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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
This is a personal account of George Orwell’s time working in a coal mine. There’s also an essay that calls-out the hypocrisy of socialists.
This has some passages that are extremely relevant to today. Specifically, about how people are pacified by small luxuries like beer and television, and that privileged people don’t think about where their fuel comes from.
Just overall very interesting to read about what it was like to work in a coal mine and how society plays out the same struggles as it did a century ago.
This has some passages that are extremely relevant to today. Specifically, about how people are pacified by small luxuries like beer and television, and that privileged people don’t think about where their fuel comes from.
Just overall very interesting to read about what it was like to work in a coal mine and how society plays out the same struggles as it did a century ago.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I think the part I liked the most is how he started in the first section diagnosing the problem by calculating how many people are malnourished and living off the dole to how he ended the book by prescribing a solution that primarily involved having the Daily Worker bring back it's book section (presumably to employ Orwell himself). Posting is always the answer. Never log off. (Cue up the marxist anime appraiser tweet.)
???
LOL
LMAO
Spoiler
You get into the cage, which is a steel box about as wide as a telephone box and two or three times as long. It holds ten men, but they pack it like pilchards in a tin, and a tall man cannot stand upright in it. The steel door shuts upon you, and somebody working the winding gear above drops you into the void. You have the usual momentary qualm in your belly and a bursting sensation in the ears, but not much sensation of movement till you get near the bottom, when the cage slows down so abruptly that you could swear it is going upwards again. In the middle of the run the cage probably touches sixty miles an hour; in some of the deeper mines it touches even more. When you crawl out at the bottom you are perhaps four hundred yards under ground. That is to say, you have a tolerable-sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it – all this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg. But because of the speed at which the cage has brought you down, and the complete blackness through which you have travelled, you hardly feel yourself deeper down than you would at the bottom of the Piccadilly tube.Spoiler
You creep through sacking curtains and thick wooden doors which, when they are opened, let out fierce blasts of air. These doors are an important part of the ventilation system. The exhausted air is sucked out of one shaft by means of fans, and the fresh air enters the other of its own accord. But if left to itself the air will take the shortest way round, leaving the deeper workings unventilated; so all short cuts have to be partitioned off.Spoiler
The gas may be touched off by a spark during blasting operations, or by a pick striking a spark from a stone, or by a defective lamp, or by ‘gob fires’ – spontaneously generated fires which smoulder in the coal dust and are very hard to put out. The great mining disasters which happen from time to time, in which several hundred men are killed, are usually caused by explosions; hence one tends to think of explosions as the chief danger of mining. Actually, the great majority of accidents are due to the normal everyday dangers of the pit; in particular, to falls of roof. There are, for instance, ‘potholes’ – circular holes from which a lump of stone big enough to kill a man shoots out with the promptitude of a bullet. With, so far as I can remember, only one exception, all the miners I have talked to declared that the new machinery, and ‘speeding up’ generally, have made the work more dangerous.Spoiler
The reason why wooden props are still generally preferred to iron girders is that a wooden prop which is about to collapse gives warning by creaking, whereas a girder flies out unexpectedly. The devastating noise of the machines makes it impossible to hear anything else, and thus the danger is increased.Spoiler
t the most characteristic industrial disease is nystagmus. This is a disease of the eyes which makes the eyeballs oscillate in a strange manner when they come near a light. It is due presumably to working in half-darkness, and sometimes results in total blindness. Miners who are disabled in this way or any other way are compensated by the colliery company, sometimes with a lump sum, sometimes with a weekly pension.Spoiler
But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven’t met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude – and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home – you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you. Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and everybody knows it. You can’t go on looking for work every day for seven years. There are allotments, which occupy the time and help to feed a family, but in a big town there are only allotments for a small proportion of the people. Then there are the occupational centres which were started a few years ago to help the unemployed. On the whole this movement has been a failure, but some of the centres are still flourishing. I have visited one or two of them. There are shelters where the men can keep warm and there are periodical classes in carpentering, boot-making, leather-work, handloom-weaving, basket-work, sea-grass work, etc. etc.; the idea being that the men can make furniture and so forth, not for sale but for their own homes, getting tools free and materials cheaply. Most of the Socialists I have talked to denounce this movement as they denounce the project – it is always being talked about but it never comes to anything – to give the unemployed small-holdings. They say that the occupational centres are simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them the illusion that something is being done for them. Undoubtedly that is the underlying motive. Keep a man busy mending boots and he is less likely to read the Daily Worker. Also there is a nasty YMCA atmosphere about these places which you can feel as soon as you go in. The unemployed men who frequent them are mostly of the cap-touching type – the type who tells you oilily that he is ‘Temperance’ and votes Conservative. Yet even here you feel yourself torn both ways. For probably it is better that a man should waste his time even with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing.Spoiler
I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At that time I had just come back from Burma, where unemployment was only a word, and I had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as, to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom I had been taught to regard as cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton-workers gazing at their destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. They simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up to work, and behold! it seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of working again. In their circumstances it was inevitable, at first, that they should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was the attitude towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as an individual and for which you were to blame.Spoiler
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the PAC level. White bread-and-marg. and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.???
