Road to Wigan Pier, Part 1

Many of the best and most influential books I’ve read I’ve come across by accident. It chanced that I was in a favorite Spencerport bookstore the other day—I’m not sure how it was I ended up there, but if my wife is reading this, I’m sure it was an accident—and I found a book by George Orwell called The Road to Wigan Pier. Having a deep appreciation for Orwell, as much for Politics and the English Language as Animal Farm, I decided the book was worth $2.50 despite knowing nothing about it. I came across Amusing Ourselves to Death, Preface to Plato, and Emmet’s Logic under similar circumstances. In each case I knew within the first hundred pages that this was a book to be re-read many times, a book that had to be answered and seriously considered.

Road to Wigan Pier is a critique of English industrial capitalism in England after WWI, and more importantly, a critique of the socialism that was attempting to replace it. The book is short, provocative, and jarringly honest. On subjects which others pour forth torrents of half-truths and rhetoric, Orwell writes a paragraph such as:

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 civilization that produced them.

The first half of the book is a sort of memoir on time Orwell spent living among coal miners and other working-class people in the north of England. The Brookers were a family he lodged with among the most repulsive conditions. Nearly a century after Orwell wrote the same problems are ignored in America, and his words are just as cutting. Consider the following passages on the plight of the poor:

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 a working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that, and the other.

And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. 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.

It is remarkable how true this remains; the poor, especially the urban poor, suffer in massive debt and want while being comforted by the iPod, the television, and the internet.

The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and the wholemeal bread or if they even, like writer of the letter to the New Statesmen, 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 P.A.C. 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 English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

Substitute the hamburger for corned beef, soda for tea, and fries for potatoes—though I will continue to argue that in America the problem of food scarcity has been solved in a spectacular and largely unacknowledged way, and that our current problems are far preferable to the famines of antiquity.

Orwell also addresses the oft argued point that poverty is maintained voluntarily by living off welfare (then nicknamed, “the dole”) to avoid real employment. As then, this was true for some, and in those cases disgusting; but not for most. The problem, in Orwell’s analysis, is his positive vision. I should state beforehand, how glad I was to find that he had one. All of this griping comes to no good if you don’t have anything better in mind. Yet Orwell’s compromised (or perhaps he would prefer “practical”) socialism is unpersuasive. Orwell had an interesting relationship with Chesterton. He idolized him as a young man, and adopted many elements of his writing style. (Regrettably, not his humor) He took every opportunity of refuting him, even when the refutation was little better than an insult. I don’t think he never understood him, and I think this was because Orwell, despite all his brilliance, ever understood one of the essential truths of mankind: that to most of them, religion is not a private hobby. Orwell always seemed to think Chesterton was forcing Catholicism into his writing like a man advocating model trains. He couldn’t get over the false (or at least, so I’d argue) divide between a man’s private religion and his public life. And that is where, as I’ll discuss in the next blog, his plan for socialism falls short.