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The Road to Wigan Pier Free FREE THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER PDF George Orwell,Richard Hoggart,Peter Davison | 240 pages | 19 Feb 2013 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780141185293 | English | London, United Kingdom The Road to Wigan Pier - Wikipedia A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Transform this Plot Summary into a Study Guide. Orwell had been commissioned to write about the economic and social struggles of northern England by publisher and socialist Victor Gollancz, and spent three months living in the area as research for the book. He shares a room with two other lodgers and must sleep with his The Road to Wigan Pier curled up or else he kicks one of the other occupants. One of his roommates works at the local coal pit, and the other was injured on the job and is living off a small pension he was awarded as a result. He describes this depressing scene as very common for the area. Orwell then examines the lives of the coal miners who dominate the area. Orwell visits a working mine in order to examine the working conditions personally, and offers an in-depth account of how the mine works and the dangerous and unhealthy conditions the miners experience. Orwell examines the earnings of the miners, which is assumed to be quite The Road to Wigan Pier by much of English The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell explains that while their base pay may seem generous there are many ways the mine charges back on that pay, so that the money they actually receive for their labor is actually quite small. Orwell then discusses the living conditions experienced by most of the miners. He notes that there is a chronic shortage of housing, and thus housing is inordinately expensive. As a result of these two factors, most of the miners settle for substandard housing in tight, unhealthy quarters, usually shared with multiple roommates. Orwell also notes the many proposed programs The Road to Wigan Pier build new affordable housing for workers like the miners. Unemployment is discussed; Orwell notes that at the time of his research the official number of unemployed in England is 1. This is also not an accurate assessment, as it assumes that 2 million are out of work and everyone else is doing fine, when in fact, at the time, this counted only heads of household, not wives and children. Orwell states that the actual number of people suffering from unemployment or underemployment is closer to five or six million. Closing out Part I of the book, Orwell notes the typical diets of miners and their families. They usually have plenty of money with which to purchase food, but often make poor dietary decisions because of the general misery of their lives. They seek satisfying, unhealthy foods as a form of pleasure, and as a result are often in poor health. Orwell finishes by describing in vivid detail the ugliness that capitalism and industrialization has brought to England. In Part II of the book, Orwell sets out an argument in favor of socialism, and a proposed explanation for its lack The Road to Wigan Pier popularity. He begins by making two fundamental statements: One, that the terrible conditions he described are not in any way tolerable; two, that socialism would be very effective in changing those conditions for the better. Orwell, an avowed socialist, argues that their opponents do not fight against socialism because they are selfish and afraid for the position that capitalism has granted them, nor are they making logical arguments against the system based on facts. Instead, Orwell argues that opponents of socialism are inspired by distinct emotional motives. First, Orwell argues that class prejudice is one motivating factor. He believes that pretending class divisions do not exist The Road to Wigan Pier back the movement, as different strata of the population become alienated when socialists act as if they do not exist or matter. Next, Orwell blames the industrialization of the world, arguing that machines make the population lazy and decadent. He notes that fictional utopias run by machines are always incredibly boring. He also believes that the purple prose often employed by intellectuals alienates the common person. Finally, Orwell outlines what he sees as a lack of fundamentals. Socialism, he argues, should be sold on The Road to Wigan Pier basis of equality and fairness for all, rather The Road to Wigan Pier complex political doctrines. Orwell admits that The Road to Wigan Pier himself is an ardent socialist, but that he has adopted an objective view in order to see the movement from the other side in order to perceive the possible weaknesses of the philosophy and the people attempting to spread it. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell S eventy-five years ago this weekend, Old Etonian Eric Blair — "a tall feller with a pair of flannel bags, a fawn The Road to Wigan Pier and a mac", as one northerner described him — was pacing along the Leeds and Liverpool canal searching for Wigan Pier. A few rats running through the snow, The Road to Wigan Pier tame, presumably weak with hunger. Weeks earlier, Blair The Road to Wigan Pier set out from London armed with a small advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, to investigate the "distressed areas" of northern England. It was Gollancz who, to save the former colonial officer's family from embarrassment, gave Blair the pseudonym George Orwell when he published Down and Out in Paris and London and had come up with the idea for what would become The Road to Wigan Piera classic literary journey that critics called beautiful and disturbing. The New Statesman and Nation's review said of Orwell: "The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too. Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical The Road to Wigan Pier of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more — not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if "venturing among savages", but getting there. We are witnessing the longest squeeze in living standards since the s, according to Mervyn Kinggovernor of the Bank of England, and its effects fall heavier on the north. Following the Wall Street Crash and the global depression that it heralded, unemployment in places such as Wigan remained stubbornly high. The Road to Wigan Pier sets out a hellish vision of a broken Britain, before delivering a long meditation on creating a fairer society. Its author favours a socialist solution, but then spends more time deriding socialism's mainly middle-class proponents in a voice and style that would guarantee him a Daily Mail column today and make readers of the Observerfor which he wrote until his untimely death inblanch. There's a lot of hand-wringing about the British class structure, the north-south divide and their commingling — a theme that appears to have lit a recent bushfire after the BBC Trust said that Radio 4 isn't "northern" enough. Were he alive today to revisit his journey north, Orwell would find time and distance converging, the past rushing to meet him. I set out, armed with a credit card, to walk in his steps with his contemporary diary as my guide. Orwell was fastidious in recording the minutiae of his budget as he tramped north, using trains, buses and his own two legs. But where Orwell spent the best part of two months on his journey and nine months writing The Road to Wigan Pier up, I only have three days. He originally intended to go to Rochdale, home The Road to Wigan Pier Jack Hilton, a working-class writer whom he greatly admired. Hilton, a lifelong socialist, advised him to head for Wigan, where an incoming southerner would see the full magnitude of the depressed north. Ever since, Wiganers have regretted Hilton's advice, while cannily turning the infamy of Orwell's depiction to the advantage of their town. My grandfather was a Wigan miner whose bare skin, perma-tattooed with blue spiders' webs from the coal dust, frightened me as a child on summer days on Morecambe Bay shore. Orwell said the miners' marbled skin looked like Roquefort cheese, which would have meant nothing to them. He also condemned Lancashire cheese as "flabby", which only goes to show how food fashions change. Grandad and his workmates couldn't understand why Orwell chose to dwell so relentlessly on the negative, the impact of which altogether erased his praise of the heroism of miners working underground in appalling and dangerous conditions. Orwell's depiction of his sordid lodgings above a tripe shop — with an unemptied chamber pot beneath the breakfast table — makes great copy but tells us little about the living conditions of most Wiganers. It The Road to Wigan Pier an article of faith in the town that he only moved to live with the Forrests because of their low reputation and that his previous lodgings were too clean. Orwell also visited Liverpool, Sheffield and Barnsley — each of which now finds itself in the political limelight. Embarrassingly for David Cameron, Liverpool has pulled out of his "big society" The Road to Wigan Piersaying it is impossible to fulfil at the same time as having to take The Road to Wigan Pier for slashing local services.
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