The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell

The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.

and in the morning the room stank like a ferret’s cage.

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 civilisation that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us.

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs.

In a crowded, dirty little country like ours one takes defilement almost for granted.

is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realise what splendid men they are.

nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh

What is surprising, on the other hand, is the immense horizontal distances that have to be travelled underground.

I had not realised that before he even gets to his work he may have to creep through passages as long as from London Bridge to Oxford Circus.

You try walking head down as the miners do, and then you bang your backbone.

This is the reason why in very hot mines, where it is necessary to go about half naked, most of the miners have what they call ‘buttons down the back’—that is, a permanent scab on each vertebra.

When finally you get back to the surface you have been perhaps three hours underground and travelled two miles, and you are more exhausted than you would be by a twenty-five-mile walk above ground.

When you think of a coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal; you don’t think, necessarily, of those miles of creeping to and fro.

so that essentially the process of getting it out is like scooping the central layer from a Neapolitan ice.

The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National.

But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks.

Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more.

But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves.

You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

Some of the older men have their foreheads veined like Roquefort cheeses from this cause.

But doubtless even at this late date the old ladies in Brighton boarding-houses are saying that ‘if you give those miners baths they only use them to keep coal in’.

The rate of accidents among miners is so high, compared with that in other trades, that casualties are taken for granted almost as they would be in a minor war.

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 working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive rôle. He does not act, he is acted upon.

Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know; but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.

I should not like to be shot for having an intelligent face, but I do agree that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches.

But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty.

In a town like Wigan, for instance, there are over two thousand houses standing which have been condemned for years, and whole sections of the town would be condemned en bloc if there were any hope of other houses being built

Once bugs get into a house they are in it till the crack of doom; there is no sure way of exterminating them.

And there are the special miseries attendant upon back to back houses. A fifty yards’ walk to the lavatory or the dust-bin is not exactly an inducement to be clean.

In such places as these a woman is only a poor drudge muddling among an infinity of jobs.

Nevertheless, in a Corporation estate there is an uncomfortable, almost prison-like atmosphere, and the people who live there are perfectly well aware of it.

but in so far as re-housing is being done, it is being done—perhaps it is unavoidable—in a monstrously inhuman manner.

As for pubs, they are banished from the housing estates almost completely, and the few that remain are dismal sham-Tudor places fitted out by the big brewery companies and very expensive.

It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty.

sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

I have seen too much of slums to go into Chestertonian raptures about them.

On balance, the Corporation estates are better than the slums; but only by a small margin.

He liked Wigan very much—the people, not the scenery. Indeed, he has only one fault to find with it, and that is in respect of the celebrated Wigan Pier, which he had set his heart on seeing. Alas! Wigan Pier has been demolished, and even the spot where it used to stand is no longer certain.

The most cruel and evil effect of the Means Test is the way in which it breaks up families.

In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby.

Unemployment has not changed this convention, which on the face of it seems a little unfair. The man is idle from morning to night but the woman is as busy as ever—more so, indeed, because she has to manage with less money.

the English working class do not show much capacity for leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for organisation. The whole trade union movement testifies to this;

The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole’ and saying that ‘these men could all find work if they wanted to’, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.

But the beauty or ugliness of industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite ineradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness, a sort of Northern snobbishness.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become.

there can hardly be a town in the South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop.

I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded.

Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system;

Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West—the