---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 8 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/8/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 8. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/8/"
---

# 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]

## 8. PART II · VIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/8/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/8/#p-N

[¶0] The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking
it are not immediately clear.

[¶1] In the earlier chapters of this book I have given a rather fragmentary
account of various things I saw in the coal areas of Lancashire and
Yorkshire. I went there partly because I wanted to see what
mass-unemployment is like at its worst, partly in order to see the most
typical section of the English working class at close quarters. This was
necessary to me as part of my approach to Socialism. For before you can
be sure whether you are genuinely in favour of Socialism, you have got
to decide whether things at present are tolerable or not tolerable, and
you have got to take up a definite attitude on the terribly difficult
issue of class. Here I shall have to digress and explain how my own
attitude towards the class question was developed. Obviously this
involves writing a certain amount of autobiography, and I would not do
it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or
rather sub-caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance.

[¶2] I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class.
The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the 'eighties and
'nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of
wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or
perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as
a mound but as a layer—the layer of society lying between £2,000 and
£300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom. You notice that
I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way
of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about
the English class-system is that it is _not_ entirely explicable in
terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is
also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a
jerry-built modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact
that the upper-middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as
£300 a year—to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely
middle-class people with no social pretensions. Probably there are
countries where you can predict a man's opinions from his income, but it
is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his
traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer
very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons
and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a
war or a general strike—possibly not even then.

[¶3] Of course it is obvious now that the upper-middle class is done for. In
every country town in Southern England, not to mention the dreary wastes
of Kensington and Earl's Court, those who knew it in the days of its
glory are dying, vaguely embittered by a world which has not behaved as
it ought. I never open one of Kipling's books or go into one of the huge
dull shops which were once the favourite haunt of the upper-middle
class, without thinking 'Change and decay in all around I see.' But
before the war the upper-middle class, though already none too
prosperous, still felt sure of itself. Before the war you were either a
gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled
to behave as such, whatever your income might be. Between those with
£400 a year and those with £2,000 or even £1,000 a year there was a
great gulf fixed, but it was a gulf which those with £400 a year did
their best to ignore. Probably the distinguishing mark of the
upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent
commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in
this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the
sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the
professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys
used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny
by chanting, 'Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law'; and even of these
'Medicine' was faintly inferior to the others and only put in for the
sake of symmetry. To belong to this class when you were at the £400 a
year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was
almost purely theoretical. You lived, so to speak, at two levels
simultaneously. Theoretically you knew all about servants and how to tip
them, although in practice you had one or, at most, two resident
servants. Theoretically you knew how to wear your clothes and how to
order a dinner, although in practice you could never afford to go to a
decent tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew how to
shoot and ride, although in practice you had no horses to ride and not
an inch of ground to shoot over. It was this that explained the
attraction of India (more recently Kenya, Nigeria, etc.) for the
lower-upper-middle class. The people who went there as soldiers and
officials did not go there to make money, for a soldier or an official
does not make money; they went there because in India, with cheap
horses, free shooting, and hordes of black servants, it was so easy to
play at being a gentleman.

[¶4] In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is
far more _consciousness_ of poverty than in any working-class family
above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an
unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an
unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in
keeping up appearances. It is obvious that people of this kind are in an
anomalous position, and one might be tempted to write them off as mere
exceptions and therefore unimportant. Actually, however, they are or
were fairly numerous. Most clergymen and schoolmasters, for instance,
nearly all Anglo-Indian officials, a sprinkling of soldiers and sailors
and a fair number of professional men and artists, fall into this
category. But the real importance of this class is that they are the
shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the
£2,000 a year class and over, have their money as a thick layer of
padding between themselves and the class they plunder; in so far as they
are aware of the Lower Orders at all they are aware of them as
employees, servants and tradesmen. But it is quite different for the
poor devils lower down who are struggling to live genteel lives on what
are virtually working-class incomes. These last are forced into close
and, in a sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I suspect
it is from them that the traditional upper-class attitude towards
'common' people is derived.

[¶5] And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority
punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of _Punch_
during the past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for
granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except
at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he
ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting
breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has
arisen, and to do that one has got to realise what the working classes
look like to those who live among them but have different habits and
traditions.

