The following is the original forward written by Victor Gollancz as a response to George Orwell’s book published by the Left Book Club in 1937. While Gollancz published the book, he had wanted Orwell to remove the second part of the book and expand the first part. Orwell refused. The forward was meant to give context to Left Book Club readers by correcting Orwell and making criticisms of his arguments. The Road to Wigan Pier is now free of copyright restrictions, so I assume this forward is also reproducible.

Forward to The Road to Wigan Pier by Victor Gollancz

This Foreword is addressed to members of the Left Book Club (to whom The Road to Wigan Pier is being sent as the March Choice), and to them alone: members of the general public are asked to ignore it. But for technical considerations, it would have been deleted from the ordinary edition.

I have also to make it clear that, while the three selectors of the Left Book Club Choices— Strachey, Laski and myself— were all agreed that a Foreword was desirable, I alone am responsible for what is written here — though I think that Laski and Strachey would agree with me.

Why did we think that a Foreword was desirable? Because we find that many members — a surprisingly large number — have the idea that in some sort of way a Left Book Club Choice, first, represents the views of the three selectors, and, secondly, incorporates the Left Book Club “policy.” A moment’s thought should show that the first suggestion could be true only in the worst kind of Fascist State, and that the second is a contradiction in terms: but we get letters so frequently — most interesting and vital letters— which say: “Surely you and Laski and Strachey cannot believe what So-and-So says on page so-and-so of Such-and-Such a book,” that there can be no doubt at all that the misconception exists.

The plain facts are, of course, (a) that the three selectors, although they have that broad general agreement without which successful committee work is impossible, differ as to shade and nuance of opinion in a hundred ways; (b) that even if they were in perfect agreement on every point, nothing could be worse than a stream of books which expressed this same point of view over and over again; and (c) that their only criterion for a Choice is whether or not the reading and discussion of it will be helpful for the general struggle against Fascism and war.

And that brings me on to this question of Left Book Club “policy.” The Left Book Club has no “policy”: or rather it has no policy other than that of equipping people to fight against war and Fascism. As I have said elsewhere, it would not even be true to say that the People's Front is the “policy” of the Left Book Club, though all three selectors are enthusiastically in favour of it. What we rather feel is that by giving a wide distribution to books which represent many shades of Left opinion (and perhaps, most of all, by providing facilities for the discussion of those books in the 300 local centres and circles that have sprung up all over the country) we are creating the mass basis without which a genuine People's Front is impossible. In other words, the People's Front is not the “policy” of the Left Book Club, but the very existence of the Left Book Club tends towards a People's Front.

But we feel that a Foreword to The Road to Wigan Pier is desirable, not merely in view of the misconception to which I have referred, but also because we believe that the value of the book, for some members, can be greatly increased if just a hint is given of certain vital considerations that arise from a reading of it. The value can be increased: as to the positive value itself, no one of us has the smallest doubt. For myself, it is a long time since I have read so living a book, or one so full of a burning indignation against poverty and oppression.

The plan of the book is this. In Part I Mr. Orwell gives a first-hand account of the life of the working class population of Wigan and elsewhere. It is a terrible record of evil conditions, foul housing, wretched pay, hopeless unemployment and the villainies of the Means Test: it is also a tribute to courage and patience— patience far too great. We cannot imagine anything more likely to rouse the “unconverted” from their apathy than a reading of this part of the book; and we are announcing in the current number of The Left News a scheme by means of which we hope members may make use of the book for this end. These chapters really are the kind of thing that makes converts.

In the second part, Mr. Orwell starts with an autobiographical study, which he thinks necessary in order to explain the class feelings and prejudices of a member of “the lower upper-middle class,” as he describes himself: and he then goes on to declare his adherence to Socialism. But before doing so he comes forward as a devil's advocate, and explains, with a great deal of sympathy, why, in his opinion, so many of the best people detest Socialism ; and he finds the reason to lie in the “personal inferiority” of so many Socialists and in their mistaken methods of propaganda. His conclusion is that present methods should be thrown overboard, and that we should try to enrol everyone in the fight for Socialism and against Fascism and war (which he rightly sees to be disasters in the face of which little else is of much importance) by making the elemental appeal of “liberty” and “justice.” What he envisages is a great league of “oppressed” against “oppressors” ; in this battle members of all classes may fight side by side— the private schoolmaster and the jobless Cambridge graduate with the clerk and the unemployed miner; and then, when they have so fought, “we of the sinking middle class . . . may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.”

