disarray that the house was in; examples of this would be dust everywhere, stained broken furniture and just a lack of upkeep by the owners.

     Mr. Orwell also describes how the Brookers had a dislike for their lodgers and how their lodgers suffered from hardships.  He describes how to old age pensioners (one with cancer) who were kicked out of their homes by the means test, handed all of their moneys, which amounted to 10 shillings a week, over to the Brookers  For this they received a bed in the attic and meals of bread and butter.

     Mr. Orwell also describes people who sometimes stayed at the boarding house called newspaper canvassers.  Newspaper canvassers were employed by weekly or Sunday papers who were sent from town to town with street maps.  They were required to get twenty newspaper subscriptions a day; if they failed to do so they were fired  As long as they made their quota they received two pounds a week, and for anything over their quota they received a small commission.

     Meals for the majority of the lodgers went as follows:

               Breakfast:  two rashers of bacon

                                 one fried egg

                                 bread and butter

               Dinner:      steak puddings

                                 boiled potatoes

                                 rice pudding

              Supper:      cheese and biscuits

For “Tea” there was bread and butter and some sweet cakes.  It is important to understand that all of their food was stale, cheaply bought and even more cheaply cooked in a disgustingly dirty kitchen.

     Upon leaving the boarding house Mr. Orwell say of the Brookers that they are just disgusting people.  He remarks, however that they are characteristic by-products of the modern world and exist in the tens and hundreds of thousands, and cannot be disregarded by people who accept the civilization that produced them.  On the train leaving the industrial town he was in Mr. Orwell describes the scene outside as being monstrous slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron and foul canals.  As the train passes through the rows of slum housed set up at angles to the embankment he tells of a scene he sees outside with a woman kneeling in stones, poking a stick up a lead waste pipe “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 row, 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 and 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 pipes.”  (p: 18)

     Mr. Orwell tells of similar events throughout the industrial towns he visited in writing this book.  He also compares coal mining to his impression of hell, making the point that those things you imagine to be in hell are there, for example: heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and above all, unbearable cramped space  Mr. Orwell the goes on to describe what it is like to go down into a coal mine.  First thing you do is get into this steel box, about as wide as a telephone booth and two or three times as long, which is an elevator that a tall person cannot stand upright in.  The elevator takes you down about four hundred yards reaching a speed of about sixty miles an hour.  The biggest surprise Mr. Orwell had found was the distance you had to travel from the elevator to the coal face.  A mile would be considered average, three miles would be considered fairly normal and even five miles was not unheard of  However, the distance becomes much farther when you add the fact that there is almost no place where a person can stand upright.  It is also very dark and there are a great many obstacles in your way, like the cart trucks, loose rock and the beams that have buckled under which you have to duck even further.  At several points throughout the journey you have to crawl on your hands and knees.  Mr Orwell explains the job of a coal miner,then goes on to talk about the importance of coal to the world, and in the end explains that a coal miner's yearly earnings he estimates to be between 115 to 150 pounds,  This figure is not much considering that the middle class make 200 to 2000 pounds a year, for work not nearly as hard or as vital to society.  Mr Orwell then talks about the poor living conditions of these people  The miners and all the working class people live in back to back houses that are set up so there is no back yard; the same back wall is used for two houses.  There is no plumbing or bathroom inside the houses and usually there is at least four or five people sleeping in the same room, often the same bed.  Their furniture is usually crates and they cannot afford linen for their beds.  These houses are arranged in rows with about fifteen outhouses being at the end of one side of rows.

     In the second half of his book Mr. Orwell attempts to explain why socialism is losing its popularity.  Mr Orwell attributes this mostly to the fact of mistaken methods of propaganda.  That is to say that socialism in the form it is currently being presented to the people has something in it distasteful to the people  One possible answer to this that Mr. Orwell came up with was that socialists themselves were the offensive thing.  Mr. Orwell noted that the average socialist is a “prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of non-conformity behind him, and above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”  (p 173)  Another impression Mr. Orwell has is that just mentioning the name socialism draws every lunatic to it like a magnet.

     Industrialism is another reason for socialism's decline.  Socialism is for the industrialism and the advancement of technology, while many people blame industrialization for the hardships they suffer.  Other reasons for this decline could be the belief that socialism could lead to fascism, and the fact that many socialists believe that socialism will arrive on its own due to historic necessity.

     As I said in the beginning, this book was written for socialist propaganda.  Where in the last part Mr. Orwell criticizes socialism, he in fact only says change these things and he believes socialism will flourish.  His definition of socialism is the end of tyranny.  However it is also important to point out that at the beginning of this book there is a rebuttal by the publisher, in which he tells everyone reading the book to disregard the second part of the book, and that it was only published because of its accurate description of the working class.

     My opinion of the book is that it was interesting even considering that I disagree with socialism.  It was particularly interesting to note Mr. Orwell's warning about fascism and the impending war he believed would come.  Although by 1937 I would imagine that view of fascism should have been common, it was interesting to note that Mr. Orwell believed that only socialism could save the world from fascism.  As to how this book relates to our reading, we have just gotten to this point in the reading and I am writing this paper before I read the chapters.