Mind The Gaps

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

This is a primary source analysis of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). To reach an understanding of the source, it is essential to examine who George Orwell was, why he became a writer, and what factors led him to write about the North of England rather than other regions in the 1930s.

George Orwell, born Eric Blair in Bengal in 1903, was educated at Eton and worked in the Indian Police in Burma from 27 November 1922 to 12 July 1927. However, the term “Indian Police” is misleading, as illustrated in Fig.1, which shows only one non-Caucasian officer in the photograph. As a member of the Indian Police, Orwell occupied a privileged position to oppress others in Burma. In his story Shooting an Elephant, he describes how he came to see imperialism as an “evil thing” and grew weary of witnessing the “dirty work” of the Empire at “close quarters.” It was at this point that he began to loathe the British Empire, which he viewed as an unbreakable “tyranny” of the British Raj over its subjects. Orwell’s time in India profoundly shaped his politics, turning him into a socialist and anti-fascist. He left the police service because he believed imperialism was “incompatible” with human decency. After resigning, he took several poorly paid jobs—such as dishwasher, private tutor, and teacher in private schools—while living in squalid conditions to atone for his role in the imperialist system and gather material for his writing. He adopted the pseudonym George Orwell to avoid bringing shame to his family due to his left-wing and anti-imperialist views.

Fig.1 Orwell (back row, third from left) during police training in Burma, 1923.

In 1936, George Orwell was commissioned to write a book about the deprived conditions in the North of England during the Great Depression. This work was to be published as part of the Left Book Club series by Victor Gollancz. The Left Book Club was a significant influence on left-wing ideology in Britain between 1930 and 1940, publishing works by members of the Communist Party of Britain and prominent left-wing politicians such as Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps. The Road to Wigan Pier was published without being proofread by Orwell, as he was in Spain fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the POUM (Marxist Workers’ Party) (Fig.2). He was severely injured during this conflict, being shot in the neck. The book is an important work that documents Orwell’s investigation into the living and working conditions of the working classes, exposing the extent of poverty in the industrial North of Britain. However, the book was published with a critical foreword by Victor Gollancz, who distanced himself from Orwell’s assertion that the middle classes were brought up to believe that “the working classes smell” and accused Orwell of forming “half-truths.”

The book was poorly received by the British Communist Party upon publication. The Party’s General Secretary, Harry Pollitt, wrote a scathing review in the Morning Star, dismissing Orwell as a “disillusioned little middle-class boy” with a distorted view of the working class and advising him never to write on subjects he “does not understand.” Journalist Paul Foot (2003) challenges Pollitt’s criticism, arguing that it does not align with Orwell’s life as a man who deliberately forsook wealth and privilege to live among the working class in poverty. Foot points out Orwell’s experiences living as a tramp and waiter and his efforts to downsize his life. While Pollitt is largely forgotten by the public, The Road to Wigan Pier has become a significant symbol of left-wing ideology in Britain, thanks to its hard-hitting reportage on poverty and the subhuman conditions of British industry.

Fig.2 George Orwell (the tallest figure at the back) with his wife, Eileen Blair, in Spain during the Civil War with the POUM militia, 1937.

Orwell chose to examine poverty in the North of England because this region had borne the brunt of industrial capitalism since the Industrial Revolution. Industrial progress led to declining living standards, pollution, and inadequate, decaying housing. In 1936, a third of Yorkshire’s working-class population lived in poverty, and this situation worsened during the Great Depression. In 1934, unemployment in Yorkshire reached 67.8%. These statistics underrepresent the true scale of the crisis, as they exclude women, the self-employed, and, as Orwell notes, only account for heads of families drawing the dole.

When Orwell arrived in Wigan in 1936, the town had become a subject of ridicule in music hall jokes, as described by Brunsdale (2000), who noted that it was “synonymous with sordid working-class life.” The closure of cotton mills and mines exacerbated unemployment and deprivation. Wigan Pier itself did not exist when Orwell wrote the book (Fig.3); it had been sold for scrap in 1930. Instead, Orwell used it as a metaphor for societal decay caused by capitalism. He described the conditions of the unemployed working class, living in derelict housing, squatting illegally, and possessing only “scraps of furniture” salvaged from rubbish tips. One vivid example he provides is a group of men whose sole table was a marble-topped wash-hand stand—a poignant symbol of their attempts to maintain some semblance of domesticity despite abject poverty.

Orwell draws attention to how unemployment affected unmarried men more severely, reducing them to the barest level of subsistence. Married men, while living in poverty, at least had homes. According to Orwell, unemployment made little difference to a married man’s way of life, as his wife continued her daily work of cleaning and caring for the household. Orwell’s portrayal of working-class households highlights the gender divide: women’s roles were confined to housework, while men remained “masters” of the household. However, in the case of the Brookers—owners of a tripe shop and boarding house—Orwell describes a reversal of roles. Mr. Brooker, an unemployed miner, had to care for his invalid wife, who lay on the sofa all day wrapped in blankets. Orwell expresses no sympathy for the Brookers and reveals his own sexist attitudes when he asserts that women do not “protest” their lot in life because they feel that a man who does housework loses his “manhood.” His use of the term “Mary Ann” as a homophobic slur further reflects his prejudices, implying that a man becomes effeminate if he performs household chores. This reveals more about Orwell’s attitudes toward gender and poverty than about the people he describes.

Fig.3 Wigan Pier as it appeared in 2020. The structure, originally a jetty for tipping coal onto boats, is a replica created by students in 1986.

In conclusion, Orwell fails to fully escape his middle-class prejudices toward the working class. His writing focuses almost exclusively on the masculine experience and shows little interest in the deeper details of women’s domestic and family lives. To Orwell, women are wives and daughters engaged in domestic drudgery. He overlooks the industrialization of female labour and ignores women’s contributions to coal mining. Orwell dwells on the negative aspects of working-class life, presenting it as a world devoid of colour and vitality, defined by the “extreme of misery.” Despite his efforts, Orwell cannot entirely shed his middle-class upbringing, and his paternalistic tone suggests that he views the working class as a section of society that needs to be reordered according to his vision. His use of language, such as “master” and “idle,” betrays his colonial background, as these terms were commonly used by imperial officers like Orwell to describe their subjects in Burma.

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Sources

Primary Sources

• Orwell, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968.
• Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Penguin, 1986.
• Orwell, George. Inside the Whale and Other Essays. London: Penguin, 1957.

Secondary Sources

• Brunsdale, Mitzi M. Student Companion to George Orwell. London: Greenwood Press, 2000.
• Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
• Rodden, John. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of “St. George Orwell.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Kerr, Douglas. George Orwell. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003.

Articles

• Taaffe, Peter. “Revisiting The Road to Wigan Pier.” Socialist Today, Issue 137, April 2010. Accessed 28/11/20.
• Pollitt, Harry. “Mr Orwell Will Have to Try Again.” Accessed 29/11/20.
• Pearce, Robert. “Revisiting Orwell’s Wigan Pier.” History, Vol. 82, No. 267 (July 1997), pp. 410–428. Accessed 29/11/20.
• Foot, Paul. “Orwell Centenary: The Cold War Controversy.” Socialist Review, No. 276, July 2003, pp. 10–11. Accessed 29/11/20.

Appendix

• Fig.1 George Orwell training as a Police Officer in Burma. Accessed 29/11/20.
• Fig.2 George Orwell and his wife in the Spanish Civil War. Accessed 29/11/20.
• Fig.3 Wigan Pier. Accessed 30/11/20.