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Title: Road to Wigan Pier Chapter Summaries
Description: A collection of reflections/summaries for George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier." I did this on my own free time, and not for an assignment, so it's not super academic or anything. It's just for people looking to get a gist of the chapters. I covered all the major points. I articulated them like I was explaining the information to myself, thus the summaries are written in plain English, as translated from Orwell's semi-posh, 1930s London English. The document is about 8.1 pages long (11 pt font).
Description: A collection of reflections/summaries for George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier." I did this on my own free time, and not for an assignment, so it's not super academic or anything. It's just for people looking to get a gist of the chapters. I covered all the major points. I articulated them like I was explaining the information to myself, thus the summaries are written in plain English, as translated from Orwell's semi-posh, 1930s London English. The document is about 8.1 pages long (11 pt font).
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Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above
Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
Chapter 1
In chapter one Orwell describes a lodge in one of the expansive industrial areas of northern
England
...
The
lodgings are dusty, smelly, and cramped - at least four people will bunk in the same little room,
where the bunks themselves are hardly large enough for a person
...
The food served by the Brookers is old, bland, and filthy; some of the most expensive
food is still supposedly infested with black beetles
...
The
Brookers are also miserable; Ms
...
Mr
...
They both hate their guests and don’t seem to understand why
classier people don’t come to their disgusting lodge
...
They are like ghosts, sulking around and repeatedly
playing pre-recorded quips and complaints
...
She looked up, miserable, as though she saw no future for herself
...
Chapter 2
In the second chapter Orwell goes into the mines and experiences the working day of a miner
...
He explains that in most mines, the
tunnel workers must travel down is at least one mile long, but most of them are around 3 miles,
sometimes going up to five miles
...
It is so hot most miners only wear thin
trousers and shoes, and they only wear shoes because there are shards of shale all over the
floor
...
Depending on
the tunnel, they can take anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes to traverse in one direction, but this
time is not included in the miners shift and thus they are not paid for it
...
A lot of miners have “buttons down the back,” meaning they have a pattern of
scabs for each particular vertebrae from where they hit the beams
...
The miners do not enjoy the travel
...
Depending on what shift they
work, they may be operating machinery, using explosives, moving around gigantic boulders of
raw coal (raw coal essentially has all the properties of normal stone) or breaking up and shifting
coal so it could be brought up to the surface
...
They do this all while
kneeling, relying wholly on upper body strength, while covered with dust such as they appear
black
...
Any
given miner, Orwell writes, could be anywhere from twenty to sixty years old
...
Or lack thereof
...
Coal dust is a pain to wash off, and in the days before
plumbing and water-on-demand and porcelain bathtubs, the miners had washbasins
...
Orwell remarks that getting the
coal dust out of your eyelids could take about ten minutes
...
After they washed,
they spent any small amount of free time they did or didn’t have, they would go to bed
...
If you add the travel in the tunnels, and the commute
from the miner’s home to the pit (many miners lived rather far from the pit as housing in
industrial districts could be scarce), it would not be abnormal for the workday to last ten hours
...
The coal company would swindle workers on a weekly basis by deducting
money from their checks to pay for their lanterns and other such things
...
Every miner, he says, has seen a coworker die or be maimed
...
Some stretches of mine would
go frighteningly long without being supported, and when the roof did eventually gave in and
catch someone in the rubble, it could take hours to get them to the surface
...
After many years mining, some miners could develop a disease which made their eyes
spasm when exposed to light, and may eventually cause blindness, as a result of working in
dark spaces
...
Furthermore, when they were allowed to collect compensation was not exactly on the
worker’s terms; Orwell describes how the life of the working class was always based around the
convenience of others
...
Chapter 4
The northern industrial districts were being choked by a housing crisis of the likes I could have
never imagined
...
The houses were
tiny and covered in black dust
...
There was no hot water in any of the houses, and the water they did have was often unclean
or mixed with sewage, causing quite a high rate of tuberculosis
...
The roofs of these houses were in great
disrepair; water would leak through to the low levels and erode through the wooden floors, and
also invite an infestation of bugs to join it in its efforts; some floors had holes you could see the
lower floor in
...
Most of these tiny, two-room houses would be built without sturdy foundations, and over
the course of several years entire rows of houses would begin to lean to a side and distort,
making windows and doors irreparably jammed
...
And even despite the uninhabitable quality of these homes people still clamored to buy
them because they were in such high demand
...
There would
sometimes be three to a bed, in three beds, that the room could barely accommodate
...
Somehow, these houses had a worse alternative: fixed caravans
...
Though the word caravan may bring to mind a cozy camper-van type idea,
these were no such thing
...
Sometimes the only place the corporations would allow caravans was on top of giant piles
of rubbish or big patches of mud, and they stank more than any other kind of home in these
districts
...
The corporations and local operations often talk of de-slumming these areas, as though
tearing down all the bad houses and replacing them with good ones would fix the poverty
...
Needless to say, it is not an easy problem to solve
...
But for these workers the inhumane conditions follow them everywhere
...
Chapter 5
This chapter is about the unemployment crisis in the industrial areas
...
There is a primitive form of welfare,
called the dole, that most of these people live in, if they qualify something called the “means
test” which is a strict examination to make sure that whoever is applying for the dole isn’t getting
money by any other means
...
Doing so much as carting firewood down the street could get you reported
...
The unemployed are often aided by an organization called NUWM, which was made
by and for workers, who offer legal advice and information on how to “cheat” the means test
...
Families remain intact
...
In the winter, the unemployed population often wanders
through town and pays small prices to enter public buildings, just to keep warm
...
They seem to value luxury over necessity
...
The unemployed will gamble, go to crappy theaters, bet on football, buy cheaply made yet nice
looking clothes
...