[¶6] A shabby-genteel family is in much the same position as a family of
'poor whites' living in a street where everyone else is a Negro. In such
circumstances you have got to cling to your gentility because it is the
only thing you have; and meanwhile you are hated for your stuck-up-ness
and for the accent and manners which stamp you as one of the boss class.
I was very young, not much more than six, when I first became aware of
class-distinctions. Before that age my chief heroes had generally been
working-class people, because they always seemed to do such interesting
things, such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and bricklayers. I
remember the farm hands on a farm in Cornwall who used to let me ride on
the drill when they were sowing turnips and would sometimes catch the
ewes and milk them to give me a drink; and the workmen building the new
house next door, who let me play with the wet mortar and from whom I
first learned the word 'b——'; and the plumber up the road with whose
children I used to go out bird-nesting. But it was not long before I was
forbidden to play with the plumber's children; they were 'common' and I
was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it
was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their
children grow up with vulgar accents. So, very early, the working class
ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race
of enemies. We realised that they hated us, but we could never
understand why, and naturally we set it down to pure, vicious malignity.
To me in my early boyhood, to nearly all children of families like mine,
'common' people seemed almost sub-human. They had coarse faces, hideous
accents and gross manners, they hated everyone who was not like
themselves, and if they got half a chance they would insult you in
brutal ways. That was our view of them, and though it was false it was
understandable. For one must remember that before the war there was much
more _overt_ class-hatred in England than there is now. In those days
you were quite likely to be insulted simply for looking like a member of
the upper classes; nowadays, on the other hand, you are more likely to
be fawned upon. Anyone over thirty can remember the time when it was
impossible for a well-dressed person to walk through a slum street
without being hooted at. Whole quarters of big towns were considered
unsafe because of 'hooligans' (now almost an extinct type), and the
London gutter-boy everywhere, with his loud voice and lack of
intellectual scruples, could make life a misery for people who
considered it beneath their dignity to answer back. A recurrent terror
of my holidays, when I was a small boy, was the gangs of 'cads' who were
liable to set upon you five or ten to one. In term time, on the other
hand, it was we who were in the majority and the 'cads' who were
oppressed; I remember a couple of savage mass-battles in the cold winter
of 1916-17. And this tradition of open hostility between upper and lower
class had apparently been the same for at least a century past. A
typical joke in _Punch_ in the 'sixties is a picture of a small,
nervous-looking gentleman riding through a slum street and a crowd of
street-boys closing in on him with shouts of ''Ere comes a swell! Let's
frighten 'is 'oss!' Just fancy the street-boys trying to frighten his
horse now! They would be much likelier to hang round him in vague hopes
of a tip. During the past dozen years the English working class have
grown servile with a rather horrifying rapidity. It was bound to happen,
for the frightful weapon of unemployment has cowed them. Before the war
their economic position was comparatively strong, for though there was
no dole to fall back upon, there was not much unemployment, and the
power of the boss class was not so obvious as it is now. A man did not
see ruin staring him in the face every time he cheeked a 'toff', and
naturally he did cheek a 'toff' whenever it seemed safe to do so. G. J.
Renier, in his book on Oscar Wilde, points out that the strange, obscene
bursts of popular fury which followed the Wilde trial were essentially
social in character. The London mob had caught a member of the upper
classes on the hop, and they took care to keep him hopping. All this was
natural and even proper. If you treat people as the English working
class have been treated during the past two centuries, you must expect
them to resent it. On the other hand the children of shabby-genteel
families could not be blamed if they grew up with a hatred of the
working class, typified for them by prowling gangs of 'cads'.

[¶7] But there was another and more serious difficulty. Here you come to the
real secret of class distinctions in the West—the real reason why a
European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a
Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his
equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are
chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my
childhood. The words were: _The lower classes smell_.

[¶8] That was what we were taught—_the lower classes smell_. And here,
obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or
dislike is quite so fundamental as a _physical_ feeling. Race hatred,
religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of
intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical
repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a
sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath
stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him,
however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks
he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him. It may not
greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to
believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish
and dishonest; it is when he is brought up to believe that they are
dirty that the harm is done. And in my childhood we _were_ brought up to
believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea
that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body;
you would not get nearer to it than you could help. You watched a great
sweaty navvy walking down the road with his pick over his shoulder; you
looked at his discoloured shirt and his corduroy trousers stiff with the
dirt of a decade; you thought of those nests and layers of greasy rags
below, and, under all, the unwashed body, brown all over (that was how I
used to imagine it), with its strong, bacon-like reek. You watched a
tramp taking off his boots in a ditch—ugh! It did not seriously occur
to you that the tramp might not enjoy having black feet. And even
'lower-class' people whom you knew to be quite clean—servants, for
instance—were faintly unappetising. The smell of their sweat, the very
texture of their skins, were mysteriously different from yours.

