Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #164140 in Books
• Published on: 1972-10-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Amazon.com
Although George Orwell grew up in the relative comfort of the English middle class, his socialist convictions and general sense of fairness led him to hate his country's deeply ingrained class structure. That perspective permeates this book, but the most striking elements are the quotidian details of life that Orwell observes in his first-person account of the lives of coal miners and others in the poor north of England. Wigan Pier is almost too realistic at times, as Orwell brings his unparalleled powers of observation to portray the wretched conditions of the working class. That Orwell may have slanted his reporting to make things look worse than they were is a question that does not lessen the book's interest.

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Customer Reviews

Who let George off his leash?
THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is a fabulous bit of muckraking journalism by the most important political writer of the 20th century, George Orwell. O was an accomplished novelist in his own right, but it was in his capacity as an agitator for democratic socialism that his pen was at its sharpest, and in this revealing, often appalling look at the life of British coal miners, he was at his brutally honest best.

WIGAN is actually two books in one - the first half deals with his own experiences in the industrial north of England, where he investigated not only what happened at the mines themselves, but how the miners lived, or rather subsisted, in conditions of disgusting squalor and privation (he also spends a good deal of time examining the fate of the unemployed and "pensioned off"). In the latter half, he offers a pitiless criticism of British socialism, which he sees is the only positive solution to Britain's social and economic injustices, but regards as hopelessly clumsy and dogmatic in its approach, and doomed lose out to fascism unless it changed its message and won over the ordinary British worker.

Orwell's concerns in the book were severalfold. He wanted to expose and improve the lot of the common man; he wanted to make suggestions for how that lot might be improved; he wanted the Left to understand just how bad its image problem was in the eyes of the ordinary British citizen (their target audience); and he wanted, above all things, to hammer home to the world that Socialism stood for "justice and common decency" and not some watered-down version of the Russian Revolution. His greatest fear was that the fascists, by virtue of their superior propaganda and understanding of human motivation, would steal away the common man from the one system that could truly offer him a fair shake.

THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER was commissioned by the Left Book Club, which wanted Orwell to write an Upton Sinclair-esque exposé of the life of the British worker "without whom everyone in England would soon starve." They got what they wanted, but on the bonus plan; his criticisms of Socialism, and by extension, the Club itself, were so vitriolic that the Club inserted a forward in the book which essentially refutes everything in it. The forward is worth reading, if only to unintentionally demonstrate that Orwell's attack on the Socialist leadership was dead-on: they did lack common sense, they had no understanding of the common man or of how badly they themselves were regarded by him, and their propaganda was appallingly bad. Luckily for them, they had Orwell...though my guess is at the time they weren't feeling so lucky when they read it. The reader, on the other hand, will.

great book
George Orwell is the man. This is for sure one of the top 5 best books i've ever read. Even if I tried, I couldn't come close to doing the book justice with this review.

Orwell's indictment of industrial squalor
This work commisioned by the Left Book Club, a socialist group in England in the 1930's contains an incredible description of the miserable working conditions of coal miners in the northern industrial areas of England. Orwell's power of description brings home the awful condiditons to the reader in a very tangible and palpable way. Reminiscent of Jacob Riis' "How The Other Half Lives" or Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", Orwell's account is unforgettable social historical writing.

The remainder of the book is a polemical piece critical of socialists of his day. To the modern reader that will not have as much relevance except as an example of Orwell's pursuasive writing but the earlier sections of the book are incredibly memorable.