The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell Essay Example for Free

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell Essay In the Road to Wigan Pier Orwell explained how the English class-system works. He purported that in Britain it isnt possible to determine the class of a person by simply looking at his income. The things that make up a middle-class person are his behavior, birth and profession. To describe fully the concept of middle class, Orwell, in Part One, set out to report, in a detailed and vivid manner, on working class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of the West Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the seven chapters of Part One Orwell was able to describe the life of miners and conditions down a coal mine. Orwell described how he went down a coal mine to observe proceedings and he explained how the coal is distributed, and that the working conditions are very poor. He described the housing shortage in the region as the reason why people were satisfied even with substandard housing conditions. In the second part Orwell described his personal idea of socialism. His general idea is that socialism and communism are no longer movements of the working class. The movement is lead by the middle-class, the bourgeoisie. He stated plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism but feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people, who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents. Reasons such as ,class prejudice and machine worship. He points that class prejudice is real and it is visceral. Middle class socialists do themselves no favors by pretending it does not exist and by glorifying the manual worker they tend to alienate that large section of the population which is economically working class but culturally middle class. Orwell finds most socialists guilty machine worship. He himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopia are deadly dull.