The Road To Wigan Pier - Reviews and Criticism

Reviews and Criticism

The book was reviewed on 14 March 1937 by Edward Shanks, for The Sunday Times, and by Hugh Massingham, for The Observer.

Harry Pollitt reviewed the book, vitriolically, for the 17 March 1937 issue of the Daily Worker, though even he " was forced to concede some merit to its first part."

Initial response

In general, early reviewers of The Road to Wigan Pier praised Orwell’s depiction of the working class in Part I. The poet Edith Sitwell wrote "the horror of the beginning...is unsurpassable. He seems to be doing for the modern world what Engels did for the world of 1840-50. But with this difference, that Orwell is a born writer, whereas Engels, fiery and splendid spirit though he was, simply wasn't a writer." Responses to Part II, as the book transformed from reportage into a mix of politics, polemics, and selective autobiography, were more varied, ranging from praise to anger and indignation. Arthur Calder-Marshall’s March 20, 1937 review in Time and Tide celebrates Orwell’s achievement, and can be summarized by its first line: “Of Mr Orwell’s book, there is little to say except praise.”

This sentiment is shared in a review by Hamish Miles in New Statesman and Nation on May 1, 1937. Miles writes that The Road to Wigan Pier “is a living and lively book from start to finish. The honest Tory must face what he tells and implies, and the honest Socialist must face him, too.” Douglas Goldring, writing in Fortnightly in April 1937, describes the book as “beautiful” and “disturbing,” and like Miles highly recommends that both conservatives and socialists read it. In Tribune on March 12, 1937, Walter Greenwood calls Part I “authentic and first rate” but was more ambivalent towards Part II: “ has you with him one moment and provoked beyond endurance the next . . . I cannot remember having been so infuriated for a long time than by some of the things he says here.”

H. J. Laski, a co-founder of the Left Book Club, wrote a review in March 1937 in Left News which repeats the main arguments of Gollancz’s preface. Laski claims that Part I is “admirable propaganda for our ideas” but that Part II falls short: “But having, very ably, depicted a disease, Mr Orwell does what so many well-meaning people do: needing a remedy (he knows it is socialism), he offers an incantation instead. He thinks that an appeal to 'liberty' and 'justice' will, on the basis of facts such as he has described, bring people tumbling over one another into the Socialist Party . . . This view is based on fallacies so elementary that I should doubt the necessity of explaining them as fallacies were it not that there are so many people who share Mr Orwell's view. Its basic error is the belief that we all mean the same things by liberty and justice. Most emphatically we do not."

In the April 1937 number of the Left News Gollancz reported that the book had produced : "both more, and more interesting, letters than any other Club Choice. The book has done, perhaps in a greater degree than any previous book, what the Club is meant to do - it has provoked thought, and discussion of the keenest kind. While members with a training in scientific socialism have been surprised at the naïveté of the second part, they have found it valuable, as showing how much education they still have to do.." Orwell biographers Stansky & Abrahams noted : "But Gollancz and Laski, believing in a scientific rather than an emotional socialism, believing (in 1937) that it was still possible to equip people to fight against war and Fascism, were caught in a time warp: history was leaving them behind. Orwell in Spain was continuing his education - in a real war against Fascism - and it was very different from anything envisioned by the selectors of the Left Book Club. What he was learning had less to do with scientific socialism than with the morality of politics, and it would change his life."

A radio play by David Pownall, Writing on Wigan Pier, with Adrian Scarborough as Orwell, was broadcast by BBC Radio Four in 2010.