The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At the beginning of the second part of the book Orwell writes

The road to Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear.

He does elucidate his journey along this path.
Based on Orwell’s personal observations while in situ, the first part is an engrossing treatise on the socio-economic status of the coal-mining community in the Lancashire area; it addresses the living conditions, housing, sanitation, food and nutrition, working conditions in the mines, health facilities, roles of religion and trade-unions, recreational opportunities or a lack thereof. I faced the onerous task of deciphering the values of “pounds, shillings and pence” and could not but marvel the British doggedness of not adopting the decimal system. They had inflicted the Indians with the equally puzzling currency system of “rupee, anna and paisa.” The stark landscape, prevalent poverty, the all-pervading smoke and sickness like pneumoconiosis reminded me of AJ Cronin’s The Citadel.

And that is the central fact about housing in the industrial areas: not that the houses are poky and ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, or that they are distributed in incredibly filthy slums round belching foundries and stinking canals and slag-heaps that deluge them with sulphurous smoke – though all this is perfectly true – but simply that there are not enough houses to go round.
A slag-heap is at best a hideous thing, because it is so planless and functionless. It is something just dumped on the earth, like the emptying of a giant’s dust-bin. On the outskirts of mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country. Often the slag-heaps are on fire, and at night you can see the red rivulets of fire winding this way and that, and also the slow-moving blue flames of sulphur, which always seem on the point of expiring and always spring out again.

Besides the economic disparity, he also dwells on the prevalent class system in Britain. It may not have been as evil as the divisive caste system in India, but was very much in evidence

You cannot have and effective trade union of middle-class workers, because in times of strikes almost every middle-class wife would be egging her husband ton to backleg and get the other fellow’s job.
That is what we were taught – the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a <>physical<> feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite., but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks – habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him.

The second part is more autobiographical. He talks about his experiences as a police officer in colonial India – in Burma, to be precise, and then his experiment with poverty as in Down and Out in Paris and London. Witnessing the poverty and indifference of the governing dispensation, both political, as well as bureaucratic, his inchoate ideas start to crystallize at this stage, as he develops his philosophy on Socialism, Fascism, Communism, totalitarian regimes etc – this tends to go on and on a bit, but is still fascinating, seeing Orwell’s thought processes that culminates in Animal Farm and 1984

In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was sentimental nonsense.
I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man.

Not as entertaining as his other novels, nonetheless, it's an important seminal work.

View all my reviews