14. The Question of Poverty Tourism in The Road to Wigan Pier

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Edition used: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), ed. Peter Davison and introd. Richard Hoggart (London: Penguin, 2001). Hereafter referred to as RWP. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book.

‘In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall thin man with a ravished complexion came over to the table. […] He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz, and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line.’[1] This account was written by Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, in 1950. The man she remembered seeing, of course, was George Orwell. The ‘advance’ was the advance for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which he wrote before he went to fight in revolutionary Spain. Orwell had gone north in early 1936 having been commissioned by Victor Gollancz, his publisher, ‘to report on the conditions of real industrial workers.’ Gollancz wanted ‘the same kind of thing as Down and Out but now a book about working men in poverty and unemployment, not tramps and outcasts.’[2] What he got was another two-part work: just as Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) splits across its twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters between the cities mentioned in its title, so too does The Road to Wigan Pier split between practice and theory, from a close-up account of misery ‘on the ground’ to a more abstracted view of ‘economic injustice’ as a structural problem determining society as a whole (RWP, p. 139). Orwell’s goal in writing the book was to diagnose the evil of a system that ‘robbed and bullied’ (RWP, p. 210) ordinary people, and that forced upon society more generally a choice between political alternatives: socialism or fascism?

The Road to Wigan Pier is in some ways the autobiography Orwell never wrote. In it he recounts what he saw in places like Hanley and Burslem, in Staffordshire—places he described in his diary as ‘about the most dreadful places’ he had ever seen. ‘Labyrinths of tiny blackened houses and among them the pot-banks [pottery factories] like monstrous burgundy bottles half buried in the soil, belching forth smoke. Signs of poverty everywhere’.[3] It’s a book concerned with ‘the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire’, which he visited in order ‘to see what mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at close quarters’ (RWP, p. 113). Orwell devotes about a hundred pages to describing these conditions, with a further hundred or so pages devoted to reflecting on their implications for civilization at large. Amid all this, in Part II of the book, we learn a great deal about Orwell’s life, where he came from, how his politics were formed, and why he thought in the ways he did. He notes that he went north because he ‘was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that [he] had got to expiate’ (RWP, p. 138), guilt accumulated in the five years he’d spent working in Burma as an apparatchik of empire. He’d been an oppressor. Now he wanted to see what life was like for the oppressed, and to do something about it. He ended Down and Out in Paris and London by saying that the mere recording of ‘being hard up’ was ‘a beginning’—a gesture designed to make people take notice, people who might usually look the other way.[4] The Road to Wigan Pier wanted to do this, to make people take notice, and to look ahead to some kind of solution.

It’s often been said that The Road to Wigan Pier is an unstable book. For example, Richard Rees, a model for the character Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), called Orwell ‘no political theorist’, and criticized the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier as an extended episode of Orwell’s socialist exuberance getting the better of him, leading to often brilliant but also sometimes ‘wildly unfair’ arguments.[5] More recently, Douglas Kerr has shown how the ‘generic instability’ of the text derives not only from the uncertain chain of connection between its first and second halves, but also from the fact that Orwell was ‘as usual’ writing ‘more than one kind of book’—from literary effects that raise questions about ‘the observer’s modality’, about Orwell, and about ‘where he stands in relation to what he sees.’[6] Orwell himself described the first half of The Road to Wigan Pier as ‘fragmentary’ (RWP, p. 113), which points to an issue of interpretation. How are we, as readers, meant to make sense of these fragments? Dorian Lynskey calls Part I of the book ‘a sterling example of campaigning journalism, eliciting the reader’s empathy by interleaving hard data with a vivid sense of the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of working-class life.’ Part II, for Lynskey, begins with ‘a kind of memoir, tracing the evolution of [Orwell’s] political consciousness with punishing honesty’, but ends in ‘a confused polemic.’[7] Rees suggested that the ‘chief value’ of The Road to Wigan Pier may not in fact be its jumbled ‘contribution to the Socialism-versus-Fascism controversy of the nineteen-thirties but its far-sighted warning of dangers which in those days had scarcely appeared above the horizon.’[8] However we slice it, different readers will have different opinions about just what kind of book The Road to Wigan Pier was meant and tried to be.

