100 best nonfiction books: No 39 – The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937)
George Orwell’s unflinchingly honest account of three northern towns during the Great Depression was a milestone in the writer’s political development
Monday 24 October 2016
“The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.” This opening line is the sound of a great writer finding his authentic voice. With absolute confidence, after several false starts, the mature George Orwell takes charge of this idiosyncratic account of working-class life from his first page.
Formerly Eric Blair, he was now writing with the urgency of a freelance with a much-needed commission, and also as a man just back from a journey through the industrial wastes of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the depths of the Great Depression.
Orwell had been signed up in the spring of 1936 for perhaps as little as £50 (plus expenses) by Victor Gollancz, the leftwing publisher who had championed Down and Out in Paris and London. Gollancz wanted a “condition of England” title to include in his Left Book Club, a bookselling experiment he had started to develop at the beginning of 1936. In fact, when Orwell delivered his manuscript at the end of the year, Gollancz was confronted with rather more than he’d bargained for, an infuriating but always compelling, personal quest by one of the strangest and most complicated figures in English literature.
The Road to Wigan Pier falls into two parts, a travelogue describing Orwell’s journey through three northern towns, and a matching, but much more contentious, quest of heart and mind. It was, declared its author, a “political book”, a mix of reportage and political commentary with a dash of autobiography. Orwell’s contemporaries such as Cyril Connolly noted that, henceforth, he would be a socialist, but a socialist with an aura of secular saintliness that some found affected, even comical. And yet, with all its weaknesses, it would prove to be a milestone in his creative development.
Orwell’s long-term publisher, Fred Warburg, described it as “one of the most contradictory books ever written”, which is another way of saying that, as well as writing outstanding reportage from “Wigan Pier”, Orwell was willing to be honest about himself as a refugee from the middle class, via Eton, Burma and the dosshouses of Paris and London. In these pages, finally, he began to carve out his peculiar place as a British literary socialist, and to reconcile himself to himself.
The first half opens with a brilliant, stand-alone chapter about the Brookers’ tripe shop-cum-lodging house, No 22 Darlington Street. From the squalor of working-class Wigan, Orwell plunges into meetings with the unemployed, with slum-dwellers, with coalminers, and dockers.
Anxious to return to his future wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell spent just two months in the north, and finally took the train home, closing his travels with a scene glimpsed from his railway carriage, the unforgettable image of a working-class woman trying to unblock a drain:
At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked… She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye … it wore the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen… She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe.
The second half of Wigan Pier is much more uneven, and famously provocative. Even now, Orwell’s private encounter with English socialism can seem shocking. His determination “to see what mass unemployment is like at its worst” was principally to do with his own quest, a journey that was, he writes, “necessary to me as part of my approach to socialism”.
For before you can be sure whether you are genuinely in favour of socialism, you have got to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult question of class.
Orwell is never less than self-lacerating. On the class question, he eviscerates himself: “The real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal is summed up in four frightful words: the lower classes smell.”
From here, an admission that continues to shock, and having described his adolescent self as “an odious little snob”, he confesses his deep sense of inadequacy: “I had not much grasp of what socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings… I could agonise over their sufferings, but I hated them and despised them whenever I came anywhere near them.”
In conclusion, having fretted neurotically over the condition of domestic socialism, and his obligations towards it, he arrives at a kind of armistice in the war with himself: “To sum up – there is no chance of righting the conditions I described in the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from fascism, unless we can bring an effective socialist party into existence.”
Rarely, in English literature, has a writer flayed himself so mercilessly in print, or published so many hostages to fortune. But the upshot of this uniquely strange book was a kind of creative liberation: Eric Blair, who was now unequivocally George Orwell, had found his voice and his identity. For the rest of his active life – barely 10 years – he would write as a British literary socialist. From this declaration of intent come his masterpieces: Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and, finally, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s arguable that without The Road to Wigan Pier none of these would have been possible.
A signature sentence
“And then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of the sinking middle class – the private schoolmaster, the half-starved freelance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns – may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”
Three to compare
JB Priestley: English Journey (1934)
Robert Byron: The Road to Oxiana (1937)
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy (1957)
002 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion(2005)
009 Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
010 The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
021 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)
022 A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
