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 Working Class England October 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If for the sake of argument one suspends their ideological beliefs, the working conditions discussed in the coal mines of Northern England were appalling. In making the reader understand these conditions, George Orwell establishes his position on the corrosive working conditions of this period and the path to change. In effect, the coal mines are Orwell's tool for presenting socialism as a more fair system.
Some reviewers have made the argument that this is Orwell's manifesto for socialism. The first half of the book is an eye opening experience in viewing conditions in a coal mine. This was a time before strong labor unions or any type of organized labor. Though Orwell observes that the workers seem to be content in their squalor, their contentment does not make it acceptable. The conditions and lifestyle are sickening. As Orwell states "I remember the shock of astonishment it gave me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair proportion, ... were decent young miners and cotton workers gazing at their destiny with a sort of dumb amazement as an animal in a trap. ...They had been brought up to work, and behold! and it seemed as if they were never going to get a chance of working again" (p 81).
The remainder of the book is Orwell's explanation of socialism and why so many are repulsed by it. In nature, the class system is far from just. Orwell never seems to completely follow through on his argument. While some readers will be negative toward the book because of a socialist theme, my negative view is based on the fact that Orwell's argument for socialism is far from complete. I am not sure many can be sold on the ideology from this book. Aside from explaining the process of Orwell's coming to terms with socialism and prejudices that exist in others, the argument lacks a sense of focus and perhaps even clear purpose.
 The Road to Wigan Pier July 23, 2008
I have just finished reading The Road to Wigan Pier and I have to admit that I did not enjoy it as much as I thought that I would. While Down and Out in Paris and London is darkly ironic and insightful (and, to a lesser extent, I have had similar experiences in my own life and share a similar feeling about them), the first part of TRWP -- the account of working and living conditions in Yorkshire and Lancashire towns in the 1930s -- is frankly bleak and historically interesting, but it is impossible to enjoy reading this part, and I find the second part -- the rant against socialists of his time -- to be too bitter and, to be quite honest, so unfair that it is more revealling of Orwell's snobbery and disillusionment than anything else. The second part is really all about Orwell's angst about his middle-class upbringing and I did not think that it did the first part any justice. I would have liked to have read more about what Orwell thought socialism should be, rather than his vague appeals to justice and decency, and his tirade against middle class prigs, parlour house Bolsheviks, and socialist intellectuals.
Even though his complaints had some truth to them, I found myself agreeing with the rebuttal by Victor Gollancz -- the Left Book Club's editor --, which was printed as a preface, even though, with the benefit of hindsight, Orwell's comments about the Soviet Union were more insightful than the editor realized (though, given the preface was written in 1937, the editor should have had a little more hindsight than he did!).
Having said that, it is important to remember that Orwell was going through something of a crisis of conscience at this point in his life and he was so deeply concerned with the failure of socialism and the rise of fascism that, by the time the book was published in 1937, he had already left to join up with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. I think that this book shows the frustration and personal conflicts that had risen to a head in Orwell's life, and his experiences of northern industrial towns was the last straw. I think that his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, even though they deepened his disillusionment and confirmed all his suspicions about the Soviet Union and the Commintern, as well as confirming his fears about the rise of fascism, helped him very much in dealing with his personal conflicts and his crisis of conscience. This is why is next book, Homage to Catalonia is, like Down and Out in Paris & London, darkly ironic, insightful, and, while clearly accounting tragedy and betrayal, is full of the 'warts and all' modesty and decency that I very much admire in Orwell's writings.
We have nothing to lose but our aitches May 28, 2008
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
Contrary to my expectations, this is Orwell's most personal book. He bares his soul to us. At least I think he seriously tries to be perfectly honest, if not complete.
After his success with Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell got commissioned by the influential Left Book Club (Victor Gollancz one of the editors)to write a book about unemployment in the industrial and empoverished northern part of England. This was the mid 30s, the recent depression had led to high unemployment and endless misery in England as elsewhere.
GO went there and dug in and lived with workers and in boarding houses and crawled through mines (though he was about twice as tall as a miner should be) and talked to people and read statistics and reports.