Chapter 6
This chapter is about how the unemployed go about getting basic necessities, namely food and
coal
...
What one might not imagine is just how poor those diets are
...
Sugary tea, white bread, sweets, corned beef, canned
milk, and various other food that comes from factories
...
If they did have teeth,
they were blueish and irregular and weak due to calcium deficiency
...
”
To find fuel the unemployed usually just steal it
...
Occasionally, to
keep their image, they will round someone up, minorly fine them, and have a newspaper article
written about them
...
A common practice for
the poor would be the “scramble for coal” in which they would jump upon a slow-moving mining
train and gather as much coal as they could carry
...
Chapter 7
The beginning of this chapter discusses the environment industrialism creates
...
The rivers run yellow with discarded sulfur and
chemicals
...
They’re on fire a lot of the time, but serve no real purpose
...
Newer industrial areas in the affluent south are clean, white, and produce less waste
products
...
Orwell is not so
concerned with the messiness of industrialism since the south has shown that it can be done
relatively cleanly
...
It creates
a kind of class prejudice between the working and middle classes, and the prejudice works both
ways
...
Northerners
would resent the soft, sedentary life of a London denizen
...
Orwell has met many working class types who claim that one northerner
would be worth five southerners, and he has met southerners that would agree with them
...
In a way, it’s true
...
In
fact, Orwell brainstorms that once, at some point in the future, all labour is automated, if such
virtues will cease to exist in the populations
...
Chapter 8
This is the first chapter of part two of the book, in which Orwell examines the English socialist
movement
...
According to him,
it is more like a caste system, as income is not the sole determiner of one's class
...
They may
even live in the same neighborhood, but Orwell describes the relationship as that of “a white
man living in a negro neighborhood” in the sense that the lower middle class person would feel
a sense of inherent superiority to his neighbors
...
” After the war, the lower classes were reduced
to beggars and tramps, according to Orwell
...
And most of all, the lower class stink
...
Try as you might, but the stench and filth of the lower class can hardly be ignored
...
Understandably, the young
generation that remained, when they returned, were quite resentful of the older generations, and
by extension, the society they had built
...
The celebrations traditionally held after a successful war were ruined by the young
generation singing blasphemous songs in place of traditional ones
...
Orwell spends the rest of the chapter explaining the time in his life where he felt the
same way
...
He began to view all government as oppressive and naively thought that if people
really wanted economic well being they could will it into existence
...
Chapter 10
What a chapter
...
It's easy to say that your society is horrible compared to your
hypothetical utopia, but it is remarkably hard to come up with a viable plan of action, and to act it
out
...
In fact, Orwell claims, marxists understand this, however unconsciously it may be,
and have no real desire to see revolution occur
...
Many Marxist articles foolishly claim that “the bourgeoisie are dead” which only serves to
further ignite the classist antagonism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat
...
Call a man dead, and he won't
go down without a fight
...
Chapter 11
It seems self evident that if socialism was to be applied wholeheartedly and worldwide that there
should be a result that is objectively better than 1930s England
...
It is not unlike the current situation among more radical liberal circles
...
Orwell is amusingly hostile to the vegetarians among them in particular
...
Marxist jargon is,
as Orwell puts it, as out of place in normal speech as terms used in advanced mathematics; a
Marxist lecturer rarely appeals to a working class audience
...
And the Marxists feel similarly towards the proletariat whom they trivialize and
infantilize, and assume that they can't handle too much responsibility for themselves
...
Chapter 12
(Part 1)
Among the socialist movement is a kind of machine worship; some belief that all of man's
struggles are destined to be liberated by the machine
...
What is left for a human to do? Why pick up a hobby when a machine can inevitably outperform
you? After all it is pointless to put meaningless little difficulties in the way of a goal that is easily
achievable; hence why one doesn't try to eat a meal with crude stone utensils
...
Indeed a post scarcity environment would inevitably give way to a universal
crisis of meaning in a world with no struggle and a population who has never had to struggle,
and has thus never produced the valuable traits that rise out of struggle
...
Part 2
Orwell fears that socialism has made itself so undesirable it is bound to degenerate and be
overtaken by fascism, as it had on the European mainland
...
Fascism, despite it's
evils, does guarantee at the very least a stable society, wherein the kind of disfigured society
proposed by the English socialist movement is bound to fall apart in catastrophic fashion
...
Chapter 13
George Orwell believes that human government has two conceivable endgames
...
Unfortunately there is only a thin line between the two, which is why socialist
movements should be taken carefully
...
If
abandon and alienate the working class such that they will not unite with you, than scaring them
with a culture war is sure to unite them against you in a sudden and possibly violent swing to the
left wing
...
So what is to be done? Orwell admits that there is no obvious solution to the issue of
machine worship, but there is conceivable solutions to the class prejudice and other such
problems
...
Pay attention to the basics
...
Freedom
...
Unity
...
Socialism in its purest form is not a warfare
of class cultures but a liberation of oppressed workers from exploitative plutocrats
...
It must show that socialism is compatible with common decency
...
Title: Road to Wigan Pier Chapter Summaries
Description: A collection of reflections/summaries for George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier." I did this on my own free time, and not for an assignment, so it's not super academic or anything. It's just for people looking to get a gist of the chapters. I covered all the major points. I articulated them like I was explaining the information to myself, thus the summaries are written in plain English, as translated from Orwell's semi-posh, 1930s London English. The document is about 8.1 pages long (11 pt font).
Description: A collection of reflections/summaries for George Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier." I did this on my own free time, and not for an assignment, so it's not super academic or anything. It's just for people looking to get a gist of the chapters. I covered all the major points. I articulated them like I was explaining the information to myself, thus the summaries are written in plain English, as translated from Orwell's semi-posh, 1930s London English. The document is about 8.1 pages long (11 pt font).