---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 10 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/10/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 10. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/10/"
---

# The Road to Wigan Pier

*George Orwell*

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> Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Date of first publication: 1937
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Aug. 21, 2018
Date last updated: Aug. 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180878

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _The Road_
                            _to Wigan Pier_

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1947
     Uniform Edition published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd 1949
                    Published in Penguin Books 1962

> Copyright 1937 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> The abbreviation WC has been capitalised.

> [The end of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ by George Orwell]

## 10. X

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/10/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/10/#p-N

[¶0] But unfortunately you do not solve the class problem by making friends
with tramps. At most you get rid of some of your own class-prejudice by
doing so.

[¶1] Tramps, beggars, criminals and social outcasts generally are very
exceptional beings and no more typical of the working class as a whole
than, say, the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie.
It is quite easy to be on terms of intimacy with a foreign
'intellectual', but it is not at all easy to be on terms of intimacy
with an ordinary respectable foreigner of the middle class. How many
Englishmen have seen the inside of an ordinary French bourgeois family,
for instance? Probably it would be quite impossible to do so, short of
marrying into it. And it is rather similar with the English working
class. Nothing is easier than to be bosom pals with a pickpocket, if you
know where to look for him; but it is very difficult to be bosom pals
with a bricklayer.

[¶2] But why is it so easy to be on equal terms with social outcasts? People
have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't
really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are
different—notice the difference of accent?' etc. etc. As a matter of
fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say,
notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for
accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by
this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously
surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice
it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come
from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents
is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his
mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand
them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not
necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated'
one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps,
are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of
different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their
attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like
themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask
too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you
choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are
under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be
accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps
if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it
might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed
that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and
seemingly _of_ it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It
is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small
squalid democracy—perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists
in England.

[¶3] But when you come to the normal working class the position is totally
different. To begin with, there is no short cut into their midst. You
can become a tramp simply by putting on the right clothes and going to
the nearest casual ward, but you can't become a navvy or a coal-miner.
You couldn't get a job as a navvy or a coal-miner even if you were equal
to the work. Via Socialist politics you can get in touch with the
working-class intelligentsia, but they are hardly more typical than
tramps or burglars. For the rest you can only mingle with the working
class by staying in their houses as a lodger, which always has a
dangerous resemblance to 'slumming'. For some months I lived entirely in
coal-miners' houses. I ate my meals with the family, I washed at the
kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them,
played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though
I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance,
I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However
much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation,
there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea
under the princess's mattress. It is not a question of dislike or
distaste, only of _difference_, but it is enough to make real intimacy
impossible. Even with miners who described themselves as Communists I
found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling
me 'sir'; and all of them, except in moments of great animation,
softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped
they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were
aware of it. Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference
confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much like a
stone wall as the plate-glass pane of an aquarium; it is so easy to
pretend that it isn't there, and so impossible to get through it.

[¶4] Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is
penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at
the same time everyone claims that _he_, in some mysterious way, is
exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern
in everyone else but never in ourselves. Not only the _croyant et
pratiquant_ Socialist, but every 'intellectual' takes it as a matter of
course that _he_ at least is outside the class-racket; _he_, unlike his
neighbours, can see through the absurdity of wealth, ranks, tides, etc.
etc. 'I'm not a snob' is nowadays a kind of universal _credo_. Who is
there who has not jeered at the House of Lords, the military caste, the
Royal Family, the public schools, the huntin' and shootin' people, the
old ladies in Cheltenham boarding-houses, the horrors of 'county'
society and the social hierarchy generally? To do so has become an
automatic gesture. You notice this particularly in novels. Every
novelist of serious pretensions adopts an ironic attitude towards his
upper-class characters. Indeed when a novelist has to put a definitely
upper-class person—a duke or a baronet or whatnot—into one of his
stories he guys him more or less instinctively. There is an important
subsidiary cause of this in the poverty of the modern upper-class
dialect. The speech of 'educated' people is now so lifeless and
characterless that a novelist can do nothing with it. By far the easiest
way of making it amusing is to burlesque it, which means pretending that
every upper-class person is an ineffectual ass. The trick is imitated
from novelist to novelist, and in the end becomes almost a reflex
action.

