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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Much like Hemingway's lost satchel or Genet's samizdat manuscripts, I'll piece this together from jumbled memories. How's that for hubris?
The Road To Wigan Pier was amongst the best books I've read this year. The route established by Orwell is more sinuous than expected. He examines a lodging house and then travels to the pits themselves. He finds valor in those who toil. He doesn't patronize.
He ponders the unemployment issue in England. He busts myths. He unrolls lengths of statistics. He then concludes his book by meandering back and forth between the theoretical and the autobiographical. It is easy to see how this spurned readers, both then and now.
My reasons for reading this now were related on Hadrian's Wall (sorry I couldn't resist.) but Orwell's book did serve as a pleasurable counterpoint to my own holiday experiences.
The Road To Wigan Pier was amongst the best books I've read this year. The route established by Orwell is more sinuous than expected. He examines a lodging house and then travels to the pits themselves. He finds valor in those who toil. He doesn't patronize.
He ponders the unemployment issue in England. He busts myths. He unrolls lengths of statistics. He then concludes his book by meandering back and forth between the theoretical and the autobiographical. It is easy to see how this spurned readers, both then and now.
My reasons for reading this now were related on Hadrian's Wall (sorry I couldn't resist.) but Orwell's book did serve as a pleasurable counterpoint to my own holiday experiences.
“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.”
Reading "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell was a compelling literary experience. This book explores the harsh realities faced by the working class in northern England before World War II. Orwell's journey through Lancashire and Yorkshire is vivid and heartbreaking as he documents the squalor, pollution, and relentless hardship endured by miners and their families.
The first part of the book is a detailed account of life in the mines & surrounding communities. Orwell's strength lies in his ability to observe without patronizing, presenting the miners' valor without romanticizing their plight. His description of the Brookers' boarding house stands out, painting a picture of disappointment and decay that underscores broader societal neglect.
The second part shifts to a more theoretical and autobiographical discourse. Orwell reflects on his upbringing and political evolutiona; he advocates for socialism while critically examining why many working-class individuals resist it. His honesty about his own prejudices adds a layer of personal vulnerability and introspection to his arguments.
Orwell's critique of socialism's failings, particularly its association with various "cranks" and the alienation of those it aims to help, remains relevant. He argues that for socialism to succeed, it must focus on its core principles of liberty and justice. One of the most poignant aspects of the book is Orwell's acknowledgment of his own limitations in bridging the class divide. Despite his commitment to socialism, he admits that his background and inherent biases prevent him from fully integrating with the working class he champions. This self-awareness makes Orwell's voice feel uniquely trustworthy and relatable.
The work is certainly not flawless; the second part can feel meandering and repetitive at times, and Orwell's political naivety occasionally surfaces. However, these issues are minor compared to the book's overall impact. Orwell's brutal honesty and sharp observations make this a crucial read for anyone interested in social justice, class struggles, and the development of political thought.Overall, Orwell's ability to blend personal narrative with broader social critique is front and center. This book challenges readers to confront their own prejudices and consider the systemic changes needed to create a more equitable society. Despite being written nearly a century ago, Orwell's insights into class and socialism continue to resonate even in modern times.
Reading "The Road to Wigan Pier" by George Orwell was a compelling literary experience. This book explores the harsh realities faced by the working class in northern England before World War II. Orwell's journey through Lancashire and Yorkshire is vivid and heartbreaking as he documents the squalor, pollution, and relentless hardship endured by miners and their families.
The first part of the book is a detailed account of life in the mines & surrounding communities. Orwell's strength lies in his ability to observe without patronizing, presenting the miners' valor without romanticizing their plight. His description of the Brookers' boarding house stands out, painting a picture of disappointment and decay that underscores broader societal neglect.
The second part shifts to a more theoretical and autobiographical discourse. Orwell reflects on his upbringing and political evolutiona; he advocates for socialism while critically examining why many working-class individuals resist it. His honesty about his own prejudices adds a layer of personal vulnerability and introspection to his arguments.
Orwell's critique of socialism's failings, particularly its association with various "cranks" and the alienation of those it aims to help, remains relevant. He argues that for socialism to succeed, it must focus on its core principles of liberty and justice. One of the most poignant aspects of the book is Orwell's acknowledgment of his own limitations in bridging the class divide. Despite his commitment to socialism, he admits that his background and inherent biases prevent him from fully integrating with the working class he champions. This self-awareness makes Orwell's voice feel uniquely trustworthy and relatable.
