Road to Wigan Pier

 The business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked one of the sweated pickers… why they did not for a union. I was told immediately that “they” would never allow it. Who were “they”? I asked. Nobody seemed to know; but evidently “they” were omnipotent.

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress “educated” people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their “education” is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have all the cheek necessary to a commander.  (50)

Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They [the unemployed] have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude - and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home - you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you. Still, an unemployed man who feels at home with books can at any rate occupy himself by reading. But what about the man who cannot read without discomfort? Take a miner, for instance, who has worked in the pit since childhood and has been trained to be a miner and nothing else. How the devil is he to fill up the empty days? It is absurd to say that he ought to be looking for work. There is no work to look for, and odd knows it. You can’t go on looking for work every day for seven years…. (83)

… in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of cheap smart clothes since the war… Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity… For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets… above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries (89-90)

… the development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish and chips, art silk stockings, tinned salmon cut price chocolate… the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution… The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process - the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives. (91)

The histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. (113)

Secker & Warburg 1965