The Road To Wigan PierBefore he authored the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, George Orwell was a journalist, reporting on England's working class — an investigation that led him to examine democratic socialism. In the 1930s, the Left Book Club, a socialist group in England, sent George Orwell to investigate the poverty and mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. Once there, he went beyond the requests of the book club, to investigate the employed as well. Orwell chose to live as the coal miners did — sleeping in foul lodgings, subsisting on a meager diet, struggling to feed a family on a dismal wage, and going down into the hellish, backbreaking mines. What Orwell saw clarified his feelings about socialism, and in The Road to Wigan Pier, he pointedly tells why socialism, the only remedy to the shocking conditions he had witnessed, repelled "so many normal decent people." "Orwell's code was a simple one, based on truth and 'deceny'; he was important — and original — because he insisted on applying that code to his own Socialist comrades as well as to the class enemy...It is the best sociological reporting I know."—The New Yorker |
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accent Alf Smith attitude average bourgeois bourgeoisie Brookers civilisation class-distinctions coal dust coal-miner colliery common lodging-house Communist Comrade X Corporation houses course cup of tea D. H. Lawrence Daily Worker Davy lamp decent dirty dole England English fact Fascism feel feet fight five George Orwell half happen Hence human hundred income industrial towns instance kind of thing Labour Lancashire Left Book Club less literary live living-room lodgers look machine means mechanical progress mechanisation Men Like Gods merely middle middle-class miner mines never night notice Orwell perhaps person poverty probably proletarian realise remember Rent ROAD TO WIGAN round seemed Sheffield shillings a week slag-heaps slum smell snobbishness Socialism Socialist sort tion tramps travelling ugly unemployed unemployment usually whole WIGAN PIER working-class yards