The Road to Wigan Pier

"That’s right. Part One is this wonderful reportage. The chapter that always made the largest impact on me was the first one, where he’s staying in this dreadful lodging house run by a couple called the Brookers in Wigan, above a terrible tripe shop. Orwell’s fastidiousness, which is one of his greatest characteristics, was outraged by having to stay in this terrible place. Part of the amusement of that, to me, is the way in which every description is loaded against the people involved. He obviously loathes Mr and Mrs Brooker, with whom he’s staying. But they can’t win on any level: Orwell will describe a room not only as filthy, but as “debauched.” Just a slightly untidy room is “debauched.” There’s another marvelous occasion where he comes across the landlord Mr Booker peeling potatoes, and Orwell says, “he sat by the fire with a tub of filthy water, peeling potatoes at the speed of a slow-motion picture.” Now, if you’re peeling potatoes, then the water you’re peeling them into is going to be dirty. There’s nothing you can do about it. But in Orwell’s eyes, it’s another brick in the wall. Whatever the Brookers do, they simply can’t win. I just think it’s terribly funny, and I simply don’t care how unfair it is that all the evidence is loaded against them, because it’s just so brilliantly written. The second half is a polemic about socialism written by somebody who hadn’t really yet worked out what socialism was. On the one hand, it’s very astute, but on the other hand, it’s rather clumsily done, because Orwell is still coming to grips with this enormous subject that he’s only just begun to think about. In fact, this so offended Victor Gollancz, who published the book under the auspices of the Left Book Club in 1937, that he wrote a preface taking exception to some of it. He didn’t toe any party lines and would have given offense to many of the people who’d come across it. The Road to Wigan Pier is a very transitional book. It shows all the attention to detail and the thought of street-level reportage that distinguishes Down and Out in Paris and London , but it’s moving forward to a political position— the political position—that will underlie what Orwell starts writing in the 1940s, for which we now celebrate him. The distinguished literary critic John Sutherland wrote a book called Orwell’s Nose (2016), which he describes as a ‘pathological biography’, after he noticed just how heightened Orwell’s sense of smell is. He’s obviously a very sensitive child. You read the essay that he wrote about his prep school, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1952), and he’s practically fixated on smell and noxiousness. The thing one notices about Orwell a lot is his fastidiousness. He’s always going on about sweat; he’s always going on about smell; he’s always going on about dirt. It’s one of several obsessions that he clearly has from a very early part of his life that then begin to flow in a sort of unhindered tide through the novels. To give you another example, another obsession of Orwell’s that takes hold from an early age is rats. Rats are everywhere in Orwell’s books. There are loads of rats in Down and Out ; in Burmese Days , whenever anyone gets buried there are already rats burrowing down deep underneath the graves. It reaches his highest point in Nineteen Eighty-Four when O’Brien threatens to release the cage full of starving rats on Winston’s face. But it flows all the way through. Even as a teenager, Orwell is writing letters to friends about going out and shooting rats in the countryside, and he says that one of the things that really upsets him in Spain, lying there in his tent, is having a rat crawl over him in the dark. In fact, Orwell is once supposed to have virtually started a mini-war in Spain in 1937 when he was particularly annoyed by this rat that kept on coming into the trench in which he was placed, so he took out his pistol and shot it. The noise started reverberating all the way down the line, and I think they actually thought that there was an attack happening. People were picking up rifles and shooting into the dark—all because Orwell had become so enraged by this rat that he decided to blow its head off underground. It’s one of his obsessions: there’s his fastidiousness, there’s the rat phobia, and he’s also very paranoid from an early age. He’s always complaining that people are eavesdropping on him, spying on him, reading his letters. He said that one of the reasons he changed his name is that if you had an enemy, he might cut out your name from a newspaper and work black magic over it. He had some very odd mental characteristics, of which I think this was one. For all the sympathy or the empathy he feels, he can never quite suppress his feeling of disgust of it with it, I suppose. It’s interesting perhaps to compare him with the Victorian writer by whom he was very influenced, George Gissing. There are profound differences between them; Gissing eventually turned into a kind of elitist who thought that the working classes were written off and beyond saving. But at the beginning, they both possess this same immense sympathy, coupled with almost a disgust at the squalor in which people live and the limited range of their intellectual resources and this kind of thing. It’s a very equivocal, ambiguous view, I think. It’s a very good point, but I think you have to accept that all writers are products of their time. Nobody, however enlightened or disinterested, ever transcends the pressure of their age. For example, quite a bit of Orwell’s writing in the 1930s might now by modern standards be recognized as anti-Semitic. We can say the same thing about T S Eliot , but that doesn’t invalidate The Waste Land . It was just the sort of thing, unthinkingly and in pre-Holocaust days, that people sometimes said about Jewish people in the 1930s. We’re all creatures of our time, and sometimes we realize that and start making amends, which Orwell did. There is a revealing article called ‘Revenge is Sour’ that he wrote while a war correspondent in occupied Europe in 1945, where he witnesses a confrontation between a captured SS man and a former Jewish prisoner. A Jewish friend of his rebuked him for inadequate appreciation of the issues involved, and Orwell admitted that he had not thought about this hard enough. Later in his career, you can see him consciously trying not to say anything that would offend Jewish people. There’s a realisation that he perhaps wrongly had a more casual attitude towards this in the past. So, we can see him trying to make amends for previous mistakes, which I think is a very positive thing. But he was a creature of his time."