[¶9] Everyone who has grown up pronouncing his aitches and in a house with a
bathroom and one servant is likely to have grown up with these feelings;
hence the chasmic, impassable quality of class-distinctions in the West.
It is queer how seldom this is admitted. At the moment I can think of
only one book where it is set forth without humbug, and that is Mr
Somerset Maugham's _On a Chinese Screen_. Mr Maugham describes a high
Chinese official arriving at a wayside inn and blustering and calling
everybody names in order to impress upon them that he is a supreme
dignitary and they are only worms. Five minutes later, having asserted
his dignity in the way he thinks proper, he is eating his dinner in
perfect amity with the baggage coolies. As an official he feels that he
has got to make his presence felt, but he has no feeling that the
coolies are of different clay from himself. I have observed countless
similar scenes in Burma. Among Mongolians—among all Asiatics, for all I
know—there is a sort of natural equality, an easy intimacy between man
and man, which is simply unthinkable in the West. Mr Maugham adds:

[¶10] In the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of
    smell. The working man is our master, inclined to rule us with
    an iron hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none can
    wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to
    your work before the factory bell rings is no pleasant thing,
    nor does heavy labour tend to sweetness; and you do not change
    your linen more than you can help when the week's washing must
    be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I do not blame the working man
    because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social
    intercourse difficult to persons of sensitive nostril. The
    matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth,
    wealth or education.

[¶11] Meanwhile, _do_ the 'lower classes' smell? Of course, as a whole, they
are dirtier than the upper classes. They are bound to be, considering
the circumstances in which they live, for even at this late date less
than half the houses in England have bathrooms. Besides, the habit of
washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe, and
the working classes are generally more conservative than the
bourgeoisie. But the English are growing visibly cleaner, and we may
hope that in a hundred years they will be almost as clean as the
Japanese. It is a pity that those who idealise the working class so
often think it necessary to praise every working-class characteristic
and therefore to pretend that dirtiness is somehow meritorious in
itself. Here, curiously enough, the Socialist and the sentimental
democratic Catholic of the type of Chesterton sometimes join hands; both
will tell you that dirtiness is healthy and 'natural' and cleanliness is
a mere fad or at best a luxury.[1] They seem not to see that they are
merely giving colour to the notion that working-class people are dirty
from choice and not from necessity. Actually, people who have access to
a bath will generally use it. But the essential thing is that
middle-class people _believe_ that the working class are dirty—you see
from the passage quoted above that Mr Maugham himself believes it—and,
what is worse, that they are somehow _inherently_ dirty. As a child, one
of the most dreadful things I could imagine was to drink out of a bottle
after a navvy. Once when I was thirteen, I was in a train coming from a
market town, and the third-class carriage was packed full of shepherds
and pig-men who had been selling their beasts. Somebody produced a quart
bottle of beer and passed it round; it travelled from mouth to mouth to
mouth, everyone taking a swig. I cannot describe the horror I felt as
that bottle worked its way towards me. If I drank from it after all
those lower-class male mouths I felt certain I should vomit; on the
other hand, if they offered it to me I dared not refuse for fear of
offending them—you see here how the middle-class squeamishness works
both ways. Nowadays, thank God, I have no feelings of that kind. A
working-man's body, as such, is no more repulsive to me than a
millionaire's. I still don't like drinking out of a cup or bottle after
another person—another man, I mean: with women I don't mind—but at
least the question of class does not enter. It was rubbing shoulders
with the tramps that cured me of it. Tramps are not really very dirty as
English people go, but they have the name for being dirty, and when you
have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin,
you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for
you.

[¶12] I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important. To
get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how
one class appears when seen through the eyes of another. It is useless
to say that the middle classes are 'snobbish' and leave it at that. You
get no further if you do not realise that snobbishness is bound up with
a species of idealism. It derives from the early training in which a
middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to
be ready to die for his country, and to despise the 'lower classes'.

[¶13] Here I shall be accused of being behind the times, for I was a child
before and during the war and it may be claimed that children nowadays
are brought up with more enlightened notions. It is probably true that
class-feeling is for the moment a very little less bitter than it was.
The working class are submissive where they used to be openly hostile,
and the post-war manufacture of cheap clothes and the general softening
of manners have toned down the surface differences between class and
class. But undoubtedly the essential feeling is still there. Every
middle-class person has a dormant class-prejudice which needs only a
small thing to arouse it; and if he is over forty he probably has a firm
conviction that his own class has been sacrificed to the class below.
Suggest to the average unthinking person of gentle birth who is
struggling to keep up appearances on four or five hundred a year that he
is a member of an exploiting parasite class, and he will think you are
mad. In perfect sincerity he will point out to you a dozen ways in which
he is worse-off than a working man. In his eyes the workers are not a
submerged race of slaves, they are a sinister flood creeping upwards to
engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture
and all decency out of existence. Hence that queer watchful anxiety lest
the working class shall grow too prosperous. In a number of _Punch_ soon
after the war, when coal was still fetching high prices, there is a
picture of four or five miners with grim, sinister faces riding in a
cheap motorcar. A friend they are passing calls out and asks them where
they have borrowed it. They answer, 'We've bought the thing!' This, you
see, is 'good enough for _Punch_'; for miners to buy a motor-car, even
one car between four or five of them, is a monstrosity, a sort of crime
against nature. That was the attitude of a dozen years ago, and I see no
evidence of any fundamental change. The notion that the working class
have been absurdly pampered, hopelessly demoralised by doles, old-age
pensions, free education, etc., is still widely held; it has merely been
a little shaken, perhaps, by the recent recognition that unemployment
does exist. For quantities of middle-class people, probably for a large
majority of those over fifty, the typical working man still rides to the
Labour Exchange on a motor-bike and keeps coal in his bath-tub: 'And, if
you'll believe it, my dear, they actually _get married_ on the dole!'

