---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 9 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/9/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 9. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/9/"
---

# 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]

## 9. IX

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/9/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/9/#p-N

[¶0] When I was fourteen or fifteen I was an odious little snob, but no worse
than other boys of my own age and class. I suppose there is no place in
the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is
cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public
school. Here at least one cannot say that English 'education' fails to
do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of
leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at
thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your
snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it
is, sticks by you till your grave.

[¶1] At school I was in a difficult position, for I was among boys who, for
the most part, were much richer than myself, and I only went to an
expensive public school because I happened to win a scholarship. This is
the common experience of boys of the lower-upper-middle class, the sons
of clergymen, Anglo-Indian officials, etc., and the effects it had on me
were probably the usual ones. On the one hand it made me cling tighter
than ever to my gentility; on the other hand it filled me with
resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who
took care to let me know it. I despised anyone who was not describable
as a 'gentleman', but also I hated the hoggishly rich, especially those
who had grown rich too recently. The correct and elegant thing, I felt,
was to be of gentle birth but to have no money. This is part of the
_credo_ of the lower-upper-middle class. It has a romantic,
Jacobite-in-exile feeling about it which is very comforting.

[¶2] But those years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be
at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or
had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there
was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been
reversed and forgotten, but which has left various deposits of sediment
behind. Essentially, though of course one could not then see it in
perspective, it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly
from the war. In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had
behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to
contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their
sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine-guns.
Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been
conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 everyone under forty was in
a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which
followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt
against orthodoxy and authority. At that time there was, among the
young, a curious cult of hatred of 'old men'. The dominance of 'old men'
was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every
accepted institution from Scott's novels to the House of Lords was
derided merely because 'old men' were in favour of it. For several years
it was all the fashion to be a 'Bolshie', as people then called it.
England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacifism,
internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love,
divorce-reform, atheism, birth-control—things like these were getting a
better hearing than they would get in normal times. And of course the
revolutionary mood extended to those who had been too young to fight,
even to public-schoolboys. At that time we all thought of ourselves as
enlightened creatures of a new age, casting off the orthodoxy that had
been forced upon us by those detested 'old men'. We retained, basically,
the snobbish outlook of our class, we took it for granted that we should
continue to draw our dividends or tumble into soft jobs, but also it
seemed natural to us to be 'agin the government'. We derided the OTC,
the Christian religion, and perhaps even compulsory games and the Royal
Family, and we did not realise that we were merely taking part in a
world-wide gesture of distaste for war. Two incidents stick in my mind
as examples of the queer revolutionary feeling of that time. One day the
master who taught us English set us a kind of general knowledge paper of
which one of the questions was, 'Whom do you consider the ten greatest
men now living?' Of sixteen boys in the class (our average age was about
seventeen) fifteen included Lenin in their list. This was at a snobbish
expensive public school, and the date was 1920, when the horrors of the
Russian Revolution were still fresh in everyone's mind. Also there were
the so-called peace celebrations in 1919. Our elders had decided for us
that we should celebrate peace in the traditional manner by whooping
over the fallen foe. We were to march into the school-yard, carrying
torches, and sing jingo songs of the type of 'Rule, Britannia'. The
boys—to their honour, I think—guyed the whole proceeding and sang
blasphemous and seditious words to the tunes provided. I doubt whether
things would happen in quite that manner now. Certainly the public
schoolboys I meet nowadays, even the intelligent ones, are much more
right-wing in their opinions than I and my contemporaries were fifteen
years ago.

[¶3] Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a
revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the
entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time
still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely
described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what
Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings.
At a distance, and through the medium of books—Jack London's _The
People of the Abyss_, for instance—I could agonise over their
sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came
anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated
by their habitual rudeness. One must remember that just then,
immediately after the war, the English working class were in a fighting
mood. That was the period of the great coal strikes, when a miner was
thought of as a fiend incarnate and old ladies looked under their beds
every night lest Robert Smillie should be concealed there. All through
the war and for a little time afterwards there had been high wages and
abundant employment; things were now returning to something worse than
normal, and naturally the working class resisted. The men who had fought
had been lured into the army by gaudy promises, and now they were coming
home to a world where there were no jobs and not even any houses.
Moreover, they had been at war and were coming home with the soldier's
attitude to life, which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a
lawless attitude. There was a turbulent feeling in the air. To that time
belongs the song with the memorable refrain:

[¶4] _There's nothing sure but_
            _The rich get richer and the poor get children;_
            _In the mean time,_
            _In between time,_
            _Ain't we got fun?_

[¶5] People had not yet settled down to a lifetime of unemployment mitigated
by endless cups of tea. They still vaguely expected the Utopia for which
they had fought, and even more than before they were openly hostile to
the aitch-pronouncing class. So to the shock-absorbers of the
bourgeoisie, such as myself, 'common people' still appeared brutal and
repulsive. Looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the
time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging
over the insolence of bus-conductors.