[¶5] And yet all the while, at the bottom of his heart, everyone knows that
this is humbug. We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few
people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important
fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a
secret conviction that nothing can be changed.

[¶6] If you want a good illustration of this, it is worth studying the novels
and plays of John Galsworthy, keeping one eye on their chronology.
Galsworthy is a very fine specimen of the thin-skinned, tear-in-the-eye,
pre-war humanitarian. He starts out with a morbid pity-complex which
extends even to thinking that every married woman is an angel chained to
a satyr. He is in a perpetual quiver of indignation over the sufferings
of overworked clerks, of underpaid farm hands, of fallen women, of
criminals, of prostitutes, of animals. The world, as he sees it in his
earlier books (_The Man of Property_, _Justice_, etc.), is divided into
oppressors and oppressed, with the oppressors sitting on top like some
monstrous stone idol which all the dynamite in the world cannot
overthrow. But is it so certain that he really wants it overthrown? On
the contrary, in his fight against an immovable tyranny he is upheld by
the consciousness that it is immovable. When things happen unexpectedly
and the world-order which he has known begins to crumble, he feels
somewhat differently about it. So, having set out to be the champion of
the underdog against tyranny and injustice, he ends by advocating (_vide
The Silver Spoon_) that the English working class, to cure their
economic ills, shall be deported to the colonies like batches of cattle.
If he had lived ten years longer he would quite probably have arrived at
some genteel version of Fascism. This is the inevitable fate of the
sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the
first brush of reality.

[¶7] The same streak of soggy half-baked insincerity runs through all
'advanced' opinion. Take the question of imperialism, for instance.
Every left-wing 'intellectual' is, as a matter of course, an
anti-imperialist. He claims to be outside the empire-racket as
automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the
class-racket. Even the right-wing 'intellectual', who is not definitely
in revolt against British imperialism, pretends to regard it with a sort
of amused detachment. It is so easy to be witty about the British
Empire. The White Man's Burden and 'Rule, Britannia' and Kipling's
novels and Anglo-Indian bores—who could even mention such things
without a snigger? And is there any cultured person who has not at least
once in his life made a joke about that old Indian havildar who said
that if the British left India there would not be a rupee or a virgin
left between Peshawar and Delhi (or wherever it was)? That is the
attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a
thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last resort, the
only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold
together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his
heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about
Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any
other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England
depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the
tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist
system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred
million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of
affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat
a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the
Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little
island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on
herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger
wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral
responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the
products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who
hold the Empire together.

[¶8] It is at this point that one begins to grasp the unreality of most
people's attitude towards the class question. So long as it is merely a
question of ameliorating the worker's lot, every decent person is
agreed. Take a coal-miner, for example. Everyone, barring fools and
scoundrels, would _like_ to see the miner better off. If, for instance,
the miner could ride to the coal face in a comfortable trolley instead
of crawling on his hands and knees, if he could work a three-hour shift
instead of seven and a half hours, if he could live in a decent house
with five bedrooms and a bathroom and have ten pounds a week
wages—splendid! Moreover, anyone who uses his brain knows perfectly
well that this is within the range of possibility. The world,
potentially at least, is immensely rich; develop it as it might be
developed, and we could all live like princes, supposing that we wanted
to. And to a very superficial glance the social side of the question
looks equally simple. In a sense it is true that almost everyone would
like to see class-distinctions abolished. Obviously this perpetual
uneasiness between man and man, from which we suffer in modern England,
is a curse and a nuisance. Hence the temptation to believe that it can
be shouted out of existence with a few scoutmasterish bellows of good
will. Stop calling me 'sir', you chaps! Surely we're all men? Let's pal
up and get our shoulders to the wheel and remember that we're all equal,
and what the devil does it matter if I know what kind of ties to wear
and you don't, and I drink my soup comparatively quietly and you drink
yours with the noise of water going down a waste-pipe—and so on and so
on and so on; all of it the most pernicious rubbish, but quite alluring
when it is suitably expressed.

