The Road to Wigan Pier
by: George Orwell
Everyone has read Orwell's classic "1984," and probably "Animal Farm." Some of us have also read "Down and Out in Paris and London." If you have read the last, you'll note a considerable arc in thinking between that book (written in 1933), and "1984," written in 1948.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" is somewhere in the movement of that arc. I say "arc," not reversal, because, like most of us, Orwell observed, thought, adapted, and changed over time. So when a prominent thinker noted that "The Road to Wigan Pier" was on his list of "must reads," I felt that I must read it.
"1984" has been referenced more lately, by both Right and Left, Conservative and Progressives, than it probably was in thirty years, outside of a high school classroom. Both "sides" claim it for their own - the Right worrying about the Memory Hole and the rewriting of history to suit events, and the Left sure that Big Brother is sitting in the White House - both forgetting that the Two Minutes Hate is shared equally by all and probably just as pernicious to the prospects of social accord.
Rightly, though, "1984" is a warning against totalitarianism and the utter rule of the state, and against mechanization and the loss of simple human pleasures and values - and the importance of each individual as an individual.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" can perhaps best be summed up as a Road Towards 1984 in the development of Orwell as an intellect and writer.
Wigan Pier is a fictitious place, but real enough in industrialized northern England on the brink of World War II. In the book, the writer makes the trip up to the mining country in the north, but as he pulls away in a train (yes, ironic) for this trip, he observes a slum-girl digging away, trying to clean a fouled drain pipe, "For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this where it all led - to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like black-beetles."
He goes on to suggest that we can take no comfort that the "lower classes" don't experience their suffering as "we" (the educated, the elite) might: "It struck me 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 drainpipe."
Believing that coal is the black heart of industrialization and its evils, he makes a prolonged visit to coal country, and goes deep underground, literally and figuratively, to see how the coal people live, work, and endure. His descriptions of pit mining are eloquent if disturbing: a cage takes a load of men down into the ground, and they soon lose sight of the cow grazing peacefully in the grass and drop into total dark. Then they begin to "travel," what the miners called the journey to the actual coal seam they were working. This might be a few hundred feet - but more likely it would be a mile, even three or four, into the mineworks. Much of this time would be spent bent over, or even walking crab fashion, in a squatting position. And a miner's time on the job didn't start until he actually began digging coal. "Traveling time" was unpaid labor.
He is somewhat in awe of the miners, at the same time pitying them. "Watching coal miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes different people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal... In order that Hitler may march 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 forth-coming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal,' but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves.... all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel."
He explores the feelings of powerlessness these working people experience - and musing why they don't unionize and rise up, figures it has something to do with simply that: a feeling of powerlessness. But also, he acknowledges that unemployment (remember, this was the Depression) holds a sword over the heads of those with jobs. The alternative is The Dole, the dreaded dole. Though he is, in essence, arguing for Socialism in this book, he also seems to be arguing against it as he describes the minutia of rules for how much each person can collect, how many hours one might work before losing a benefit, what sort of increase a Head of Household might get versus a Single Man (and how monitored the comings and goings of those on the dole are, lest they cheat the system by actually working off the books). And even he admits that while the dole is preferable to starvation, "it probably is better that a man should waste his time with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years on end he should do absolutely nothing."
The solution, of course, is to do something, anything. "Instead of raging against their destiny (the unemployed) have made things tolerable by lowering their standards."
Orwell dwells for quite a while on the dilemma of the system of "classes" into which we inevitably seem to sort ourselves, and admits that while, like others of his class (bourgeoisie/intelligentsia), he thinks the working class literally smells, he is at the same time a revolutionary, inclined to make such grand gestures as joining the Communist Party, and reading revolutionary books. And he admits that, like many of his peers, he enjoys making fun of the Upper Classes as silly, dithering, and useless, while at the same time feeling physically revolted by the degraded habits and condition of the working class person. And here he admits a truth that few of us could own up to: "The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions - notions of good and evil, pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-class notions...the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about halfway up the social hierarchy."
He asks the proper next question: "why not level up?" Add "hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry" (and we in our era would add "a college education") and wouldn't everyone be literally on the same level?
As I read this, I began to understand why this book was revelatory for the man whose "must read" list this book was on. For while Orwell ascribes this hierarchical sorting to upbringing, we are in an epoch when (as we seem to do periodically) we are confronting "class" and "hierarchies," as well as our place along these continua, with unusual scrutiny. Why does poverty persist, especially in a nation which has more than enough resources to provide for everyone? The "1 percenters" take it all, says one side. All you have to do is work a little hard, says the other.
Orwell says something startling: "All...deliberate, conscious effort at class-breaking are, I am convinced, a very serious mistake. Sometimes they are merely futile, but where they do show a definite result it is usually to intensify class-prejudice. This, if you come to think of it, is only what might be expected. You have forced the pace and set up an uneasy, unnatural equality between class and class; the resultant friction brings to the surface all kinds of feelings that might otherwise have remained buried, perhaps forever...Scratch the average pacifist and you find a jingo. The middle-class I.L.P'er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong end of the telescope; force them into any real contact with a proletarian...and they are capable of swinging back to the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness."
