Free Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Page A

pay) is a powerful and disturbing revelation.
    Orwell's approach is documentary, empirical and pragmatic, filled with statistics, essential information and useful suggestions, and his view is, as far as possible, an “insider's” view. 33 In praising people's patience with him, Orwell humorously describes his methods and their response: “If any unauthorized person walked into
my
house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell. This only happened to me once, and in that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark; but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I wanted” (65). Orwell constantly refers to his own practical knowledge (“you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet”) with phrases like “I have had just enough experience …” and “From my own observation …” and “Once when I was ….” The result of this approach is twofold: as in
Down and Out
, he questions common assumptions, discredits the illusion and shows the reality; and he also describes the most serious injustices he has lived through himself. He has a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of what he sees, but is not merely content to describe it—he wants to transform it radically. 34
    The main effect of shattering illusions and enforcing reality is to convince the reader that he is profoundly ill-informed and must change his wrong-headed attitude about the working classes. Contrary to popular belief, Orwell finds that miners wash when they can; eat astonishingly little; are poorly paid; have impoverished landlords who cannot afford repairs;
do
mind dirtiness; favor slum clearance; dislike crowded areas; want to work and do not like unemployment; are sensitive and serious; do not smell; and lead an extremely hard life. In short, they are much like other people (“the interests of the exploited are the same” [203]), only worse off because of the inequity and iniquity of the capitalist system. By making readers understand the workers, Orwell alleviates their fears and engages their sympathy; by making them care about their countrymen, he pricks their social conscience and awakens their sense of justice.
    The great strength of
Wigan Pier
(and
Down and Out)
is that the economic injustices are always described in human terms. Orwell's vision of Wigan is like Blake's of London:
    I wander thro’ each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
    For both writers a slum implies warped lives and ailing children. Orwell's moving theme is a fervent plea for human dignity and compassion, and against “the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws, which he does not understand, the disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame” (131). He attacks Corporation housing because it is soulless and inhumane, and erodes both family and communal life; he criticizes the Means Test because it cruelly breaks up families; and he exposes the deadening effect of unemployment. His images of human degradation are the most powerful: the desolate drudgery of the exhausted young woman kneeling beside the blocked waste-pipe; the blank and aged grandmother with the yellow cretinous countenance; the worn skull-like face of the slum mother; and the dumpy shawled women crawling in the cindery mud in search of coal chips. (Orwell's contrasting image of human affirmation is the pavement-artist Bozo in
Down and Out
who gazes at the stars and is a free man in his own mind: “rich or poor, you can still keep on with your books and your ideas.”) 35 Orwell's emphasis throughout the book is on the “ordinary decent