Richard Wollheim
O,RWELL RECONSIDERED
The reissue of a book twenty-odd years after its original
appearance makes some of the conventions and courtesies of review–
ing superfluous. Once it has come of age a book should be judged
by
the standards of history. Judged by these standards
The Road
to Wigan Pier
is undoubtedly a piece of out-of-date journalism. Let
us consider each of these charges separately.
The charge of journalism is one made freely in general criti–
cism, and we should make an effort to use it sparingly and with
precision. What makes
The Road to Wigan Pier
a piece of journal–
ism isn't its content, nor the urgency with which it is written, nor
even exactly its style. It is, rather, the particular attitude that the
author adopts toward his subject matter. Whether he is writing
about the condition of the working classes in the 1930's (as in the
first part of the book) or about the predicament of socialism and
socialists (as in the second part) , his method is the same. In each
case, what he does is to pick out from the material at his disposal a
number of details all of them as startling, as shocking, as arresting
as possible, and then to set them down in a style that is very deli–
berately and very self-consciously none of these things. The method
is undoubtedly effective. One would have to
be
very thick-skinned
indeed not to be deeply discomforted by
The Road to Wigan Pier.
But the method has also its defects, and the most important of these
is that it tends to distortion. Such a tendency is most evident in the
second or argumentative part of the book where Orwell in
his
desire to make every point count for one, succeeds often enough in
completely obliterating the lines of the discussion. One feels that a
