The Road to Wigan Pier

(Retracing...) Orwell said he would find little to interest him in Barnsley, which was a kindness compared to his verdict on Sheffield: "It seems to me, by daylight, one of the most appalling places I have ever seen." From his two months in the north, one image stayed with him above all others; a

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pale young woman "with the usual draggled, exhausted look … I thought how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling in the gutter in a back alley in Wigan, in the bitter cold, prodding a stick up a blocked drain. At that moment she looked up and caught my eye, and her expression was as desolate as I have ever seen; it struck me that she was thinking just the same as I was." We cannot know if he was right, but it seems a rare moment, in a book about human sympathy, of connection between the man raised to be an officer of the empire and the proletariat that, however much he wished to embrace, repelled him still. Jack Hilton, the man who set him on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. "So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle," was his damning verdict. Victor Gollancz disagreed, but with strong reservations. He finally published it as part of the Left Book Club series, but included a foreword in which he rebutted Orwell's colourful views on the "fruit-drinkers" of the middle-class liberal elite, fearful that his readership might take offence. In a later edition, against the author's wishes, he deleted the polemical second section altogether.

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