Now the whole of this second part is highly provocative, not merely in its general argument, but also in detail after detail. I had, in point of fact, marked well over a hundred minor passages about which I thought I should like to argue with Mr. Orwell in this Foreword; but I find now that if I did so the space that I have set aside would be quickly used up, and I should wear out my readers’ patience. It is necessary, therefore, that I should limit myself to some of the broader aspects. In the first place, no reader must forget that Mr. Orwell is throughout writing precisely as a member of the “lower upper-middle class” or, let us say without qualification, as a member of the middle class. It may seem stupid to insist on this point, as nothing could be clearer than Mr. Orwell's own insistence on it: but I can well imagine a reader coming across a remark every now and again which infuriates him even to the extent of making him forget this most important fact: that such a remark can be made by Mr, Orwell is (if the reader follows me) part of Mr. Orwell's own case. I have in mind in particular a lengthy passage in which Mr. Orwell embroiders the theme that, in the opinion of the middle class in general, the working class smells! I believe myself that Mr. Orwell is exaggerating violently: I do not myself think that more than a very small proportion of them have this quaint idea (I admit that I may be a bad judge of the question, for I am a Jew, and passed the years of my early boyhood in a fairly close Jewish community; and, among Jews of this type, class distinctions do not exist— Mr. Orwell says that they do not exist among any sort of Oriental). But clearly some of them think like this— Mr. Orwell quotes a very odd passage from one of Mr. Somerset Maugham’s books— and the whole of this chapter throws a most interesting light on the reality of class distinctions. I know, in fact, of no other book in which a member of the middle class exposes with such complete frankness the shameful way in which he was brought up to think of large numbers of his fellow men. This section will be, I think, of the greatest value to middle class and working class members of the Left Book Club alike: to the former because, if they are honest, they will search their own minds; to the latter, because it will make them understand what they are “up against”—if they do not understand it already. In any case, the moral is that the class division of Society, economic in origin, must be superseded by the classless society (I fear Mr. Orwell will regard this as a wretched and insincere cliché) in which alone the shame and indignity so vividly described by Mr. Orwell— I mean of the middle class, not of the lower class — will be impossible.

Mr. Orwell now proceeds to act as devil's advocate for the case against Socialism. He looks at Socialists as a whole and finds them (with a few exceptions) a stupid, offensive and insincere lot. For my own part I find no similarity whatsoever between the picture as Mr. Orwell paints it and the picture as I see it. There is an extraordinary passage in which Mr. Orwell seems to suggest that almost every Socialist is a “crank”; and it is illuminating to discover from this passage just what Mr. Orwell means by the word. It appears to mean anyone holding opinions not held by the majority— for instance, any feminist, pacifist, vegetarian or advocate of birth control. This last is really startling. In the first part of the book Mr. Orwell paints a most vivid picture of wretched rooms swarming with children, and clearly becoming more and more unfit for human habitation the larger the family grows: but he apparently considers anyone who wishes to enlighten people as to how they can have a normal sexual life without increasing this misery as a crank! The fact, of course, is that there is no more “commonsensical” work than that which is being done at the present time by the birth control clinics up and down the country — and common sense, as I understand it, is the antithesis of crankiness. I have chosen this particular example, because the answer to Mr. Orwell is to be found in his own first part: but the answers to Mr. Orwell's sneers at pacifism and feminism are as obvious. Even about vegetarianism (I apologise to vegetarians for the “even”) Mr. Orwell is astray. The majority of vegetarians are vegetarians not because “they want to add a few miserable years to their wretched lives” (I cannot find the exact passage at the moment, but that is roughly what Mr. Orwell says), but because they find something disgusting in the consumption of dead flesh. I am not saying that I agree with them: but anyone who has seen a man — or woman — eating a raw steak (saignant, as the French say so much more frankly) will feel a sneaking sympathy. The fact is that in passages like that to which I have referred, and in numerous other places in this part of the book, Mr. Orwell is still a victim of that early atmosphere, in his home and public school, which he himself has so eloquently exposed. His conscience, his sense of decency, his understanding of realities tell him to declare himself a Socialist : but fighting against this compulsion there is in him all the time a compulsion far less conscious but almost— though fortunately not quite — as strong : the compulsion to conform to the mental habits of his class. That is why Mr. Orwell, looking at a Socialist, smells out (to use a word which we have already met in another connection) a certain crankiness in him; and he finds, as examples of this crankiness, a hatred of war (pacifism), a desire to see woman no longer oppressed by men (feminism), and a refusal to withhold the knowledge which will add a little happiness to certain human lives (birth control).

