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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. Embarrassingly for Labour, Eric Illsley is behind bars for fraud over the MPs' expenses scandal after resigning his Barnsley Central seat and forcing a byelection next month. A large pawnshop is the first impression of Wigan: it faces the railway station. Turn left and walk the short distance to Wigan Pier and you will find it corralled by signs offering residential and commercial space for sale and to let. A plaque commemorates the Queen's opening of Wigan Pier The Road to Wigan Pier March50 years after Orwell's forlorn efforts to find it. In fact the "pier" never existed, except in song and laughter. The story goes that day-trippers on the train to Southport, peering out across the blighted landscape in a thick fog, spotted a railway gantry leading to a jetty from which coal was tipped into barges on the canal. True or not, the pier became a music-hall staple of George Formby. The Pier "experience"-cum-heritage centre was Wigan's revenge, cashing in on the one-sided portrait painted by Orwell. But the Way We Were museum, featuring a Victorian schoolroom and colliery, closed in and has stood empty ever since. John stays because the The Road to Wigan Pier are friendly and The Road to Wigan Pier don't get too many coppers about — they're too afraid to come out". He tells hair-raising stories about a local pub's "trannie night", which he claims is popular with ex-miners. The bar staff admit that the current trading conditions are abysmal. It's time to move on. King Street begins with the Money Shop — "Cheque-cashing in no-time! Guse's Kebabs feeds the hungry and stupefied as they tumble out on to King Street in the small hours. The Wigan Observer reports that an eight-months-pregnant teenager was jailed for blinding in one eye a year-old single mother by twice stamping a stiletto heel into her victim's face in a Wigan nightclub. Amy Smith, 17 at the time of the attack, said she was too drunk to recall what had happened. She will serve 33 months in a young offenders institute but what future is there for Joanne Brown? Permanently disfigured, her eye socket smashed in 16 places and cheekbone, jaw and skull fractured, she faces years of surgery. Orwell read the local papers in Wigan Library, as I am doing, in an upstairs room backing on to King Street, but he didn't visit the town's pubs or observe Wiganers at play. His brother-in-law, Humphrey Dakin, a no-nonsense Yorkshireman with little time for Eric's politics, chided him for not taking in a football match and only seeing the worst of life up north. Describing the British class structure, The Road to Wigan Pier said in The Road to Wigan Pier that as a child he felt lower-class people were almost subhuman, with coarse faces, hideous accents and gross manners; feelings forged before the The Road to Wigan Pier War when it was impossible or at least very dangerous for a well-dressed person to go through a slum street. Whole quarters were considered unsafe because of hooligans, he wrote. I grew so tired of people telling me they were certain that Orwell wouldn't recognise Wigan today that, spying a meeting in Crompton Street spiritualist church, I entered in the hope that I would be able to contact the author and put an end The Road to Wigan Pier the riddle. Next door Gala Bingo's car park was two-thirds full. Orwell was constantly cold in Wigan and complained about the food — particularly the local delicacy of cold tripe seasoned with vinegar, a dish that my father still recalls with Proustian pleasure. Labour is the permanent party of local government in Wigan metropolitan borough, holding 24 out of 25 wards. The demise of the North West Development Agency means that a well-advanced inner relief road scheme to tackle the town's traffic congestion has been abandoned, along with other redevelopment projects. Molyneux, a miner's son, was dismissive of Cameron's "big society". Two volunteer-staffed libraries have been running successfully on outlying housing estates for several years, with plans to extend the concept to civic and leisure centres. Across the Pennines in Barnsley, Meg Munn, MP for Sheffield Heeley, is on familiar territory as she joins the Labour byelection campaign to hold Illsley's seat: she was a social worker here in the s. Physically both are completely transformed. When I first came here it was terrible, with most of the shops boarded up. This was my first visit to Sheffield since the miners' strike of the mids and I was staggered by the city's transformation. New buildings, public spaces and monuments all conspire to project a positive image of progress. A piercing siren goes off on the corner of Leopold Street and Barker's Pool and nobody reacts. Scriven says he shares the frustration of his fellow Lib Dem council leaders who have criticised the government for front-loading public-sector cuts. We are having to cut council jobs, but that's less The Road to Wigan Pier the jobs we've just secured by Sky moving here. Orwell said he would find little to interest him in Barnsley, which was a kindness compared to his verdict on Sheffield: "It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen. At that moment she looked up and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same as I was. We The Road to Wigan Pier know if he was right, but it seems a rare The Road to Wigan Pier, in a book about human sympathy, of connection between the man raised to be an officer of the empire and the proletariat that, however much he wished to embrace, repelled him still. Jack Hilton, the man who set him on the road The Road to Wigan Pier Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle," was his damning verdict. Victor Gollancz disagreed, but with strong reservations. He finally published it as part of the Left Book Club series, but included a foreword in which he rebutted Orwell's colourful views on the "fruit-drinkers" of the middle- class liberal elite, fearful that his readership might take offence. In a later edition, against the author's wishes, he deleted the polemical second section altogether. By the time the book appeared in its distinctive tangerine soft cover, Orwell was in Spain fighting fascism. Alongside him were men from Barnsley, Sheffield and Wigan. The Observer George Orwell. The road to Wigan Pier, 75 years on. David Sharrock retraces George Orwell's journey that The Road to Wigan Pier bare Britain's north-south divide, and finds a growing sense of hard times here again. A group of unemployed men, from an illustrated feature on poverty in Wigan that appeared in the Picture Post in David Sharrock. The road to Wigan Pier, 75 years on | George Orwell | The Guardian

