Back to the Classics 2021 #15

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

Travel Classic: I’ve been reading and re-reading George Orwell since about 1980. On his recommendation I’ve read Tobias Smollett (here and here), Bernard Shaw (here and here), and Ernest Bramah. For readers and other seekers, his caution is always worth remembering: “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

The Road to Wigan Pier - George Orwell

In 1936 the Left Book Club commissioned George Orwell to write long journalism about conditions in the coal areas of the north of England. This book is about unemployment, housing, hygiene, monotonous diets, and other economic realities in the wake of the devastation wrought by the Great Depression of 1929. The book provides excellent background to unjustly neglected novels such as South Riding by Winifred Holtby and The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley.

For me, really impressive and memorable is chapter two’s description of the life of miners and conditions in coal mines. I had always pictured miners working not far from the elevators but in fact they have to walk, often bent over, for 90 unpaid minutes to get to where coal is worked. It’s shockingly hard yakka.

A reason this book of period journalism has survived is that Orwell brings his novelist’s eye for great scenes like this:

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the-embankment. 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. I had time to see everything about her--her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then 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 drain-pipe.

The second half of the book argues that socialism can remedy the appalling conditions described in the first half. Because Orwell was an honest man, he makes a good faith effort to examine why the people who would benefit from socialism seem so turned off by socialism. One reason, Orwell asserts, is that the advocates of socialism are so off-putting to the people they are trying to persuade.

Middle-class socialists valorize the working class and thus turn off members of the working class who know damn well he is a fool that glorifies the working class. Middle-class socialists assume technology will solve all our problems while Orwell and members of the working class distrust technology as a job-killing beast. Orwell also points out that lots of middle-class socialists come off as plain weird to members of the working class or condescending when they use turgid literary or technocratic language. Orwell finally points out that socialists seem to care more for ideological consistency and esoteric debates than making clear their argument for socialism.

Certainly the book, especially part two, still has something to say to us readers who live in a country where nobody trusts members of the other side, not believing anymore that Those People believe in the values we pledge allegiance to.

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