This conflict of two compulsions is to be found again and again throughout the book. For instance, Mr. Orwell calls himself a “half intellectual”; but the truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob — still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery. For those who can read, the exhibition of this conflict is neither the least interesting nor the least valuable part of the book: for it shows the desperate struggle through which a man must go before, in our present society, his mind can really become free — if indeed that is ever possible.

I have said enough, I think, to show, by means of one example, the way in which I should venture to criticise the whole of this section of the book. But there is another topic here which cannot be passed over without a word or two. Among the grave faults which Mr. Orwell finds in Socialist propaganda is the glorification of industrialism, and in particular of the triumphs of industrialisation in the Soviet Union (the words “Magnitogorsk” and “Dnieper” make Mr. Orwell see red— or rather the reverse). I have a fairly wide acquaintance among Socialists of every colour, and I feel sure that the whole of this section is based on a misunderstanding. To leave Russia out of account for the moment, no Socialist of my acquaintance glorifies industrialism. What the Socialist who has advanced beyond the most elementary stage says (and I really mean what he says, not what he ought to say) is that capitalist industrialism is a certain stage which we have reached in the business of providing for our needs, comforts and luxuries: that though it may be amusing to speculate on whether or not a pre-industrialist civilisation might be a more attractive one in which to live, it is a matter of plain common sense that, whatever individuals may wish, industrialism will go on: that (if Mr. Orwell will forgive the jargon) such “contradictions” have developed in the machine of capitalist industrialism that the thing is visibly breaking down: that such break-down means poverty, unemployment and war: and that the only solution is the supersession of anarchic capitalist industrialism by planned Socialist industrialism. In other words, it is not industrialism that the Socialist advocates (a man does not advocate the sun or the moon), but Socialist industrialism as opposed to capitalist industrialism.

Mr. Orwell, of course, understands this quite elementary fact perfectly well : but his understanding conflicts with his love of beauty, and the result is that, instead of pointing out that industrialism can be the parent of beauty, if at all, then only under planned Socialist industrialism, he turns to rend the mythical figure of the Socialist who thinks that gaspipe chairs are more beautiful than Chippendale chairs. (Incidentally, gaspipe chairs are more beautiful than the worst Chippendale chairs, though not nearly as beautiful as the best.)

As to the particular question of the Soviet Union, the insistence of Socialists on the achievements of Soviet industrialisation arises from the fact that the most frequent argument which Socialists have to face is precisely this: “I agree with you that Socialism would be wholly admirable if it would work — but it wouldn't.” Somewhere or other Mr. Orwell speaks of intelligent and unintelligent Socialists, and brushes aside people who say “it wouldn't work” as belonging to the latter category. My own experience is that this is still the major sincere objection to Socialism on the part of decent people, and the major insincere objection on the part of indecent people who in fact are thinking of their dividends. It is true that the objection was more frequently heard in 1919 than in 1927, in 1927 than at the end of the first Five Year Plan, and at the end of the first Five Year Plan than to-day — the reason being precisely that quite so direct a non possumus hardly carries conviction, when the achievements of the Soviet Union are there for everyone to see. But people will go on hypnotising themselves and others with a formula, even when that formula is patently outworn: so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism.