[¶9] But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing
class-distinctions away. More exactly, it _is_ necessary to wish them
away, but your wish has no efficacy unless you grasp what it involves.
The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions
means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the
middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of
class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of
class-distinctions. All my notions—notions of good and evil, of
pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and
beautiful—are essentially _middle-class_ notions; my taste in books and
food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of
speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the
products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half
way up the social hierarchy. When I grasp this I grasp that it is no use
clapping a proletarian on the back and telling him that he is as good a
man as I am; if I want real contact with him, I have got to make an
effort for which very likely I am unprepared. For to get outside the
class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness,
but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well. I have got to alter
myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognisable as
the same person. What is involved is not merely the amelioration of
working-class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of
snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper-class and middle-class
attitude to life. And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the
extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me.

[¶10] 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 good will who
quite honestly believe that they are working for the overthrow of
class-distinctions. The middle-class Socialist enthuses over the
proletariat and runs 'summer schools' where the proletarian and the
repentant bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another's necks and be
brothers for ever; and the bourgeois visitors come away saying how
wonderful and inspiring it has all been (the proletarian ones come away
saying something different). And then there is the outer-suburban
creeping Jesus, a hangover from the William Morris period, but still
surprisingly common, who goes about saying 'Why must we level _down_?
Why not level _up_?' and proposes to level the working class 'up' (up to
his own standard) by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control,
poetry, etc. Even the Duke of York (now King George VI) runs a yearly
camp where public-schoolboys and boys from the slums are supposed to mix
on exactly equal terms, and _do_ mix for the time being, rather like the
animals in one of those 'Happy Family' cages where a dog, a cat, two
ferrets, a rabbit and three canaries preserve an armed truce while the
showman's eye is on them.

[¶11] All such deliberate, conscious efforts at class-breaking are, I am
convinced, a very serious mistake. Sometimes they are merely futile, but
where they do show a definite result it is usually to _intensify_
class-prejudice. This, if you come to think of it, is only what might be
expected. You have forced the pace and set up an uneasy, unnatural
equality between class and class; the resultant friction brings to the
surface all kinds of feelings that might otherwise have remained buried,
perhaps for ever. As I said apropos of Galsworthy, the opinions of the
sentimentalist change into their opposites at the first touch of
reality. Scratch the average pacifist and you find a jingo. The
middle-class ILP'er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a
classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong
end of the telescope; force them into any _real_ contact with a
proletarian—let them get into a fight with a drunken fish-porter on
Saturday night, for instance—and they are capable of swinging back to
the most ordinary middle-class snobbishness. Most middle-class
Socialists, however, are very unlikely to get into fights with drunken
fish-porters; when they do make a genuine contact with the working
class, it is usually with the working-class intelligentsia. But the
working-class intelligentsia is sharply divisible into two different
types. There is the type who remains working-class—who goes on working
as a mechanic or a dock-labourer or whatever it may be and does not
bother to change his working-class accent and habits, but who 'improves
his mind' in his spare time and works for the ILP or the Communist
Party; and there is the type who does alter his way of life, at least
externally, and who by means of State scholarships succeeds in climbing
into the middle class. The first is one of the finest types of man we
have. I can think of some I have met whom not even the most hidebound
Tory could help liking and admiring. The other type, with exceptions—D.
H. Lawrence, for example—is less admirable.