[¶6] When I was not yet twenty I went to Burma, in the Indian Imperial
Police. In an 'outpost of Empire' like Burma the class-question appeared
at first sight to have been shelved. There was no obvious class-friction
here, because the all-important thing was not whether you had been to
one of the right schools but whether your skin was technically white. As
a matter of fact most of the white men in Burma were not of the type who
in England would be called 'gentlemen', but except for the common
soldiers and a few nondescripts they lived lives appropriate to
'gentlemen'—had servants, that is, and called their evening meal
'dinner'—and officially they were regarded as being all of the same
class. They were 'white men', in contradistinction to the other and
inferior class, the 'natives'. But one did not feel towards the
'natives' as one felt towards the 'lower classes' at home. The essential
point was that the 'natives', at any rate the Burmese, were not felt to
be physically repulsive. One looked down on them as 'natives', but one
was quite ready to be physically intimate with them; and this, I
noticed, was the case even with white men who had the most vicious
colour-prejudice. When you have a lot of servants you soon get into lazy
habits, and I habitually allowed myself, for instance, to be dressed and
undressed by my Burmese boy. This was because he was a Burman and
undisgusting; I could not have endured to let an English manservant
handle me in that intimate manner. I felt towards a Burman almost as I
felt towards a woman. Like most other races, the Burmese have a
distinctive smell—I cannot describe it: it is a smell that makes one's
teeth tingle—but this smell never disgusted me. (Incidentally,
orientals say that _we_ smell. The Chinese, I believe, say that a white
man smells like a corpse. The Burmese say the same—though no Burman was
ever rude enough to say so to me.) And in a way my attitude was
defensible, for if one faces facts one must admit that most Mongolians
have much nicer bodies than most white men. Compare the firm-knit silken
skin of the Burman, which does not wrinkle at all till he is past forty,
and then merely withers up like a piece of dry leather, with the
coarse-grained, flabby, sagging skin of the white man. The white man has
lank ugly hair growing down his legs and the backs of his arms and in an
ugly patch on his chest. The Burman has only a tuft or two of stiff
black hair at the appropriate places; for the rest he is quite hairless
and is usually beardless as well. The white man almost always goes bald,
the Burman seldom or never. The Burman's teeth are perfect, though
generally discoloured by betel juice, the white man's teeth invariably
decay. The white man is generally ill-shaped, and when he grows fat he
bulges in improbable places; the Mongol has beautiful bones and in old
age he is almost as shapely as in youth. Admittedly the white races
throw up a few individuals who for a few years are supremely beautiful;
but on the whole, say what you will, they are far less comely than
orientals. But it was not of this that I was thinking when I found the
English 'lower classes' so much more repellent than Burmese 'natives'. I
was still thinking in terms of my early-acquired class-prejudice. When I
was not much past twenty I was attached for a short time to a British
regiment. Of course I admired and liked the private soldiers as any
youth of twenty would admire and like hefty, cheery youths five years
older than himself with the medals of the Great War on their chests. And
yet, after all, they faintly repelled me; they were 'common people' and
I did not care to be too close to them. In the hot mornings when the
company marched down the road, myself in the rear with one of the junior
subalterns, the steam of those hundred sweating bodies in front made my
stomach turn. And this, you observe, was pure prejudice. For a soldier
is probably as inoffensive, physically, as it is possible for a male
white person to be. He is generally young, he is nearly always healthy
from fresh air and exercise, and a rigorous discipline compels him to be
clean. But I could not see it like that. All I knew was that it was
_lower-class_ sweat that I was smelling, and the thought of it made me
sick.

[¶7] When later on I got rid of my class-prejudice, or part of it, it was in
a roundabout way and by a process that took several years. The thing
that changed my attitude to the class-issue was something only
indirectly connected with it—something almost irrelevant.

[¶8] I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I
hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably
cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not
fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part
of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears—indeed,
it _is_—benevolent and even necessary; and so no doubt are the French
rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo, for people usually govern
foreigners better than they govern themselves. But it is not possible to
be part of such a system without recognising it as an unjustifiable
tyranny. Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this. Every
'native' face he sees in the street brings home to him his monstrous
intrusion. And the majority of Anglo-Indians, intermittently at least,
are not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England
believe. From the most unexpected people, from gin-pickled old
scoundrels high up in the Government service, I have heard some such
remark as: 'Of course we've no right in this blasted country at all.
Only now we're here for God's sake let's stay here.' The truth is that
no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to
invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign
oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic
oppression. Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to
keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to
the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen; similarly, people who
live on unearned dividends without a single qualm of conscience, see
clearly enough that it is wrong to go and lord it in a foreign country
where you are not wanted. The result is that every Anglo-Indian is
haunted by a sense of guilt which he usually conceals as best he can,
because there is no freedom of speech, and merely to be overheard making
a seditious remark may damage his career. All over India there are
Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and
just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right
company, their hidden bitterness overflows. I remember a night I spent
on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself
whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the
night in talking. Half an hour's cautious questioning decided each of us
that the other was 'safe'; and then for hours, while the train jolted
slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with
bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire—damned it from the
inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had
been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when
the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous
couple.

