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eponymist 's review for:
The Road to Wigan Pier
by George Orwell
George Orwell was one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. Partly it’s the man, partly the era that he lived through. Of Orwell’s novels, most are fair, one or two extraordinary, Animal Farm’s re-enactment of the major stages of any revolutionary uprising being his best. For high grade Orwell though, you have to turn to his non-fiction.
The Road to Wigan Pier, like Down and Out in Paris and London, is a book of two halves. The first half depicts Orwell’s experiences travelling around the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 1930s, investigating the conditions of the poor. The second half is written in essay form. It examines class consciousness and is Orwell’s passionate defence of socialism. It contains the famous words, ‘The working classes smell’.
Which is what the middle class were taught, we are told, and Orwell takes his own strata of society to task for their snobbish attitudes to those lower down the food chain. However, as with all his writings, it as much what The Road to Wigan Pier tellsus about an important epoch in history that matters. Thirties politics was dynamic, unlike today, with widely divergent opinions fighting for supremacy, occasionally even fighting side by side. The road to Wigan Pier led George Orwell all the way to Catalonia to sign up against the fascists. These days he’d be labelled an insurgent.
The Road to Wigan Pier isn’t patronising or pompous, it merely sets out Orwell’s observations and his opinions and asks that they be added to the aggregate of intellectual thought on the subject. That it is done with such forthrightness is all the better. And yet like so many books written against the backdrop of the great depression, The Road to Wigan Pier speaks to the modern world with new relevance. It reminds us how far Britain has come.
The Road to Wigan Pier, like Down and Out in Paris and London, is a book of two halves. The first half depicts Orwell’s experiences travelling around the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 1930s, investigating the conditions of the poor. The second half is written in essay form. It examines class consciousness and is Orwell’s passionate defence of socialism. It contains the famous words, ‘The working classes smell’.
Which is what the middle class were taught, we are told, and Orwell takes his own strata of society to task for their snobbish attitudes to those lower down the food chain. However, as with all his writings, it as much what The Road to Wigan Pier tellsus about an important epoch in history that matters. Thirties politics was dynamic, unlike today, with widely divergent opinions fighting for supremacy, occasionally even fighting side by side. The road to Wigan Pier led George Orwell all the way to Catalonia to sign up against the fascists. These days he’d be labelled an insurgent.
The Road to Wigan Pier isn’t patronising or pompous, it merely sets out Orwell’s observations and his opinions and asks that they be added to the aggregate of intellectual thought on the subject. That it is done with such forthrightness is all the better. And yet like so many books written against the backdrop of the great depression, The Road to Wigan Pier speaks to the modern world with new relevance. It reminds us how far Britain has come.