[¶12] To begin with, it is a pity, though it is a natural result of the
scholarship system, that the proletariat should tend to interpenetrate
the middle class via the literary intelligentsia. For it is not easy to
crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a
decent human being. The modern English literary world, at any rate the
highbrow section of it, is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds
can flourish. It is just possible to be a literary gent and to keep your
decency if you are a definitely _popular_ writer—a writer of detective
stories, for instance; but to be a highbrow, with a footing in the
snootier magazines, means delivering yourself over to horrible campaigns
of wire-pulling and backstairs-crawling. In the highbrow world you 'get
on', if you 'get on' at all, not so much by your literary ability as by
being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of
verminous little lions. This, then, is the world that most readily opens
its doors to the proletarian who is climbing out of his own class. The
'clever' boy of a working-class family, the sort of boy who wins
scholarships and is obviously not fitted for a life of manual labour,
may find other ways of rising into the class above—a slightly different
type, for instance, rises via Labour Party politics—but the literary
way is by far the most usual. Literary London now teems with young men
who are of proletarian origin and have been educated by means of
scholarships. Many of them are very disagreeable people, quite
unrepresentative of their class, and it is most unfortunate that when a
person of bourgeois origin does succeed in meeting a proletarian face to
face on equal terms, this is the type he most commonly meets. For the
result is to drive the bourgeois, who has idealised the proletariat so
long as he knew nothing about them, back into frenzies of snobbishness.
The process is sometimes very comic to watch, if you happen to be
watching it from the outside. The poor well-meaning bourgeois, eager to
embrace his proletarian brother, leaps forward with open arms; and only
a little while later he is in retreat, minus a borrowed five pounds and
exclaiming dolefully, 'But, dash it, the fellow's not a gentleman!'

[¶13] The thing that disconcerts the bourgeois in a contact of this kind is to
find certain of his own professions being taken seriously. I have
pointed out that the left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual'
are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in
fact he believes in. As one example out of many, take the public-school
code of honour, with its 'team spirit' and 'Don't hit a man when he's
down', and all the rest of that familiar bunkum. Who has not laughed at
it? Who, calling himself an 'intellectual', would dare _not_ to laugh at
it? But it is a bit different when you meet somebody who laughs at it
_from the outside_; just as we spend our lives in abusing England but
grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things.
No one has been more amusing about the public schools than 'Beachcomber'
of the _Express_. He laughs, quite rightly, at the ridiculous code which
makes cheating at cards the worst of all sins. But would 'Beachcomber'
like it if one of his own friends was caught cheating at cards? I doubt
it. It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from
yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are. If
you are a bourgeois 'intellectual' you too readily imagine that you have
somehow become unbourgeois because you find it easy to laugh at
patriotism and the C of E and the Old School Tie and Colonel Blimp and
all the rest of it. But from the point of view of the proletarian
'intellectual', who at least by origin is genuinely outside the
bourgeois culture, your resemblances to Colonel Blimp may be more
important than your differences. Very likely he looks upon you and
Colonel Blimp as practically equivalent persons; and in a way he is
right, though neither you nor Colonel Blimp would admit it. So that the
meeting of proletarian and bourgeois, when they do succeed in meeting,
is not always the embrace of long-lost brothers; too often it is the
clash of alien cultures which can only meet in war.

