Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, was so concerned that these passages would be misinterpreted, and that the (mostly middle-class) members of the Left Book Club would be offended, that he added a foreword in which he raises some caveats about Orwell’s claims in Part Two. He suggests, for instance, that Orwell may exaggerate the visceral contempt that the English middle classes hold for the working class, adding, however, that, “I may be a bad judge of the question, for I am a Jew, and passed the years of my early boyhood in a fairly close Jewish community; and, among Jews of this type, class distinctions do not exist.”
Other concerns Gollancz raises are that Orwell should so instinctively dismiss movements such as pacifism or feminism as incompatible with or counter-productive to the Socialist cause, and that Orwell relies too much upon a poorly defined, emotional concept of Socialism. Gollancz claims that Orwell “does not once define what he means by Socialism” in The Road to Wigan Pier. The foreword does not appear in some modern editions of the book, though it was included, for instance, in Harcourt Brace Jovanovich’s first American edition in the 1950s.
At a later date Gollancz published part one on its own, against Orwell’s wishes, and he refused to publish Homage to Catalonia at all.
Book title
Orwell was asked about Wigan Pier in a radio programme in December 1943. He replied: “Well, I am afraid I must tell you that Wigan Pier doesn’t exist. I made a journey specially to see it in 1936 and I couldn’t find it. It did exist once, however, and to judge from the photographs it must have been about twenty feet six metres long.” The original “pier” at Wigan was a coal loading staithe, probably a wooden jetty, where wagons of coal from a nearby colliery were unloaded into waiting barges on the canal. The original wooden pier is believed to have been demolished in 1929, with the iron from the tippler being sold as scrap.
Although a pier is a structure built out into the water from the shore, in Britain the term has the connotation of a seaside holiday. In the broadcast radio interview of 1943 Orwell elaborated on the name Wigan Pier: “Wigan is in the middle of the mining areas. The landscape is mostly slag-heaps – Wigan has always been picked on as a symbol of the ugliness of the industrial areas. At one time, on one of the muddy little canals that run round the town, there used to be a tumble-down wooden jetty; and by way of a joke some nicknamed this Wigan Pier. The joke caught on locally, and then the music-hall comedians got hold of it, and they are the ones who have succeeded in keeping Wigan Pier alive as a byword.”
Geographically, Wigan Pier is the name given today to the area around the canal at the bottom of the Wigan flight of locks on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
Reviews and criticism
The book was reviewed on 14 March 1937 by Edward Shanks, for The Sunday Times, and by Hugh Massingham, for The Observer.
Initial response
In general, early reviewers of The Road to Wigan Pier praised Orwell’s depiction of the working class in Part I. The poet Edith Sitwell wrote: “The horror of the beginning … is unsurpassable. He seems to be doing for the modern world what Engels did for the world of 1840–50. But with this difference, that Orwell is a born writer, whereas Engels, fiery and splendid spirit though he was, simply wasn’t a writer.”
Responses to Part II, as the book transformed from reportage into a mix of politics, polemics, and selective autobiography, were more varied, ranging from praise to anger and indignation. Arthur Calder-Marshall’s 20 March 1937 review in Time and Tide celebrates Orwell’s achievement, and can be summarised by its first line: “Of Mr Orwell’s book, there is little to say except praise.”
This sentiment is shared in a review by Hamish Miles in New Statesman and Nation on 1 May 1937. Miles writes that The Road to Wigan Pier “is a living and lively book from start to finish. The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too.”
Douglas Goldring, writing in Fortnightly in April 1937, describes the book as “beautiful” and “disturbing”, and like Miles highly recommends that both conservatives and socialists read it. In Tribune on 12 March 1937, Walter Greenwood calls Part I “authentic and first rate” but was more ambivalent towards Part II: ” In Part II, Orwell has you with him one moment and provoked beyond endurance the next … I cannot remember having been so infuriated for a long time than by some of the things he says here.”
H. J. Laski, a co-founder of the Left Book Club, wrote a review in March 1937 in Left News which repeats the main arguments of Gollancz’s preface. Laski claims that Part I is “admirable propaganda for our ideas” but that Part II falls short: “But having, very ably, depicted a disease, Mr Orwell does what so many well-meaning people do: needing a remedy (he knows it is socialism), he offers an incantation instead.
He thinks that an appeal to ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ will, on the basis of facts such as he has described, bring people tumbling over one another into the Socialist Party. … This view is based on fallacies so elementary that I should doubt the necessity of explaining them as fallacies were it not that there are so many people who share Mr Orwell’s view. Its basic error is the belief that we all mean the same things by liberty and justice. Most emphatically we do not.”
In the April 1937 edition of the Left News, Gollancz reported that the book had produced “both more, and more interesting, letters than any other Club Choice. The book has done, perhaps in a greater degree than any previous book, what the Club is meant to do – it has provoked thought, and discussion of the keenest kind. While members with a training in scientific socialism have been surprised at the naïveté of the second part, they have found it valuable, as showing how much education they still have to do.”
Orwell biographers Stansky and Abrahams noted: “But Gollancz and Laski, believing in a scientific rather than an emotional socialism, believing (in 1937) that it was still possible to equip people to fight against war and Fascism, were caught in a time warp: history was leaving them behind. Orwell in Spain was continuing his education – in a real war against Fascism – and it was very different from anything envisioned by the selectors of the Left Book Club. What he was learning had less to do with scientific socialism than with the morality of politics, and it would change his life.”
A radio play by David Pownall, Writing on Wigan Pier, with Adrian Scarborough as Orwell, was broadcast by BBC Radio Four in 2010.
Criticism
Communist Party of Great Britain leader Harry Pollitt, who was also an acquaintance of Orwell and a native of Lancashire where the book is set, gave a strongly negative review. Although Pollitt praised Orwell’s description of mining conditions and the indictment of housing in industrial centres, he believed that Road to Wigan Pier was a snobbish portrayal of working class life.
If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. If on his return from Mandalay he had bought one or two penny pamphlets on socialism and the working-class movement, what fatal experiences he could have saved himself from, Because one never gets to know the movement by slumming.
I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the “smell” of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. Well, pardon me if I say at once, without any working-class snobbery, that it’s a lie.
Pollitt also attacked Orwell for judging people on their aesthetic, rather than whether they wanted to build a better world.
I am not concerned whether a man wants to drink a lemonade with a straw and in shorts or whether coming out of the docks he calls for a pint of Mann and Crossman’s: the thing I am concerned about is: are they concerned to try and build up a new society? If so, what is the best way in which we can help them? And we don’t do this by telling them they “smell”, or that they are “showing fat bottoms in shorts”. It can only be done by patient argument, by careful explanation, and by really trying to understand their particular problems, and show by our understanding that we want to help.
According to Christopher Hitchens, the allegation of having said “the working classes smell” in The Road to Wigan Pier became a recurring criticism of Orwell from critics on the Left, despite it not being his personal sentiment. “As his published correspondence shows, every time Orwell wrote anything objectionable to the Left, up would come this old charge again, having attained the mythic status that placed it beyond mere factual refutation.” In the book, according to Hitchens, Orwell instead refers to it being “middle-class people, such as his own immediate forebears, [that] were convinced that ‘the working classes smell’.”