Spoiler
I suspect the real reason is that in the past brown bread has been confused with black bread, which is traditionally associated with Popery and wooden shoes. (They have plenty of Popery and wooden shoes in Lancashire. A pity they haven’t the black bread as well!) But the English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea wouldSpoiler
Curiously enough it is not the triumphs of modern engineering, nor the radio, nor the cinematograph, nor the five thousand novels which are published yearly, nor the crowds at Ascot and the Eton and Harrow match, but the memory of working-class interiors – especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still prosperous – that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in.Spoiler
This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.LOL
Spoiler
In addition to this there is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.LMAO
Spoiler
But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
Excellent book, well thought out and a very interesting read.
This book starts very strong with the descriptions of the lives of miners in what are now the run down and neglected parts of England. The middle is an interesting bit of self reflection on George's own life and how he came to view class, empire, Socialism in the way that he did. And then by the end it gets a bit trite with him talking grandiosely about what is and isn't possible (amongst other things), from his own perspective but acting as if it is a universal truth. This is even pre-television so I can't hold it against him too, but it doesn't hold up so well compared to the rest of the book. The first half, with the miners, was excellent.
Orwell and I have the same sun, moon, and rising, which beings us together in a way I cannot and will not articulate. The second part of this quasi-doc text was most interesting, and cemented a "pro-socialist, minus the bad socialists" stance. It was hard not to compare it to the state of the world, which shows how we have not learned much about caring for everyone since at least the interwar period.
challenging
funny
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Minor: Alcoholism, Bullying, Alcohol, Colonisation
Amusing opinions on vegetarians but spot on in his perceptive observations on apples. Oh, and a bit of socialism as an antidote to working class poverty in the industrial North.
I did enjoy the first half of the book and about what it was like in those days in that area and of the poverty and how tough life was. In the second half of the book I got a bit bogged down about Socialism and Fascism but I did persevere and I am glad I did as I did learn a lot about class structure and what Socialism etc is about. Overall it is a good book to read.
A knowledge compound book club choice:
I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about this choice for January, it's already such a depressing time of year, a deep look at the lives of the lower classes and class divides of 100 years ago just wasn't what I wanted to start with.
I can't say I enjoyed the book. The stark realities of the miners lives in Part One made for hard reading, I couldn't help but think of the children (and adults too) who are working in mines today, probably under worse circumstances (if that's possible). The window into the mining towns of the North of England was morbidly fascinating. The terrible conditions, the indignities and the similarities of some parts of poverty today.
I took a lot of screenshots, where I felt bar some subtle differences in language, the feelings and situations could have been lifted from an article in the New Statesmen this year. One of the participants in Book club runs a business in Wigan and he bemoaned that everything was still true and the dilapidated housing stock, with its wonky windows and doors, is as depressing as Orwell wrote.
There were some great unexpected nuggets that really gave some color to the chapters. Insights that would probably be left out of any historic retelling as unimportant, like how old men thought they'd get ill if they washed their legs and how if a miner saw a woman on his way to work it was bad luck so he'd call in sick.
Part One gets the majority of the stars in my rating. Even though I did not enjoy the subject matter I feel like it was worth knowing. It was interesting, well written and evoked many emotions. At the risk of sounding like a sandal wearing Bolshie, I think this being in the required reading list in secondary school would make for some interesting discussions.
Part two? Not so much. It is interesting for so many other reasons, but I fear the world has moved on so far, the relevance of his deploring the behaviours (and seemingly the existence) of almost everyone is more comical than rousing.
