Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

distance, stretched the 'flashes'--pools of stagnant water that had seeped

  into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly

  cold. The 'flashes' were covered with ice the colour of raw umber, the

  bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore beards of

  ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing

  existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water. But even

  Wigan is beautiful compared with Sheffield. Sheffield, I suppose, could

  justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World: its

  inhabitants, who want it to be pre-eminent in everything, very likely do

  make that claim for it. It has a population of half a million and it

  contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village of

  five hundred. And the stench! If at rare moments you stop smelling

  sulphur it is because you have begun smelling gas. Even the shallow

  river that runs through the town is-usually bright yellow with some

  chemical or other. Once I halted in the street and counted the factory

  chimneys I could see; there were thirty-three of them, but there would

  have been far more if the air had not been obscured by smoke. One scene

  especially lingers in my mind. A frightful patch of waste ground

  (somehow, up there, a patch of waste ground attains a squalor that

  would be impossible even in London) trampled bare of grass and littered

  with newspapers and old saucepans. To the right an isolated row of gaunt

  four-roomed houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an

  interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney beyond chimney, fading

  away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made of the

  slag from furnaces. In front, across the patch of waste ground, a cubical

  building of red and yellow brick, with the sign 'Thomas Grocock, Haulage

  Contractor'.

  At night, when you cannot see the hideous shapes of the houses and the

  blackness of everything, a town like Sheffield assumes a kind of sinister

  magnificence. Sometimes the drifts of smoke are rosy with sulphur, and

  serrated flames, like circular saws, squeeze themselves out from beneath

  the cowls of the foundry chimneys. Through the open doors of foundries you

  see fiery serpents of iron being hauled to and fro by redlit boys, and you

  hear the whizz and thump of steam hammers and the scream of the iron under

  the blow. The pottery towns are almost equally ugly in a pettier way.

  Right in among the rows of tiny blackened houses, part of the street as it

  were, are the 'pot banks'--conical brick chimneys like gigantic burgundy

  bottles buried in the soil and belching their smoke almost in your face.

  You come upon monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as

  deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and

  on the other workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the

  face of the cliff with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather,

  and even the snow was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery

  towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. Less than ten miles

  away you can stand in un-defiled country, on the almost naked hills, and

  the pottery towns are only a smudge in the distance.

  When you contemplate such ugliness as this, there are two questions

  that strike you. First, is it inevitable? Secondly, does it matter?

  I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably

  ugly about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of

  its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a

  cathedral. It all depends on the architectural tradition of the period.

  The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have

  been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and

  smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money

  to think about anything else. They go on being ugly largely because the

  Northerners have got used to that kind of thing and do not notice it. Many

  of the people in Sheffield or Manchester, if they smelled the air along

  the Cornish cliffs, would probably declare that it had no taste in it. But

  since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has

  grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack

  or an awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering

  white structure of concrete, glass, and steel, surrounded by green lawns

  and beds of tulips. Look at the factories you pass as you travel out of

  London on the G.W.R.; they may not be aesthetic triumphs but certainly

  they are not ugly in the same way as the Sheffield gasworks. But in any

  case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about

  it and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it

  is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable,

  industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself

  as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic

  mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of

  mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the

  industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow

  aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive

  chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it

  from a purely aesthetic standpoint and it may, have a certain macabre

  appeal. I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by

  fascinating me even when I abominate it. The landscapes of Burma, which,

  when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of

  nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged

  to write a novel about them to get rid of them. (In all novels about the

  East the scenery is the real subject-matter.) It would probably be quite

  easy to extract a sort of beauty, as Arnold Bennett did, from the

  blackness of the industrial towns; one can easily imagine Baudelaire, for

  instance, writing a poem about a slag-heap. But the beauty or ugliness of

  industrialism hardly matters. Its real evil lies far deeper and is quite

  uneradicable. It is important to remember this, because there is always

  a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is

  clean and orderly.

