Authenticity Betrayed: The "idiotic folk" of Love on the Dole

Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.

—George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier

Perhaps the most famous image in George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is that of a lone woman poking a stick up a clogged drainpipe. Orwell sees her from a train that is pulling out of Wigan and has time to observe and describe everything about her, concluding with the expression on her face, "the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen" (15). In an instant Orwell realizes that she understands the desolation of her situation as fully as he does (15), and the moment takes on the significance of an epiphany for the "lower-upper-middle class" reporter (113). The force of this realization is shaken somewhat, however, when we consult the raw material from which Orwell crafted his book, "The Road to Wigan Pier Diary." The "Diary" account of the same episode reveals a telling difference from its appearance in The Road to Wigan Pier. In the "Diary" Orwell is on foot, "passing up a horrible squalid side-alley" (177), when he and the woman see each other. For The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell reworks the episode significantly so as to remain in the privileged position of unseen observer; his repositioning of himself on a train literalizes the different levels on which he and the woman exist and eliminates the element of reciprocal eye contact. The change dramatically alters the dynamic of the encounter, making an allegory of class relations out of an ordinary, squalid sight; the train window through which he claims to see the woman becomes a concrete manifestation of both the "good prose" ("Why I Write," 7) in which he recounts the episode and the "aquarium walls" that divide the classes (Wigan Pier, 145).

This typically Orwellian move provides an object lesson in how refashioning an episode can have dramatic aesthetic and ideological consequences. What is more, it is a lesson Orwell repeats several times in The Road to Wigan Pier; his awareness of the relationship between the aesthetic and the ideological permeates his selection and orientation of material. Time and again Orwell manipulates his raw material to extract the maximum aesthetic and ideological force from it, subordinating literal truth to ideological efficacy. Through such manipulation Orwell merges the popular taste for both empirical reports and socially driven works, countering the need for audience appeal with such conventions of documentary writing as photographs, tables of facts and figures, and reports of firsthand experience. Indeed, such is his zeal for an aura of objective truth that Orwell cites only one work of fiction among all the apparatus of reportage in Part 1 of The Road to Wigan Pier. That work is the stage version of Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole. ¹ Orwell evokes a scene from Greenwood's tale to point out the real human costs of the conditions he describes so carefully. Placing Greenwood's work among his other evidence, Orwell demonstrates remarkable faith in its authenticity, effectively treating it as yet another piece of documentary evidence. Ironically, while the accuracy and veracity of Orwell's work has come under considerable critical fire, Greenwood's work (ostensibly the more fictional of the two) has been taken at face value; the critical attention that has made Orwell into such a contested figure has neglected to examine the equally sophisticated interplay between the aesthetic and the ideological that makes Greenwood's book so enduring—and so problematic.

This critical neglect is all the more baffling given the recent trend toward reading literature in the context of cultural studies—Love on the Dole helped introduce an entire generation of British readers to the realities of working-class life in industrial England. ² Despite its overt presentation as a novel, its aesthetic force was virtually superseded by the attention paid to the accuracy of its depiction. Prefiguring Orwell by...