The Road to Wigan Pier – George Orwell
A list of memorable quotes.
This is the final instalment of the Orwell hype train. The Road to Wigan Pier, much like Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air, is a book that will be worth your time.
It is worth noting that The Road to Wigan Pier is a work of non-fiction. The first book delves into Orwell’s investigation of working-class life in the United Kingdom. He focuses on the life of miners. What makes this so special is that Orwell gives it his all to also live their experience. This is why, I think, it makes this book so poignant.
The first quote that comes below is probably one of the most moving things I have ever read by an author. It really is something.
Here are some quotes:
At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy cogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed. And I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had the round pale face. The usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is 25 and looks 40, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it. The most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn't the same for them as it would be for us’, and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her –understood as well as I did – how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain pipe.
It is not long since conditions in the mines were worse than they are now. There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with a harness round their waists and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to an fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of cold. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they are doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; It keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as a type of manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an intellectual and a superior person generally for it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the times and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X author of Marxism for all infant’s – all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of cold dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act; he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that they will never allow him to do this, that and the other.
But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty.
Many people, however, imagine that they can abolish class distinctions without making any uncomfortable change in their own habits and ideology. Hence the eager class-breaking activities which one can see in progress on all sides. Everywhere there are people of goodwill who quite honestly believe that they are working for the overthrow of class-distinctions. The middle-class socialist enthusiasts over the proletariat and runs summer schools where the proletarian and their opponent bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another's necks and be brothers forever and the bourgeois come away saying how wonderful and inspiring it has all been.
The interests of all exploited people are the same.