[¶9] So far as my observation goes nearly all Anglo-Indian officials have
moments when their conscience troubles them. The exceptions are men who
are doing something which is demonstrably useful and would still have to
be done whether the British were in India or not: forest officers, for
instance, and doctors and engineers. But I was in the police, which is
to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism. Moreover,
in the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters, and
there is an appreciable difference between doing dirty work and merely
profiting by it. Most people approve of capital punishment, but most
people wouldn't do the hangman's job. Even the other Europeans in Burma
slightly looked down on the police because of the brutal work they had
to do. I remember once when I was inspecting a police station, an
American missionary whom I knew fairly well came in for some purpose or
other. Like most Nonconformist missionaries he was a complete ass but
quite a good fellow. One of my native sub-inspectors was bullying a
suspect (I described this scene in _Burmese Days_). The American watched
it, and then turning to me said thoughtfully, 'I wouldn't care to have
your job.' It made me horribly ashamed. So _that_ was the kind of job I
had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from
the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me! But I
should have felt the same shame even if there had been no one to bring
it home to me. I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of the
whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, our criminal
law (far more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a
horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. The
wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the
grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the
men who had been flogged with bamboos, the women and children howling
when their menfolk were led away under arrest—things like these are
beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I
watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand
murders. I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to
jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars. I
thought then—I think now, for that matter—that the worst criminal who
ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge. But of course I had
to keep these notions to myself, because of the almost utter silence
that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. In the end I worked out
an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment
always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to
behave decently if only you will let them alone. This of course was
sentimental nonsense. I see now as I did not see then, that it is always
necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of
society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh
criminal law and administer it ruthlessly; the alternative is Al Capone.
But the feeling that punishment is evil arises inescapably in those who
have to administer it. I should expect to find that even in England many
policemen, judges, prison warders, and the like are haunted by a secret
horror of what they do. But in Burma it was a double oppression that we
were committing. Not only were we hanging people and putting them in
jail and so forth; we were doing it in the capacity of unwanted foreign
invaders. The Burmese themselves never really recognised our
jurisdiction. The thief whom we put in prison did not think of himself
as a criminal justly punished, he thought of himself as the victim of a
foreign conqueror. The thing that was done to him was merely a wanton
meaningless cruelty. His face, behind the stout teak bars of the lock-up
and the iron bars of the jail, said so clearly. And unfortunately I had
not trained myself to be indifferent to the expression of the human
face.

[¶10] When I came home on leave in 1927 I was already half determined to throw
up my job, and one sniff of English air decided me. I was not going back
to be a part of that evil despotism. But I wanted much more than merely
to escape from my job. For five years I had been part of an oppressive
system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered
faces—faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned
cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of
servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly
everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally:
orientals can be very provoking)—haunted me intolerably. I was
conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. I
suppose that sounds exaggerated; but if you do for five years a job that
you thoroughly disapprove of, you will probably feel the same. I had
reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always
right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the
natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself. I felt that I
had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of
man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down
among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their
tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in
solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary
lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every
suspicion of self-advancement, even to 'succeed' in life to the extent
of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a
species of bullying.

[¶11] It was in this way that my thoughts turned towards the English working
class. It was the first time that I had ever been really aware of the
working class, and to begin with it was only because they supplied an
analogy. They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same
part in England as the Burmese played in Burma. In Burma the issue had
been quite simple. The whites were up and the blacks were down, and
therefore as a matter of course one's sympathy was with the blacks. I
now realised that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find
tyranny and exploitation. Here in England, down under one's feet, were
the submerged working class, suffering miseries which in their different
way were as bad as any an oriental ever knows. The word 'unemployment'
was on everyone's lips. That was more or less new to me, after Burma,
but the drivel which the middle classes were still talking ('These
unemployed are all unemployables', etc. etc.) failed to deceive me. I
often wonder whether that kind of stuff deceives even the fools who
utter it. On the other hand I had at that time no interest in Socialism
or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then—it sometimes seems
to me now, for that matter—that economic injustice will stop the moment
we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop
the method adopted hardly matters.

