By Megan Thomas
I have family in Wigan and visit regularly, and whenever I mention it I often get the response: “I’ve never been… but I’ve read The Road to Wigan Pier!” It seemed I ought to read it, in the name of small talk at least.
Obviously, as it’s political non-fiction written in 1936, it’s dated. A lot can happen politically in 88 years, as it turns out! With that said, I found some of the commentary spookily relevant, as is often the case with George Orwell.
The picture painted of Wigan is grim, but it’s not really a picture of Wigan so much as one of all industrial Northern towns brought to their knees by not just the war but a criminally unequal society. There are times when Orwell’s (or rather, Old Etonian Eric Blair – Orwell was his pen name) personal attitudes towards the working class are strikingly uncomfortable (as I said, it’s dated), but there is something to be said for him standing up to his own class through his writing, urging them to wake up and smell the oppression. I don’t believe anyone could have read the chapters about mine labour at the time and not found themselves simultaneously deeply respecting what a grueling yet essential job it was, and squirming at the conditions made so much worse by government.
While there are still remnants of the North-South divide that Orwell explored back in 1936, I was quite fascinated to get a glimpse of that history – certainly it explains a lot of lingering modern attitudes. I’m not sure I fully grasped that this was in many ways a legislated divide rather than a sociological one. Other elements I found particularly interesting were his observations on the link between poverty and healthy eating, as well as his predictions on the impact of technology.
I’ll leave you with a chilling quote, which I wouldn’t be surprised to read in a modern newspaper column: “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”
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