The outcome is an oddity. Part 1 is a solid piece of investigative reporting and journalistic sociology. Chapter 1 is along the lines of Down and Out, an account of life in a boarding house in the North. Start with chapter 2 if you are squeamish. The hygienic conditions are worse than anything in Down and Out.
The following chapters in part 1 give us decsriptions of the life of miners and work in the coal mines, of the miners' leisure time, health, work safety, accidents, the housing conditions in the fearful northern slums (worse than the slums in India and Burma, says GO, because of the cold dampness), of unemployment and malnutrition, of food and fuel, of the uglyness of industrial countries at the time. The strongest chapter in this part, in my opinion, is the one on unemployment and its psychology. This subject is timeless. Even if the slums have changed, the essential condition of unemployment is surely unchanged.
So far so good and in line with the job description.
But then the man went and added a second part which deals in first place with himself, an autobiography and history of the thought of GO. Having grown up as a son of shabby genteels, he was raised on contempt for the working class. Public school education enforced the attitude. After school and after WW1, GO took a job in the imperial police in Burma and there learned to hate the system. He quit after 5 years and went into a personal crisis, a kind of horror vacui and hatred against his self. He goes on search of redemption as told with some embellishment in Down and Out. He tries to anihilate his social persona, but learns it does not work that way. The North England job gives him a chance to reconsider his position. He philosophizes about socialism and the classes. Interesting to us (at least to me), but shocking to the Left Book Club.
They decide to publish it anyway, but Gollancz adds a foreword where he thinks he needs to warn his club members that here is somebody who does not walk the line of good doctrinarism. Very odd.
By the way, did you know that quite likely fish and chips and the football pools have averted revolution in England by providing 'panem and circenses'? Says Orwell, and I love him for that kind of insight.
(This concludes my Orwell cycle, unless I decide to re-visit Burma and Catalonia.)
Who let George off his leash? May 9, 2008
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is a fabulous bit of muckraking journalism by the most important political writer of the 20th century, George Orwell. O was an accomplished novelist in his own right, but it was in his capacity as an agitator for democratic socialism that his pen was at its sharpest, and in this revealing, often appalling look at the life of British coal miners, he was at his brutally honest best.
WIGAN is actually two books in one - the first half deals with his own experiences in the industrial north of England, where he investigated not only what happened at the mines themselves, but how the miners lived, or rather subsisted, in conditions of disgusting squalor and privation (he also spends a good deal of time examining the fate of the unemployed and "pensioned off"). In the latter half, he offers a pitiless criticism of British socialism, which he sees is the only positive solution to Britain's social and economic injustices, but regards as hopelessly clumsy and dogmatic in its approach, and doomed lose out to fascism unless it changed its message and won over the ordinary British worker.
Orwell's concerns in the book were severalfold. He wanted to expose and improve the lot of the common man; he wanted to make suggestions for how that lot might be improved; he wanted the Left to understand just how bad its image problem was in the eyes of the ordinary British citizen (their target audience); and he wanted, above all things, to hammer home to the world that Socialism stood for "justice and common decency" and not some watered-down version of the Russian Revolution. His greatest fear was that the fascists, by virtue of their superior propaganda and understanding of human motivation, would steal away the common man from the one system that could truly offer him a fair shake.
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER was commissioned by the Left Book Club, which wanted Orwell to write an Upton Sinclair-esque expose of the life of the British worker "without whom everyone in England would soon starve." They got what they wanted, but on the bonus plan; his criticisms of Socialism, and by extension, the Club itself, were so vitriolic that the Club inserted a forward in the book which essentially refutes everything in it. The forward is worth reading, if only to unintentionally demonstrate that Orwell's attack on the Socialist leadership was dead-on: they did lack common sense, they had no understanding of the common man or of how badly they themselves were regarded by him, and their propaganda was appallingly bad. Luckily for them, they had Orwell...though my guess is at the time they weren't feeling so lucky when they read it. The reader, on the other hand, will.
great book October 11, 2007
George Orwell is the man. This is for sure one of the top 5 best books i've ever read. Even if I tried, I couldn't come close to doing the book justice with this review.
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