Orwell’s publisher, Gollancz, a committed left-winger and promoter of socialism, was horrified by the book’s second half, but he couldn’t bring himself not to publish it. The Left Book Club edition of the book carried an introduction by Gollancz in which he insisted that the whole of the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier ‘is based on a misunderstanding’ of the socialist project.[9] For Gollancz, Orwell was ‘at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob—still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.’[10] Note the doubleness in this: Gollancz recognizes the tensions in Orwell’s position, yet must, out of loyalty to his socialist allies, come down hard on Orwell’s apparent inconsistencies and failure to end The Road to Wigan Pier with a positive account of what socialism, in his view, should and could be. Michael Shelden writes about the matter as follows:

Part II’s persistent questioning of socialist ideas—as Orwell perceived them—made the book very difficult for Gollancz to accept. The publisher knew that many of the club’s members would object to it, but he also realised that Part I was an immensely powerful statement against the exploitation of workers.[11]

For D. J. Taylor, the ‘Gollancz introduction is a fascinating period piece: high-minded, sincere, painfully conscious of its duty both to author and to subject, yet reduced to almost neurotic distress by the thought that any of the achievements of the Soviet Revolution could be so amateurishly called into question.’[12] Orwell took all the criticism as an oblique kind of compliment, noting to Gollancz that his introduction to the Left Book Club edition was ‘the kind of discussion of what one is really talking about that one always wants & never seems to get from the professional reviewers.’[13] Bad reviews, perhaps, could be good publicity.

The Road to Wigan Pier has the flavour of a book written fully in the knowledge that many of its claims will be received with difficulty, if not with outright hostility. The book’s second part, with all its toing-and-froing between productive and obstructive versions of socialism, certainly reads in this manner. It’s as if Orwell had in his mind while writing the book all the possible objections to his critique of the socialist project, and made the answering of these objections, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not, his narrative goal. Gollancz wasn’t convinced, although this didn’t stop him supporting Orwell by seeing the book into print. Another concern was the large amount of money Orwell had been given as a contractual advance for The Road to Wigan Pier, and the implications of this sum for his role as a social investigator. There is some uncertainty about the exact size of the advance, but if the usually quoted figure of £500 is to be believed, then this means that Orwell was given something like £35,000 in today’s currency. Orwell’s biographer Peter Davison writes about this as follows: ‘Whichever way one looks at it, £500 would have been a great deal of money in 1936 and, had Orwell received that, there might be some justification for those who see him as being richly paid to poke into the affairs of those living in poverty.’[14] The accusation sometimes sticks. There are still those who think that Orwell’s finances cut against the goal of The Road to Wigan Pier—that his peering into the lives of the economically exploited and downtrodden was a kind of voyeurism, done for his benefit rather than for theirs.

Orwell’s justification for writing The Road to Wigan Pier came from several kinds of concern. His first impulse derived from feelings of shame over his complicity in the imperial project in which he’d participated a decade earlier in British Burma. Orwell refers in the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier to an ‘immense weight of guilt’ that he felt he ‘had got to expiate’; having been a member of the tyrant class, he wanted to ‘get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants’ (RWP, p. 138).[15] This impulse took him to Paris and to London, where he could ‘pal up with dock-labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, and […] criminals’ (RWP, p. 140). He wanted to live among such individuals—to get to know their stories, to listen to them, to get a feel for their circumstances, and, having done so, to tell people about what he’d learned. Yet Orwell knew that the simple act of making friends with outcasts and drifters, however well intentioned, couldn’t ‘solve the class problem’ (RWP, p. 143) that his role in Burma had made him want to address. Orwell argued that a problem here is that outcasts of the kind he was drawn to are ‘very exceptional beings and no more typical of the working class as a whole than, say, the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie’ (RWP, p. 143). His goal was to find a meaningful way to understand the plight of the quote-unquote ‘ordinary’ working classes. His fear was that this very effort would turn him into what we would now call a poverty or slum ‘tourist’—would associate him with the framing of poverty, to use Bianca Freire-Medeiros’s phrasing, as a product for consumption through travel.[16]

