***** Orwell took little interest in the textile industry: for him, Wigan was a mining town, although in fact cotton was equally important with coal in its economy. Nor did he do more than allude to the role of women workers.(95) Most notable of all, perhaps, is that he depicts no cheerful people, says virtually nothing of pubs, and alludes to sport only very briefly. . . . The only joke in the book [The Road to Wigan Pier], if such it can be called, is about a man refused the dole on the grounds that he had a job `carting firewood', whereas in reality he had been doing a moonlight flit from his lodgings with his furniture.(96) Yet it seems that the omission of all jollity from the book was the result not so much of a blind spot as of self-censorship.
The [The Road to Wigan Pier] Diary is notably `lighter' in tone. His first landlady in Wigan, Mrs H, was of `merry disposition' and her son `seems fairly happy'. He also included a section on pubs (which employed singers and dancers, some of whom were said to be very immoral) and working men's clubs (with `a good knockabout comedian whose jokes were of the usual twins-mother-in-law-kippers type, and pretty steady boozing'). His original notes referred to the existence of 160 pubs in Wigan, one to every 540 of the population.(97) There is also more about working-class political organizations in the Diary, and a speech by Wal Hannington of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement at Wigan Co-op hall was described. Orwell was surprised by the amount of communist feeling: there were loud cheers when Hannington announced that if England and the USSR went to war, the latter would win. The audience was `rough ... but very attentive', in sharp contrast to Orwell's judgement in the book that the working class had `grown servile'.(98)
(Robert Pearce, "Revisiting Orwell's 'Wigan Pier,'" _History: The Journal of the Historical Association_, July 1997, <http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/wigpier.htm> ***** -- Yoshie
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