Friday 12th September, 2008
Did Orwell really hate Wigan?
Orwell was a sincere and passionate writer. I believe that he identified strongly with the miners with whom he was in such close contact.
When he was challenged by a reviewer in the Manchester Guardian who accused him of "closing his vision to all that is good in order to proceed with his wholehearted vilification of humanity." Orwell replied, speaking of himself in the third person, "He liked Wigan very much – the people, not the scenery."
In "The Road to Wigan Pier" he states:
"In the metabolism of the Western world the coal miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. He is a sort of of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders near everything that is not grimy is supported."
and:
"... if there is one type of man to whom I do feel myself inferior, it is the coal-miner."
These are, I believe, genuine statements, sincerely meant.
He describes "working class" home life thus:
“His (manual worker in employment's) home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane and comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working-class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat - it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted."
Again, I believe these are genuine beliefs. George Orwell was a good socialist. He had genuine sympathy and empathy with the "working class" people he encountered.
Even so, he knew his place. He knew that, however strongly he empathised with miners and their families, this "lower-upper-middle class" (Orwell's term) writer could never be one of them.
He writes:
"For some months I lived entirely in coal-miners' houses. I ate my meals with the family, I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I."
Summary
Orwell was sincere. He wrote what his political beliefs dictated:
"I went there (coal mining areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire) partly because I wanted to see what mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most typical section of the English working class at close quarters. This was necessary to me as part of my approach to Socialism."
However, his emotive descriptions of "dreadful northern slums" did Wigan no favours.