  But when you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart

  from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly

  because of certain real differences which do exist, but still more because

  of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a

  long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of Northernness,

  sort of Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always

  take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask

  him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real'

  life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work,

  that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers

  and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour'
,

  plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish,

  effeminate, and lazy--that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner

  goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague

  inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the

  Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a

  barbarian out for loot. And feelings of this kind, which are the result

  of tradition, are not affected by visible facts. Just as an Englishman

  five feet four inches high and twenty-nine inches round the chest feels

  that as an Englishman he is the physical superior of Camera (Camera being

  a Dago), so also with the Northerner and the Southerner. I remember a

  weedy little Yorkshireman, who would almost certainly have run away if a

  fox-terrier had snapped at him, telling me that in the South of England he

  felt 'like a wild invader'. But the cult is often adopted by people who

  are not by birth Northerners themselves. A year or two ago a friend of

  mine, brought up in the South but now living in the North, was driving me

  through Suffolk in a car. We passed through a rather beautiful village.

  He glanced disapprovingly at the cottages and said:

  'Of course most of the villages in Yorkshire are hideous; but the

  Yorkshiremen are splendid chaps. Down here it's just the other way

  about--beautiful villages and rotten people. All the people in those

  cottages there are worthless, absolutely worthless.'

  I could not help inquiring whether he happened to know anybody in that

  village. No, he did not know them; but because this was East Anglia they

  were obviously worthless. Another friend of mine, again a Southerner by

  birth, loses no opportunity of praising the North to the detriment of the

  South. Here is an extract from one of his letters to me:

  I am in Clitheroe, Lanes...I think running water is much more

  attractive in moor and mountain country than in the fat and sluggish

  South. 'The smug and silver Trent,' Shakespeare says; and the South--er

  the smugger, I say.

  Here you have an interesting example of the Northern cult. Not only

  are you and I and everyone else in the South of England written off as 'fat

  and sluggish', but even water when it gets north of a certain latitude,

  ceases to be H2O and becomes something mystically superior. But the

  interest of this passage is that its writer is an extremely intelligent man

  of 'advanced' opinions who would have nothing but con-tempt for nationalism

  in its ordinary form. Put to him some such proposition as 'One Britisher is

  worth three foreigners', and he would repudiate it with horror. But when it

  is a question of North versus South, he is quite ready to generalize. All

  nationalistic distinctions--all claims to be better than somebody else

  because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different

  dialect--are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people

  believe in them. There is no doubt about the Englishman's inbred

  conviction that those who live to the south of him are his inferiors;

  even our foreign policy is governed by it to some extent. I think,

  therefore, that it is worth pointing out when and why it came into

  being.

  When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the

  map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern

  Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the

  more virtuous you become. 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. This nonsense about the superior energy of the

  English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at

  least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us', writes a Quarterly Reviewer

  of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to

  luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums

  up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races. In the mythology of

  Garlyle, Creasey, etc., the Northerner ('Teutonic', later 'Nordic') is

  pictured as a hefty, vigorous chap with blond moustaches and pure morals,

  while the Southerner is sly, cowardly, and licentious. This theory was

  never pushed to its logical end, which would have meant assuming that the

  finest people in the world were the Eskimos, but it did involve admitting

  that the people who lived to the north of us were superior to ourselves.

  Hence, partly, the cult of Scotland and of Scotch things which has so

  deeply marked English life during the past fifty years. But it was the

  industrialization of the North that gave the North-South antithesis its

  peculiar slant. Until comparatively recently the northern part of England

  was the backward and feudal part, and such industry as existed was

  concentrated in London and the South-East. In the Civil War for instance,

  roughly speaking a war of money versus feudalism, the North and West were

  for the King and the South and East for the Parliament. But with the

  increasing use of coal industry passed to the North, and there grew up a

  new type of man, the self-made Northern business man--the Mr Rouncewell

  and Mr Bounderby of Dickens. The Northern business man, with his hateful

  'get on or get out' philosophy, was the dominant figure of the nineteenth

  century, and as a sort of tyrannical corpse he rules us still. This is the

  type edified by Arnold Bennett--the type who starts off with half a crown

  and ends up with fifty thousand pounds, and whose chief pride is to be an

  even greater boor after he has made his money than before. On analysis his

  sole virtue turns out to be a talent for making money. We were bidden to

  admire him because though he might be narrow-minded, sordid, ignorant,

  grasping, and uncouth, he had 'grit', he 'got on'; in other words, he knew

  how to make money.