[¶14] I have been looking at this from the point of view of the bourgeois who
finds his secret beliefs challenged and is driven back to a frightened
conservatism. But one has also got to consider the antagonism that is
aroused in the proletarian 'intellectual'. By his own efforts and
sometimes with frightful agonies he has struggled out of his own class
into another where he expects to find a wider freedom and a greater
intellectual refinement; and all he finds, very often, is a sort of
hollowness, a deadness, a lack of any warm human feeling—of any real
life whatever. Sometimes the bourgeoisie seem to him just dummies with
money and water in their veins instead of blood. This at any rate is
what he _says_, and almost any young highbrow of proletarian origin will
spin you this line of talk. Hence the 'proletarian' cant from which we
now suffer. Everyone knows, or ought to know by this time, how it runs:
the bourgeoisie are 'dead' (a favourite word of abuse nowadays and very
effective because meaningless), bourgeois culture is bankrupt, bourgeois
'values' are despicable, and so on and so forth; if you want examples,
see any number of the _Left Review_ or any of the younger Communist
writers such as Alec Brown, Philip Henderson, etc. The sincerity of much
of this is suspect, but D. H. Lawrence, who was sincere, whatever else
he may not have been, expresses the same thought over and over again. It
is curious how he harps upon that idea that the English bourgeoisie are
all _dead_, or at least gelded. Mellors, the gamekeeper in _Lady
Chatterley's Lover_ (really Lawrence himself), has had the opportunity
to get out of his own class and does not particularly want to return to
it, because English working people have various 'disagreeable habits';
on the other hand the bourgeoisie, with whom he has also mixed to some
extent, seem to him half dead, a race of eunuchs. Lady Chatterley's
husband, symbolically, is impotent in the actual physical sense. And
then there is the poem about the young man (once again Lawrence himself)
who 'got up to the top of the tree' but came down saying:

[¶15] _Oh you've got to be like a monkey_
           _if you climb up the tree!_
           _You've no more use for the solid earth_
           _and the lad you used to be._
           _You sit in the boughs and gibber_
           _with superiority._

[¶16] _They all gibber and gibber and chatter,_
           _and never a word they say_
           _comes really out of their guts, lad,_
           _they make it up half way..._

[¶17] _I tell you something's been done to 'em,_
           _to the pullets up above;_
           _there's not a cock bird among 'em ..._ etc. etc.

[¶18] You could hardly have it in plainer terms than that. Possibly by the
people at 'the top of the tree' Lawrence only means the real
bourgeoisie, those in the £2,000 a year class and over, but I doubt it.
More probably he means everyone who is more or less within the bourgeois
culture—everyone who was brought up with a mincing accent and in a
house where there were one or two servants. And at this point you
realise the danger of the 'proletarian' cant—realise, I mean, the
terrible antagonism that it is capable of arousing. For when you come to
such an accusation as this, you are up against a blank wall. Lawrence
tells me that because I have been to a public school I am a eunuch.
Well, what about it? I can produce medical evidence to the contrary, but
what good will that do? Lawrence's condemnation remains. If you tell me
I am a scoundrel I may mend my ways, but if you tell me I am a eunuch
you are tempting me to hit back in any way that seems feasible. If you
want to make an enemy of a man, tell him that his ills are incurable.

[¶19] This then is the net result of most meetings between proletarian and
bourgeois: they lay bare a real antagonism which is intensified by the
'proletarian' cant, itself the product of forced contacts between class
and class. The only sensible procedure is to go slow and not force the
pace. If you secretly think of yourself as a gentleman and as such the
superior of the greengrocer's errand boy, it is far better to say so
than to tell lies about it. Ultimately you have got to drop your
snobbishness, but it is fatal to pretend to drop it before you are
really ready to do so.

[¶20] Meanwhile one can observe on every side that dreary phenomenon, the
middle-class person who is an ardent Socialist at twenty-five and a
sniffish Conservative at thirty-five. In a way his recoil is natural
enough—at any rate, one can see how his thoughts run. Perhaps a
classless society _doesn't_ mean a beatific state of affairs in which we
shall all go on behaving exactly as before except that there will be no
class-hatred and no snobbishness; perhaps it means a bleak world in
which all our ideals, our codes, our tastes—our 'ideology', in
fact—will have no meaning. Perhaps this class-breaking business isn't
so simple as it looked! On the contrary, it is a wild ride into the
darkness, and it may be that at the end of it the smile will be on the
face of the tiger. With loving though slightly patronising smiles we set
out to greet our proletarian brothers, and behold! our proletarian
brothers—in so far as we understand them—are not asking for our
greetings, they are asking us to commit suicide. When the bourgeois sees
it in _that_ form he takes to flight, and if his flight is rapid enough
it may carry him to Fascism.