[¶12] But I knew nothing about working-class conditions. I had read the
unemployment figures but I had no notion of what they implied; above
all, I did not know the essential fact that 'respectable' poverty is
always the worst. The frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly
thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonised
struggles against economic laws which he does not understand, the
disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame—all this was
outside the range of my experience. When I thought of poverty I thought
of it in terms of brute starvation. Therefore my mind turned immediately
towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars,
criminals, prostitutes. These were 'the lowest of the low', and these
were the people with whom I wanted to get in contact. What I profoundly
wanted, at that time, was to find some way of getting out of the
respectable world altogether. I meditated upon it a great deal, I even
planned parts of it in detail; how one could sell everything, give
everything away, change one's name and start out with no money and
nothing but the clothes one stood up in. But in real life nobody ever
does that kind of thing; apart from the relatives and friends who have
to be considered, it is doubtful whether an educated man _could_ do it
if there were any other course open to him. But at least I could go
among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself
temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted
by them, I should have touched bottom, and—this is what I felt: I was
aware even then that it was irrational—part of my guilt would drop from
me.

[¶13] I thought it over and decided what I would do. I would go suitably
disguised to Limehouse and Whitechapel and such places and sleep in
common lodging-houses and pal up with dock-labourers, street hawkers,
derelict people, beggars, and, if possible, criminals. And I would find
out about tramps and how you got in touch with them and what was the
proper procedure for entering the casual ward; and then, when I felt
that I knew the ropes well enough, I would go on the road myself.

[¶14] At the start it was not easy. It meant masquerading and I have no talent
for acting. I cannot, for instance, disguise my accent, at any rate not
for more than a very few minutes. I imagined—notice the frightful
class-consciousness of the Englishman—that I should be spotted as a
'gentleman' the moment I opened my mouth; so I had a hard luck story
ready in case I should be questioned. I got hold of the right kind of
clothes and dirtied them in appropriate places. I am a difficult person
to disguise, being abnormally tall, but I did at least know what a tramp
looks like. (How few people do know this, by the way! Look at any
picture of a tramp in _Punch_. They are always twenty years out of
date.) One evening, having made ready at a friend's house, I set out and
wandered eastward till I landed up at a common lodging-house in
Limehouse Causeway. It was a dark, dirty-looking place. I knew it was a
common lodging-house by the sign 'Good Beds for Single Men' in the
window. Heavens, how I had to screw up my courage before I went in! It
seems ridiculous now. But you see I was still half afraid of the working
class. I wanted to get in touch with them, I even wanted to become one
of them, but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous; going into
the dark doorway of that common lodging-house seemed to me like going
down into some dreadful subterranean place—a sewer full of rats, for
instance. I went in fully expecting a fight. The people would spot that
I was not one of themselves and immediately infer that I had come to spy
on them; and then they would set upon me and throw me out—that was what
I expected. I felt that I had got to do it, but I did not enjoy the
prospect.

[¶15] Inside the door a man in shirt-sleeves appeared from somewhere or other.
This was the 'deputy', and I told him that I wanted a bed for the night.
My accent did not make him stare, I noticed; he merely demanded
ninepence and then showed me the way to a frowzy firelit kitchen
underground. There were stevedores and navvies and a few sailors sitting
about and playing draughts and drinking tea. They barely glanced at me
as I entered. But this was Saturday night and a hefty young stevedore
was drunk and was reeling about the room. He turned, saw me and lurched
towards me with broad red face thrust out and a dangerous-looking fishy
gleam in his eyes. I stiffened myself. So the fight was coming already!
The next moment the stevedore collapsed on my chest and flung his arms
round my neck. ''Ave a cup of tea, chum!' he cried tearfully; ''ave a
cup of tea!'

[¶16] I had a cup of tea. It was a kind of baptism. After that my fears
vanished. Nobody questioned me, nobody showed offensive curiosity;
everybody was polite and gentle and took me utterly for granted. I
stayed two or three days in that common lodging-house, and a few weeks
later, having picked up a certain amount of information about the habits
of destitute people, I went on the road for the first time.

[¶17] I have described all this in _Down and Out in Paris and London_ (nearly
all the incidents described there actually happened, though they have
been rearranged) and I do not want to repeat it. Later I went on the
road for much longer periods, sometimes from choice, sometimes from
necessity. I have lived in common lodging-houses for months together.
But it is that first expedition that sticks most vividly in my mind,
because of the strangeness of it—the strangeness of being at last down
there among 'the lowest of the low', and on terms of utter equality with
working-class people. A tramp, it is true, is not a typical
working-class person; still, when you are among tramps you are at any
rate merged in one section—one sub-caste—of the working class, a thing
which so far as I know can happen to you in no other way. For several
days I wandered through the northern outskirts of London with an Irish
tramp. I was his mate, temporarily. We shared the same cell at night,
and he told me the history of his life and I told him a fictitious
history of mine, and we took it in turns to beg at likely-looking houses
and divided up the proceeds. I was very happy. Here I was, among 'the
lowest of the low', at the bedrock of the Western world! The class-bar
was down, or seemed to be down. And down there in the squalid and, as a
matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling
of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which
was sufficiently vivid at the time.