  This kind of cant is nowadays a pure anachronism, for the Northern

  business man is no longer prosperous. But traditions are not killed by

  facts, and the tradition of Northern' grit' lingers. It is still dimly felt

  that a Northerner will 'get on', i.e. make money, where a Southerner will

  fail. At the back of the mind of every Yorkshireman and every Scotchman who

  comes to London is a sort of Dick Whittington picture of himself as the boy

  who starts off by selling newspapers and ends up as Lord Mayor. And that,

  really, is at the bottom of his bumptiousness. But where one can make a

  great mistake is in imagining that this feeling extends to the genuine

  working class. When I first went to Yorkshire, some years ago, I imagined

  that I was going to a country of boors. I was used to the London

  Yorkshireman with his interminable harangues and his pride in the sup-posed

  raciness of his dialect (' "A stitch in time saves nine", as we say in the

  West Riding'), and I expected to meet with a good deal of rudeness. But I

  met with nothing of the kind, and least of all among the miners. Indeed the

  Lancashire and Yorkshire miners treated me with a kindness and courtesy

  that were even embarrass
ing; for if there is one type of man to whom I do

  feel myself inferior, it is a coal-miner. Certainly no one showed any sign

  of despising me for coming from a different part of the country. This has

  its importance when one remembers that the English regional snobberies are

  nationalism in miniature; for it suggests that place-snobbery is not a

  working-class characteristic.

  There is nevertheless a real difference between North and South, and

  there is at least a tinge of truth in that picture of Southern England as

  one enormous Brighton inhabited by lounge-lizards. For climatic reasons the

  parasitic dividend-drawing class tend to settle in the South. In a

  Lancashire cotton-town you could probably go for months on end without once

  hearing an 'educated' accent, whereas there can hardly be a town in the

  South of England where you could throw a brick without hitting the niece of

  a bishop. Consequently, with no petty gentry to set the pace, the

  bourgeoisification of the working class, though it is taking place in the

  North, is taking place more slowly. All the Northern accents, for instance,

  persist strongly, while the Southern ones are collapsing before the movies

  and the B.B.C. Hence your 'educated' accent stamps you rather as a

  foreigner than as a chunk of the petty gentry; and this is an immense

  advantage, for it makes it much easier to get into contact with the working

  class.

  But is it ever possible to be really intimate with the working class?

  I shall have to discuss that later; I will only say here that I do not

  think it is possible. But undoubtedly it is easier in the North than it

  would be in the South to meet working-class people on approximately equal

  terms. It is fairly easy to live in a miner's house and be accepted as one

  of the family; with, say, a farm labourer in the Southern counties it

  probably would be impossible. I have seen just enough of the working

  class to avoid idealizing them, but I do know that you can learn a great

  deal in a working-class home, if only you can get there. The essential

  point is that your middle-class ideals and prejudices are tested by

  contact with others which are not necessarily better but are certainly

  different.

  Take for instance the different attitude towards the family. A

  working-class family hangs together as a middle-class one does, but the

  relationship is far less tyrannical. A working man has not that deadly

  weight of family prestige hanging round his neck like a millstone. I have

  pointed out earlier that a middle-class person goes utterly to pieces under

  the influence of poverty; and this is generally due to the behaviour of his

  family--to the fact that he has scores of relations nagging and badgering

  him night and day for failing to 'get on'. The fact that the working class

  know how to combine and the middle class don't is probably due to their

  different conceptions of family loyalty. You cannot have an effective trade

  union of middle-class workers, be-cause in times of strikes almost every

  middle-class wife would be egging her husband on to blackleg and get the

  other fellow's job. Another working-class characteristic, disconcerting at

  first, is their plain-spokenness towards anyone they regard as an equal. If

  you offer a working man something he doesn't want, he tells you that he

  doesn't want it; a middle-class person would accept it to avoid giving

  offence. And again, take the working-class attitude towards 'education'.

  How different it is from ours, and how immensely sounder! Working people

  often have a vague reverence for learning in others, but where 'education'

  touches their own lives they see through it and reject it by a healthy

  instinct. The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures

  of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work

  at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should

  descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one