The work is certainly not flawless; the second part can feel meandering and repetitive at times, and Orwell's political naivety occasionally surfaces. However, these issues are minor compared to the book's overall impact. Orwell's brutal honesty and sharp observations make this a crucial read for anyone interested in social justice, class struggles, and the development of political thought.Overall, Orwell's ability to blend personal narrative with broader social critique is front and center. This book challenges readers to confront their own prejudices and consider the systemic changes needed to create a more equitable society. Despite being written nearly a century ago, Orwell's insights into class and socialism continue to resonate even in modern times.
What I like most about George Orwell is his honesty. He does not allow himself to stoop to pretending he truly "penetrated" the working class, or hide the nuances of his feelings towards i.e. his time in the colonial police in Burma. While reading this book, I revisited my view of Burmese Days, where I chastised him for writing a book where the main character was primarily disgusted by British imperialism for what seemed like selfish reasons - that it forced him to do violence, to be part of the cog of the machine. I wanted a pure, anti-Imperialist hero, with unbounding empathy for the full population of oppressed. I wanted a romanticised Socialist hero. But Orwell will never give you that - he will only give you reality. Hence, despite him writing this examination of the working class in 1930's Northern England, and expounding on the many techniques socialism needed to adopt to gain acceptance, and then later in life writing famous allegories which critique Russian communists. He does not care for ideological purity, he cares for the realities of power, the realities of discourse, for actually freeing the oppressed, no matter what ideological veneer that happens under. And for that I greatly respect him and hope to be like him. To remain a pragmatist.
3.5 stars - not life-shattering, but enjoyable, and an encouragement to reground myself in pragmatism. Bits and pieces of learnings (or rather, reminders) still very much relevant a century later
Quotes / ideas:
“He was one of those people who can chew their grievences like a cud.”
“I have noticed that people who let lodgings nearly always hate their lodgers. They want their money but they look on them as intruders and have a curiously watchful, jealous attitude which at bottom is a determination not to let the lodger make himself too much at home.”
“The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again.”
“But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.”
“ This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people‘s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon.”
“A person of bourgeois origon goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress ‘educated’ people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their ‘education’ is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander”
“In general, these conditions are taken as a matter of course, though not always. Some people hardly seem to realise that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all clinging desperately to their houses, lest worse should befall.”
- small landlords were the worst - no money for repairs
“ I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”
“ I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury.”
“Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.”
On English nationalism: “ the histories Iwas 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.”
“Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their plain-spokenness towards anyone they consider an equal. If you offer a working man something he doesn’t want, he tells you that he doesn’t want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence.”
- most important thing that reinforces class distinction is the idea that poor people are dirty / smell. Physical repulsion more powerful than anything else
“The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.”
Socialists are largely:
(1) negative denouncer of the bourgeoisie
(2) reformists, who want to ‘do’ socialism to the working class, rather than true revolution
(3) young social-literary climbers who are socialist because it is the fashion (and will be fascist in 5 years)
(4) “cranks” aka eccentrics, attracted to any mention of progressivism
- Marxists struggle to understand the opposition because of their focus on economic causes, and underestimation of ideological. This also means they suck at propaganda
“And here you observe the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.”
“A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world - which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.”
“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.”
“The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation.”
“… ‘liberated’ by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors.”
- socialism cause fascism - obsession with economics, seen as hedonism and cheap progress; people run to tradition, spirituality, “hardness”, aesthetics
“… the type of hambug who passes resolutions ‘against Fascism and Communism’, i.e. against rats and rat-poison.”
“It is quite easy to imagine a middle-class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”
- To make socialism successful
(1) talk less theoretical jargon (e.g. dialectics) and more about justice, liberty and the plight of the unemployed
(2) talk less about mechanical progress and more about (a) that the interests of all exploited people are the same (b) that Socialism is compatible with common decency
3.5 stars - not life-shattering, but enjoyable, and an encouragement to reground myself in pragmatism. Bits and pieces of learnings (or rather, reminders) still very much relevant a century later
Quotes / ideas:
“He was one of those people who can chew their grievences like a cud.”
“I have noticed that people who let lodgings nearly always hate their lodgers. They want their money but they look on them as intruders and have a curiously watchful, jealous attitude which at bottom is a determination not to let the lodger make himself too much at home.”
“The most dreadful thing about people like the Brookers is the way they say the same things over and over again.”
“But it is no use saying that people like the Brookers are just disgusting and trying to put them out of mind. For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilisation that produced them.”
“ This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people‘s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon.”
“A person of bourgeois origon goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress ‘educated’ people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their ‘education’ is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander”
“In general, these conditions are taken as a matter of course, though not always. Some people hardly seem to realise that such things as decent houses exist and look on bugs and leaking roofs as acts of God; others rail bitterly against their landlords; but all clinging desperately to their houses, lest worse should befall.”
