Down Among the Oppressed

Abstract

Orwell returned to England consumed with guilt for his time as a colonial policeman and determined to become a writer. He gave his own account of his feelings in The Road to Wigan Pier. For five years he had been the agent of an oppressive, exploitative system and the experience left him with a bad conscience. He had ‘an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate’. He had to escape not just from Imperialism, but from every kind ‘of man’s dominion over man’. He was determined to take the side of the poor and downtrodden against their oppressors. This determination was to eventually lead him to socialism, but for the time being it involved him in expeditions among the poor in both London and Paris. Orwell attempted, in his own words, to ‘submerge’ himself, to ‘get right down among the oppressed’, to experience life as they did.¹ He intended to write about the way the poor lived from the inside, but for a middle-class audience. Inevitably, this project involved problems: his expeditions were just that, temporary forays among the down-and-out, carried out by someone so far removed in background and upbringing as to be almost from another world. There was inevitably a ‘colonial’ dimension to the exercise: Orwell was exploring darkest England (and Paris), and then returning to civilisation with exotic tales to tell about the lives of the poor. He was to be redeemed from this accusation by the consistency with which he was to champion the oppressed. He did not go on the tramp merely to acquire literary material, as a necessary stage in the construction of a literary career and reputation, but in order to redeem himself from the taint of Imperialism. He wanted to experience injustice and inequality at the sharp end, and having done this, was to spend the rest of his life fighting against them.