He questions here whether either the middle class person who has stepped down, or the working class person who has risen, is happy once we see the world from another angle. The middle-class person who idealizes the working man and climbs into the coal cage is likely horrified at the filth and heavy work, and the working-class man who has scratched his way into the middle-class ranks may find it stultifying and bloodless. (He reminds us of Lady Chatterley's Lover as a short-hand way of seeing the game-keeper as a lusty man of the soil, Lord Chatterley as a well-to-do but impotent upper-crust-man, and poor Lady Chatterley as the maid in the middle.)
It is here that Orwell suggests Socialism as perhaps the answer. Not the political socialism - the "mechanized" one; but more one of space, time, nature, even troubles. It is in the nature of man, he suggests, to want to work. To do something. To be something. To be useful. He dismisses Fascism, the ultra-end of Capitalism, in his view (and recall that he's viewing it during the rise of the Fascist state in Italy). He feels that Communism is unworkable as it carries the seeds of its own destruction, the "tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on."
The problem lies, Orwell thinks, in that "Socialism" has not been presented properly. If only we could go back to the pre-machine days of one man, one hammer, we might sort the problem out. But "We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines stopped working most of us would die...for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it." Therefore, The Answer is not in over-throwing mechanization, in Fascism or Communism.
"The real Socialist," he writes, "is one who wishes not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes - to see tyranny over-thrown." To get there, he must be willing to get rid of his "sandals and pistachio-coloured shirts, and every vegetarian, tee-totaller and creeping Jesus" be sent away to do Yoga exercises quietly. "The more intelligent kind of Socialist (must) stop alienating possible supporters in silly and quite irrelevant ways...You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up."
We must stop, he says, talking about the "capitalist" and the "proletarian," and "a little more about the robbers and the robbed." The middle class person, the clerk, the engineer, the grocer, or civil servant - they too are The Robbed. The enemy, if "enemy" is the right word, is the plutocracy - and that group doesn't wear just a single style of clothing or run a single type of organization.
In Orwell's view, the Upper, Middle, and Working Classes must not see one another as "the enemy," or "the other," but rather together in an effort to keep extremes at bay, and keep life for the ordinary living, wherever one happens to land in life.
Everyone has read Orwell's classic "1984," and probably "Animal Farm." Some of us have also read "Down and Out in Paris and London." If you have read the last, you'll note a considerable arc in thinking between that book (written in 1933), and "1984," written in 1948.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" is somewhere in the movement of that arc. I say "arc," not reversal, because, like most of us, Orwell observed, thought, adapted, and changed over time. So when a prominent thinker noted that "The Road to Wigan Pier" was on his list of "must reads," I felt that I must read it.
"1984" has been referenced more lately, by both Right and Left, Conservative and Progressives, than it probably was in thirty years, outside of a high school classroom. Both "sides" claim it for their own - the Right worrying about the Memory Hole and the rewriting of history to suit events, and the Left sure that Big Brother is sitting in the White House - both forgetting that the Two Minutes Hate is shared equally by all and probably just as pernicious to the prospects of social accord.
Rightly, though, "1984" is a warning against totalitarianism and the utter rule of the state, and against mechanization and the loss of simple human pleasures and values - and the importance of each individual as an individual.
"The Road to Wigan Pier" can perhaps best be summed up as a Road Towards 1984 in the development of Orwell as an intellect and writer.
Wigan Pier is a fictitious place, but real enough in industrialized northern England on the brink of World War II. In the book, the writer makes the trip up to the mining country in the north, but as he pulls away in a train (yes, ironic) for this trip, he observes a slum-girl digging away, trying to clean a fouled drain pipe, "For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this where it all led - to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like black-beetles."
He goes on to suggest that we can take no comfort that the "lower classes" don't experience their suffering as "we" (the educated, the elite) might: "It struck me 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 drainpipe."
Believing that coal is the black heart of industrialization and its evils, he makes a prolonged visit to coal country, and goes deep underground, literally and figuratively, to see how the coal people live, work, and endure. His descriptions of pit mining are eloquent if disturbing: a cage takes a load of men down into the ground, and they soon lose sight of the cow grazing peacefully in the grass and drop into total dark. Then they begin to "travel," what the miners called the journey to the actual coal seam they were working. This might be a few hundred feet - but more likely it would be a mile, even three or four, into the mineworks. Much of this time would be spent bent over, or even walking crab fashion, in a squatting position. And a miner's time on the job didn't start until he actually began digging coal. "Traveling time" was unpaid labor.
He is somewhat in awe of the miners, at the same time pitying them. "Watching coal miners at work, you realize momentarily what different universes different people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal... In order that Hitler may march 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 forth-coming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal,' but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves.... all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel."