- small landlords were the worst - no money for repairs
“ I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.”
“ I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury.”
“Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.”
On English nationalism: “ the histories Iwas 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.”
“Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at first, is their plain-spokenness towards anyone they consider an equal. If you offer a working man something he doesn’t want, he tells you that he doesn’t want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving offence.”
- most important thing that reinforces class distinction is the idea that poor people are dirty / smell. Physical repulsion more powerful than anything else
“The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.”
Socialists are largely:
(1) negative denouncer of the bourgeoisie
(2) reformists, who want to ‘do’ socialism to the working class, rather than true revolution
(3) young social-literary climbers who are socialist because it is the fashion (and will be fascist in 5 years)
(4) “cranks” aka eccentrics, attracted to any mention of progressivism
- Marxists struggle to understand the opposition because of their focus on economic causes, and underestimation of ideological. This also means they suck at propaganda
“And here you observe the huge contradiction which is usually present in the idea of progress. The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.”
“A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world - which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.”
“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.”
“The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation.”
“… ‘liberated’ by the machine, as a race of enlightened sunbathers whose sole topic of conversation is their own superiority to their ancestors.”
- socialism cause fascism - obsession with economics, seen as hedonism and cheap progress; people run to tradition, spirituality, “hardness”, aesthetics
“… the type of hambug who passes resolutions ‘against Fascism and Communism’, i.e. against rats and rat-poison.”
“It is quite easy to imagine a middle-class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.”
- To make socialism successful
(1) talk less theoretical jargon (e.g. dialectics) and more about justice, liberty and the plight of the unemployed
(2) talk less about mechanical progress and more about (a) that the interests of all exploited people are the same (b) that Socialism is compatible with common decency
This should be required reading for everyone. It is eerie how what Orwell writes about in the 1930s is so close to where we are today. Abject poverty and fascism are on the rise, and international tension is at its worst peak. Whether Orwell's prescription of democratic, grassroots socialism will prevail today (at the moment it looks very unlikely), is to be seen. But a great, important read.
Part 1 (the first half) is excellent, part 2 is poor. It could have done with (at least) some serious editing and restructuring. The publisher was right to suggest it should have been published separately! Orwell comes across as a curmudgeon.
If you feel inclined I would suggest either read part 2 once or not at all!
If you feel inclined I would suggest either read part 2 once or not at all!
informative
slow-paced
Orwell’s non-fiction is uniformly better than his fiction and the Road to Wigan Pier is a great example.
In the first half he takes us on a winding journey though the depression era North. I’ll never forget his description of the coal mine, nor the state of peoples housing or the effect of years of unemployment on entire streets. In particular there is a fantastic portrayal of unemployed people taking coal from moving trains. The desperation and hope and pride of the people he introduces is still incredibly moving eighty-odd years later.
The second half is a discussion on socialism. I think this is the weaker section of the book. Some of Orwell’s beliefs have not exactly aged well but broadly his points do bear considering. There were a number of sections that still feel very relevant and a number more where he was spot on about what would happen with fascism. Overall I think there is something to be said for understanding socialism through the eyes of its opponents. His argument for socialism at the end, despite having just spent half the book discussing its criticisms, is still compelling - especially given events that happened in the years following the books publication.
I would read this book if you’re keen on Orwell or you want a vision of life during the Great Depression in Britain. In classic Orwell style he captures the world around him with quirks that make you smile and horror that makes you cringe.
In the first half he takes us on a winding journey though the depression era North. I’ll never forget his description of the coal mine, nor the state of peoples housing or the effect of years of unemployment on entire streets. In particular there is a fantastic portrayal of unemployed people taking coal from moving trains. The desperation and hope and pride of the people he introduces is still incredibly moving eighty-odd years later.
The second half is a discussion on socialism. I think this is the weaker section of the book. Some of Orwell’s beliefs have not exactly aged well but broadly his points do bear considering. There were a number of sections that still feel very relevant and a number more where he was spot on about what would happen with fascism. Overall I think there is something to be said for understanding socialism through the eyes of its opponents. His argument for socialism at the end, despite having just spent half the book discussing its criticisms, is still compelling - especially given events that happened in the years following the books publication.
I would read this book if you’re keen on Orwell or you want a vision of life during the Great Depression in Britain. In classic Orwell style he captures the world around him with quirks that make you smile and horror that makes you cringe.
challenging
slow-paced
Striking (read: depressing) for what hasn't changed as opposed to what has. Personally interesting also for shining a light on coal mining in the Thirties; my grandad was a Bevin boy, and always said he and my grandma were lucky all thirteen if their kids survived to adulthood.