The Road To Wigan Pier - Background

Background

Orwell submitted the typescript of Keep the Aspidistra Flying to Gollancz on 15 January 1936. At some point in the next few days Gollancz asked him to consider a new project - writing a book about unemployment and social conditions in economically depressed northern England. In the period from 31 January to 30 March 1936, Orwell lived in Wigan, Barnsley and Sheffield researching the book.

Gollancz was not only a successful publisher but also a dedicated social reformer. "As a social reformer, a socialist, and an idealist, Gollancz had an unquestioning, perhaps overly optimistic, faith in education; if only people could be made to know the nature of poverty, he thought, they would want to eradicate it, remove from power the government that tolerated it, and transform the economic system that brought it into being." As a successful publisher however, he knew that to reach a large audience he needed something more than a collection of facts, statistics, graphs and dogmatic conclusions.

The view that this was a specific commission with a £500 advance—two years' income for Orwell at the time, is based on a recollection by Geoffrey Gorer who was interviewed for Melvyn Bragg's TV programme Omnibus in 1970. He reported that Gollancz had offered Orwell £500 to underwrite the trip, and but for Gollancz's support Orwell would never have gone. Recent biographers, however, do not repeat this account. On 1 April 1936, Orwell rented a cottage in a remote village in Hertfordshire where he wrote up "The Road to Wigan Pier". Shelden points out that the rental for the cottage was less than £2 a month.

Orwell, as well as living off the land, supplemented his income by running the cottage as the village stores. Yet, writing to Jack Common in April 1936 about setting up shop, "Orwell sounds hard put to find £20 in order to stock his shelves, rather than like a man who had received £500 a couple of months earlier." When it came to marrying, Orwell wrote to Gorer that "I should never be economically justified in marrying, so might as well be unjustified now as later". D. J. Taylor argues that these factors, and the fact that Gollancz was not a person to part with such a sum on speculation, suggest that Gorer was confusing Orwell's eventual earnings from the book with a small contribution for out of pocket expenses that Gollancz might have given him.

Orwell set out on the journey on the last day of January 1936, having given up his job at Booklovers' Corner and his flat in Kentish Town; - he would not live in London again until 1940. He made no plans in advance, but Richard Rees promised to send him names of people in the north connected with The Adelphi or the Adelphi Summer School who might help him, - he established also a network of contacts through the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, - and for the next two months he followed a route from Birmingham to Manchester to Leeds. He kept a diary from 31 January through 25 March which records the unretouched material that he would develop into the first part of The Road to Wigan Pier.

For three weeks in February 1936 he was in Wigan, the longest single stop he would make; March was allotted to Yorkshire - Sheffield, Leeds, Barnsley. He had completed a rough first draft of the book by October and sent off the final version to Moore in December. Gollancz published the work under the Left Book Club which gave Orwell a far higher circulation than his previous works. However Gollancz feared the second half would offend Left Book Club readers and inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain. The original edition included 32 illustrations which were photographs of Welsh coal miners and of slums in the East End of London. Orwell did not choose the images and their inclusion may not have been his idea.