That Orwell was aware of this problem is evident from the fact that he describes the process of ‘mingl[ing] with the working class by staying in their houses as a lodger’ as an act that ‘always has a dangerous resemblance to “slumming”’ (RWP, p. 145). By ‘slumming’ Orwell would have meant the pejorative view of ‘urban social exploration’ that by the mid-1930s had long since been associated with ‘the obloquy [or disgrace] of sensationalism,’ to use Seth Koven’s phrasing: ‘not sober inquiry and self-denying service to others.’[17] The Road to Wigan Pier tries to steer clear of ‘sensationalism’ by repeatedly highlighting the limits of its project. Valerie Meyers writes that although the book is significant for developing the nuance and subtlety of Orwell’s ‘narrative voice, the “I” who tells the story, to unify his material and further his argument’, it’s also characterized by a powerfully self-mocking tone that draws attention to Orwell’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘ineptitude, thus reminding his middle-class readers of their ignorance.’[18] A good example of this point is the way Orwell emphasizes his inadequacy as a manual labourer. ‘At a pinch’, he writes, ‘I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks’ (RWP, p. 29). The implication is that it would kill all of those from what Orwell calls the ‘exploiting parasite class’ (RWP, p. 123) who depend so thoroughly on coal and on the downtrodden individuals who mine it.

Remarks like this alert us to Orwell’s self-aware view of the nature of his project. He characterizes the intimate experience of poverty, and the empirical, in-person study of ‘unemployment and its effects’ (RWP, p. 78) on society more widely, as a ‘kind of duty’ (RWP, p. 14)—something all socially conscientious individuals, and especially those who claim to be socially conscientious individuals, need to pursue if a cohesive, coherent solution to the plight of ‘underpaid, underfed people’ (RWP, p. 82) is to be formulated. To go and look at families like the Brookers, or at a young woman poking a stick up a leaden waste-pipe, or at miners striding and working underground for hours on end—to look, in short, at the lives lived amid ‘the slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals and gasometers’ (RWP, p. 17) of industrial communities—is the necessary first step in gaining the proper experience of what it means to be pressed down by capitalism. Without such knowledge, without such experience, it’s too easy to idealize the living conditions of the working-class poor—to pretend, for example, that you can abolish poverty by abolishing the slum housing in which so many poor people live (RWP, p. 59); or that class differences can simply be wished away. Orwell didn’t view experiences of the kind that fed into The Road to Wigan Pier as sensationalist ‘experiences’ in the sense that modern tourism sells travel as a commercial product like any other. On the contrary, he argued that seeing and knowing, that being informed about the ‘conditions of life’ (RWP, p. 158) in the industrial north of England, was an obligatory part of the way forward to genuine social betterment.

This is not to say, however, that Orwell didn’t recognize the problems standing in his path. The Road to Wigan Pier may not fetishize the ‘spectacle’ of poverty in a way that leaves it open to accusations of economic voyeurism, but it hardly gives a free pass to the middle-class observer who wants to do good in the world. Consider, with this thought in mind, the following key passage from the book, which outlines the problem Orwell knew he faced:

Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions—notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful—are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy. When I grasp this I grasp that it is no use clapping a proletarian on the back and telling him that he is as good a man as I am; if I want real contact with him, I have got to make an effort for which very likely I am unprepared. For to get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable as the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class attitude to life. And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me. (RWP, pp. 149-50)

Orwell knew that it’s not enough merely to announce solidarity with the working classes. What’s needed is a transformation of the self—a loss, really, an abandoning of something that makes you what you are. ‘The fact that has got to be faced’, he writes, ‘is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself’ (RWP, p. 149). It’s a question of finding a way to understand the oppressed through a mode of understanding that does not, in its very working, reproduce the terms of difference that might deepen their plight.