[¶14] The reason why class-hatred seems to be diminishing is that nowadays it
tends not to get into print, partly owing to the mealy-mouthed habits of
our time, partly because newspapers and even books now have to appeal to
a working-class public. As a rule you can best study it in private
conversations. But if you want some printed examples, it is worth having
a look at the _obiter dicta_ of the late Professor Saintsbury.
Saintsbury was a very learned man and along certain lines a judicious
literary critic, but when he talked of political or economic matters he
only differed from the rest of his class by the fact that he was too
thick-skinned and had been born too early to see any reason for
pretending to common decency. According to Saintsbury, unemployment
insurance was simply 'contributing . . . to the support of lazy
ne'er-do-weels', and the whole trade union movement was no more than a
kind of organised mendicancy:

[¶15] 'Pauper' is almost actionable now, is it not, when used as a
    word? though to _be_ paupers, in the sense of being wholly or
    partly supported at the expense of other people, is the ardent,
    and to a considerable extent achieved, aspiration of a large
    proportion of our population, and of an entire political party.

[¶16] (_A Second Scrap Book._)

[¶17] It is to be noticed, however, that Saintsbury recognises that
unemployment is bound to exist, and, in fact, thinks that it ought to
exist, so long as the unemployed are made to suffer as much as possible:

[¶18] Is not 'casual' labour the very secret and safety-valve of a
    safe and sound labour-system generally?

[¶19] . . . In a complicated industrial and commercial state constant
    employment at regular wages is impossible; while dole-supported
    unemployment, at anything like the wages of employment, is
    demoralising to begin with and ruinous at its more or less
    quickly arriving end.

[¶20] (_A Last Scrap Book._)

[¶21] What exactly is to happen to the 'casual labourers' when no casual
labour happens to be available is not made clear. Presumably (Saintsbury
speaks approvingly of 'good Poor Laws') they are to go into the
workhouse or sleep in the streets. As to the notion that every human
being ought as a matter of course to have the chance of earning at least
a tolerable livelihood, Saintsbury dismisses it with contempt:

[¶22] Even the 'right to live' . . . extends no further than the right
    of protection against murder. Charity certainly will, morality
    possibly may, and public utility perhaps ought to add to this
    protection supererogatory provision for continuance of life; but
    it is questionable whether strict justice demands it.

[¶23] As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives
    some right to the possession of the soil of that country, it
    hardly requires notice.

[¶24] (_A Last Scrap Book._)

[¶25] It is worth reflecting for a moment upon the beautiful implications of
this last passage. The interest of passages like these (and they are
scattered all through Saintsbury's work) lies in their having been
printed at all. Most people are a little shy of putting that kind of
thing on paper. But what Saintsbury is saying here is what any little
worm with a fairly safe five hundred a year _thinks_, and therefore in a
way one must admire him for saying it. It takes a lot of guts to be
_openly_ such a skunk as that.

[¶26] This is the outlook of a confessed reactionary. But how about the
middle-class person whose views are not reactionary but 'advanced'?
Beneath his revolutionary mask, is he really so different from the
other?

[¶27] A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the
Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously,
living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on
earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his
bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his
habits, his manners, his imaginative background—his 'ideology', in
Communist jargon? Is there _any_ change in him except that he now votes
Labour, or, when possible, Communist at the elections? It is noticeable
that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly
more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous
Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees
with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music,
ballet, are still recognisably bourgeois tastes; most significant of
all, he invariably marries into his own class. Look at any bourgeois
Socialist. Look at Comrade X, member of the CPGB and author of _Marxism
for Infants_. Comrade X, it so happens, is an old Etonian. He would be
ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you notice that he
still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone. He idealises the
proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs.
Perhaps once, out of sheer bravado, he has smoked a cigar with the band
on, but it would be almost physically impossible for him to put pieces
of cheese into his mouth on the point of his knife, or to sit indoors
with his cap on, or even to drink his tea out of the saucer. Perhaps
table-manners are not a bad test of sincerity. I have known numbers of
bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades
against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one
who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Yet, after all, why not?
Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still
take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in
his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting. So you see
he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was
taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.

[¶28] -----

[¶29] [1] According to Chesterton, dirtiness is merely a kind of 'discomfort'
and therefore ranks as self-mortification. Unfortunately, the discomfort
of dirtiness is chiefly suffered by other people. It is not really very
uncomfortable to be dirty—not nearly so uncomfortable as having a cold
bath on a winter morning.