Free Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers

single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.
    Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it.
    [He is a] man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened … who is
generously angry.
    Orwell's grim vision of Wigan, quoted earlier, is very close to Dickens’ famous description of the unnatural ugliness and mechanical uniformity of Coketown, and to Lawrence's portrayal of the insentient corruption of Wiggiston, the mining village that is contrasted to Ursula's hopeful vision of the rainbow. The very extinction of organic life, of vital sources being choked off,terrifies all three novelists, and the heart of this problem exists in the crucial social issue of whether the poor should marry and have children. In
Hard Times
, the “hateful” Bounderby tells the worker Stephen Blackpool, “You had better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married”; 29 and the ironic conversation of Bitzer and Mrs. Sparsit expresses the selfish and moribund attitude of the middle classes: “‘I am quite sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families,’ said Bitzer. ‘Why look at me, ma’am!
I
don't want a wife and family. Why should they?’ ‘Because they are improvident,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.” 30
    It is precisely this view, so hostile to life, which Orwell attacks in both
Keep the Aspidistra
and
Wigan Pier.
In the former, Gordon (who violently, and unfairly, objects to Rosemary's wish for contraceptives) says, “Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in a family way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins” (49); and Orwell writes in the latter, alluding to Walter Greenwood's popular play of 1933, “getting married on the dole annoys old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being” (78). In
The Rainbow
, the colliery manager Tom Brangwen, who exploits the miners, marries the lesbian schoolmistress Winifred Inger, a strange union of perversion, sterility and corruption. And in
Women in Love
, the ugliness, poverty and suffering that Gerald Crich inflicts on the miners is symptomatic of his radical failure as a human being. In Dickens, Lawrence and Orwell the emotional sterility of the mine owners, who impose a deathly ugliness on both landscape and people, is contrasted to the inextinguishable warmth and vitality of the oppressed working classes.
    In the 1930's, coal “was by far the largest single industry, the only one employing more than a million workers. It had always been the symbol of class struggle.” 31 Orwell's immersion in the reality of this struggle was his very deliberate attempt to overcome what he considered “the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism, to make contact with the normal working classes.” 32 Orwell believes it is both his duty and responsibility to have first-hand experience in the slums and mines, and he cannot see the value of the more objective intellectual inquiry of Beatrice Webb, whom he calls a “high-minded Socialist slum visitor” (157). As he wrote to Richard Rees from Wigan, “Have you ever been down a mine? I don't think I shall ever feel quite the same about coal again.” Neither will his readers, for Orwell's acute observations on coal mining leave a vivid impression: “you have a tolerable sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid rock,bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it—all this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg” (22). His account of the miners crawling to work underground for two or three hours each day (without