Is it possible, Orwell asks of his middle-class readers, for those of ‘bourgeois status’ to understand—really understand—the fact that the average ‘person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits’, as opposed to the ‘petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, [that] is inherent in working-class life’ (RWP, p. 44)? Can the bourgeois individual, in short, leap out of their skin? Orwell was deeply critical of the bourgeois socialist who claims to be ‘ready to die on the barricades’ (RWP, p. 126), yet discloses, in everything he does, ‘the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class’ (RWP, p. 127). Such individuals are just another instance of those who ‘imagine that they can abolish class-distinctions without making any uncomfortable change in their own habits and “ideology”’ (RWP, p. 150). The ‘chasmic, impassable quality of class-distinctions in the West’ (RWP, p. 120) are easy rhetorically to condemn, but very hard, in practice, to cognize, let alone eradicate. As Orwell put it in a slightly different context, elsewhere in the book: ‘Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much like a stone wall as the plate-glass pane of an aquarium; it is so easy to pretend that it isn’t there, and so impossible to get through it’ (RWP, p. 145).

Orwell emphasizes at the beginning of Part II of The Road to Wigan Pier that he went to ‘the coal areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire’ partly because he wanted to see ‘what mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at close quarters.’ He added that first-hand knowledge of these ‘distressed areas’, as they’re described in Coming Up for Air (1939), was necessary as part of his ‘approach’ to socialism’ (RWP, p. 113).[19] Orwell’s ‘attitude towards the class question’ (RWP, p. 113), in his phrase, derived to some extent from a need to expiate feelings of guilt—to atone for the part he’d played in the imperial project. They also came from a simple conviction that ‘every empty belly’ not only evidenced the failure of capitalist structures to look after their own, but also the need for socialism as an alternative (see RWP, p. 159). The Road to Wigan Pier is a humanitarian book, in this sense, even as it recognizes that many of those individuals alert to capitalism’s evils are likely to associate socialism ‘with a fat-bellied, godless conception of “progress”’, and thus to be revolted by its apparent assaults on their ‘feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an aesthetic sense’ (RWP, p. 203). Orwell’s deeper point is that capitalism exploits everyone but the plutocratic exploiters. Defeating them requires proof not only that ‘the interests of all exploited people are the same’, but also that socialism ‘is compatible with common decency’ (RWP, p. 214). Whether The Road to Wigan Pier succeeds in making these arguments palatable, or even making the arguments in the first place, is for individual readers to decide.

In the end, it might be helpful to think of The Road to Wigan Pier as a book about confronting the ills of modernity, about facing up to the obligations of ‘the wreck of a civilisation’ (RWP, p. 170) and about deciding how to change it for the better. The fact that the book devotes so much attention to human faces suggests that it’s a book about human bodies even as it’s a book about what to do about human bodies; that it’s a book about faces which tries to face up to the conditions that make those faces look how they look. The Road to Wigan Pier might, therefore, be considered a meaningful step forward from the form and method of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which Orwell characterizes in The Road to Wigan Pier itself as a book about ‘absurd’ (RWP, p. 142) feelings of release and adventure in the midst of lack, precariousness, and scarcity. The Road to Wigan Pier tries, and arguably fails, to provide a systematic and coherent way forward, but it nevertheless tries—nevertheless makes an effort to theorize a way forward from the destitution Orwell saw in the north of England to some kind of socio-economic solution. The danger, Orwell was already seeing, is that the socialist remedy he desired could be perverted into ‘crankishness’, ‘machine-worship’, and what he called ‘the stupid cult of Russia’ (RWP, p. 201)—a subject to which, as we all know, he’d later return.

[1] George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 11: Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2000), p. 5.

[2] Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (1982; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 279.

[3] George Orwell, Diaries, ed. Peter Davison, introd. Christopher Hitchens (New York and London: Liveright, 2012), pp. 30-31.

[4] George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), ed. Peter Davison, introd. Dervla Murphy (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 230.

[5] Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), p. 50.

[6] Douglas Kerr, George Orwell (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2003), pp. 41-2.

[7] Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ (London: Picador, 2019), p. 7.

[8] Rees, George Orwell, p. 60.

[9] Gollancz quoted in D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003), p. 210.

[10] Gollancz quoted in Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth, p. 8.

[11] Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991; London: Politico’s, 2006), pp. 272-3.

[12] Taylor, Orwell, p. 210.

[13] Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939, p. 23.

[14] Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), p. 67.

[15] The same desire to see things from the viewpoint of the oppressed, not always in ways free from prejudice, is evident in works like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’.

[16] Bianca Freire-Medeiros, Touring Poverty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 1.

[17] Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 8.

[18] Valerie Meyers, George Orwell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 11.

[19] George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 623.