Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. The very best the English-working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated by, for instance, rearmament. For enormous blocks of the working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those conditions showing any fundamental improvement.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive. It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it difficult to remain unaware of it. Orwell wrote this book after leaving Wigan and moving into his little house in Wallington, Hertfordshire. They attempted, but failed, to have the second part of the book suppressed from publication. After its publication the Communists (who called themselves Socialists) hated Orwell with a passion. In the second half Orwell explains how the Communists have stolen the Socialist cause and given it a bad name. The first half describes the living and working conditions of England's coal miners. The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, when he was thirty-four years old, is Orwell's fifth book.

Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic forceĮvery fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, With his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation -Īnd wonder what the devil his motive really is. The intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist,

The road to wigan pier