Northern Exposure: The Travails of Class in a Post-Industrial Landscape

Abstract

There is that notorious moment in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1988) when the writer-explorer, departing by train the dank confines of a struggling English northern town, witnesses, and recounts, the striking image of a young working-class woman, ‘kneeling on stones, poking a stick up a leaden waste-pipe’. As he watches from the carriage he observes ‘the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen’; a look which, for Orwell, seems to capture the existential horror of inter-war working-class life, mirrored in the lines on her face, the wretchedness of her task, the stark confines of her world (Orwell, 1988/1937, p. 17). Caught there in the sympathetic middle-class gaze, the nameless woman is meant somehow to be emblematic of the crisis inflicted upon the working class as a whole, trapped in conditions which it cannot change or control.