Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, days after Zohran Mamdani was sworn into office as New York City mayor, Charles Lane revisits George Orwell’s 1937 classic, The Road to Wigan Pier—which he characterizes as a prescient commentary on today’s socialist revival.
Among my prized possessions is a first-edition copy of George Orwell’s nonfiction The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 by Britain’s Left Book Club. It’s not much to look at. No illustration or artwork adorns its faded orange limp-cloth cover. The spine is split and stained black, as if with coal dust Orwell picked up while he researched the book, in mining regions of industrial northern England.
Still, I treasure this beat-up volume for its searing description of life among the ill-paid, socially marginalized workers upon whose backbreaking labor the entire British economy depended, and for whom Orwell expressed respect, bordering on awe.
“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working,” Orwell wrote, after a harrowing visit deep underground. “It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.”
