| THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER George Orwell Victor Gollancz (Fwd.) New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| LibCong 58-10888 | 264pp. | HC/BWI | $? | |
A cluttered, cramped, dirty old lodging-house in an unspecified location in the North of England, occupied with varying degrees of permanence by disabled miners, itinerant salesman, and Orwell. The small, dour landlord running a tripe-shop on the premises, his perpetually soiled hands leaving black marks on his stock in trade as well as on the food he prepares for the tenants and his invalid wife. Such is the gloomy scene on which this book opens.
It struck me that this place must be fairly normal as lodging-houses in the industrial areas go, for on the whole the lodgers did not complain. The only one who ever did so to my knowledge was a little black-haired, sharp-nosed Cockney, a traveller for a cigarette firm. He had never been in the North before, and I think that till recently he had been in better employ and was used to staying in commercial hotels. This was his first glimpse of really low-class lodgings, the kind of place in which the poor tribe of touts and canvassers have to shelter upon their endless journeys. In the morning as we were dressing (he had slept in the double bed of course) I saw him look round the desolate room with a sort of wondering aversion. He caught my eye and suddenly divined that I was a fellow-Southerner. " The filthy bloody bastards !" he said feelingly. After that he packed his suit-case, went downstairs and, with great strength of mind, told the Brookers that this was not the kind of house he was accustomed to and that he was leaving immediately. The Brookers could never understand why. They were astonished and hurt. The ingratitude of it ! Leaving them like that for no reason after a single night ! Afterwards they discussed it over and over again, in all its bearings. It was added to their store of grievances. |
Orwell's description of the Brookers' lodging-house and the mines and cities he visits are very effective in painting a picture of industrial desolation. Such descriptions fill most of Part I of the book, and the author supplements them with a series of pictures (some not very clear) that show us some of what his words far more effectively tell us. Then he shifts gears. In Chapter 8 he discourses on the historical origins of the traditional contempt of the North for the South. (page 144)
When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. " Better is it for us," writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, " to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to luxuriate amid olives, vines and vices." " Olives, vines and vices " sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of Carlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner (" Teutonic," later " Nordic ") is pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals, while the Southerner is sly, cowardly and licentious. This theory was never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that the finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting that the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves. |
Orwell closes this chapter, and Part I, by considering the nature of class hostility in the England of his time, and how things may change "two hundred years into the Utopian future." The members of the working class, with their forthrightness, their hospitality, even their distaste for education, are very much to be admired, in his view — though he avoids idealizing them and is at pains to point out that, as a child of the "lower upper middle class" himself, he will never be really welcome or comfortable among them. In what has gone before, I judge him largely correct. But his predictions (pages 149-50) are ludicrous.
Hardly one of the things I have imagined will still be there. In that age when there is no manual labor and everyone is "educated," it is hardly likely that Father will still be a rough man with enlarged hands who likes to sit in shirt-sleeves and says " Ah wur coomin' oop street." And there won't be a coal fire in the grate, only some kind of invisible heater. The furniture will be made of rubber, glass and steel. If there are such things as evening papers there will certainly be no racing news in them, for gambling will be meaningless in a world where there is no poverty and the horse will have vanished from the face of the earth. Dogs, too, will have been suppressed on grounds of hygiene. And there won't be so many children, either, if the birth-controllers have their way. |
Part I was Orwell's description of the problem; Part II is his proposed solution. In a word, that solution is Socialism. It is clear that his advocacy of Socialism springs from two roots: his admiration for the working man, so ill-used and downtrodden in England's North in his time, and the five years he spent in Burma commanding a detachment of Imperial police.1 So he shows his common decency: for it is natural to hate oppression, the more so when one is part of the system of oppressors; as is admiring those who keep their dignity under duress, and wishing to improve their lot in life. However, his arguments in this six-chapter polemic amount to assuming Socialism equates with common decency. The fact that it hasn't caught on in England he ascribes to two factors: the inferior grade of most socialists, and the belief that Socialism fosters a pernicious form of technological progress that would ultimately rob man of all humanity, leaving him "something resembling a brain in a bottle" (page 233).
His arguments are rife with inconsistencies and unsupported assumptions.2 Chief among them is the central one, that the steady improvement in labor-saving devices must inevitably erode human physical ability. Orwell says on page 228 that In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness.
Further down the same page, he amplifies his concern: But the trouble goes immensely deeper than this. Hitherto I have only pointed out the absurdity of aiming at mechanical progress and also at the preservation of qualities which mechanical progress makes unnecessary. The question one has got to consider is whether there is any human activity which would not be maimed by the dominance of the machine.
Notice that the "dominance of the machine" is assumed. He then spends most of page 229 in listing a number of human activities that may be regarded either as loathsome work or delightful play, and points out that such "play" — that is, purposeful effort done for its inherent rewards — is an essential component of human life. But, he warns, There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry-stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery.
And hence, for his hapless humans, whatever they want to do, they will find another machine has set them free from that.
(Emphasis in original) The dire warnings continue: Mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.
This is a straw-man argument. Nowhere is it written that machines will be employed to do everything they conceivably could do; and even in cases where mechanical methods have largely supplanted human ones (as in Orwell's example of transport), there will be exceptions — just as today there are back-packers, rock climbers, and people who visit dangerous places in primitive conditions for the fun of it.
George Orwell's observations of working men, and his sentiments toward them, are thoroughly admirable. I applaud them here, and I quote some examples on the Errata page. But his logic is less than compelling. Victor Gollancz notes in his Foreword2 that Orwell is "at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual" (page xviii). I would say rather that Orwell's internal contradiction is one shared by many modern liberals: he (as he freely admits) uses the tools of industry while at the same time condemning industry as a pernicious force which must destroy every vestige of humanity. He notes at one point that Wigan Pier had been demolished. I hope I have done the same to his logic. I still recommend the book; it paints a vivid picture of early twentieth-century life in the industrial North of England, and gives insights into what created those conditions. It also, as a sidelight, offers glimpses of many contemporary literary and political figures. An index would have made this last feature more useful; the book has none (and no table of contents, for that matter, though there is a list of illustrations.) Later editions, such as the one pictured above, no doubt correct those omissions.
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