The Road to Wigan Pier

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1937

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-13

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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary

A key cause of the terrible living conditions in working-class communities, Orwell observes, is the housing crisis in many industrial towns. Few of the homes are clean and livable, meaning that the miners and their families are forced to accept whatever is available. While middle-class people are unaffected by the housing shortage, working-class people must accept the terrible conditions provided by cheap, corrupt landlords who exploit their tenants. The government has even condemned many of these houses as unfit for human habitation, but they remain open because the inhabitants have nowhere else to live. Orwell’s firsthand experience of these houses includes floors collapsing, roofs leaking, and the landlords routinely charging much more than the property’s value while forcing tenants into cramped, filthy rooms.

Orwell admits that he cannot fully encapsulate the extent of the misery the lack of housing causes, struggling to describe the reality of eight people forced to share small rooms, or two or three people sharing a bed. In such circumstances, maintaining personal hygiene is impossible. Everything and everyone is constantly filthy. The same is true in every industrial town Orwell visits, and he suggests that the terrible conditions rob people even of any desire to keep themselves clean.

Among the most desperate people are those who live in the temporary caravans—rudimentary mobile homes designed to be towed by a car. In the poorest cities, ramshackle communities of hundreds of caravans have appeared, and often have conditions worse than the slums Orwell witnessed while living in Asia. Families who live in the caravans must share 12 cubic meters of cold, damp space, in which the toilets are just holes in the ground outside. Despite these terrible conditions, the rents on the caravans are often comparable to houses. Other lower-class people live in houses built by the mining companies, but the quality of these houses is dubious, and rents are high. Added to that, life in the mining company communities is costly, while the communities themselves are soulless and depressing; new tenants are hosed down with delousing spray, and they are forbidden from changing their properties or adding any hints of personality. Orwell blames the comfortable middle class for ignoring the reality of working-class life and instead spending money on large government buildings.

Chapter 5 Summary

Orwell examines the government unemployment figures and finds the data misleading. While the government suggests that 2 million people are unemployed in Britain, these figures only count the people claiming unemployment benefits; they do not include the huge number of people who are underpaid, who rely on a small pension, or who are not recognized by the government. The actual number of poor or underfed people could be closer to 20 million. The industrial towns in North England have a great deal of unemployment, exploitative employment, and poverty. The scant benefits offered by the government are often not enough to keep a family fed, leading Orwell to estimate that perhaps a third of the people in the industrial towns are struggling to put food on the table and make rent.

Orwell therefore criticizes the British benefits system; its strict rules and tests are unreliable and unpredictable, and often trap people in poverty. Elderly people are forced to live apart from their families, for example, limiting the care they can receive. Orwell also believes that the benefits system discriminates against people in North England in comparison to those in the South, though he notes that many of the poorest neighborhoods are in London. Some men struggle to keep warm and spend their time in public places like libraries, as this is cheaper than heating the small homes in which they live. Because the cost of living is so much higher for single people, many people get married simply to ensure they receive more benefits.

Although unemployed people lack the time, resources, and comfort to write books about their suffering, Orwell reminds readers that poverty does not make them unintelligent. He also notes that the best help does not come from the government, but from charities such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. These charities try to make the members more politically active but rarely succeed, partly because people are ashamed to identify themselves as unemployed. Orwell admits that he was raised to see unemployed people as lazy, but now he realizes that they want to work. Rather than an individual problem, he wants people to consider unemployment a social problem and remember that unemployed people do not cease to be people. Some services and products provide small, cheap comforts to unemployed people, allowing them to retain some aspect of humanity.

Chapter 6 Summary

Orwell believes that food is not just an essential part of staying alive, but can also change the world. World War I, for example, would not have been possible without the invention of tinned food. Diet illustrates the average unemployed family’s suffering. Almost half of their budget goes towards food, though they do not adhere to the guidelines for minimum sustenance, as they prefer not to live on raw carrots and brown bread; less healthy food is a small pleasure, while still being cheap and available.

However, poorer diets have serious implications. Poor people are less well nourished, so they are often smaller, less healthy, and suffering from dental issues. This malnutrition partly stems from the loss of the healthiest men in World War I, as well as an inherently English lack of understanding about healthy diets. Even though the government offers advice on nutrition, this advice can seem patronizing, so it is often rejected. As a result, many people continue with their bad diets and waste a great deal of food. Orwell notes the irony of a government that refuses to help people out of poverty while still criticizing them for how they spend what little money they have.

One advantage for the miners is their access to discounted coal. In addition, many of the people who live near the slag heaps pick through the waste for any coal which has been thrown away. Groups of people compete aggressively for the discarded coal fragments, especially when the economy is bad and people are out of work. While this practice technically amounts to stealing, Orwell refuses to criticize it, and the memory of watching people fight for the abandoned coal stays with him for many years.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

In addition to describing the poverty found in working-class communities in industrial towns, Orwell delves into the causes of the suffering he observes. His account of the lack of available housing does both; the housing that is available is rundown, filthy, and unfit for human habitation, largely because it’s in such short supply and such high demand that people simply have nowhere else to live. In this respect, The Road to Wigan Pier is not just a description of working-class communities, but an attempt to understand the root cause of the problem.

Orwell’s experiences in the lodging houses and the rental properties eventually become repetitive. Everything is so filthy, so dangerous, and so miserable that he is forced to cover the same subjects repeatedly. He admits this, decrying the feeble nature of his words and their inability to truly capture the misery he witnesses. In fact, the repetition is one way in which he tries to navigate this issue; the constant descriptions of the same problems impress upon the reader just how depressingly common they are. Every person in every house in every town is experiencing the same struggles, showing the extent to which they affect all of society.

Deliberately absent from Orwell’s discussions of poverty and the housing crisis is the role of government. He feels as though the government has abdicated its responsibility to the people, either by not building more social housing or by failing to regulate the industries that are the root cause of so much suffering. The glaring absence of the government is a damning indictment of the authorities’ failures, and also provides a space for private concerns to intercede; for example, the mining companies build their own towns and communities for their workers to try to alleviate the housing crisis. However, this attempt, like everything else the private companies do, becomes a new way in which to exploit poor people and increase profits. The houses built by the mining company are expensive, low quality, and give the company new excuses to garnish workers’ wages. Orwell therefore suggests that the solution to a problem caused by aggressively exploitative capitalist companies can never be provided by the companies themselves.

The suffering of the working-class people manifests in many ways besides housing; Orwell also describes their poor diets and desperate scramble for fuel among the scrap heaps outside the mines. These bleak portrayals of working-class realities gain additional power from the data Orwell collects about unemployment numbers. Such numbers are hugely underestimated, meaning that the desperate fight for survival among the working-class communities is a far bigger problem than anyone suspects or cares to acknowledge. No one, Orwell suggests, wants to take responsibility for an incredibly important and pressing social issue.