by George Orwell
This short book was published in 1936. Something I read or listened to recently must have referred to it, so I downloaded the book on Kindle – only to find, when I was halfway through, that I have an old, faded paperback copy from the 1960s. Ah well.
The book begins with the author living in a boarding-house in Sheffield (not Wigan) and describing the squalor of the place, and the drear and discomfort of its residents. I am aware, from my little bit of family history research, that it was common for young working men to live as lodgers, and for families with some space in their homes to let our a room or rooms. In this case, the lodgers seem to provide the main source of income for a slovenly family, who also keep a shop.
We move on to a description of the life and work of a miner. The author appears to have spent some weeks or months living in close quarters with working people. The book is full of detail: wages, outgoings, amounts available to the unemployed (and where it comes from), the cost of various things that have to be paid for. It is rather hard, at a distance of almost 90 years, to put any of this into the perspective of monetary value in the 2020s. All I really have to go on is the memory of my grandmother telling me that when she qualified as a nurse, she earned £50 a year. This feels already significant to me: that a nurse’s salary was given as an annual rate rather than weekly. (She also told me she had one day off a month. This would have been in the mid-1920s.)
Trying to look at this book from the perspective of a contemporary reader, I can see that it might have made an impact on the socialist-leaning middle class reader in the 1930s. Orwell makes no apology for the fact that he himself had a privileged background and a good education, before deciding to experience life on ‘the other side’ by first living as a tramp (see Down and out in Paris and London) and then experiencing the life of the working class and, particularly, the unemployed, in Wigan and Sheffield. He recognises the thin line between the extreme Right and the extreme Left, and looks dispassionately at the socialism promoted by middle class people such as himself.
The last half of the book explores socialism as perceived by Orwell. I have to confess that I was a little bored by this time, and didn’t read on. Perhaps I will come back to this book; I feel, in a way, that I owe it to my late father-in-law, who was surely influenced by the socialist ideas and organisations of the time. He would have been a late teen, who grew up in a reasonably comfortable working-class household in Teesside, and by this time would have been already working for the railways, having left grammar school (he had a scholarship place) with no thought of a university education. He (W B Lockwood) set off on his big adventure, travelling solo across Europe, in 1935/6.
I think it is the family connection with early twentieth century socialism that makes this book appealing to me. Perhaps I will come back to it.
A rug and a book 