The way to Wigan Pier
Der Weg nach Wigan Pier ( The Road to Wigan Pier , 1937 in London by Victor Gollancz Ltd. ) published in the Left Book Club is a partly documentary and partly essayistic work by George Orwell .
Emergence
In 1937, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to research the conditions of miners in northern England. To do this, he should go to Wigan Pier , a mining area near Liverpool . One of the big problems there was the impoverishment of the Lancashire and Yorkshire miners during the years of mass unemployment. When Orwell arrived in Wigan, he stayed in proletarian houses, drove into the coal mines with the miners and experienced their living conditions first hand. In his diaries he noted that Wigan is one of the most hideous places he has ever seen. The actual pier at Wigan was nestled in an ugly landscape full of spoil heaps on a murky canal that was teeming with rats. The children got to know the training of pauperism from an early age and the workers struggled for daily survival. At that time there was the saying "vacation at Wigan Pier" as an indication of the poverty of the vacationer. Orwell's report on The Road to Wigan Pier was published in 1937.
content
The book consists of two very different parts. In the first part, Orwell describes in a social report the experiences he made in early 1936 in the northern English industrial area (in the towns of Barnsley , Sheffield and Wigan ). The small mining town of Wigan is roughly between Liverpool and Manchester. Many miners were unemployed there in the 1930s. The book details how their living conditions have deteriorated since the First World War . At the end of the first part, Orwell expresses his view that socialism can improve people's living conditions.
In the second part, the author deals with the current political situation both in Empire and in Europe in the form of an essay . He complains that the protagonists of the socialist movement do little credit to them. Above all, Orwell asks the question why socialism no longer has supporters in Great Britain, especially in sections of the population who would benefit economically from it. The author attributes this to five factors:
1. Reverse class prejudices : The one-sided glorification of the working class and their way of life makes people who culturally more likely to belong to the middle class feel repelled.
2. Technocracy : According to Orwell, many socialists tend to promote technical progress for its own sake and to have utopian ideas about the feasibility of social change.
3. Jargon : The pompous language of socialist books and articles and the many technical terms (e.g. production relations , main contradiction, etc.) have a deterrent effect on the reader.
4. Lack of concentration on the essentials: The author believes that socialists are too preoccupied with philosophical consistency and ideological orthodoxy and that they often lose sight of their basic concern - the improvement of people's living conditions.
5. " Crankiness ": In the socialist movement, according to Orwell, there are not a few people with a very unorthodox way of life (he names for example vegetarians , nudists , people with full beards and sandals, etc.). This would often prevent conventional people from to join this movement.
He relates the impoverishment ( pauperization ) of the middle class to fascism, which is also burgeoning in Great Britain .