attack on upper-class British socialists (this, despite being inclined towards
socialism himself). In the first half of this book, Orwell portrays the appalling
conditions faced by UK miners in the 1930s:^167
Several dentists have told me that in industrial districts a person over thirty with any of his
or her own teeth is coming to be an abnormality. In Wigan various people gave me their
opinion that it is best to get shut of your teeth as early in life as possible. ‘Teeth is just a
misery,’ one woman said to me.A Wigan Pier coal miner had to walk—crawl would be a better word, given
the height of the mine shafts—up to three miles, underground, in the dark,
banging his head and scraping his back, just to get to his seven-and-a-half-
hour shift of backbreaking work. After that, he crawled back. “It is
comparable, perhaps, to climbing a smallish mountain before and after your
day’s work,” stated Orwell. None of the time spent crawling was paid.
Orwell wrote The Road to Wigan Pier for the Left Book Club, a socialist
publishing group that released a select volume every month. After reading the
first half of his book, which deals directly with the miners’ personal
circumstances, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for the working poor.
Only a monster could keep his heart hardened through the accounts of the
lives Orwell describes:
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, crawling on all
fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were
pregnant.In book’s second half, however, Orwell turned his gaze to a different
problem: the comparative unpopularity of socialism in the UK at the time,
despite the clear and painful inequity observable everywhere. He concluded
that the tweed-wearing, armchair-philosophizing, victim-identifying, pity-
and-contempt-dispensing social-reformer types frequently did not like the
poor, as they claimed. Instead, they just hated the rich. They disguised their
resentment and jealousy with piety, sanctimony and self-righteousness.
Things in the unconscious—or on the social justice–dispensing leftist front—
haven’t changed much, today. It is because of of Freud, Jung, Nietzsche—
and Orwell—that I always wonder, “What, then, do you stand against?”
whenever I hear someone say, too loudly, “I stand for this!” The question
seems particularly relevant if the same someone is complaining, criticizing,
or trying to change someone else’s behaviour.