Book Review - Road to Wigan Pier

The Road to Wigan Pier
By George Orwell
128 pages, 1937

My first taste of George Orwell came late in High School, in Grade 12, when I read his novella Animal Farm during class. The first period of the morning was a library period, I picked up the book and started reading it, then either skipped the rest of day’s classes or surreptitiously read the book on my desk rather than paying attention to the class’ subject. It was the first book that I read in a single day. It was also the first book that I re-read in its entirety. Orwell’s got a special place in the library of my heart.

I’ve since read and re-read many of his works, and works here is a better word than books because writing was for him work, not an artistic endeavour, even though it failed to earn him adequate recognition or wealth in his lifetime. Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier all fall into a category that has too much storytelling to be essays, too much reportage to be novels and too much philosophising to be journalism. Labelling his work into a category is a difficult task.

Labelling him into a category is a difficult task for that matter! He loved England and railed against Imperialism. He remained unpalatable to the right for his socialism and to the left for his anti-Stalinism. He was a man of modest education who believed in liberty and justice without illusions. He was writing at a time when most leftists would ignore the tales of horror coming out of Stalinist Russia, most rightists and liberals would accept Hitler and his cronies as fellow travellers in the greater struggle against communism and most patriots accepted the British Empire as something that was a glory to England. Orwell’s honesty was to see evil and call it such, regardless of alliances, associations or any ‘big-picture’ obfuscation.

His publisher, Victor Gollancz, suggested he go up to Lancaster, Barnsley and Sheffield and write about the condition of the coal miners there. This was with the intention of producing a book specifically for the “Left Book Club” that put Orwell on the landscape more than his previous book had, or his essays and journalism had. The first half of the book is observational labour-journalism. Orwell talks about the lives of the miners in Northern England. He talks about their jobs, their ailments, their finances, their families their housing and even bathing.

The first seven chapters of the book describe the futility and hopelessness of their lives: the daily grind, the diet, and above all money. Orwell would break down daily expenses, lodging, food, and whatnot in real pounds and shillings. He would compare that to the income made by the men for their single-income families, and leave no doubt that these people were permanently poor. The liberal lie that through hard-work, determination, brains and a strong work-ethic, anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and flourish, was flayed as raw as the hands of a mineworker.

It’s important to remember that he’s writing, not about the itinerant tramps and unemployed travellers that he visited in Down and Out in Paris and London, but about the working poor; those who were lucky enough to have permanent jobs. The purpose of part one was to identify to the readers that a problem exists. There’s a serious problem on England’s shores, that needs addressing, and he gets this across with the combination of mercy and brutal honesty that would pull at the heart-strings of even the most reactionary Tory.

The final six chapters answer the question asked by the dilemma presented. How can people of conscience go about fixing the injustice that begins every time the sun’s morning rays touch England? His answer is socialism. Not the socialism of the young middle-class, idealistic for now but ready to be fatted on the benefits of liberal-capitalism for his later years. Nor the socialism of the Soviet Union, the mechanised incarnation of a feudal empire, raising darkness from the east the way J.R.R. Tolkien would later described Mordor.

Orwell’s socialism is the socialism of the now-defunct Independent Labour Party. Built on justice and liberty; capital ideas and ideologies that demanded the respect of anyone still loyal to their own conscience. My only criticism of his philosophy was that he believed that those two soldiers wore the same uniform in every fight. Justice is ambiguous and universal liberties often come at someone’s expense.

Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell’s birth-name, hidden for obvious reasons) espouses his thoughts as to why socialism was then and is now unpalatable in England. He explains the ongoing and seemingly permanent class-war that never seems to result in peace, only a vampiric truce. He discusses his own class status and biography, the hostility between his class and the proletariat, and the alienation of bourgeois socialists from the workers they claim to represent. Many of the final chapters are very relevant to today’s dialogue between the voting masses and the governing class.

Gollancz decided only to publish the first part of the book, the part described as observational labour-journalism. The observations were marketable, the political philosophy would do nothing but alienate the buying market. Orwell was furious when he hear about this, but by that time he was out of the country, soldiering alongside the forces of the Spanish Republic against a fascist coup that had broken out in 1936. Gollancz proved to be a better critic than publisher for his client, pointing out that Orwell fails to properly define what he meant by Socialism, also criticizing Orwell for his dismissal of pacifism and feminism as flash-in-the-pan counter-movements, and for placing too much emphasis on class-war. All of which were legitimate criticisms.

Orwell’s produced more neologisms than perhaps any other writer. Big Brother is watching you, Some animals are more equal than others, Thought Police, Newspeak and ironically Orwellian are lexis that (save the final) came from his pen. I suspect that he’d have probably taken deep offence at the term Orwellian, after dedicating so much to the cause of social democracy.

It’s always struck me as odd that his legacy gets claimed by those on the right. There’s a smug ‘I told you so’ attitude of displaying Orwell as a leftist who saw the light and called the Soviet Union evil, as though he had been a supporter prior to 1949 and the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s the final warning to any moral idealist. If you criticize any leftist movement from the left, or rightist movement from the right, that seeming contradiction will be held against your judgement and that of your cohorts. That argumentative reality prevents Liberals from speaking out against corruption in their own ranks, makes many Jews leery of criticizing Israel, stops Tories from criticizing police over-enthusiasm, and makes Muslims wary of airing their own dirty laundry. To stand on personal morals rather than group solidarity blunts the sword of your words. That’s Orwellian.