But Mr. Orwell’s attack on Socialists who are for ever singing paeans of praise to Soviet industrialisation is also connected with his general dislike of Russia— he even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as “half-gramophones, half-gangsters.” Here again the particular nature of Mr. Orwell’s unresolved conflict is not difficult to understand; nor is it difficult to understand why Mr. Orwell states that almost all people of real sensitiveness, and in particular almost all writers and artists and the like, are hostile to Socialism— whereas the truth is that in several countries, for instance in France, a great number, and probably the majority, of writers and artists are Socialists or even Communists.

All this is not to say that (while this section gives, in my view, a distorted picture of what Socialists are like and what they say) Socialists themselves will not find there much that is of value to them, and many shrewd pieces of, at any rate, half-truth. In particular I think that Mr. Orwell’s accusation of arrogance and dogmatism is to a large extent justified: in fact as I think back on what I have already written here I am not sure that a good deal of it is not itself arrogant and dogmatic. His accusation of narrowness and of sectarianism is not so well grounded today as it would have been a few years ago: but here also there is still plenty of room for improvement. The whole section indeed is, when all has been said against it, a challenge to us Socialists to put our house and our characters in order.

Having criticised us in this way (for though Mr. Orwell insists that he is speaking merely as devil’s advocate and saying what other people say, quite often and quite obviously he is really speaking in propria persona — or perhaps I had better say “in his own person,” otherwise Mr. Orwell will class me with “the snobs who write in Latinised English” or words to that effect) Mr. Orwell joins us generously and whole-heartedly, but begs us to drop our present methods of propaganda, to base our appeal on freedom and liberty, and to see ourselves as a league of the oppressed against the oppressors. Nothing could be more admirable as a first approach; and I agree that we shall never mobilise that vast mass of fundamentally decent opinion which undoubtedly exists (as, for instance, the Peace Ballot showed) and which we must mobilise if we are to defeat Fascism, unless we make our first appeal to its generous impulses. It is from a desire for liberty and justice that we must draw our militant strength; and the society which we are trying to establish is one in which that liberty and that justice will be incarnate. But between the beginning in that first impulse to fight, and the end when, the fight won, our children or our children’s children will live in the achievement, there is a great deal of hard work and hard thinking to be done — less noble and more humdrum than the appeal to generosities, but no less important if a real victory is to be won, and if this very appeal is not to be used to serve ends quite opposite to those at which we aim.

It is indeed significant that so far as I can remember (he must forgive me if I am mistaken) Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism; nor does he explain how the oppressors oppress, nor even what he understands by the words “liberty” and “justice.” I hope he will not think I am quibbling: he will not, I think, if he remembers that the word “Nazi” is an abbreviation of the words “National Socialist”; that in its first phase Fascism draws its chief strength from an attack on “oppression” — “oppression” by capitalists, multiple stores, Jews and foreigners; that no word is commoner in German speeches to-day than “Justice”; and that if you “listen in” any night to Berlin or Munich, the chances are that you will hear the “liberty” of totalitarian Germany — “Germans have become free by becoming a united people” —compared with the misery of Stalin’s slaves.

What is indeed essential, once that first appeal has been made to “liberty” and “justice,” is a careful and patient study of just how the thing works: of why capitalism inevitably means oppression and injustice and the horrible class society which Mr. Orwell so brilliantly depicts: of the means of transition to a Socialist society in which there will be neither oppressor nor oppressed. In other words, emotional Socialism must become scientific Socialism— even if some of us have to concern ourselves with what Mr. Orwell, in his extremely intellectualist anti-intellectualism, calls “the sacred sisters” Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.

What I feel, in sum, is that this book, more perhaps than any that the Left Book Club has issued, clarifies —for me at least— the whole meaning and purpose of the Club. On the one hand we have to go out and rouse the apathetic by showing them the utter vileness which Mr. Orwell lays bare in the first part of the book, and by appealing to the decency which is in them; on the other hand we have so to equip ourselves by thought and study that we run no danger, having once mobilised all this good will, of seeing it dispersed for lack of trained leaders — lance corporals as well as generals — or even of seeing it used as the shock troops of our enemies.

V. G.

January I937