| Chapter 1: | Setting out on an English Journey |
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pointed out, “Priestley actually attempts to redefine it in democratic, collective, inclusive terms, which were to come into their own, partly through the voice of Priestley himself, in the early 1940s.”25 In the harsh world of the 1930s, the nation’s idea of itself was, for Priestley, inextricable from the challenges it faced, and at such times a travel writer becomes (if he is not one already) a social reformer in waiting.
George Orwell’s Route to Wigan Pier
As you travel northward your eye, accustomed to the South or East, does not notice much difference until you are beyond Birmingham.… It is only when you get a little further north, to the pottery towns and beyond, that you begin to encounter the real ugliness of industrialism—an ugliness so frightful and so arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it.
—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)26
George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a hard-hitting piece of reportage, describing the squalor of the stops along his journey with what Habermann called “grim precision … armed with facts and figures,” and drilling home with the precision of a miner at a coal face the blighted world of the Depression.27 Orwell went in search of a part of England hitherto overlooked by many, but like Priestley, the reports that he brought back are of a land crippled by poverty and for too long neglected by those in the south of the country, who offered nothing in place of the declining industrial legacy of the Victorian age. As Habermann noted, Orwell did not conceive England in terms of landscape. For him, “Englishness is expressed through an infinitely complex class system,” a form of “social topography” that takes the place of the natural and manmade scenery.28 Indeed, to speak of a relationship between people and the land seems, arguably, out of place in a work whose abiding image is perhaps the vision that Orwell saw from the window of his train as it was leaving Wigan: