essays

It's worth knowing that this book was originally commissioned by the Left Book Club, a Socialist book club in the UK, and when the manuscript arrived they realized Orwell had delivered more than they'd bargained for. In part one, Orwell brilliantly reports on the atrocious living and working conditions in northern England in the 1930s. His chapter covering his visit to a coal mine has been often anthologized, but the entire section consists of equally vivid portraits. In part two, Orwell discusses Socialism with such a jaundiced eye that it had the editors of the Left Book Club wondering if they could get away with printing only the first half of the book! Orwell did not fully believe in Socialism until he fought in the Spanish Civil War after "Wigan Pier" was printed, and contrary to the right-wingers who have claimed him as one of their own, Orwell was a dedicated Socialist to the day he died, but a skeptical one. Read "Wigan Pier," and for more information, read Orwell's diary he kept during his trip to the north in Volume 1 of the Collected Essays.

The first half of this book was very consuming. I found myself caught up in the mines of England and could relate to the characters with Orwell's great descriptions. But the second half of the book was totallu different. It was Orwell writing a paper about how he felt about socialism and class destinctions in England. To some this may be a very appealing subject, but to me, I had trouble understanding what Orwell wanted to say to the reader. Part one of this book is great and I highly reccommend it, but once I began to read part two I had trouble picking the book up to finish it.

There's no point to defending Orwell's attitude towards the progressive rich (as expressed in this book). But his point is really quite simple: the working classes are more old-fashioned and less academic than the upper classes; therefore, if the stereotypical socialist is a "bearded fruit-juice drinker" who discusses Marx over tea, the movement is not going to collect members. Not revolutionary, but true enough and expressed with enough vigour to make it an entertaining polemic.

That said, I prefer the first half of the book, where Orwell describes his stint in the coal-mining districts of the north of England. He is excellent on the squalor and awfulness of life in the mining towns, as well as the unemployment question and the general effects of the Depression. The chapter on working-class houses in Sheffield, though less vivid, is also excellent. Orwell isn't too much of a graphic artist, but he gives you enough detail that it's a minor imaginative task to reconstruct the lifestyle he's writing about.

And, having reconstructed this landscape, it's difficult not to half-agree with his evocation of the dignity of a working man's life before the war, or to feel with him that "it is not the triumphs of modem engineering ... but the memory of working-class interiors - especially as I sometimes saw them in my childhood before the war, when England was still prosperous - that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in."