He explores the feelings of powerlessness these working people experience - and musing why they don't unionize and rise up, figures it has something to do with simply that: a feeling of powerlessness. But also, he acknowledges that unemployment (remember, this was the Depression) holds a sword over the heads of those with jobs. The alternative is The Dole, the dreaded dole. Though he is, in essence, arguing for Socialism in this book, he also seems to be arguing against it as he describes the minutia of rules for how much each person can collect, how many hours one might work before losing a benefit, what sort of increase a Head of Household might get versus a Single Man (and how monitored the comings and goings of those on the dole are, lest they cheat the system by actually working off the books). And even he admits that while the dole is preferable to starvation, "it probably is better that a man should waste his time with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years on end he should do absolutely nothing."
The solution, of course, is to do something, anything. "Instead of raging against their destiny (the unemployed) have made things tolerable by lowering their standards."
Orwell dwells for quite a while on the dilemma of the system of "classes" into which we inevitably seem to sort ourselves, and admits that while, like others of his class (bourgeoisie/intelligentsia), he thinks the working class literally smells, he is at the same time a revolutionary, inclined to make such grand gestures as joining the Communist Party, and reading revolutionary books. And he admits that, like many of his peers, he enjoys making fun of the Upper Classes as silly, dithering, and useless, while at the same time feeling physically revolted by the degraded habits and condition of the working class person. And here he admits a truth that few of us could own up to: "The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions - notions of good and evil, pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-class notions...the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about halfway up the social hierarchy."
He asks the proper next question: "why not level up?" Add "hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry" (and we in our era would add "a college education") and wouldn't everyone be literally on the same level?
As I read this, I began to understand why this book was revelatory for the man whose "must read" list this book was on. For while Orwell ascribes this hierarchical sorting to upbringing, we are in an epoch when (as we seem to do periodically) we are confronting "class" and "hierarchies," as well as our place along these continua, with unusual scrutiny. Why does poverty persist, especially in a nation which has more than enough resources to provide for everyone? The "1 percenters" take it all, says one side. All you have to do is work a little hard, says the other.
Orwell says something startling: "All...deliberate, conscious effort at class-breaking are, I am convinced, a very serious mistake. Sometimes they are merely futile, but where they do show a definite result it is usually to intensify class-prejudice. This, if you come to think of it, is only what might be expected. You have forced the pace and set up an uneasy, unnatural equality between class and class; the resultant friction brings to the surface all kinds of feelings that might otherwise have remained buried, perhaps forever...Scratch the average pacifist and you find a jingo. The middle-class I.L.P'er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong end of the telescope; force them into any real contact with a proletarian...and they are capable of swinging back to the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness."
He questions here whether either the middle class person who has stepped down, or the working class person who has risen, is happy once we see the world from another angle. The middle-class person who idealizes the working man and climbs into the coal cage is likely horrified at the filth and heavy work, and the working-class man who has scratched his way into the middle-class ranks may find it stultifying and bloodless. (He reminds us of Lady Chatterley's Lover as a short-hand way of seeing the game-keeper as a lusty man of the soil, Lord Chatterley as a well-to-do but impotent upper-crust-man, and poor Lady Chatterley as the maid in the middle.)
It is here that Orwell suggests Socialism as perhaps the answer. Not the political socialism - the "mechanized" one; but more one of space, time, nature, even troubles. It is in the nature of man, he suggests, to want to work. To do something. To be something. To be useful. He dismisses Fascism, the ultra-end of Capitalism, in his view (and recall that he's viewing it during the rise of the Fascist state in Italy). He feels that Communism is unworkable as it carries the seeds of its own destruction, the "tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on."
The problem lies, Orwell thinks, in that "Socialism" has not been presented properly. If only we could go back to the pre-machine days of one man, one hammer, we might sort the problem out. But "We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines stopped working most of us would die...for the present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it." Therefore, The Answer is not in over-throwing mechanization, in Fascism or Communism.
"The real Socialist," he writes, "is one who wishes not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes - to see tyranny over-thrown." To get there, he must be willing to get rid of his "sandals and pistachio-coloured shirts, and every vegetarian, tee-totaller and creeping Jesus" be sent away to do Yoga exercises quietly. "The more intelligent kind of Socialist (must) stop alienating possible supporters in silly and quite irrelevant ways...You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up."
We must stop, he says, talking about the "capitalist" and the "proletarian," and "a little more about the robbers and the robbed." The middle class person, the clerk, the engineer, the grocer, or civil servant - they too are The Robbed. The enemy, if "enemy" is the right word, is the plutocracy - and that group doesn't wear just a single style of clothing or run a single type of organization.
In Orwell's view, the Upper, Middle, and Working Classes must not see one another as "the enemy," or "the other," but rather together in an effort to keep extremes at bay, and keep life for the ordinary living, wherever one happens to land in life.
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