The Road to Wigan Pier

• The Road to Wigan Pier
  Author: George Orwell 1937 232 pp
  My rating: 3*
  Started July 8 2008, Finished July 11 2008
  
  Orwell’s examination of working class poverty in the coal mining towns of northern England during the depression has two parts: the first is a detailed description of what that poverty entails based on Orwell’s first hand experiences living among his subject families and the second is Orwell’s proposed remedy, in a word, Socialism. The first part was quite compelling, but felt a bit truncated; perhaps as with The Reluctant Communist, there is just not very much one can say about such drab, uneventful and purposeless lives. Also of note about this section, since the early sproutings of what would eventually become the British welfare state were extant at the time of Orwell’s research, his subject families received enough assistance from the government to avoid starvation (though their diets were quite limited and innutritious) or homelessness. Since these people weren’t faced with starvation as say, the characters in Down and Out in Paris and London were, the most destructive effect of poverty for the residents of Wigan Pier was the lack of self-worth resulting from lives without gainful employment or any hope thereof.
  The second part of the book is a testament to the power of Orwell’s writing – his take on the human condition places such a premium on honesty, particularly due to his constant questioning of his own prejudices and biases, that his prose can be far more readable than his logic and conclusions would justify on their own. In part two, Orwell addresses the issue of what can be done to rectify England’s social-economic structure that allows perhaps one third of its citizens to exist in dire poverty. The only answer Orwell sees is the adoption of Socialism. The alternatives are dismissed in passing: capitalism is self-destructive, dying (if not already dead) and essentially designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many; Communism is a perverted, dictatorial perversion of Socialism; Fascism, which was ascendant at the time Wigan Pier was written, is an abomination that Orwell was willing to put his life on the line to combat it years before the outbreak of WWII. Orwell wastes much time defending Socialism from its supporters who are stereotyped as head in the cloud proto-hippies or the subset of the affluent classes which espouses support for the working class while secretly detesting almost everything about the people who constitute it. The biggest problem in this section though is that as the book’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, points out in the book’s forward, Orwell never defines what he means by Socialism; I read the forward after reading the rest of the book and this was a point that had bothered me for almost all of point two – I found this lacking severely undercut whatever points Orwell was trying to make.
  Also of note in part two are several instances where Orwell draws boneheaded conclusions or time has proved him utterly wrong:
• “I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.” (Ch 8) This reader considers it possible that such silent soup sipping is the ingrained habit of a lifetime, requiring no thought or effort, not an overt statement of social revulsion.
• “In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.” (Ch 12) This passage, part of a section where Orwell inveighs against the increasingly complete mechanization of society, completely fails to appreciate that people could come to enjoy activities such as biking, hiking and running for their own sake.
• “… Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face. The capitalist- imperialist governments, even though they themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction against Fascism as such.” (Ch 12) This quote is one of many throughout Orwell’s studies on poverty where he completely underestimates the health of capitalism; of course it was the “dying” capitalist and the corrupt communist countries that crushed capitalism, socialist countries playing no significant role whatsoever.
  
  
  
  
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  On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. (Ch 1)
  
  This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. (Ch 3)
  
  It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. (Ch 4)
  
  In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention … (Ch 5)
  
  We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. (Ch 5)
  
  Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards. (Ch 5)
  
  I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. (Ch 5)
  
  Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. (Ch 5)
  
  The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody's teeth. (Ch 6)
  
  I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. (Ch 7)
  
  In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. (Ch 8)
  
  Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings. At a distance, and through the medium of books--Jack London's The People of the Abyss, for instance --I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness. (Ch 9)
  
  And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. (Ch 11)
  
  the swindle of “progress” (Ch 12)
  
  But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant, and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches. (Ch 13)
  
  “so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism. (xviii) From forward by Victor Gollancz.
  
  Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism (xx)