He is very honest. But part two is all opinion and conjecture and guessing what the future will hold. Being from the future and reading it almost 100 years later it is cringey in parts, funny in others and scary in the rest.
He seems to disdain the whole lot of his own middle class for being too snobby, doesn't really have much to say about the upper classes except they're not as dumb as the caricatures in the papers make them out to be and has a longing to be accepted by the lower classes - a fetishisation almost - except they smell funny and they can't eat soup properly.
We spent most of book club talking about class in the UK and how it's defined now and if it's still as hard to move up and down through the ranks.
What I really wanted to talk about was how much he got right (if we can't get the middle classes to agree that socialism is to the benefit of all then facism will win), what he got wrong (people DO still want to do things with their hands and brains even though a machine could do it for them), and what he left out... mainly the future of capitalism, almost as if he couldn't imagine one.
He really gets on a ranty soapbox about everything that socialists do wrong (wear pistachio coloured shirts, wear sandals, agree with feminism and offer a vegetarian option) and there are grains of truth at the bottom of the silo, but in all part two is more a museum peice for 'slightly left wing, middle class, thoughts and opinions of 1930s England' its great that it exists! We could learn some things from it, but we shouldn't necessarily take on everything he said.
I couldn't help thinking that he would lose his mind at England in 2025, from the 'woke mind virus' podcasters to zero hour job contracts. We are not where he thought we'd be and I'm sure he'd be bitterly disappointed in us all.
I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about this choice for January, it's already such a depressing time of year, a deep look at the lives of the lower classes and class divides of 100 years ago just wasn't what I wanted to start with.
I can't say I enjoyed the book. The stark realities of the miners lives in Part One made for hard reading, I couldn't help but think of the children (and adults too) who are working in mines today, probably under worse circumstances (if that's possible). The window into the mining towns of the North of England was morbidly fascinating. The terrible conditions, the indignities and the similarities of some parts of poverty today.
I took a lot of screenshots, where I felt bar some subtle differences in language, the feelings and situations could have been lifted from an article in the New Statesmen this year. One of the participants in Book club runs a business in Wigan and he bemoaned that everything was still true and the dilapidated housing stock, with its wonky windows and doors, is as depressing as Orwell wrote.
There were some great unexpected nuggets that really gave some color to the chapters. Insights that would probably be left out of any historic retelling as unimportant, like how old men thought they'd get ill if they washed their legs and how if a miner saw a woman on his way to work it was bad luck so he'd call in sick.
Part One gets the majority of the stars in my rating. Even though I did not enjoy the subject matter I feel like it was worth knowing. It was interesting, well written and evoked many emotions. At the risk of sounding like a sandal wearing Bolshie, I think this being in the required reading list in secondary school would make for some interesting discussions.
Part two? Not so much. It is interesting for so many other reasons, but I fear the world has moved on so far, the relevance of his deploring the behaviours (and seemingly the existence) of almost everyone is more comical than rousing.
He is very honest. But part two is all opinion and conjecture and guessing what the future will hold. Being from the future and reading it almost 100 years later it is cringey in parts, funny in others and scary in the rest.
He seems to disdain the whole lot of his own middle class for being too snobby, doesn't really have much to say about the upper classes except they're not as dumb as the caricatures in the papers make them out to be and has a longing to be accepted by the lower classes - a fetishisation almost - except they smell funny and they can't eat soup properly.
We spent most of book club talking about class in the UK and how it's defined now and if it's still as hard to move up and down through the ranks.
What I really wanted to talk about was how much he got right (if we can't get the middle classes to agree that socialism is to the benefit of all then facism will win), what he got wrong (people DO still want to do things with their hands and brains even though a machine could do it for them), and what he left out... mainly the future of capitalism, almost as if he couldn't imagine one.
He really gets on a ranty soapbox about everything that socialists do wrong (wear pistachio coloured shirts, wear sandals, agree with feminism and offer a vegetarian option) and there are grains of truth at the bottom of the silo, but in all part two is more a museum peice for 'slightly left wing, middle class, thoughts and opinions of 1930s England' its great that it exists! We could learn some things from it, but we shouldn't necessarily take on everything he said.
I couldn't help thinking that he would lose his mind at England in 2025, from the 'woke mind virus' podcasters to zero hour job contracts. We are not where he thought we'd be and I'm sure he'd be bitterly disappointed in us all.