English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I supposed was blocked.²⁹

That Orwell sees this woman’s plight from the window of his train carriage lends the scene a voyeuristic quality, but noting her “sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold,” and seeing in her prematurely aged face “the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen,” he knew that although he was leaving Wigan he would carry a powerful sense of place with him:

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. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. 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.³⁰

Bringing the woman’s plight to the attention of his readers—note the usage of we in the quotation’s opening sentence—Orwell reminded them that such images were found in their country. The North may feel, from his account, like another land, but the reader will not be allowed to look upon it merely as some distant outpost, the blighted corner of an affluent suburban culture. Rather, it will be made horribly real and relevant, if only because in its coal-mining, heavy industrial heritage it provided the bedrock upon which early twentieth-century England rather awkwardly rested.