The Turning-Point: Wigan and Spain

Abstract

Two months in the north of England and six in Spain proved the turning-point in Orwell’s political education, his development as a writer, and his health. Two myths about The Road to Wigan Pier must first be dealt with: that it was commissioned by the Left Book Club, and that he went to Wigan ‘armed with a large advance from Victor Gollancz’, sometimes specified as £500, based on information from Geoffrey Gorenr.¹ As £500 would, in today’s money, be about £20 000, it would have been a huge advance; £500 was more than twice the average annual wage in the mid-thirties, so in terms of average wages today it would be equivalent to about £32 000. Whichever way one looks at it, £500 would have been a great deal of money in 1936 and, had Orwell received that, there might be some justification for those who see him as being richly paid to poke into the affairs of those living in poverty. The confusion over who commissioned Orwell is well demonstrated by the current Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition (1993). This states, correctly, in its description of the book in its preliminaries, that Orwell was ‘commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire’, but on its back cover states that the book was ‘Commissioned by the Left Book Club in 1936’. The first Penguin edition (1962) did not make that error. It did suggest, however, that Orwell’s ‘comments on Socialism in the second part of the book could still serve to educate an opposition’.