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Richard Hoggart Introduction. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. Get A Copy. PaperbackPenguin Modern Classicspages. Published April 26th by Penguin Classics first published March More The Road to Wigan Pier Original Title. LawrenceT. The Road to Wigan PierG. Yorkshire, England Lancashire, England. Other The Road to Wigan Pier Friend Reviews. To The Road to Wigan Pier what your friends thought of this book, The Road to Wigan Pier sign up. To The Road to Wigan Pier other The Road to Wigan Pier questions about The Road to Wigan Pierplease sign up. Where is the quote "If there is one man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner" as i'm studying The Road to Wigan Pier in an essay due tomorrow? Please answer! I love this book and Orwell he is a genius though. Will Hughes What a desperate plea. Did you try Google? Too late now, of course. Still, it would be interesting to hear how you got on with your essay. Did you pas …more What a desperate plea. Did you pass? See all 3 questions about The Road to Wigan Pier…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Road to Wigan Pier. Written ostensibly as a documentary-report on the life of the working classes in the industrial towns of england, Orwell uses his reportage to investigate two crucial questions: 1. Why class differences persist even when the means exist to destroy them 2. Why socialism is failing practically and intellectually even as the moral facet of its rectitude is irrefutable to his mind, at least The reader has to be warned that The Road to Wigan Pier can seem a bit rambling or circuitous! It is evocative and reminded me strongly of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity in depth of detail and emotional involvement. It is a quick tour but captures the essential cruelties and degradation of life - rotten housing, lack of toilets, unemployment - and the complete hopelessness of it all. But just as Boo does later, Orwell also manages to convey that it is not due to the people, it is purely due to the conditions imposed on them. Orwell is very careful to drill this point home. It is the situations that make the classes. This is exactly what I expected from the title of the book though I had also been resigned to some amount of political commentary, Orwell being Orwell. But soon the real purpose of the book starts to take shape and for a while I felt disappointed. But Orwell soon reveals the purpose behind his autobiographical excursions in the second part of the book and now I have come to regard this second section as the most vital. It is a narrative technique which I am now starting to notice in a number The Road to Wigan Pier other authors trying to grapple with class differences, including Suketu Mehta The Road to Wigan Pier Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Foundtrying to come to terms with a riven Bombay. So, in this second, and to me most important, section, Orwell exposes his own biases and prejudices through a frank autobiographical study. He opens up his own upbringing to show how prejudices creep in and establish themselves in our psyche and never let go no matter how hard we hammer at them. To criticize the choice of detail is besides the point. Then comes the last section: the fulmination and the grand rhetoric. This section is the hardest to agree with and feels the most dated to the modern reader. Orwell tries to examine his second major point - Why is Socialism Declining? Only by asserting this moral core of Socialism, stripped of class propaganda, can the scales be tipped in favor of Socialism and away from Fascism. Socialism needs to bring these classes into its fold. That is the crying need of the day. This arises from the fact that this exposition was published before either or Animal Farm and after Brave New World. Orwell needed to show the other extreme to turn this revulsion on its head. We often compare Brave New World and as if they were alternate predictions and give marks to Huxley for having predicted better. Orwell wanted to show The Road to Wigan Pier other extreme - the purely Fascist Dystopia - to bring around the people who were revolted by Brave New World and similar Utopian visions that were doing the rounds then such as The Dream and Men Like Gods. You can also think of the caricature in the Wall-E movie for a better visualized reference. Orwell gives a grand argument, based on how the purpose of machines is to make human life easier and thus softer, to The Road to Wigan Pier how the Wall-E future is pretty much inevitable according to this conception of progress. He needed to present the antithesis to this vision - No matter how bad the caricature of the socialist progress, the Fascist one is surely the one to avoid. Well done, Orwell, you turned the course. Huxley, you needed to scare us more - we are headed there fast, still. View all 29 comments. Oct 20, Barry Pierce rated it liked it Shelves: read-in20th-century. Alright Georgie I get what you're saying, being poor in the 30s was really fucking awful. I loved the way you wrote about the industrialisation of the north of England and your views on a Socialism and the such but ugh why did you write this one so It felt like I was reading a page Guardian column. I had to force myself through certain parts, not because they were boring or anything but because of the way you went about writing this thing. Why didn't you write The Road to Wigan Pier like Down and Out? It's a pity Georgie. A pity. View all 3 comments. Oct 03, Darwin8u rated it really liked it Shelves: Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in The Road to Wigan Pier same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men. Orwell is fantastically precient, clear, and direct. His writing hits you like a boulder to the head. This book proves it is just as dangerous to be 'theoretically' on the same side as Orwell as it is to be in direct opposition. Probably the greatest tribute that can be dropped at the feet of Orwell are the acolytes he produced. One doesn't need to go too much further than Chris Hitchens or Andrew Sullivan to find writers whose style, attitude, and flourish were directly influenced by Orwell's anti-ecumenical, anti- fascist voice. View all 10 comments. Aug 27, Nigeyb rated it liked it. This was only the second time I've sampled his non-fiction. Before I discuss my thoughts on the book I want to mention how much I enjoy Orwell's writing style. These rules seem to me to inform his style that I perceive to be simple and powerful. Onto the book itself, in the first half of The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell catalogues the poverty he encounters in the north of England during the depression of the s.