The book was published by Victor Gollancz, who had begun his company in 1929 with offices in Covent Garden. Gollancz was a driven man, a canny bargainer, and soon his business was thriving. He paid his authors small advances but spent much larger sums on advertising. He published all kinds of books, but politics was his first love, and he was a passionate socialist. Orwell’s book was as much sociological as political, but it appealed to Gollancz ‘as a powerful statement against social injustice.’78 Published at the beginning of January 1933, it was an immediate success, widely praised in the press (by, among others, Compton Mackenzie). Orwell realised that no quick or glib remedy for poverty could possibly work. What he was after was a change in perception, so that poverty would no longer be regarded ‘as a kind of shameful disease which infects people who are incapable of helping themselves.’79 He emphasised the point that even many charity workers expected ‘some show of contrition, as though poverty signified a sinful soul.’ This attitude, he felt, and the continued existence of poverty were linked.
Down and Out was followed by three novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each of these examined an aspect of British life and helped establish Orwell’s reputation. In 1937 he returned to his reportorial/sociological writing with The Road to Wigan Pier, which arose out of his heightened political awareness, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and Orwell’s growing conviction that ‘Socialism is the only real enemy Fascism has to face.’80 Gollancz had asked him to write a book about unemployment – the scourge of the 1930s since the great crash. It was hardly an original idea, and indeed Orwell had himself refused an almost identical proposal from the News Chronicle some months before.81 But feeling that he had to be more politically engaged, he agreed. Starting in Coventry, he moved north to Manchester, where he boarded with a trade union official who suggested that Orwell visit Wigan.82 He found lodgings over a tripe shop, sleeping in shifts, and in his room he found no sign that anyone had bothered to clean or dust ‘in ages’; he was told by other lodgers ‘that the supplies of tripe in the cellar were covered with black beetles’. One day he was ‘disconcerted’ to find a full chamberpot under the table at breakfast.83 According to Shelden, he spent hours at the local library compiling statistics on the coal industry and on unemployment, but most of the time he spent travelling, inspecting housing conditions, the canals, and the mines, interviewing workers and unemployed. He later described Wigan as a ‘dreadful place’ and the mines as a ‘pretty devastating experience.’ He had to go to bed for a day to get over it.84 ‘He had not realised that a man of his height could not stand upright in the mine, that the walk from the shaft to the coal face could be up to three miles and that this cramped combination “was enough to put my legs out of action for four days.” Yet this walk was only the beginning and end of the miner’s work day. “At times my knees simply refused to lift me after I had knelt down.” ‘85
Figures Orwell obtained in the library – available to anyone – established that miners suffered an appalling rate of accidents. In the previous eight years, nearly 8,000 men had been killed in the mines; one miner in six was injured. Death was so common in the mines it was almost routine: ‘A shilling was deducted from the men’s pay whenever a fellow-miner was killed – and the money contributed to a fund for the widow. But this deduction, or “stoppage,” occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked “Death stoppage” to make the notation on the pay-checks.’86 After two months in the north, Orwell was on the train home when he had one final shocking image of the cost exacted by the town’s grim reality. He noticed a young woman standing at the back of her house, trying to unblock a pipe with a stick. ‘She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums…. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.’87
Orwell had been made so angry by his experiences that he wrote the book in two parts. In the first he let the harsh facts speak for themselves. Part 2 was an emotional polemic against the capitalist system and in favour of socialism, and the publishers entertained some doubts about its merit.88 Many critics found little sense of remedy in this section, its prose vague and overwrought. But the stark details of part I were undeniable, as shaming for Britain as Johnson’s were for America. The Road to Wigan Pier caused a sensation.
Criticism of a very different aspect of civilisation came from the writer Lewis Mumford, part of a coterie who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In the early 1920s Mumford had taught architecture at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and was then taken on as architecture correspondent for the New Yorker. His growing fame led to more lecturing at MIT, Columbia, and Stanford, which he published as a book, Technics and Civilisation, in 1934.89 In this work he charted the evolution of technology. In the eotechnic phase, society was characterised by machines made of wood, and driven by water or wind power.90 In the palaeotechnic phase, what most people called the first industrial revolution, the main form of energy was steam and the main material iron. The neotechnic age (the second industrial revolution) was characterised by electricity, aluminum, new alloys, and synthetic substances.91
For Mumford, technology was essentially driven by capitalism, which needed continued expansion, greater power, greater reach, faster speeds. He thought that dissatisfaction with capitalism arose because although the neotechnic age had arrived by the 1920s, social relations were stuck in the palaeotechnic era, where work was still alienating for the vast majority of people in the sense that they had no control over their lives. A neat phrasemaker (‘Robbery is probably the greatest labour-saving device ever invented’), Mumford posed as a solution ‘Basic Communism,’ by which he didn’t mean Soviet communism so much as the municipal organisation of work, just as there was the municipal organisation of parks, fire services and swimming pools.92 Mumford’s book was remarkable for being one of the first to draw attention to the damage capitalist enterprises were doing to the environment, and how consumerism was being led, and misled, by advertising. Like many others, he saw World War I as the culmination of a technological race that met the needs of capitalists and militarists alike, and he thought the only way forward lay in economic planning. Cannily, Mumford predicted that the industrial proletariat (Orwell’s subject) would disappear as the old-style factories became obsolete, and he thought the neotechnic industries would be spread more evenly across countries (less congregated around ports or mines) and across the world. He forecast that Asia and Africa would become market and neotechnic forces in years ahead. He predicted that biology would replace physics as the most important and contentious science, and that population would become a major issue of the future. The immediate dangers for Americans, however, arose from a ‘purposeless materialism’ and an unthinking acceptance that unbridled capitalism was the only organising principle for modern life. In this Basically optimistic book (there was a section on the beauty of machines), Mumford’s criticisms of Western society were ahead of their time, which only makes them more impressive, for with the benefit of hindsight we can say that he was right far more than he was wrong.93